After the War of the Lumberjacks

I spent my high school years in the 1970's in a then-stylish resort community about 35 miles west of St. Louis. Called Lake Saint Louis.

My parents and my friends' parents owned a collection of wasteful and outlandish 1970's show houses there, with big windows and conversation pits, unnecessary oak bridges in the yard and thick shag carpet and senseless nautical detailing and shadowy hiding places designed specifically to facilitate underage drinking. Not the greatest place to grow up, probably, in the decade of Big Mistakes.

The serious point here is that architecture-as-a-profession, it doesn't learn. They're not like doctors, who share information and argue back and forth, and eventually find the best way to slice people open, they cause fewer deaths and less pain as time goes by, because they all know. They have studies, histories, comparisons, discipline. Architects -- no, it's the opposite. It's in the bylaws of the AIA that the members of that organization aren't allowed to criticize each other. Which explains a lot. It means number one that architects get confused and think nobody is allowed to criticize them (so that's where my hate email comes from). It explains why so many buildings look like number two, because everybody in the AIA contractually has to accept even the worst dreck, they nod their heads, um hum, um hum, interesting. "Very good, honey." Number three, this protects bad work and causes pretending. There's a lot of pretending. Somebody please explain to me under this system how buildings are supposed to get better or at least go forward instead of around and around.

And there's no good history, nothing that says, look, American had a rash in the 1970s, a rash of cedar-shingle ski lodges and mining shacks in the commercial vernacular, you'd think, this country had a war with the lumberjacks, and they won. Where did that come from? Architectural history is a mess. You can't even really begin to talk about whether these mining shacks were good or bad, you can't apply any system of values, because the history is not organized enough to support that kind of talk.

The Scottsdale Springs condominiums, in the three photos above and below, seems awfully familiar. It's exactly the same kind of dated and misplaced nauticism as the "Oak Tree" apartments in Lake Saint Louis. Scottsdale Springs is comforting to me, I admit, but way out of place twice over, in the desert, overlooking a golf course also way out of place. It was way out of place in Missouri too.

But with all this 70s wood it looks like home to me.

Spatial Complications

These three black and white shots are from an Ozark resort called Tan-Tar-A, also similar to the houses in Lake Saint Louis.

As in these photos, a big percentage of the LSL houses, maybe 40%, faced the lake on steep slopes, and another 25% of 'em faced one of the two golf courses. The showhouses by the lake had amenities like private docks, private beaches, expansive window space, most of them with big interior voids. Think like an architect for a sec, you design a two- or three- or four-story house for a steep slope, set into a hillside, that's difficult.

These were houses gauged more for pleasure than for work, it was a 'leisure' community with 'resort' homes.

Not that this was successfully done. Homeowners ended up with unexpectedly tiny or expansive rooms, unused or unusable corners, heating and cooling problems, dark bedrooms underground. All this floorplan cleverness sometimes meant half-forgotten third or fourth guest bedrooms with thick oak windows facing half-forgotten sloping side-yards of oak and hickory, the perfect kind of neglected suspended timeless bedrooms for teenage sexual experiments, always, in memory, in soft wool sweaters and worn jeans and about to steam up the windows.

In the stylistic quiver: balconies, sliding glass doors, breezeways, playpits, pulpits, shag carpets (my house was the worst offender there), elaborate wraparound decks, interior bridges with oak rails, cedar shingles, cathedral ceilings, railroad-tie retaining sculptures built around trees and some almost like moats, elaborate hearths suitable for ski lodges, boat docks good for getting blisters and splinters, portholes, belltowers, exterior catwalks, balcony-plunges into the pool, and astronomical heating bills.

One glance from the forbidden darkness of the golf course (puff, puff) into the warm, orange, multilevel, compositionally attractive interiors on a cold midnight, one lined up after the other, you could see the BTU's streaming out of the big wide windows like restless ghosts. High ceilings, heat rising, bad idea. Irresponsible. But, you know, these houses and The Wharf (half barn, half palace, see below) contained an incredibly rich spatial vocabulary, unphotographable experiences, spatial-emotional richness, a moody depth of feeling, a lost language.

Across the street was Missy, who lived in a house made up of several pavilions, shaped like Pizza Huts and connected, like the modules of a Habitrail, by glassy passageways, and their main room had a car-sized hearth. One house in particular had a monopitch roof, one big red dot painted on the side, and now I understand it was a direct quote from Sea Ranch.

Karyn's house had a loft, sort of a shag-carpeted crow's nest, but her mother had co-opted that perch for her artistic experiments. Karyn's bedroom was an under-ventilated afterthought sunk into the dead-end dirt side of the basement, way downstairs, windowless and removed. A room that made you think that tunneling out would be easier than climbing back upstairs to face another day. Her bedroom suited her personality or maybe partly formed it.

In Lake Saint Louis my hormones ran loose in some pretty impractical spaces, and I feel privileged to have fully enjoyed those woodsy, overly-humane, Aspen-and-California experiments. As much as my kid upbringing in various motels, my best first early sex happened in a variety of my friends' houses that, in retrospect, seem like a dramatic architectural fireworks show of misplaced energy and poor taste.

The world's champion stagy Lake Saint Louis house, though, was the Hobgood house, where my friend Brian and his succulent sister Heather lived, brunette, 15, zaftig, with her own bedroom's own sliding glass door out to the wider world of the night.

I can't describe or even draw the Hobgood's house, I don't have the axonometric chops. It took split-level to another dimension. The Hobgood house had multiple split-levels, parcels or stages of floorspace connected by short flights and catwalks, like some kind of three-dimensional strategic positioning game. There were at least three living rooms, one a conversation pit by the predictable big hearth, and the Hobgoods only hung out down there when they remembered it and felt they weren't getting full value. The uppermost platform was an office, nestled up against the ceiling angle, and when you hit the Selectric keys up there, the sound would smack and bounce unpredictably all around the whole place.

