ABSTRACT
Crocknorth lies less than ten miles across the Surrey Downs from Michael Newberry’s Panshanger. Here beneath the Scots pines and at an elevation of 600ft. (180m), Georgie Wolton built a simple, Miesian pavilion, Fieldhouse. (Figure 3.19) Completed in August 1969, it was the first house to use Cor-ten steel structurally: John Winter’s house in Highgate, completed two months earlier, had used it as a cladding material. Wolton had been to Darlington, to the newly completed Cummins Engineering Factory, “to have a look at how to detail Cor-ten, because it’s a bit tricky stuff.” 1 Cor-ten was really the best choice of material. The site was exposed and windswept, and the colour and texture of the Cor-ten complemented the tall trunks and fallen limbs of the Scots pines. To have painted it white, like the Farnsworth House, would have been a disaster. “I wanted it to get older and older and older”, she explained. “It grew mould on all the neoprene gaskets and it was simply beautiful, with the green mould, the brown steel and this brown Spectrafloat glass. It really did look rather magical.” 2 The grass was allowed to grow long and so, like a rusting Farnsworth House, it floated above its hilltop meadow. (Figure 3.20) Fieldhouse was both romantic and heroic. “Its a wild building and does not want to be tamed in any sort of way.” 3
