Part I    Installment 1

TOO MUCH MONEY

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

Our problem was money. Not too little—too much. But don’t roll your eyes in disgust just yet; as you’ll soon find out, we weren’t really rich to begin with, and we sure didn’t stay rich for long. The year was 2005, my wife and I were both working, and we were living in a small live-work apartment I’d built with sweat equity. We had a modest mortgage payment of $460 per month, as well as a tenant whose rent fully covered the mortgage and then some. My wife, Aidong Ni, is from mainland China, and I come from German immigrant parents, so both of us were imbued with the compulsion to save, save, save. Five years into our marriage, with both of us working, we were amazed to find that our bank account had swollen to more than a hundred thousand dollars.

In those halcyon pre-Great Recession days, having a lot of money in the bank was considered stupid. Instead of saving money, you were supposed to invest it, so it would grow into even more money. Then you’d invest that money and grow it into yet more money, and then—you get the idea. I never really understood the point of using all that money just to grow yet more money, but then architects aren’t known for their business acumen. As the old joke goes: An architect wins a million dollars in the lottery. A reporter asks him, “Now that you’re a millionaire, what are you going to do?” The architect replies, “Oh, I’ll just keep practicing architecture until it’s all gone.”

Still, my wife and I agreed that we should do something with our huge nest egg—that it was no use having it just sitting there in a savings account drawings a few percent interest. We’d also just had a baby, so our live-work space, which was less than eight hundred square feet, was starting to feel a little tight. The obvious thing to do, it seemed, was invest that money in an actual house. And since I’m an architect and a do-it-yourselfer who’s always up for a building project, the ideal house would be one needing some sweat equity—a diamond in the rough, so to speak.

We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most expensive places in the United States, but I started checking the local real estate listings for houses we thought we could afford. Most were in Oakland and Berkeley, on the opposite side of the bay from astronomically expensive San Francisco. I grew up in a circa-1929 cottage in Concord, California, a small town even further inland, so I had a soft spot for homes of that era. Having also spent my late teens and early twenties in an Oakland house built in 1966, I realized that I had an outright aversion to homes of that era, with their tawdry Sheetrock walls and flimsy aluminum windows. Every time we toured an open house from that period, I simply couldn’t imagine us living there. Those places just creeped me out.

By contrast, whenever we stepped into a home built in the 1920s, I felt like I’d returned to my childhood: the doors with their recessed panels, the glass doorknobs resembling giant jewels, the top-nailed hardwood floors with their skinny planks, even the kludgy old double-hung windows—it all felt endearingly like the house I grew up in.

Lucky for me, my wife, having grown up in the People’s Republic of China—probably the closest thing there is to another planet—had none of the experiential baggage I carried. Moreover, since I was an architect and presumably knew best, she was more than willing to let me choose which house would be right for us. 

The realtor's sales card for the tiny cottage
we were in contract to buy for $695,000.
It was basically one room with a kitchen tacked
onto the back, and a small loft reached by the
spiral staircase visibile in the picture at right.

In November 2005, after a few months of scanning the real estate listings, we found a house in the Berkeley hills that seemed within our price range. It was on Cragmont Avenue, a mile or so north of the University of California, in a neighborhood of wildly varying Period Revival homes styles strung along picturesque winding streets. Once again, I’ll point out that the Bay Area is one of the most expensive places to live in the whole United States, so the asking price may still shock you all these years later: $625,000. Even more shocking, though, is what was being offered for that amount: a tiny cottage that had reputedly housed the gardener working for the folks in the “big house” next door.

Even calling the place a “house” was a stretch; it was, in fact, just one big, vaulted room with a few ancillary bits tacked onto the back—about six hundred square feet in total. There was no central heating; the whole place was purportedly kept warm by a small electric wall heater built into one corner of the living room. There was an interesting spiral staircase leading up to a sort of little mezzanine, and the exterior was charmingly Storybook-ish, but that was about all the place had going for it.