It was a house where people would attempt to outsmart each other.

Blippo and Horatio

The beautiful little rambling Gunnison Public Library, kind of a nice essay in intersecting volumes and natural lighting. (No interior shots, sorry.) Armed with my laptop I found it has big window, clever capture of sunlight, a sunny armchair room, a sunny main room, multiple monopitch roofs, and no electrical plugs anywhere. Well, one single plug, already taken, damn you.

I wish I knew the name of that 70s public-notice font on the LIBRARY BOOK RETURN sign. I can't find an exact match, but there's Blippo, which is pretty close and has the same ridiculous embarassingly dated look-and-feel. And there's Horatio. I think it's probably Horatio.

The Wharf

Here we are at the Gunnison Colorado Airport. On vacation I came over here to investigate the strange loud and intermittant early-morning noise that woke me up, a noise like a weed whacker on steroids and with a pilot's license. Found a twin-prop Osprey (I think that's right; a big twin-prop cargo eggbeater anyway) making lots of takeoffs and landings. Fighting a fire maybe or on a Secret Government Mission.

And the Gunnison airport is another example of 70's wood. Building so friendly, so cunning and complicated and puzzle-like maze-like game-like, impossible to photograph with its beams and cavities and multilevel surprises, and I find it hard to convey the irony of the Gunnison Airport Security trying to "secure" this fabulous example of 70's humanism with lots of hiding places and complicated sightlines. A TSA job, though, in Gunnison, must be a good gig.

Anyway, on this page the Gunnison Airport is a stand-in for The Wharf.

My parents moved to Lake Saint Louis in 1976 partly because of The Wharf, a commercial development of two huge wooden sheds, half-barn and half-palace, with the neighborhood grocery store, Tom Boy, and pharmacy and other shops, and an elaborate boat dock on the lake. Similar in look and feel to this airport. Once they told Dad he could go back and forth on the lake and shop for groceries by boat, he was hypnotized. (We did that once.)

The stores were in these two giant wooden monopitch sheds,with elephantine trusses and beams hanging over the grocery aisles like a forbidden jungle gym overhead. The A building was grocery and pharmacy, and tucked underneath on the dockside was a series of perpetually dying shops, a Jefferson Savings bank, and a print shop owned by my Dad. The other giant wooden monopitch B building was an enormously complicated interior space, with interlocking steps and corridors and platforms, housing an Almar bookstore, a hobby shop, a music store, other useless retail locations of the past. How many levels? Hard to say exactly. Depends on how you count. The Wharf had big macrame knots displayed on the side of the building, which seemed odd even at the time.

It's this sense of spatial complexity that I wanted to get to. Unfortunately it's hard to photograph, just like the spatial effect of a set of steps is.

On 11/12/04 I tracked down and spoke to the guy who actually designed the Wharf, the architect Robert Edmonds. When asked about his influences, he brought up Harborplace in Baltimore, and Sea Ranch (although he couldn't think of the name), and the Seattle architect James Cutler who designed the Bill Gates house and likes to work in wood. Heavy timber trusses, 'structural expressionism' (meaning, exposed and expressed structural workings, not emotional content). He'd had a certain inspiration from 'fish canneries in Monterrey'. As to the spatial complications, it was a practical problem. He had to find a way to get from parking-lot level down to water level.

As to any influence from Paul Rudolph - nope.

The Source

One of the original six houses at Sea Ranch, designed by legendary Bay Area architect Joseph Esherick in 1966. Now called the "Hedgerow Houses." At least one of the original six has a sod roof.

Halprin's Social Impulse, Moore's Insane Complications

This is the Ira Keller Fountain, still going strong in Portland Oregon, and a masterpiece of 70s public architecture. The very idea of a playable fountain sponsored by the municipal government is strange and daring. Full coverage of this magnificent space and its less-attractive sister over here.

Many of these 1970s mannerisms can be sourced back to master landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and architect Charles Moore, who collaborated at the influential Sea Ranch and elsewhere. Here's a taste of Moore's work at the Klotz House in Westerly, Rhode Island -- see if any of this sounds familiar.

“Inside is madness. The octagonal ‘towers’ did not impose any tangible order, the way similarly obsessive patterns do in certain Frank Lloyd Wright houses. What they did instead was provide Moore with a chance to play countless games with angles, corners, and levels, intersecting and bending stairs, cutting innumerable interior view openings that look up or down three, four, five different levels. Carpets crawl up and over built-in seats, then spill down cascades of seating stairs - all this around the ubiquitous forty-five-degree angles. Moore’s Yale design students built a chunky fireplace out of great granite chips. The brick chimney above it twists around on its courses to avoid an anticipated angle above. Students painted the kitchen bright blue, yellow and orange (“We’re thinking of redoing it,” admitted Mrs. Klotz), including four-foot-high letters reading KITCH. (Elsewhere, a bench is painted BENCH.) Art of loud and various sorts hangs wherever the many glazed and unglazed windows permit it. Moore himself painted a black-and-white breaking wave - an idea he got from a Japanese lunchbox from the New York World’s Fair - on the wall of the master bedroom. He covered an exposed beam end first with a Chevrolet hubcap, then (when the owners protested) with a New Orleans street grill.” ( from Architect: the Life and Work of Charles Moore, by David Littlejohn.)

Party's Over

These two images are from the once-stylish and sexy Angel Fire ski resort in New Mexico, where the 1973 Starfire Lodge is (was) slated for demolition in May 2007. These photos were taken in July 2007, so this building is already a ghost.