::DEPARTMENTS:: Style With Substance

Hearth, Sweet Hearth

By Vishu Magee

Anthropologists can argue all day about what genetic quirk makes us humans instead of apes, but I’d like to offer a simpler reason for the difference: fire.

That’s right—fire. Take any group of people at any level of technological development, and you’ll find that fire lies at the very center of social, economic, and ceremonial life. So, too, with our dwellings. Though we live in an age of stainless steel cooktops and prefab fireplaces, the truth is that home is where the hearth is—which means that the fireplace is one of the most powerful objects in the home.

Since the proverbial dawn of time, whether staying warm at night, fending off animals, cooking food, or sitting in council as family or tribal groups, humans have been inseparable from fire. This is a collective evolutionary experience deeply etched in our psyches—and so any fireplace that appeals to those primal, instinctual patterns in human nature is likely to be extremely dynamic.

How can we tap into this primal relationship to fire? To begin with, fireplaces should retain a raw, elemental feeling. Really old fireplaces on the pueblos have this quality: fire that is controlled just enough to be safe, but otherwise quite accessible and strongly present in the room. Such fireplaces have notably wide openings for cooking and radiating heat, and they are usually placed so you can sit and work quite close to the flames. The shepherd’s fireplace is another example of a real working relationship with fire.

Of course, few of us live an old-time lifestyle anymore, and it’s a little silly to build a shepherd’s fireplace in a suburban setting. Yet there’s no reason for so many contemporary fireplaces to be anemic and over-stylized when there are lots of ways to evoke the ancient way.

Like what you see? Subscribe here.

Jack Parsons©

Fireplaces in the Southwest are already much closer to the aboriginal traditions of sacred fire than they are to those of the European hunting lodge or the baron’s mansion.