Still, as the talented and creative architect I fancied myself to be, I was sure I could turn this little hovel into something worth having. After talking it over with my wife, I contacted a real estate broker friend named Monica Wong and asked her to make an offer on the place. Now, “offer” usually presupposes you’re offering less money than the asking price. But at that time, in the blistering-hot Bay Area real estate market, practically no one dared to do that. On the contrary, it was quite normal for buyers to get into bidding wars and pay ten, fifteen, or twenty percent above the asking price. In one of my rare instances of common sense, I refused to play this game, since it was something of an oddball property, and since the asking price seemed pretty ambitious to begin with. In any event, the seller’s representative accepted our offer, which met their price of $625,000. We were on our way.

The disclosure documents had noted some kind of unusual arrangement relating to a small yard at the very back of the lot, which the owner of the adjoining property had apparently taken over as part of her own garden. Obviously, if we were buying the house, she would have to vacate this land, so we were compelled to meet our future neighbor and discuss it. She was a friendly older lady named Selma Klett, whose late husband had been—what else—an architect. Her house, which he’d designed, was a very interesting example of the 1960s-era California architectural style known as Brown Shingle Revival.

Selma was a perfectly nice person, and as we sat in her living room making small talk, there didn’t seem to be any issue with her relinquishing the little piece of land she’d been borrowing. She was also smitten with our infant son Robert, who was a bit over four months old at the time, and told us she had an interesting old wicker rocking goose she’d like to give him. Before we got up to go, Selma casually asked if I knew about the culverted creek running down her driveway, which struck me as an odd question, but which I didn’t really think much about until later. Then I thought about it a lot.

Next time: The half-million-dollar hovel.

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.

BACK IN GRAY

 Author's note: Hello, folks, it's been quite a while. Back in 2020, already adrift in the midst of Covid, I became so disgusted with Google's annoying retool of the Blogspot interface that I decided to take a break from blogging. After that I became distracted by starting in on a long-delayed writing project, The Crookedest House, my self-described "book about architecture disguised as a memoir". Now that I've finished the manuscript, I'll keep you posted on when and how you can get it when it's published.

A former painted lady—now just a gray lady.

In the meantime, though, I've missed exercising this platform for commentary, especially in light of the current chaos in our own government, not to mention the rising chaos everywhere else in the world. Of course, I'm an essayist on architecture and not a political columnist, but in times like these it's hard not to feel like crying out about things beyond the realm of design. So forgive me if that occasionally happens.

Accordingly, I'll segue into a now long-running trend that betrays America's unhappiness with itself in the past few decades. Perhaps you've guessed it already. Drive down any street and you'll notice one thing: Gray. Houses are gray, cars are gray. There's no doubt in my mind that this is a reflection of the national psyche—a long, drawn-out, and almost literal fading of the optimism we felt coming out of the Space Age.

Parking area at Mt. Hood, Oregon, around 1959—
the zenith of automotive two-tone and three-tone
paint jobs, and not coincidentally, of American
optimism. (Image:Reddit/The Way We Were).

Younger readers among you might not even be aware of this onetime American exuberance, which is a sad thing in itself. I'll have to go back even long before my own time to give you some idea what I'm talking about. Beginning in the 1950s, with a booming economy and fresh credentials as the nation that saved Europe in the Second World War, Americans felt they could do no wrong, and they weren't shy about saying so. Take a look at some of our modern architecture, and you'll see what I mean. Even more telling, take a look at the outrageously styled and kaleidoscopically colored American automobiles of that era, which made parking lots resemble huge boxes of pastel-colored candies. 

No, this isn't a staged shot—it's a line of cars, every one
of them painted in some variation of gray, just as I
found them in a parking garage.

Compare that with the usual street scene of today: Dreary lines of dull black, white, and grey cars as far as the eye can see. It's a level of boredom that would have dismayed even Henry Ford, who knew that while his Tin Lizzies could only be had in black, other manufacturers would be glad to supply Americans with colorful cars at a higher price.

Yet when I went car-shopping a few years ago, I found that the vast majority of color choices were limited to black, white, or endless permutations of gray or silver. 

