THE OUTSIDERS (PART THREE OF THREE PARTS)

In the past, an architect was just what his Latin name suggested--a “master builder”.  Practical experience was the most important schooling such a person could have, and architects thus trained gave us the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Parthenon, and all the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. 

Only during the past hundred years or so has the right to use the title “architect” been determined by academic degrees and testing rather than by practice.  In 1897, Illinois became the first state to require that architects be licensed. California followed suit in the early years of the new century.  

The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards was founded in 1919 and held its first annual meeting two years later.  Given the ever-increasing complexity of building technology, the remaining states instituted requirements for licensure over the next thirty years, with the last two holdouts, Vermont and Wyoming, doing so only in 1951.  

Today, no one may use the title “architect” in the United States without fulfilling a  seven-and-a-half-year long course of education and office internship, including an exhaustive series of examinations.  Despite the rigors of this procedure, mere possession of an architectural license has never been a guarantee of talent.  Or, as my old boss used to put it, “You can have a fishing license, but it doesn’t mean you’re gonna catch any fish.”

Conversely, a lack of formal education and licensure hasn’t always ruled out extraordinary ability.  The last two columns in this series recounted six non-architects--Frank Lloyd Wright, Addison Mizner, Cliff May, Carr Jones, Buckminster Fuller, and Craig Ellwood--who changed the course of architecture and, just as important, made the world a more interesting and beautiful place.

None of the six had formal training or licenses (in Wright’s case, his practice predated licensure requirements). Wright and Mizner gained their entire architectural educations through apprenticeship--Wright with Louis Sullivan, and Mizner with Willis Polk.  May, Jones, Fuller, and Ellwood had no formal architectural training whatever.  

None of this is meant to suggest that no schooling is better than bad schooling, or that licensure is unimportant.  But it does suggest that there are alternatives to the usual way we teach architecture and building, and how we judge architectural skill.  

It’s no accident that each of the gifted non-architects cited above learned his craft mainly through practical experience, not through academics.   Today, a handful of schools still struggle to include such hands-on training--Wright’s Taliesin and Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti among them.  Yet for the most part, the architectural establishment remains firmly entrenched in the belief that formal schooling and office internship are the only legitimate basis for competence and licensure.  

Today, few would deny the contributions of geniuses like Wright and Fuller, romantics like Jones, Mizner and May, and even consummate front men like Ellwood.  Yet the current process of education and licensure, overwhelmingly weighted as it is toward academic and office training, holds little room for such mavericks in the future.  That’s a pity, because in many ways, the practically-trained architect follows most closely in the footsteps of the  “master builder”.    

THE OUTSIDERS (PART TWO OF THREE PARTS)

Last time, we looked at the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright, Addison Mizner, and Cliff May, all renowned architects who were never formally trained or licensed.  Today we’ll touch on a few more architects who made an undeniable contribution to the profession, despite their lack of formal credentials.

Carr Jones, a designer-builder who practiced in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost half a century beginning in the late teens, was a pioneer in green architecture if ever there was one. Jones fashioned lyrically beautiful homes out of used brick, salvaged timber, and castoff pieces of tile, slate, and iron, often wrapping his dramatically-vaulted rooms around a landscaped central court.  Perhaps because he was trained as a mechanical engineer and never traveled abroad, Jones was all but innocent of architectural pretension. Instead, he built on unvarying principles of comfort, conservation, and craftsmanship.  And unlike many trained architects whose style changes with every faddish breeze that blows, Jones’s convictions remained uncompromised right down to his death in 1966.

R. Buckminster Fuller had no architectural training either, and indeed was expelled from Harvard during his freshman year for "irresponsibility and lack of interest".  His first job was working as an apprentice machine fitter.  Yet over the course of his long and wide-ranging career, Fuller’s architectural innovations included not only the geodesic dome--his best-known invention--but also the gleaming, steel-sheathed Dymaxion House, a dwelling meant to be mass produced in a factory and installed on the site as you might bolt down a lamppost.    

