Turning Point

By Eve Kushner

This past summer, I slid into a crisis of meaning. At the empty core of it all was architecture. An editor at a flashy European magazine kept asking me to write about the world's most attention-getting buildings, and I obliged, partly because I like to oblige and partly because he paid pretty well. But I felt increasingly sickened by the slickness of the facades and of the architects I interviewed. In writing about those buildings, I felt as if I were doing the devil's work.

It seemed clear that I'd strayed far from the purpose I had once established for myself-shining a spotlight on people who strive to make the world a better place. I had aimed to be a conduit for their passions, spreading their fire to readers. In Builder/Architect, I profiled several architects working with integrity and determination. Although that felt meaningful for quite some time, in July I fell into a dark psychic hole and didn't know how to get out. A gray dreariness settled over me, a fog that wouldn't lift. I couldn't find the fun in anything or the point of it all.

Then, writing three Builder/Architect columns about the late Iranian architect Nader Khalili gave me the positive jolt I needed. How lucky that, in the midst of despair, I could "spend time" with a man who made it seem essential that we each define quests for ourselves. As I watched him speak about quests in a videotaped lecture, tears streamed down my cheeks. He made me ache for the sense of purposefulness I'd once had but had somehow lost. Where had it gone? How could I find it again?

The answer, Khalili said, was most likely right in front of me, in a place so obvious that I'd been overlooking it. I considered that. Perhaps a sense of quest had been with me all along but had gotten buried under daily deadline concerns. If I stopped working so hard, could I still recognize it? It dawned on me that it wasn't enough to define a quest and then stow it in a closet; I needed to keep reexamining my quest and to nourish it, as one nourishes a plant, or else it would wither. In truth, I'd stopped feeling that it was even important for me to have a quest. But Khalili conveyed a sense of urgency about the matter, and that lifted my spirits immensely.

In September I vacationed in Los Angeles, and although I enjoyed myself, the sterility of the climate-controlled architecture oppressed me. Visiting friends, I spent hours in air-conditioned houses. As I left those hermetically sealed, look-alike structures, I longed for something real.

What a relief to tour Khalili's desert compound, two hours northeast of Los Angeles. With earth-filled bags, he and his students built structure after structure, proving his idea about sheltering the poor by using the earth under one's feet. When I gazed at the collection of buildings, I had ample visual evidence of what it means to pursue a quest for decades. I felt I had finally made contact with something that mattered. The dusty desert and the hand-built, irregular structures were as real as it gets.

I took dozens of pictures and disseminated them to several people in my life, many of whom don't care much about architecture. Such enthusiastic responses came my way! Khalili's architecture-and all the possibilities it represented-clearly touched something deep in them, as well.

If slick, soulless architecture had taken me to a low place, rugged architecture had brought me back to where I wanted to be. Writing about architecture has exposed me to two extremes. On the one hand, this profession has an astounding capacity for artifice, doublespeak and selfishness. On the other hand, consider the architects I profiled in the outsiders series. Malcolm Wells explored ways in which earth-sheltered buildings heal the environment. Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett showed that people in cohousing communities can create vital social networks while sharing resources, thereby living more lightly on the planet. Kelly Lerner took it upon herself to provide well-insulated straw-bale buildings for poor and homeless populations in Mongolia and China. And then there's Khalili.

These architects carved out space and time to think about what people really need and what the planet requires. These visionaries also held true to an inner fire that never flamed out, as mine did last summer. Sure, they faced plenty of frustrations and discouragement, and occasionally they questioned the sanity of their quests. But they always returned to their core purpose, relying on the following engines:

• outrage at all that's wrong with the way we build
• a sense of responsibility for people and the environment
• confidence that their creative solutions could work
• commitment so strong that they threw themselves into the effort, sacrificing quite a bit and holding nothing back

These architects have shown me what it's like to live one's beliefs and to pursue goals doggedly, without regard for convention. As truly original thinkers, they've also demonstrated that being true to oneself means tapping into personal potential-one of the world's most powerful forces. These people have served as my touchstone, helping me to shape the life I want to live.

