A Haven Grows in Hyattsville

One afternoon, Rockcastle drives into Hyattsville in his green Volvo. In addition to being an academic, he's a practicing architect and has produced blueprints for about 90 buildings across the country. But he's also, says his friend Velasco, "an innovator -- someone who's always been way ahead of the curve and likes it out there."

Rockcastle parks behind the Machen building, gets out of the Volvo and shakes hands with his contractor, a 40-year-old local guy named William Potts Jr.

"The ceiling tiles upstairs," Potts begins, "you want those removed?" He has learned to ask about everything. Rockcastle has unpredictable ideas about what's worth saving.

"Yes," Rockcastle nods, following Potts. They pass a three-foot-tall pile of mahogany paneling Potts has peeled from the walls. Keep these, Rockcastle says and points at the paneling, grinning mischievously. To anyone else, the wood scraps would be a "Brady Bunch" bygone, a relic of 1960s rec rooms better left to old photo albums. But to Rockcastle, they're raw materials: He plans to turn them into furniture.

"I'm gonna use that paneling in a strange way," he begins, and Potts's eyes widen skeptically, "that you'll be entertained by."

It's their joke. Rockcastle often concocts avant-garde ideas rarely seen in small-scale renovations near Hyattsville's old business corridor. He talks about "vertical archaeology" and "movable walls." He says he "understands the voice" of building materials and proclaims, "I don't like machine-made things. They look like they came from nowhere."

Minutes later, Potts is asking about the ceiling's fluorescent lights, a group of '60s-era oddities shaped like seven-foot daisy petals: "What about them?"

Rockcastle muses, "Oh, that's all coming off. I've been dying to think of a way to use them. Maybe on the wall."

The architect calls the space he owns a "flexible building." He grabs a notebook and begins to sketch. The two storefronts on the ground floor he will keep as office space: They will become the East Coast branch of his Minneapolis architecture firm, Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, and the outer walls of the office will be gallery space. Upstairs, he is gutting the old apartments and creating a row of bedrooms across the back. The front will become one great space, with kitchens, that can be divided into two rooms with the movable walls.

"The more you specialize," he says, dismissing rigid floor plans that allow only one configuration, "the more vulnerable it is."

And as he moves toward renovating -- revolutionizing, really -- his Hyattsville space into something brand-new, he becomes entranced by hints of its previous tenants. He will keep old patches of wallpaper, complete with water damage, and frame them behind a glass-shelved dining cabinet. He will put in flooring that leaves exposed the marks, or "ghosts," of the walls that he removed.

"I don't think it's appropriate to erase all the time. No botox. No electroshock therapy," he says. It is important to leave behind "enough evidence that a place has experienced a life."