Don’t Miss the Building for the Trees: Bahrhausen and Reflecting on BVH’s History of Design

In April of this year, I moved back home from New York to Nebraska and shortly thereafter started working at BVH. One of the key factors for seeking a job at BVH was my desire to understand how a design practice like BVH, a mid-sized design-focused regional firm, can maintain a consistent design ethos (thoughtfully crafted, contextually sensitive architecture) like it has for the nearly six decades it’s existed.

It hasn’t been an especially calm sixty-some odd years in architecture at that, as architects have had to navigate stylistic changes (modernism to postmodernism to whatever we’re doing now) and technical advancements (drafting to CAD to BIM). As taste, staff, and technology changed, there must have been someone guiding the ship through choppy waters. Based on my research, Deon Bahr was that North Star, providing design guidance and fostering an optimistic studio culture. Bahr was the founding principal of BVH, a prolific artist in Nebraska, and broadly an eminent figure in the arts and architecture communities in the Great Plains for decades. Bahr and Bob Hanna founded BVH in 1968, and since then, BVH has received somewhere around 300 design awards (which I guess means BVH’s average is five a year?). I didn’t get the opportunity to meet Deon, who passed away earlier this year, but some coworkers pointed me to Bahr’s home, a unique wood-lined box set inside a grove of trees in South Lincoln. Few things provide more clarity into the design ethos of an architect than the houses they design for themselves, and Bahr’s home, Barhhausen, is as much a part of his catalog of artwork as his artwork feels inspired by his architectural work. His home was art, and his art was art. 

Bahr’s name for his family home, Bahrhausen, is clearly a cheeky nod to the bauhaus influence in the home’s design, which is evident in Bahrhausen’s deceptively simple form, its meticulous detailing in service of clean lines and edges, and how Bahr’s home makes complex material relationships look simple. On the other hand, Bahrhausen’s exterior cedar cladding and roofing speak to different ideas that permeate Bahr’s and thus BVH’s work, meditation on architecture’s relationship to its context or landscape. Bahr was, famously, both an architect and an artist, and perhaps equally committed to Bauhaus’s tenets for both of his passions. Interviewed for the Lincoln Journal Star in 2014, Bahr once said of his art, “As with all art, modifications and surprises inform the final outcome. I prefer backgrounds of canvas and wood panels and am currently into hard-edge strips.” The hard-edge, angular, unadorned cedar facade of Bahrhausen is reminiscent of Bahr’s paintings, which similarly use compositional techniques like hard-edge lines, proportion, and layering to either flatten readings of three-dimensional objects or create the illusion of depth in two-dimensional composition. 

Deon Bahr’s Bahrhausen opus sits, encapsulated by thickets of mature trees, on a two-acre plot of land in Southeast Lincoln. Bahr designed and built Bahrhousen in 1972, a few years after he helped found BVH, when the adjacent plots were fields of tall prairie grass. Over fifty years later, the small outcropping of trees that surrounds the Bahr family home is now flanked by Firethorn golf course and St. Mark’s Methodist Church, as development in Lincoln has crept further south. However, you likely won’t notice the church bells once you’re inside the property, walking or driving along the thin concrete drive that leads to the main house, sights and sounds obscured by the trees. Like Bahr’s art, the design of Bahrhausen opens up as you examine it.

As you continue down the drive, trees gradually peel back to reveal glimpses of cedar wrapped boxes a hundred or so feet away (Eastern Red Cedar are among the most common trees in Nebraska). Sunlight filtering through the tree canopy provides diffused light, revealing a small cedar-clad shed to the right of the path; an appetizer of the architecture to come. The forest fully recedes once you approach the central driveway and patio, which is laid with burgundy bricks in a running bond. Flanking the driveway are two two-story buildings wrapped in cedar shingles and cedar siding; the Bahrhousen main house and its workshop. 

Coming up on Bahrhausen for the first time feels like a sleight of hand. The surrounding trees allow the cedar boxes to fold into their context, until the site’s flora peels back at the brick-lined driveway and the hard-edged wood wrapped shapes come fully into view. The reveal feels playful and satisfying as the hard edge cedar forms host an eclectic mix of exterior elements:a variety of circular and rectilinear windows, garage doors, angled walls and portions of the exterior cedar walls that jog out or bend in, all hosted in an otherwise monolithic wood-wrapped form. Bahrhausen’s big reveal requires a pause to study all its disparate elements, which Bahr once described to the Lincoln Journal star as a “modern two-story exploded box”.

The side door of the workshop building and the front door of Bahrhausen’s main house are connected via a small bridge, wrapped in the same wood the house and garage are clad in. The bridge juts out towards the main house, connecting to ground floor at a forty-five degree angle, skirting over the adjacent landscape which rolls gently down the exterior walls of the main house. The front door to the main house is carved into the building’s form, pushed in at the same angle of the adjoining bridge from the workshop. Once inside, the house is split into two wedge shaped wings to the North and South, connected by a hallway that hosts bathrooms and a connection to the house’s stair, which juts out towards the exterior patio. The angled walls on the North and South wings create views and connections from the first and second levels to two porches, a large porch accessed by sliding doors in the dining room and living room and a small exterior landing, accessed by a small set of stairs off of the large porch, that leads out to back of the property and more thickets of mature trees. 

“Bahrhausen is a playful experiment that looks to its surrounding landscape to find elements to set up subtle visual games between the house and its context. The hard boundaries of the cedar boxes begin to blur with the trunks of surrounding trees, playing with space in a visual game akin to an Escher painting, flattening space between the building and its context.”

Once you’re adjacent to the house, exterior elements like windows and doors play new games on the exterior; their eclecticism once again challenges the otherwise rigid shape of the mono-material boxes. Bahr’s home seems to be saying something about how to thoughtfully compose a facade, while also not being too rigid about composition. Sometimes there are rhythms that reveal themselves in the windows and doors on the facade, and in other moments architectural elements appear where they work best or to throw off the pre-established rules, like the circular porthole window (the only of its kind on the project) which is tucked away on the Southeast corner of the building. It seems like in these moments, Bahr is taking whimsy very seriously; creating rules around the composition of his home and breaking those rules at moments in ways that reward exploration. That same kind of exploration becomes part of the curated progression through the house: park your car in the workshop, walk outside between the two main buildings and cross the bridge, enter the main house, circulate out to the porch, and then walk out to the Eastern edge of the site. You go inside to go outside, rinse and repeat. Reading from Bahrhausen, Bahr seemed to have believed that architecture needed to be thoughtfully curated but to also play games that make a building more than just a “machine for living”. Bahrhausen is a house, but it’s also a series of hard edge wooden boxes, a composition of eclectic exterior elements that pop in and out, shapes that blend in or disappear into their context, and an apparatus for bringing you from inside to outside, etc.

When I moved back home earlier this year, I had been living and working outside of Nebraska, mostly on the East Coast, for nearly a decade. Since then, I’ve been looking into BVH’s catalog of work to better understand what designing in Nebraska (and other nearby states) could or should look like. Bahr believed that great design didn’t just come from cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or London, and I think that bears out in projects like Bahrhausen. My hope is that generations after Bahr can build on his ethos, well-crafted projects, rigorously playful, connected to their landscapes.