This is my last Builder/Architect column. It's been a terrific two years, and I'm grateful to everyone at the magazine, as well as my readers. Here's hoping you find a bounty of creative freedom.

For past columns, go to www.evekushner.com and click "On Building."

December 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Spreading the Fire

Last Part in the Outsiders Series

By Eve Kushner

Two months ago, we saw how deeply the late architect Nader Khalili (1936-2008) revered clay. He aimed to rebuild parts of the world out of clay, firing it like pottery for greater stability. That way, he could provide safe, low-cost shelter for the poor.

His second memoir, Sidewalks on the Moon, expresses his feelings about clay: "This simplest of materials could mold any dream into any form and structure. It could become a water jug by one mind and a palace or even a whole city by others. The material is always the same. It is the way of molding that is different. Ultimately, it is the molder that makes the difference."

One senses that he's talking not only about clay or about his own visions. Rather, he's talking about all of us - the potential in every person to shape and follow lifelong dreams.

Indeed, it wasn't enough for Khalili to embrace and adhere to his own quest. He sought to send everyone down that road. Quoting the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, Khalili would say that if you wake up without a quest, it's a waste of a day. Just as Khalili wanted to provide for the economically impoverished, he wanted to help the spiritually impoverished - anyone lacking a sense of deep, driving purpose.

To think that everyone can have a quest, not just the special few with social or architectural visions, is democratic to say the least. It's also highly unusual for a visionary to think in such an egalitarian way.

People flocked to Cal-Earth, Khalili's compound in the Southern California desert town of Hesperia, to learn about earth architecture. According to his widow, Iliona Outram, his main goal at Cal-Earth was to "create an ambience of inspiration." And it worked, she said, marveling at all the visitors who found him inspiring, encouraging and compassionate. She notes that in earlier days, it wasn't architects but rather ceramicists, writers and even homemakers who traveled to hear him speak. Clearly, his message transcended the limitations of any one profession. Outram told me, "What Nader started is an energy in this world."

Khalili, who wrote and lectured prolifically, often spoke of what a quest is and how to pursue one. The necessary precondition is thirst of a metaphorical sort. Quoting Rumi, Khalili would say that parched lips will drive you until you find a fountain.

But it's not enough to thirst for just anything, said Khalili, noting that daydreams about becoming rich, famous or sexy are only wishful thinking. A quest is different, he said. A quest is what moves you. A quest is a sense of purpose. "No one can prove there is any meaning to our existence," he wrote. Nevertheless, he felt that a quest can make life more meaningful.

A quest should concern something beyond the self, Khalili believed. "My quests became more meaningful when my goals met with others' needs and goals," he wrote in Racing Alone, his first memoir.

Extending this notion of relating to others in a cooperative, productive way, he eschewed competition. He was fond of asking, "Why do we need to race each other constantly?" At 38, after achieving considerable success by designing skyscrapers, he dropped out of the rat race. He noted that as he followed his dreams in the latter half of life, "The joy of discovering and the ecstasy of creating brought with them a greater sense of achievement than any success I had gained before by racing and competing." By ceasing to focus on racing and competing, everyone can access an "endless reserve of strength," he said. Moreover, if you compete only with yourself (that is, race alone), you always come in first.

As he sought to inspire others with a sense of quest, he set the bar low and offered frequent reassurance. Khalili said not to worry if you haven't figured out what your quest is: "A lot of times, the treasure is right in front of us," only we're in too much of a hurry to recognize it. Be around those who have the right energy and the right spirit - that is, people doing purposeful things. Get involved in something. Eventually, you'll find your quest "Having a quest is the key to all your desires," he said. "It doesn't mean the quest will come true. Just having it is important."

November 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Burning With a Visionary Fire

Part Nine in the Outsiders Series

By Eve Kushner

Visions came with astounding forcefulness to Nader Khalili (1936-2008), the Iranian architect I introduced last month. After leaving a successful conventional practice at 38, he devoted his life to a core vision - building clay houses for the world's poor and firing those houses for stability, as one fires pottery.

