We’ve been reading the impressive Large, Lasting & Inevitable: Jorge Silvetti in Dialogues and Writings on Architecture as a Cultural Practice (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Told through a series of interviews by former students and colleagues, it’s a dense and fascinating journey through Silvetti’s career.
Like many on the Outer Cape, we are familiar with that Jorge Silvetti — the one whose firm, Machado Silvetti, brought us the extraordinary renovation and addition to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2006. But there is another Jorge Silvetti, the one who, with his husband and professional partner Rodolfo Machado, introduced us not only to the pleasures of this place but also to the power of a well-appointed room and the many stories a house can reveal.
One of those houses is a 1940s Cape on Main Street in Wellfleet, which we photographed over the years before they sold it last summer in anticipation of spending more time in Buenos Aires. Looking at these photographs now, we see perhaps the most important lesson we have learned from Jorge and Rodolfo, one that has informed our practice over the last 30 years. It’s about decoration, but it’s also about place.
The two of us — we, too, are partners, an architectural designer and a decorator — had just started dating when we came to Provincetown for the first time. It must have been 1980. We spent that weekend walking along the stretch of beach that connects the East End to the West End. Though we were lost in conversation, the magic of this place did not elude us. The sense of history, mystery, melancholy, and beauty was more palpable with each step.
Not long after that first visit, our commitment to Cape Cod began in earnest when we rented a house in Truro for the month of August with our friends Rodolfo and Jorge.
That house was at the end of North Pamet Road. A fire road just across the street led the four of us through a cranberry bog to a secluded stretch of beach between Ballston and Longnook, with very few people in evidence along the way.
For years after that August, friends from Boston, New York, and Buenos Aires joined us at that house for as many weeks as their schedules would allow. This Cape tradition became a constant in all our lives when, in 1989, Rodolfo and Jorge bought the Wellfleet house. Situated on three acres overlooking marshland, the house became the epicenter of our summer holidays.
Over the years, the two improved the property: first a new kitchen and studio, then a sunroom; sitework to create outdoor living spaces and gardens came next and, finally, an expansion of the dormers to enlarge bedrooms on the second floor. Throughout the house’s architectural iterations, the couple’s attraction to beautiful objects and their obsession with style informed the interiors. Each room of the house became a repository for the things they loved. Thoughtful furnishings and artful arrangements, from Frankoma pottery and vintage kitchen utensils to art and books — lots of both — created seductive spaces for social or solitary enjoyment.
The Argentines (long “i”) — as our group of friends called Rodolfo and Jorge — are avid collectors. In 2021, they arranged to give their collection of more than 200 pieces of dinnerware and fine art ceramics made by Frankoma, a beloved Oklahoma company, to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma. They had been collecting vintage pieces in Frankoma’s Prairie Green color palette for more than four decades.
Born and raised in Buenos Aires, with stops for graduate studies in Paris and Berkeley, the pair eventually settled in Boston to start what would become their international architectural firm. Jorge taught at Harvard and Rodolfo at the Rhode Island School of Design.
But it was a stint in Pittsburgh to teach at Carnegie Mellon before arriving in Boston that made them avid flea market aficionados. Western Pennsylvania turned out to be a treasure trove of forgotten objects. Decades later, the cache of things they found in those markets, along with collections accumulated from their travels, adorned the rooms of their Wellfleet house.
Over many years, we’ve seen how smart, informed, delightful, and meaningful good rooms can be. We’ve learned about spaces created for pleasure. With all of that, Rodolfo and Jorge’s Wellfleet house stands out in our memories as one that reveals the relevance of that most loaded of terms: we’ve come to understand the components of taste.
We’ve learned that a good room possesses the spirit of its inhabitants even in their absence. Memories of a good room inform a thousand more.
