Boulder Modern - talk by Mark Gerwing, local architect

First Christian church

I am giving a public talk on February 19th on a brief history of Modern Architecture in Boulder at the public library Canyon Theater.  I have given a version of this talk in the past, with emphasis on preservation of the recent past.  This time around I have rewritten the focus of the talk to present the work of some of Boulder earliest Modernist architects as a harbinger of the growth of a regionalist style.

Kenneth Frampton presciently set forth the idea of a type of critical regionalism that he felt would become one of the dominant paradigms for architecture as far back as the early 1980's.  I am certainly no academic scholar, but it is abundantly clear to me that a majority of the most interesting architecture produced over the last three decades in this country has come out of far-flung offices that embody Frampton's notion of Critical Regionalism.  Even a very cursory glance at the work of Will Bruder and Rick Joy down the southwest or Clark and Menefee and the late Sam Mockbee in the South reveals architectural practices that have extended the lessons of classic Modernism and have imbued them with the local vernacular architecture as well as very particular regional concerns.  In fact, most regions of the country have developed just this kind of very place specific architecture that consistently produce the most interesting work, albeit not the most breathlessly praised trends of the architectural press.

Willard 05

However, all that being said, it has seemed curious to me that the Rocky Mountain West does not seemed to have produced similarly informed, critical practices that have coalesced into a critical mass that could be seen as a regionalist style or approach.  At least not in the present tense.

P1070325

Boulder, Colorado, nestled against the Front Range, was a sleepy little college town with its founding based in mining and agriculture.  It was not that dissimilar from many similarly situated little cities, from Missoula, Montana to Ft. Collins and Colorado Springs, Colorado, south to Albuquerque.  From 1950 to 1970 however, radical transforms in population, transportation, local technology and an unprecendented growth building spree, allowed for a flourishing architectural culture that I believe was the avant garde of a nascent Mountain West critical regional style.

Mark Gerwing lecture invite revised

All of that is a very long introduction to what I hope will be a more brief, and certainly more entertaining talk.  Of particular interest to me is trying to place some remarkable buildings within their cultural context, from sox hops to the sexual revolution, in this time of great national and international upheaval - changes both frightening and thrilling.  If nothing else, I will be showing some pictures of some really cool buildings.

Boulder Modernists - Tician Papachristou

Sirotkin House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1959, Boulder, Colorado

Another in a series of posts of some of the remarkable architects that were working in Boulder, Colorado in the 1960s.  This was a particularly fruitful time for questioning the basis for especially residential design and Boulder's building boom allowed some of the more talented local architects to experiment with new forms, materials and most notably, new sets of relationships between the house and landscape.

Tician Papachristou briefly taught at the University of Colorado, but his first experiences in Boulder were as a draughtsman for the prolific local architect James Hunter.  As Papachristou eventually opened his own office, his work became increasingly sculptural and his early collaborations with another young Boulder architect, Charles Haertling, were to be greatly influential on the latter's remarkable later career.

Sirotkin House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1959, Boulder, Colorado

There are a pair of houses by Papachristou in the Hill neighborhood just west of the University that were designed as a duet.  The Sirotkin house sits higher to the west and looks out beyond the Jesser house.  The Sirotkin House is a fairly rigorous geometric design that features a series of curving landscape walls that run into the house, joining the interior and exterior.  Unlike the Palm Springs modernist houses which seamlessly flowed interior space with the exterior environment, here in Boulder the weather, although sunny, is quite cold and snowy in the winter.  The melding of architecture and landscape by Papachristou is accomplished by creating walls that start out as landscape retaining walls and at some point turning into house walls.

Jesser House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1959, Boulder, Colorado

Jesser House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1959, Boulder, Colorado

The curvilinear forms of the Jesser House are in stark contrast to the strict orthagonal geometry of the Sampson House designed by Papachristou in 1958.  This long, low house shares the same strategies for integration between landscape and building as the paired Jesser and Sirotkin houses - walls freely move from within the house to across the landscape.  In this case these walls are severely straight, setting up a marked hierarchy with the tilted entry plane that cuts through the house.  The roof forms are all executed as planes and their liminal extension is emphasized by extended rafters and the oddly projecting posts of the tilted wall plane.  This house strikes me as still freshly modern, maybe more so than the previous two houses.