A passage from his second memoir conveys the power and passion of his imaginings: "In my daydreams ... I can sculpt the interior of a room in a house, or even the entire house, paint the surfaces with decorative figures and calligraphy of Persian poetry, then fire the spaces ... It will be an integration of the arts of landscaping, sculpting, graphics and 6,000 years of ceramics and earth-architecture into one single house."

Khalili had no shortage of ideas. He planned to stabilize eroding Los Angeles cliffs by firing them until they turned into rock. He developed superadobe - structures made from earth-filled bags. He spoke to NASA about lunar architecture and tried to convince Los Alamos scientists to provide technology that would start fires on that airless surface. In Los Alamos, he fretted about the city planning and made a speech there to rectify the situation. He planned to broadcast information into disaster zones so people could immediately learn how to create emergency shelters.

Other visionaries we've met seem to have blazed a straighter path than Khalili, who followed his passions wherever they led. A prolific public speaker, he lectured without notes, frequently quoting the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi and jumping from one Rumi story to another. Khalili's memoirs were similarly nonlinear. He once wrote that the idea of documenting his long quest for earthen architecture seemed "horrendous ... since I have always run away from detailed and chronological work, avoiding anything that takes away the luxury of leaping from thought to thought and dream to dream." The applications of his idea kept changing, but his core vision of low-cost, earthen houses for the poor remained steadfast. According to his widow, Iliona Outram, he was forever committed to their needs. Because of that, she says, "He really could never lose his way."

A heart attack at 48 brought home just how much he valued his central idea. Living under new health restrictions, he contemplated postponing his work and wrote, "God, to abandon all that is to abandon life itself. I feel I am letting down the whole poor population of the world, as well … If I can get the scientists to cooperate with me to fire and melt the earth into forms and spaces, then I could build and build and thus end the problem of homelessness for millions."

His quest gave him the tenacity to overcome obstacles. With a quest, one becomes fearless, he said. It helped that he had a fighter's instinct, born from a childhood in a tough Tehran neighborhood. To prove the validity of his earth architecture concept, he established his compound, Cal-Earth, in the Southern California town of Hesperia so he could build near the San Andreas fault and meet some of the world's toughest codes. He explained, "If what you want is in the lion's mouth, then you have to go into the lion's mouth to get it." He did feel dejected after frustrations but never lost faith, says Outram.

And he partly realized his vision. In 1998, his houses passed the California codes. After the massive 2003 earthquake in Iran, two student associates built prototypes of his architecture there. Even posthumously, he's getting results. Outram, who now runs Cal-Earth, says people continue to express interest in his ideas. She feels that the world is still listening to his message.

Khalili had written, "If I can prove that to build with soil or rock is valid on the moon, it will become valid on the Earth." Similarly, if he could sell his idea in the West, third worlders could gain new respect for their own building traditions. He noted, "This route may seem to be a very long and twisted road, but I feel confident it will get there."

He wrote, "The search itself has become more important than the answer." That must be why his life path looked less like a straight road and more like a firecracker, with heat and light shooting out in all directions. Nevertheless, one flame always burned at the core.

(To be continued ... )

October 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Nader Khalili: The Quintessential Outsider Architect

Part Eight in the Outsiders Series

By Eve Kushner

In recent columns, I've explored what it's like to ditch a mainstream architectural practice for an idiosyncratic, heartfelt vision. Turns out, the late architect Nader Khalili scooped me 18 years ago!

In his bestselling memoir, Racing Alone (1990), he asked, "Is it really sane to follow one's ideals and dreams and race alone in today's world? Is it really reasonable to insist on holding to one's visions against all odds and after many trying years?" He answered with an emphatic "yes."