As both real estate brokers and automakers are quick to point out, they aren't creating these trends, but rather are responding to them—from which it's reasonable to conclude that today, the American psyche no longer has much appetite for joyful expression. And no wonder: this literal darkening of the soul takes place as Americans are fed a steady diet of gloom, doom, and fear of the Other. At the same time, we continue to shrink from our longtime leadership as a small-d democratic light in the world, at a time when the world desperately needs it. It's a decline that's purely self-inflicted, and it's born of distinctly un-American fear rather than our usual American optimism. The drab thundercloud tones we now see all around us only mirror that foreboding.

During the late Fifties and early Sixties, aspirational forms like this were routine in buildings
ranging from the monumental to the mundane—this is the Findlay Oldsmobile dealership,
built in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1963. Image: Ken MacIntyre, Modtraveler.net

FUTURE SCHLOCK

Author's Note: Please excuse the godawful layout of this blog. Google, in its infinite wisdom, has recently seen fit to introduce an "improved" interface that, to put it simply, just doesn't work. As far as I've been able to determine, gobs of functionality and simplicity have been removed, and nothing of particular value has been added. In the last few months I've managed to dodge having to use this abominable "upgrade" by reverting to the legacy interface. Alas, Google has now pulled the plug on that option as well, and you see the pitiful result below. Even at that, getting it to this level required hours upon hours of frustration.  —Arrol Gellner

If you’ve ever seen one of the old Buck Rogers movie serials, with their packing-crate robots and Art Deco rockets shooting sparks, you can appreciate how quaint another era’s vision of the future can be—and how difficult it is to get it right. Yet speculating on things to come, whether in writing, in images, or in three dimensions, is something humans find irresistible. 

Architects are no exception. The Futurist movement of the early 20th century, for instance, saw technology as man’s savior, and its proponents liked to wax poetic over things like turbines and high voltage towers. Yet to many modern eyes, their stark, mechanistic cities of tomorrow are not so much redemptive as sinister. 

"Cityscape", a 1939 work by the Italian Futurist
Tullio Crali

During the 1920s, the Russian Constructivists saw architecture in equally edgy terms. Thanks to Stalin’s growing distaste for their work, their most ambitious ideas, like those of the Futurists, were never built. This fact has ironically worked in their favor, since speculating on the future is a good deal safer than actually trying to build it in three dimensions. Paper predictions remain snugly encased in the context of their own time, while real structures must actually occupy—however uncomfortably—the future they were meant to predict. 

The "House Of The. Future" at Disneyland
in Anaheim, California, Circa 1957. 
Its predictions turned out to be wildly off the mark.

Disneyland’s 1957 House of Tomorrow, an all-plastic home designed by MIT and sponsored by the chemical giant Monsanto, is a classic example of this phenomenon.  With its plastic furniture, plastic dishes, and molded plastic walls, it turned out to be an almost comically inept predictor of housing’s future. While plastics did find limited acceptance in many kinds of building materials, from drain pipes to windows, the predicted plastics revolution augured by the House of Tomorrow never materialized. Indeed, the actual building trends of the early twenty-first century have shown a steady retreat from man-made polymers and controlled environments, back toward organic materials and more environmentally-sensitive design.   

An unusual view of the 1939 New York World's Fair's
theme structures, the Trilon and Perisphere.
(Architects: Wallace Harrison and
J. Andre Fouilhoux)

Theme parks and expositions in general have been a steady source of futuristic centerpieces, from the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 New York World’sFair, to the globe-like, 140-foot tall Unisphere at the 1964 fair held on the same site, to the more recent Spaceship Earth, the Florida EPCOT Center’s eighteen-story geodesic sphere of 1982.  

Overshadowing all of these is the 605-foot tall Space Needle, centerpiece of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. With its concave pylons and flying-saucer superstructure, the Space Needle evoked the sort of future in which people would have robot housekeepers and fly around in jet-powered backpacks--that is, when they weren’t out driving their atomic cars. This space-age optimism even permeates the color names used in the tower’s paint scheme:  Astronaut White, Orbital Olive, Re-entry Red, and Galaxy Gold.

The observation platform of Seattle's famed Space Needle (1962)
In an era of boundless optimism, the future looked like this.
(Architects: Edward E. Carlson and John Graham Jr.)

