ARCHITEXT by Arrol Gellner

After writing hundreds of essays on architecture, first as a syndicated newspaper columnist and then as a blogger, today I'm kicking off a more personal project. For the past few years, I've been absent from the blogosphere busily working on my fourth book, The Crookedest House: An Architect's Twenty-Year Renovation Folly, which chronicles the still-ongoing renovation of a 1930 Storybook Style house my wife and I purchased in Berkeley, California.

While my previous three books pontificated on architecture in the third person, The Crookedest House speaks from the heart, much as my little essays have tried to do. Accordingly, over the coming months, I'l be presenting the book in essay-like serial installments, beginning with the prologue below. I hope you find it, and the subsequent chapters, worthy of your time. —Arrol Gellner

PROLOGUE:    THE ARCHITECT’S CURSE

Arrol Gellner: Accursed Architect?

The curse of all architects is that when we do our jobs right—I mean, really right—the solution looks so natural, so obvious, so inevitable, that people wonder why it took us so long to pull it off. Yet how many people would say of the Mona Lisa, “What’s the big deal—he just painted some lady with no eyebrows.” Thankfully, most of us appreciate the fact that Da Vinci made many, many attempts to capture just the right subtlety of expression (a fact that’s been confirmed by X-ray examinations of the canvas). He worked on it, and worked on it, and worked on it some more, in order to end up with something sublimely simple. That’s what architects—good ones, anyway—also try to do, and dammit, it just takes time. 

Ironically, the very fact that a really good design looks inevitable and obvious rather than strained and fussy also means that no one but the architect can ever really appreciate the long road traveled to make it come out that way. Things are even worse for architects who believe, as I do, that when you mess around with a building of a certain era—especially a well-designed one—it’s an integral part of your brief to make any changes or additions respect the original work. In other words, if I’m remodeling a wonderful old Mid Century Modern house, I’m not going to emend it with some personal magnum opus that’s a glaring departure from the original. Why? Because I’ve seen the results of too many such aesthetic excursions after the trends their architects followed went the way of all fashion. 

The ostensible focus of this book is the place I’ve christened The Crookedest House, which clings to hilly Cragmont Avenue in Berkeley, California. My wife and I bought it in the spring of 2006, just in time to be pulled into the undertow of the Great Recession. In the euphemistic parlance of the real estate industry, the house was “distressed”, having been severely damaged by ground movement over the course of its seventy-six years. Hence, it was priced a bit—but only a bit—below the norm for that leafy hillside neighborhood. Few people would have considered it a great buy, but it was at a price we thought we could afford. More importantly, as an architect, it offered me something I always relished: a project I could sink my teeth into without having to please anyone but my own family. 

W. H. Hooper, 
Curse-worthy Builder?

 I’ve always had a soft spot for 1920s-era houses, having grown up in one, and it’s no accident that two of the books I’ve written dealt almost exclusively with architecture of this period. Moreover, during the course of my career I’ve found that homes of the Roaring Twenties were generally built with exemplary craftsmanship. Structural damage not withstanding, I expected the same from our new house on Cragmont Avenue, built in 1930 by a prolific Berkeley builder named W. H. Hooper. 

Alas, when it came time to open up walls to prepare for construction, I got a rude awakening. There was hardly a stick of lumber in the place that didn’t seem to have come from a discard pile. A closer inspection revealed many instances of hurried workmanship, along with some areas that had never been finished at all. In short, the place seemed carelessly tossed together—a distinct outlier for its time, even compared to the builder’s prior work. For me, piecing together the how and why of this anomaly soon evolved into a project of its own, a parallel narrative that sometimes seemed hijacked by W. H. Hooper himself, and explained in his own words (via courtroom transcripts) almost a century after the fact.

As I write this prologue, some twenty years after we bought The Crookedest House, I’m still working to complete the final details of plans I first developed back in 2006. As we slowly close in on a relatively finished state of construction, the house is so convincingly a product of the late 1920s that few people would suspect that most of it is essentially new. This has led me to wonder whether I might once again have laid the classic architect’s trap for myself—that my very determination to make the new work all of a piece with the original might mean that no one would even realize the design was mine, and not that of the original builder. This is an awful enough prospect for any architect, since the only meaningful traces of our existence are the buildings we leave behind. But worse yet was the prospect that people might take my house to be the work of W. H. Hooper.

I confess that these thoughts began to nag at me, and this book is in large part just an effort to assign rightful credit, for better or worse, for the unusual house that now stands on Cragmont Avenue in Berkeley. Being acutely conscious of my own frail legacy in this latter stage of life, I shudder at the idea of some future passerby observing: “Oh, that W. H. Hooper built such wonderful houses in the Twenties!”

The hell he did.

Next time: The game is afoot.