In the context of today’s fussy, retrograde home designs, Fuller’s visionary proposals for the geodesic dome and the futuristic Dymaxion House may draw smiles, but this reflects more on the glacial pace of architectural progress than any flaw in Fuller’s thinking.

Not surprisingly, Fuller dismissed conventional architects, saying: “They work under a system that hasn't changed since the Pharaohs.” During his lifetime, the onetime Harvard dropout received exactly 47 honorary doctorates from universities the world over, and today is deservedly included in practically any general survey of twentieth-century architecture.  

One highly influental non-architect had creative skills of another kind.  Craig Ellwood was the celebrated Southern California modernist whom one critic called “the very best young architect to emerge from the West Coast in the years following World War II.”  A brilliant self-promoter, Ellwood (who was born Johnny Burke and took his tonier surname from a local liquor store) parlayed some minor development experience into a career that reached the highest echelon of modern architecture.  So skilled was Ellwood at presenting himself that despite being barely educated--his entire formal training consisted of night classes at UCLA--he was twice considered for the deanship at Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology.  

Understandably, Ellwood took pains to hide the fact that he was unlicensed from his elite clientele, and he relied heavily on a gifted staff to carry out his basic concepts.  That he was able to enrapture critics, editors, and clients alike despite his lack of education can only increase one’s admiration for his skill.  And in the final analysis, nothing can detract from the breathtakingly elegant steel-and-glass creations that are the legacy of the Ellwood office.

Next week:  The common thread among great architects and great non-architects alike.

THE OUTSIDERS (PART ONE OF THREE PARTS)

One of Frank Lloyd Wright's earliest and
least-known "commissions"—this curious
windmill tower built for his family's
Spring Green, Wisconsin, farm in xx

Though some of my colleagues might cringe to hear it, non-architects—those who lacked either the formal schooling or the license to legally use the title “architect”—have had a huge impact on American architecture over the past century.  If they weren’t architects in the legal sense, they more than lived up to the title’s original meaning of “master builder”.

Why not start at the top? Frank Lloyd Wright’s only formal training consisted of a year of engineering classes at the University of Wisconsin. Thoroughly bored, he dropped out in 1888 and headed for Chicago to find a job.  He quickly found one, first apprenticing with the Chicago architect  J. Lyman Silsbee, and later and more famously with his “lieber Meister”, Louis Sullivan. In 1893, after a falling out with Sullivan over taking outside work, Wright left the firm and opened his own office, where was able to use the title “architect” only because his practice predated the Illinois licensure requirements by four years. Wright nurtured a lifelong disdain for traditional architectural training, which eventually led him to found the Taliesin Fellowship, a unique school in which apprentice architects learned largely by doing.

Addison Mizner rose to become one of the "must-have"
society architects of Palm Beach, despite his lack of
formal credentials. Among his most enchanting works
is this Palm Beach shopping court, now named for him.

But Wright is only the best-known example of brilliant architects with unconventional or even nonexistent educations. In another vein entirely is Addison Mizner, the California-born, Guatemala-raised, Florida-polished raconteur who improbably rose to become the top society architect of Palm Beach during the Roaring Twenties. Mizner despised school, and accordingly his only architectural training was a three-year apprenticeship with the San Francisco architect Willis Polk. The happy result was a personal style that drew more from his childhood knowledge of Spanish Colonial Guatemala than from the copybooks so beloved by his contemporaries.  

Addison Mizner, whose work
was seldom taken seriously
by the architectural profession
despite his great success.

One of Cliff May's early Spanish Revival homes in
San Diego's Talmadge Park, designed in 1932, when
May was just 23 years old.

Nevertheless, Mizner’s romantic antiquarian villas were considered vulgar setpieces by his academically-trained colleagues. It probably didn’t help that he also ran a business manufacturing mock-antique furniture and building materials, which he used liberally in his own  work. Mizner’s career was spectacular but brief; he died in 1933. Today, his surviving Palm Beach work ranks among the finest Spanish Revival architecture in the nation.