As a now charmingly-retro hallmark for Seattle, the Space Needle has been an unqualified success—even today, it remains the city’s biggest tourist attraction. As a predictor of future architectural trends, though, the Needle missed the mark.  

The fact that the Space Needle and its futuristic brethren already seemed quaintly outdated within a decade of their completion shows just how risky building a vision of the the future can be. It’s a sure bet that our own “House of Tomorrow” predictions about computer-orchestrated homes—the sort of scenario in which your toaster automatically goes online to buy more Eggos--are just as likely to come to naught.   

Still, architects will no doubt keep offering you their ideas of what’s to come. Whether our predictions pan out or not—well, notwithstanding Covid-19, a worrisome election, and any other nasty surprises 2020 may have in store for us—the future will be here soon enough.

INDIRECT LIGHTING: From The Stage To Your Living Room

 

Early predecessor of indirect lighting:
Limelight spotlight, used to illuminate
the front stage area of theaters
until the end of the nineteenth century.

What do movie palaces have to do with how you light your home?

Plenty. After electric lighting replaced gaslight at the end of the 19th century, most electric lighting was “specular”, a fancy way of saying it came from a point source like the white-hot filament of a standard light bulb. That situation changed during the 1920s with the arrival of indirect lighting (“indirect” meaning that the light source is hidden).   

Indirect lighting took a while to catch on because, at first, electric fixtures were used just like gas mantles. No one thought of hiding them, since doing so would have been foolhardy with gas.  Moreover, exposed light bulbs were initially seen as an emblem of modernity.  

If you’ve ever tried to read by the light of an unshaded light bulb, though, you know that the glare they produce can be a real problem. Indirect lighting provided a dramatic solution: by concealing the light source, it diffused the light and, unlike an ordinary shade, completely eliminated specular glare.  

Spectacular use of soffit lighting in the
auditorium of the Wiltern Theater,
Los Angeles, c. 1931 (Architects: Stiles O. 
Clements and G. Albert Landsburgh)

Movie theaters were among the first to adopt indirect lighting. Auditoriums needed subdued lighting for safety even during the show, and of course having a lot of glary specular lamps wouldn’t do. Since live theaters had long used concealed footlights along the front edge of the stage—the well-known “limelight” you’ve heard about—it wasn’t much of a stretch to use indirect lighting in other parts of the building.  

Perhaps the most dramatic new form of indirect lighting in theaters was soffit lighting.  Typically, it consisted of a ceiling that stepped up from a low level at the perimeter (the “soffit”) to a higher one in the center.  Lighting fixtures were hidden in a continuous horizontal recess separating the two levels, so that a diffuse, glare-free light would bounce off of the upper ceiling into the space below.   

Indirect under cabinet lighting
provides the most even and
glare-free lighting for
kitchen work surfaces.

The futuristic hovering effect this technique produced soon became a favorite with Art Deco commercial architects, who used it in countless clever ways.  Naturally, it wasn’t long before these ideas were showing up in the latest homes as well.

But don’t think indirect lighting is all just theatrical razzle dazzle. It can be practical as well. For example, if you mount miniature fixtures under your kitchen’s wall cabinets and conceal them with a shallow skirt or “valance”, they’ll light the countertop beautifully, but won’t shine in your eyes. 

What’s more, indirect lighting can be remarkably cheap. Since you don’t see the light source, you can use ordinary fixtures costing a few dollars—instead of overpriced boutique fixtures costing hundreds—and still get very sophisticated results. Today, LEDs have vastly expanded the opportunities for indirect lighting. LED lighting strip is available as narrow as 3/8" wide, allowing it to be hidden practically anywhere. 

LED lighting strip has made it possible
to install indirect lighting in places it
couldn't go before.

However, indirect lighting can be low-tech as well; depending on the space available, ordinary porcelain sockets, light ropes, or even strands of miniature Christmas lights will do the job. Nor does the structure that conceals the lamps have to be expensive: most soffit lighting, for example, consists of little more than an ordinary lumber framework finished with drywall.  