Sampson House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1958, Boulder, Colorado

Sampson House, designed by Tician Papachristou, 1958, Boulder, Colorado

A final biographical note about Papachristou:  he was the local architect consulted when the various site locations for the NCAR labs were proposed.  His suggestion of locating them atop the mesa served as the inspiration to the architect of the project, I.M. Pei.  It is hard to imagine that these buildings would have been at all successful but for their dramatic setting.  Pei was suitable impressed with Papachristou and recommended him to the famous Modernist architect Marcel Breuer in New York.  Papachristou went to work for Breuer, leaving Colorado behind - a good move for him albeit a loss for Boulder.

Preservation of the Recent Past, by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

Why do we preserve buildings? Why do we care about mute constructions, often old and unused, occasionally in the way or overlooked? We have all walked through great neighborhoods and parts of cities with magnificent old buildings and very few of us would show no concern at all if these places were simply ground down under the wheels of progress.  That doesn't mean we save every shack or old shed, but rather we recognize some value in mere continued existence of some portions of our collective past.  What is valuable about these old buildings is not necessarily what they look like or how they function, but what they are.  The preservation of some older buildings reminds us of what we are by holding on to some portion of who we have been.

Lloyd Wright_Scott Jarson

All well enough said, but when the desire to preserve runs head long into private property rights, what is to be done?  And when the object of preservation is a building not very old, maybe not even as "old" as any one of us, then how do we view the cause for preservation.

Most folks don't readily appreciate the architecture of the recent past.  It seems a bit naive and slightly embarrassing, like looking at yourself in old high school yearbooks.  Any building that we can remember when it was new can not possibly be of a value akin to the great Architecture of past ages. And yet so many of us can lament the loss of truly great buildings, like Penn Station, that most of an earlier generation held in similar contempt that we place so many buildings constructed in the 1950's and 60's.

cyclorama2_Wikipedia Commons

The buildings shown here aren't some obscure shacks threatened with demolition.  These are significant works by some of the greatest architects of a generation ago - Bertrand Goldberg, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright.  You might not like these buildings, but that is not the point. For God's sake, most communities in the US have fashioned a minor economic industry centered on tourism to Wright houses, not the financial benefits of their destruction.

Prentice_Landmarks Illinois

It is disheartening to sit here in 2013, with over 50 years of preservation battles - successes and failures - behind us only to realize that years from now I will have to explain to my daughters why my generation tore down Neutra and Wright buildings.

The case to save Neutra's Cyclorama Building, Goldberg's Prentice Hospital and Wright's Lloyd Wright house can all be linked to here.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

Price Tower

Price Tower exterior 01

In northeast Oklahoma, just west of the Osage Indian Reservation, lies Bartlesville, home of Phillips Petroleum and Frank Lloyd Wright's only completed "skyscraper" building, the Price Tower.

The history of the Price Tower is long and complex and Frank Lloyd Wright's recycling of an earlier unbuilt tower design is well documented.  It is all worth reading and a little study, but it really does not prepare you for a confrontation with the building itself.  And even though by today's standard the building is not so tall and the motifs a bit dated, the building itself has a magnificent sculptural presence.

Designed for multi-purpose usage, the tower houses offices and residential space on each of its central floors.  From the outside of the building, the horizontal slats and fenestration define the office spaces while the vertical louvers identify the residential portions.  Instead of subdividing the building vertically and stacking one use exclusively upon the other, Wright and his client choose to intermingle the two, with only the base and top-most floors housing a single function.

Price Tower plan

It is often easy to forget how ornate Wright's work was when fully executed.  The prairie houses he created had such a streamlined, simple and bold expression, that only actually visiting a work reveals the little carved panels and decorative embellishments.  At the Price Tower, those embellishments take center stage as patterned, aged copper panels dominate the entire building and find smaller, more refined expressions on the interior.

Like so many of Wright's best works, the Price Tower is simultaneously bold and sculptural, refined and almost precious.  It tetters on the edge of gilding the lily with its decorative motifs splashed across so much of the lower levels.  But it is worth remembering the unlike so many of his modernist European contemporaries like Gropius and Mies, Wright believed in a very earthy kind of romantic sensibility and trancendent Beauty.  In that sense, the Price Tower, like Wright himself, is a last echo of the nineteenth century passing through the end of the millenium.  The Price Tower feels like a beautiful mash-up of Craftsman materiality and the Jetsons sci-fi retro-futurism.