On the opposite coast, Cliff May, the San Diego architect widely considered the father of the California Rancher, started his career building Monterey-style furniture. When he began designing Spanish Colonial-style houses for speculative builders in the early 1930s, academic architects dismissed him as a purveyor of kitsch. Yet over time, May’s rambling, site-sensitive designs metamorphosed into the rustic and low-slung homes that Americans came to love so well. All told, May built his Ranchers in forty U.S. states, and their spiritual heirs went on to become the dominant style of the postwar era. Genuine May-designed Ranchers, not to mention his earlier Spanish Revival designs, are now celebrated and studied by architectural connoisseurs.  

May's later designs hewed to a more Mid-Century vibe,
such as this Long Beach "pool house" of 1953

Cliff May: Despite his skill,
"real" architects didn't want him
in the clud.

Despite these formidable accomplishments, May received only late and grudging acceptance from his licensed colleagues—or as he rather poignantly put it,  “It took real architects a long time to let me into the club.”   

Next time, we’ll look at a few more outsiders who changed the course of architecture, and see what they all had in common.

PROOF THAT GOOD DESIGN MATTERS

During the past few weeks, every time I’ve had to use yet another badly-designed appliance, or had to sit idling at yet another ineptly-timed traffic light, or had to decipher yet another garbled set of instructions, I’ve thought of one man: Steven Jobs. And I wish there could’ve been a hundred more like him.

There’s no doubt that, with Jobs’s passing, the world has lost one of the most important visionaries of the last hundred years. But for me, the loss has less to do with his putting a computer for the rest of us on a million desktops, nor with his uncanny knack for creating things that people didn’t even know they needed. Granted, these accomplishments are vastly important to Jobs’s legacy. But to my mind, his ultimate triumph was his singular skill at persuading a largely indifferent public that excellent design really matters. He wanted us all to be as passionate about beauty and simplicity as he himself was. And to the extent that Apple’s famously intuitive and user-friendly products are now more popular than ever, he seems finally to have succeeded.

The fact is that the average American consumer has been amazingly tolerant of third-rate product design. Consequently--and understandably--any company that knows it can make perfectly good money selling clumsy, overcomplicated, or unintuitive products has no incentive whatever to improve them. And so most don’t. 

In Jobs, however, we had the unique case of a businessman on a near-religious crusade to educate his own market, relentlessly challenging us to demand more than the run-of-the-mill crap we’re typically offered. 

It’s interesting to note that the Apple cofounder, despite being a pioneer in one of the most technically complex fields yet known to man, was not an engineer but rather a laid-back college dropout with a mystical streak. To add yet another layer of paradox to this singular mind, he was notoriously--some would say tyrannically--demanding of the people who worked for him. But if this is what it took to engender the phenomenally beautiful and beautifully functional objects Apple has created out over the years, then it was all worth it.

As you’ve probably guessed, I write on a Macintosh, and have done since I bought the very first model through an Apple engineer pal back in 1984. So yes, kids--I’ve been a true believer since long before the iPod, iPad, or iPhone even existed. And for many of those years, I tried in vain to convince doubters why there was nothing like using a Mac--in short, why good design really mattered. Thankfully, with the wild success of those assorted i-Things, Jobs was finally able to make that case for me. 

Steve Jobs had already revolutionized the fields of computing, film, music, and telephonics. I wish he’d been given the time for even more far-flung conquests, because I have no doubt that the world would have been a better place for it.

We could have used a hundred more like him, but alas, there was only one.

HORROR VACUI: Enough Design, Already

The Fall of Babylon, an etching by
Jean Duvet c. 1555, is often cited
as an example of horror vacui in art.

Not long ago, I handed a young architectural intern a preliminary sketch to be drafted up on the computer. It was a site plan for an agricultural research facility comprising 130 acres, about eighty acres of which were supposed to be reserved  for farmland.

A week later, as promised, I received the computer drawing. But lo and behold, the great swath of undeveloped acreage shown in the original plan had been completely filled up with a meandering web of plazas and pedestrian malls in a galaxy of arbitrary shapes--pinwheels, checkerboards, crescents, what have you. Setting aside the fact that these busy forms would only have made sense from the air, they would also have made for some rather difficult farming.

