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441 Dutch Neck Road Cotteral House The Cotteral family built this center-hall frame home around 1860 and has lived here ever since. It may be the best preserved nineteenth century house in the township. This photograph shows the original cornice brackets and louvered shutters that ornament the exterior of the building.
108 One Mile Road T. H Mount House Thomas H. Mount moved onto this site soon after his father Ejirain (d. 1847) bought it in 1834. The brick section that Hiram added to the front of the house (above) is the oldest remaining brick building in the township. The bricks came from Thomas' brickyard and kiln, Thomas H. Mount and Company, at "Buzzard's Point," the intersection of Dutch Neck Road and Stockton Street.
440 Princeton-Hightstown Road "Moodyfield" Captain Rescarrick Moore (1755-1835) and his wife Sarah built this impressive Federal style home between 1795 and 1815. "Moodyfield " was the largest home of its kind in the township, boasting four interior end chimneys. The massive columns of the Colonial Revival porch were added by Arthur and Alice Applegate, who owned the farm from 1952 to 1985. The Rescarrick's called their home "Moodyfield" in honor of the Captain's great-grandmother, Mary Rescarrick, nee Mudie. It was Mary Mudie and her husband George Rescarrick, Sr. who bought this four hundred acre farm from Thomas Gordon in 1702. Rather than moving here, Mary arid George continued to live in Cranbury where they ran a tavern. The first member of the Rescarrick family to live here was their granddaughter Mary, who moved to the farm after she wed Henry Moore in 1747. The Moore's lived in a small house on the eastern side of the firm where their son Rescarrick was born. Rescarrick left the farm to enlist in the Middlesex County militia during the Revolutionary War. He fought in several battles, such as the Battle of Monmouth and the Battle of Connecticut Farms. After the war, he reenlisted in the militia of Middlesex County and fought in Pennsylvania to quell the Whiskey Rebellion (1794). He was elected captain of the in militia in January', 1800. Besides serving in the military of his new country and managing his farm, Captain Rescarrick also play a prominent role in Fast Windsor government. During the 1790's, he opened a tavern in which he hosted the first township meeting. In the 1820's, the Captain presided at East Windsor's annual township meetings and served as the Judge of Elections. Captain Rescarrick's children and grandchildren continued his tradition of public service. His son Henry A Moore served on the Township Committee from 1825 to 1830. His daughter Elizabeth wed Dr. Charles McChesney, New Jersey's Secretary of State under four successive governors. His grandson Rescarrick Moore Smith served as New Jersey State Treasurer from 1853 to 1865.
279 Princeton-Hightstown Road Patscenter The renowned English architect Sir Richard Rogers (b. 1933) designed this building for the Patscenter International Corporation in 1982. Construction began on April 14, 1983, with Governor Thomas Kean presiding over New Jersey's first robotic ground-breaking. Rogers' design for Patscenter reflects his belief that "technology can be used to positive ends." Instead of borrowing history "piecemeal," or applying it to the "facades of buildings like' wallpaper, Rogers insists that we must design buildings that "look optimistically into the future." Rogers' credits American architect Buckminster Fuller as the primary influence on his faith in technology. Like many of Fuller's innovative designs, Patscenter rejects a traditional frame structure. Traditional frame buildings begin on the ground with beams anchored into a foundation. One of Fuller's earliest architectural innovations was the "Dymaxion House" (1927), in which he rejects the traditional frame for a suspension design with the walls hanging from a single mast as in a suspension bridge or a circus tent (see Ethel McKnight School). In Rogers' Patscenter, the walls are suspended from the A-frame masts on the roof. Since suspension designs eliminate load bearing walls and columns, they provide fluid, flexible open space within a building. The interior can be easily changed to suit a variety of activities- As Rogers notes, a building that is "easy to modify has a longer useful life and uses its resources more efficiently" than one that is fixed. To anchor the building visually, Rogers put the mechanical systems such as plumbing and heating on a platform within the A-frame spine of the building. The systems, each a different color, run from the A-frame across the roof to the rest of the building. The effect is to emphasize the mechanical functions of the building. Whereas traditional architecture hides the mechanical systems behind the walls of the building, Patscenter places them in full view on the roof. it is as though Rogers turned the building inside-out so that the structural elements, or skeleton of the building, stand outside rather than inside the walls. The most famous of Rogers' exoskeletal designs is the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris (1978).