Price Tower section

It's not exactly on the beaten path, but a visit to the building is worthy of a prolonged side trip.  You can have a drink in the roof top bar or even stay in the boutique hotel created within, the Price Company's offices having long since removed themselves.  And in Bartlesville you can get quite excellent chicken-fried steak, so go to it.

(Much of the historical info and imagery here is from The Price Tower, published by Rizzoli, Anthony Alofsin, Editor)

Haertling's Menkick House for sale

Menkick House 02

An astute client pointed out that the magnificent house on Green Rock Drive, the Menkick House, by Charles Haertling, is up for sale.

Completed in 1970, the Menkick House is among Haertling's finest works and ranks alongside his Volsky House, Benton House and Willard House as one of the finest examples of late Modernist Organic architecture in the United States.  Placed against a large, vertical rock outcrop, the Menkick House dramatically highlights this with its expressive horizontal emphasis.  Heartling wisely located much of the plan of the house on a lower level so that the overall size of the house does not overpower the presence of the rock and from the street a great balance is achieved.

Menkick interior 01

Menkick plan

The plan and building form are reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian work in the middle period of his career and the house's use of the large rock outcrop is a vague allusion to Wright's similar use in Fallingwater.  However, Haertling's house sits rather comfortably within a relatively dense suburban neighborhood on the edge of the foothills.  It is difficult to imagine Fallingwater with any adjacent structures and in fact the later guest house designed by Wright does seem to crowd the expansive plan of the original house.

Menkick House 01

Menkick aerial

One can only hope that the new owners will treat the house with the respect it is due.  As the building sits in Boulder County, just outside of city limits, it does not come under the potential protection of the city's Landmarks Board.  The County's record of preserving Haertling's work is a bit blemished with the allowed demolition of the albeit much compromised house in Eldorado Springs designed by Haertling and Tician Papachristou.

From the street, the house looks to be in excellent condition and I know some work has been done on the interior over the years.  Someone will get to own a really great piece of not only Boulder history, but one of the finest houses of its era in the United States.

Some photos 'borrowed' from the great website on Haertling, Atomix, and ModMidMod.

First Christian Church, Boulder, Colorado

First Christian 01

As almost anyone can attest to, one of the very first buildings that most people see on arriving in Boulder is the First Christian Church on CO 36/28th Street, in southeast Boulder.

Built in 1960 and designed by Nixon and Jones, it is an excellent introduction to Boulder's great collection of late Modernist architecture.

The main sanctuary is the west-projecting prow that mimics the angled flatirons on the horizon and is clad in long strips of blue glass with a decorative, multi-colored geometric motif.  The dropping site grade accentuates the projecting prow and the long, white horizontal balcony acts like a visual cantilevered beam simultaneously anchoring the building to the ground and allowing for it to soar upward.

First Christian 06

Alongside the form of the sanctuary space is a stark brick "campanile", lozenge-shaped, standing just to the east of the main entry.  While I don't think this tower houses any bells, it does act as that typical vertical element of the traditional campanile, distinguishing the entry and providing a vertical counter to the horizontal impetus of the front of the building.

First Christian 03

The east side of the building is a series of low, single-story structures, an office and school.  But the heart of the building clearly lies in the west sloping face.

First Christian 02

The sanctuary portion of the building has been empty for quite a few years and is suffering from some much needed delayed maintenance.  The soffits are showing some damage and the brick, with its raked horizontal joints and flush vertical joints, so typical of Wright-inspired mid-century architecture, is in need of proper tuck-pointing.

First Christian 05

There are development plans afoot for much of the site, including some demolition, but retaining the sanctuary and campanile.  As First Christian sits along the most-traveled entry into Boulder, thousands of folks travel past it everyday without much of a thought.  Certainly the sites around this church have sprouted many buildings of ever-increasing size and articulation, diminishing the impact of the work.  Nevertheless, it would be difficult to imagine Boulder without this iconic, welcoming edifice.

First Christian 04