When I asked the intern why she’d added all those features unbidden, she replied:  “The plan looked so empty, I thought the client would want to see more things in it.” 

Victorian architecture is famous for its tendency to decorate
every available surface—a trait that fomented the counter-
reaction known as Arts and Crafts, and later on,
the asceticism of Modernist architecture.

This is a problem that afflicts all creative people, so much so that we even have a Latin name for it: horror vacui, or fear of emptiness. Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic of The New York Times, has called it “the driving force in contemporary American taste...(and) the major factor now shaping attitudes toward public spaces, urban spaces, and even suburban sprawl."

As Muschamp rightly perceives, the horror vacui is especially pronounced among architects.  Many, like my young drafter, think that if they don’t fills up every space with an avalanche of ideas and images, however unrelated to the program, they’ve somehow fallen short of their creative charge.

The pendulum swung wildly to the opposite extreme with the
advent of Modernist architecture—and once again,
too much ( or in this case, or too little)
brought on today's distinct lean toward horror vacui.

In fact, just the opposite is true. Architecture is a process of reduction, not just compilation.  Ideally, the architect distills a complex set of requirements into the simplest form that will both satisfy the client’s needs and offer some measure of personal artistic grace. The avalanche of ideas has its place early in the process, but as things progress, design features that aren’t essential—whether for function or effect—fall away, leaving the final polished kernel of a solution. When carried out with skill, this process doesn’t preclude fanciful ideas, but it does preclude dysfunctional and clumsy ones. 

Of course, today’s designers aren’t the only ones afflicted with horror vacui-- it’s a tendency that waxes and wanes over decades. Victorian architects, for instance, couldn’t bear to see an unadorned surface. The dawning twentieth century brought a counterreaction to this compulsive decoration; it began with the Mission Revival and Craftsman styles and reached its zenith with International Style Modernism, whose practitioners turned architectural reduction into an art form.  

There is a middle ground, of course—in this Spanish Revival
home dating from the 1920s, for example, the plain wall
surfaces serve to intensify the effect of the other elements.

Ironically, it’s precisely this Modernist austerity that’s sent us hurtling back toward the frenetic gimcrackery so evident in contemporary design. And while architecture without complexity is dull, architecture that’s layer upon layer of complexity is simply meaningless.  

A house on the Greek island of
Mykonos: No fear of plain surfaces here.

As in so many other things, the answer lies in striking a balance. Some of our era’s most idealized domestic architecture—rural French farmhouses, say, or those much-admired vernacular hillside towns in Italy or Spain—



are about as spare and simple as could be while still suiting their purpose. Against such a clean sharp background, a single flowerpot or bit of filigreed ironwork fairly bursts with ornamental power.  

Alas, like my young intern, many architects still grow fidgety at the sight of a plain white wall, much less an empty plot of land. That’s too bad because, more often than we’d like to think, the best designing we can do is none at all. 

THE FAD FACTORY

We all know that nothing looks more dated than last year’s red-hot style.  What’s not so obvious is why consumer styles-- whether clothes, curtains, or cars--come and go with such cyclical certainty.  More often than not, the seeds of new design trends are carefully nurtured by their respective industries to spur sales, and then disseminated via design magazines, television shows, and the like.  Clever marketing encourages consumers to believe that they’re the ones driving these trends, when in fact it’s more often the other way around.  

Once a hot trend inevitably runs its course, another comes along to replace it.  Those who literally bought into the previous fashion cycle are left with outmoded items that once again beg to be replaced with more current ones, thereby starting the cycle anew.  

The American auto industry brilliantly exploited this marketing ploy during the postwar era.  Back then, Detroit’s enormous, chrome-laden cars were heavily restyled each and every year, ensuring that the driver of last year’s model would be acutely aware that his near-new car was already out of date.  While most people are now wise to the role of planned obsolescence in selling cars, not so many are aware that the makers of domestic products play the same marketing game.  

