I had the good fortune to transfer to Cal when the
architecture school was still functioning in the Arc – the famed old wood shingle
building near Euclid Avenue. We did a semester-long project designing the
multi-use building shown here. My brick
and concrete structure is well grounded and even sunk into the site a bit – a
precursor of my career-long love of strong partnerships with the land. I took an advanced painting class as well.
The second semester of design was taught by Charles Moore in
the new concrete Wurster Hall. We spent
the entire semester dealing with things like kinesthetics and trying to
accommodate Santa Barbara’s Spanish stylization to evolving contemporary needs.
This was frustrating and I don’t recall
a single outstanding building or idea resulting from the entire classes’
work. I had to repeat planning and
Professor Denise Scott Brown’s approach almost brought me to tears with the
superficiality of it all. Oscar Palacios
and I presented Denise with a well thought out argument for why she should excuse
us from the class work and do individual study, but she refused us. Oscar dropped out of school rather than
continue the misery. I stuck with it,
but with fourth year essentially being planning design and fifth year being a
thesis I stood to only be designing one more building. I needed more than this.
The biggest student influences on me at Cal were from my
onetime roommate, Walter Thomason, and an upper classman I still have not met
to this day, Craig Hodgetts. Craig’s architecture
and sculpture had a skill and integrity that resonated with me and is still apparent
in his architecture today.
Although I saw myself as a Californian I had a strong desire
to better understand the desert. Arizona
has plenty of desert, Taliesin West, and Arcosanti so I decided to transfer and
complete my studies at Arizona State in Tempe.
No comments:
Post a Comment