16 Lanning Boulevard East Windsor Municipal Building In August, 1982, township employees began moving from the crowded Ward Street town hall into this unusual building, which won awards for architectural and technical excellence. When Mayor Leonard J. Milner dedicated the building a few weeks later, the township celebrated the event with fireworks. The East Windsor council had decided to build a new town hall in October, 1979, at the height of the national energy crisis. In this period of national fuel shortages and rising fuel prices, the council decided to build a passive solar building designed by Stephen DiRochi of the Hillier Group, Princeton. By' using the sun for heat and the earth for insulation, DiRochi 's design uses 60% less fossil fuels than a conventional modern building. The nucleus of DiRochi 's design is the two-story glass wall at the Southern end of the building (see above). The glass works as a passive solar collector so that when sunlight pours through the two-story glass wall, it becomes trapped in the space between this glass outer wall and a concrete heat-radiating inner wall. The trapped sunlight heats the air between the walls tip to 150 degrees. Ceiling vents then move the heated air into the building's hot-air heating system and through the rest if the building. On cloudy winter day's, a conventional furnace heats the building. During the summer, maple trees shade the south wall to prevent the sun from heating the building. A round the other three sides of the building, DiRochi designed a landscaped earth berm to insulate the building from both hot and cold temperatures. Tons of earth make up the berm, which slopes like a pyramid twenty four feet up in the air from a thirty' foot deep base. The massive concrete walls that DiRochi placed beneath the berm to support the earth form a cathedral ceiling in the lobby at the center of the building. Between the trapezoidal shape of the building and its setting in the middle of a circular driveway, no low-flying aircraft could guess that it served as the center of local government--an important consideration during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union After he developed split-level homes around Eilers Corner and Hickory Corner in the 1950's and 1960's, township resident Jerry Finn began looking for a new way to design housing. He created the idea of Twin Rivers, the first planned unit development (PUD) in New Jersey. Mr. Finn's idea earned him the 1968 National Builder of the Year Award. The English street names in Twin Rivers reflect the origin of Mr. Finn's idea, in part, in the theories of the English planner Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928). By 1889 England's growing population faced a severe housing shortage and little available open space on which to build. Howard proposed "garden cities" or "new towns" that would cluster buildings owned by the community in the middle of open land to create "greenbelts" of open space surrounding the town.. The unfinished town of Radburn, New Jersey (1928), followed Howard's ideas of clustered houses, as did the "new towns" of Greenhills, Ohio; Columbia, Maryland and Reston, Virginia. Concerned that New Jersey would eventually face the same space shortages as England Mr. Finn used Sir Howard's theories to design Twin Rivers. Finn envisioned it is a nineteenth century village with a mixture of homes, schools, churches, temples, stores, and light industry. Along with his partners Herbert J. Kendall, W. R. Grace, and American Standard, Mr. Finn began building Twin Rivers in 1969 after the New Jersey Legislature passed enabling legislation, the Planned Unit Development Act of 1967. This legislation allowed East Windsor to eliminate its zoning restrictions for minimum lot and street sizes. Without these restrictions, the buildings in Twin Rivers could be near enough to one another for residents to walk to work, shop, or play. When it opened in 1970, Twin Rivers had just 30 acres of roads and nearly 200 acres of parks and lawns. The apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and homes in the four quads, or living areas, were interconnected with greenways for pedestrians like the one above. By eliminating the need for cars, the design helped preserve open space.
Twin Rivers Drive Ethel McKnight School Named for a local educator and community leader, the Ethel McKnight School was the first geodesic-domed school in New Jersey. The golden, anodized-aluminum dome stands forty-two feet high with a 144 foot overhead span of interlocking polygons. When it opened in October, 1970, the dome provided twelve open-space class rooms for 350 third through fifth graders. Architect J. E. Fariday of Micklewright, Mountford, Hammett, Bouman, Blanche of Trenton, based his geodesic design on the ideas of Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), the Internationally known American inventor, designer, and philosopher. Fuller believed that since our creative intelligence is limitless, we could use technology to improve life and overcome limited resources. Fuller's first major architectural innovation was his "Dymaxion House," a mobile building suspended from a single mast (see Patsccnter). He coined the word "Dynaxion" by combining the words "dynamic" and "maximum". The word aptly symbolizes Fuller's goal: to get a ' maximum advantage from minimum energy output', or to do more with less, so that everyone could have more of everything. After World War II, Fuller's "people's technology" led to his invention of the geodesic dome, a low-cost, efficient method of modular construction that some believe to be the most important structural innovation of the twentieth century. Using his geodesic geometry, Fuller's dome interconnects materials such as aluminum into self-supporting geodesic patterns, such as the polygons in the McKnight School. Because geodesic domes do not need internal supports such as beams or walls, they allow builders to enclose a great deal of space in a short amount of time with a minimum of material. The 23,000 square feet of interior space in the McKnight school cost $520, 000, and the building was completed in just five months.
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