Take kitchen appliances, for example.  Since a washing machine or refrigerator will ordinarily last decades, the simplest way to coax consumers into buying a new one is to make them embarassed at how dated the old one looks. Accordingly, over the years, we’ve seen a whole succession of color and finish fads come and go, each by turns energetically touted as the ultimate in chic.  They’ve ranged from the basic sanitary-white appliances of the late 1940s through Turquoise, Coppertone, Advocado, Harvest Gold, Almond, Black, and eventually back to white again.  

Of course, merely ending up right where you started wouldn’t carry much urgency as a fashion statement, so appliance makers found a new sales angle: Why, this wasn’t just plain old white--it was White on White.    

Given that any fashionable item is doomed to look uniquely dated in a very short time, one wonders why people continue to be so easily swayed by the artificial dictates of fashion, rather than recognizing it for the finely-tuned  sham that it is.  

At the root of this susceptibility lies, I think, an unfounded lack of confidence in our ability to judge for ourselves.  Dig even deeper, and we may find a reluctance to trust one of our most important design tools:  our own intuition.  For instance, when clients bring me a range of color choices for, say, countertops, they’ll dutifully run through the ones they perceive to be in step with current design trends.  But at some point, they’ll show me the one color that really makes their eyes light up, which they’ll resignedly dismiss with some comment such as, “I absolutely LOVE this color, but I know it’s way out of fashion.”

I couldn’t think of a better reason to choose it.

SPACE CASE

I often get calls from nice folks who’ve drawn up their own plans and want me to check them for problems.  Some of these designs are wonderfully creative, yet virtually all of them are sabotaged by the same basic shortcomings:  People never allow enough space for hallways, staircases, kitchens, or baths. 

Stairs are undoubtedly the biggest booby trap for neophyte planners.  Even a relatively steep, straight stair climbing your basic nine-foot-high story requires a bare minimum floor area of three by ten feet--and this doesn’t include the top and bottom landings or the thickness of the enclosing walls.  L- or U-shaped stairs need even more room. Yet people routinely show me designs for second-story additions in which the entire staircase is miraculously packed into a linen closet.  They’re usually crestfallen to learn that, in fact, the new second-floor bedroom they thought they were adding will only be replacing the one wiped out by the stairs. 

Kitchens are typically overcrowded as well.  The absolute minimum aisle width between facing countertops--even those on islands--is four feet.  Although this may seem excessive on paper, it won’t be once you’ve got doors, drawers, and dishwasher racks projecting into the aisle, not to mention a few bystanders “helping” you cook.  Nor should sinks and cooktops have less than eighteen inches of counter space on either side--and again, this includes islands.  

Even when they know there really isn’t enough room to accommodate everything they want, amateur planners will often try to cheat their way out of the problem by cannibalizing other spaces.  Clothes closets are a common victim:  Although they need to be at least two feet deep, people are always trying to whittle a few inches off  them to buy space somewhere else.  Forget it--jacket sleeves cannot be fooled by this strategy.    

Other immutable rock-bottom minimums:

•  Foyers need to be at least six by six feet.

•  Hallways, like stairs, can be no less than three feet wide.

•  Walk-in closets need to be at least five feet wide for a single-sided arrangement, and seven feet wide for a double-sided one. 

•  Double lavatory sinks require a countertop at least six feet wide.  Never mind those dinky five-foot examples you find at the big-box store--that’s just wishful thinking. 

•  Toilets should occupy a space at least 30 inches wide when between a wall and a counter, and at least 36 inches wide when between two walls.

•  Stall showers require a space no less that three feet square; tubs and tub/showers need at least 2 foot 8 inches by 5 feet.

•  Garages must be at least 19 feet deep inside.  And don’t dream of trying to squeeze a furnace, water heater, or washer and dryer into that minimum, either.

When space is tight, both architects and amateurs can be tempted to fudge minimum dimensions by a few inches here or there.  Don’t.  In fact, it’s good practice to allow a few inches more than you need, since finishes, trim, and unexpected errors or obstructions often conspire to nibble away preciousroom from a space that’s already squeezed.  If you can’t accomodate the above minimums, you may need to rethink your wish list.  Better to throw a few things overboard than to sink the whole ship.