Regardless of how you design your indirect lighting, though, remember that the lamps—yes, even LEDs—will need replacement now and then. Make sure that you have reasonable access, especially in tight locations like ceiling coves. And for  heaven’s sake, turn off the juice first.

IN AMERICA, ALAS, THE CAR IS STILL KING

Heaven help the pedestrian in shopping centers like this one—
which unfortunately are typical across the nation.

A few blocks from my office, there’s a dreary, ten-year-old strip mall fronted by literally acres of unrelieved parking lot.  Though it has no fewer than five separate entrances for cars, God help anyone who dares to approach the place on foot. To reach its quarter-mile-long phalanx of storefronts, you can either negotiate the single paltry thread of sidewalk the developers saw fit to provide, or else try to cross a vast sea of dirty asphalt on foot, with cars flashing carelessly past on all sides and bearing down behind you unseen.

One of the many exasperating tenets of postwar planning was the assumption that nobody would ever want to walk anywhere, anytime. Shopping centers, not to speak of downtown streets, were laid out mainly to suit automobiles and not people. Seemingly, the only time a human was expected to walk outdoors was enroute to the driver’s seat.  

In an environment designed for
and dominated by cars,
pedestrians are just in the way.

Yet many people do walk, and hopefully many more will do so in coming years. What with traffic snarls, interminable waits at signals, and the inevitable battle for parking, it’s often quite literally faster to walk three or four blocks than it is to drive that far. And mind you, I say this as a lifelong motorhead. 

Given all the bad things we’ve found out about designing cities around cars instead of people, modern planners are doing their best to bring pedestrians into this creaky old equation. It’s a fine idea in theory, but in practice, wherever cars and pedestrians mix, the cars invariably win out. The reason is obvious:  Since a car weighs twenty to thirty times what a person does, any contest between the two will not end up in the pedestrian’s favor. Hence, we’re psychologically conditioned from childhood to subordinate ourselves to those big bad cars.  

Self-driving cars are not going to change scenes like this—
they may even make them worse. The problem is
in the cars, not in who's driving them.
(Image: Bill O'Leary, The Washington Post)

Less obvious, but just as problematic, a car also takes up about thirty times as much space as a person on foot, resulting in vast areas of our cities that have no function whatever but to store our four-wheeled friends. All told, we pave over about forty percent of our cities solely to accommodate motor vehicles (in Los Angeles, the figure is said to be closer to sixty percent).  This autocentric environment extends right into our own homes, one-quarter of which we happily devote to garage space. 

For decades, the rhetoric of New Urbanist planning has promised to reverse these twisted priorities. More recently we've heard utopian predictions about the benefits of self-driving cars, but these, too, will not address the root problem—driverless or not, they are still cars, and will still dominate public roads at the expense of those who'd rather walk. 

In my town, you'll find this lovely shopping street—
but rather than making it a pedestrian mall, traffic engineers
decided to let cars go barreling down the middle of it.

Much has been predicted, but little has actually changed on the ground. I recently stopped in at yet another shopping complex not far from my office, this one barely two years old. Unlike the stupefying strip mall mentioned earlier, this “retail village” employs many of the latest New Urbanist planning ideas--varied building facades, happy little plazas, pretty paving, and the like.  

For hapless shoppers, alas, these potentially lovely surroundings are completely co-opted by the constant stream of cars that go barreling right through the heart of the place. That’s right:  For some inexplicable reason, automobiles weren’t barred from what might have been a charming little shopping lane.  

So far, neither New Urbanist rules nor Silicon Valley tech have been enough to change the game.  Those big bad cars are still winning it.  

THE ARCHITECTURAL OUTSIDERS Part Three of Three Parts

The Great Pyramid of Giza, built 2580 to 2560 BC.
Architect/master builder: Hemiunu

In the past, an architect was just what the Latin word 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 Giza, 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.”

The boardroom at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, one of the
handful of schools that still emphasize hands-on training.
Most of the facility was built by its students.

Conversely, a lack of formal education and licensure hasn’t always ruled out extraordinary ability. The last two installments 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.  

Buckminster Fuller, non-architect, but one of the
most creative thinkers and builders of the
twentieth century.

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”.