Khalili (1936-2008), who died of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles at 72, was the quintessential outsider architect. He abandoned a lucrative, unfulfilling career. Then, for more than three decades, he dedicated himself to a quest: creating earthquake-resistant housing for the poor. His solution lay in making domed, vaulted buildings out of the earth under people's feet. At the Cal-Earth Institute, which he established in 1991 in the Southern California desert town of Hesperia, he built buildings to prove his point and shared his vision in workshops with thousands of visitors.

Reared in Tehran, Iran, as one of nine children in an impoverished family, Khalili studied Persian literature and poetry in Iran, then engineering and architecture in Turkey. He studied further in the United States. Khalili built booming practices in Los Angeles and Tehran. Specializing in skyscrapers, he earned millions of dollars by designing high-rise apartment buildings and parking garages. He traveled the world to lecture about skyscrapers. He also entered competitions to build bigger and bigger buildings.

Pushing 40, he abruptly abandoned his practice, heading into the Iranian desert on a motorcycle to find answers. People around him thought he'd lost his mind. They said, "Look, you've got to pull yourself together." But he was resolute about his quest. He was equally determined to reject the status quo. His second memoir, Sidewalks on the Moon (1994), referred to his "pervasive skepticism of accepted values." Noting that he had broken away from many required behaviors and from superstitions imprinted upon him in childhood, he added, "I am burning inside to break away from everything, even myself, the way I have known myself."

He rejected mechanical, industrialized ways of building, including the concrete and steel his Western teachers embraced. He also disliked the lack of human scale in many modern structures; the one-story houses he advocated put people directly in touch with the earth.

"We have to listen to nature," he said in lectures. "We don't have to be interesting or different. Architects often feel they have to do something different. That's just coming from the ego."

He counseled a return to the basics that humans knew for years before losing that knowledge in the modern hustle bustle and in a rush to acquire more than the Joneses.

To Khalili, many answers lay in working with the four elements: earth, fire, air and water. He spent years figuring out ways to build clay structures and light them on fire, as one would fire pottery in a kiln. He reasoned that this would produce a fireproof building.

"Clay holds so much untouched magic," said Khalili, noting that Persians used to build beautiful structures out of clay. Nowadays, he wrote, "We can think of clay only in the scale of our hands." That is, we associate clay with vases that we can hold, not with creations the size of a house.

"We ought to break the ties and free our minds of our conception of clay. We ought to start all over again," wrote Khalili. He knew that the place to start making change was by breaking through mental limitations.

He emphasized the environmental benefits of dome-shaped earthen houses. Requiring no wood framing, the structures can be tree free. They need no cement, a product that uses tremendous energy during manufacturing. To build houses like the ones at his Hesperia compound, one simply fills bags with earth, arranges them like blocks of ice in an igloo and reinforces them with barbed wire. One needn't waste energy by trucking in heavy construction materials.

"A lot of times, the treasure is right in front of us," Khalili would say. He was referring partly to the earth that's readily available as a building material and partly to the passionate quest on which any one of us can embark, if we're brave enough to try.

To be continued ...

For pictures and previous columns, go to evekushner.com and choose "on building."

September 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Kelly Lerner: Happily on the Fringes

Part Seven in the Outsiders Series

By Eve Kushner

Worldwide, the race is on for architects to design flashy structures that have everything to do with fame and ego. How refreshing, then, that architect Kelly Lerner of Spokane, WA, doesn't care about glitz, glamour or being different for the sake of being different, though she has designed hundreds of structures internationally.

She feels that she's completely on the fringes of her profession, not because her buildings look unusual, but, rather, because she has such deep environmental beliefs that she can't relate to most architects. Natural Home magazine named her one of the top 10 eco-architects in the United States.

But Lerner, 43, stands out in her field for reasons beyond her ecological commitment. For starters, she has held her own in the male-dominated world of building, where people tend to dismiss women, she says.

What's more, she's responsible for constructing more straw bale buildings than probably anyone in the world. She has done so largely in Mongolia and China.

Mongolia and China! That's quite a departure for an Indiana native. Happily aware that this work makes her an oddity, Lerner laughs and says, "I enjoy being the person who has run all over Mongolia doing weird stuff. That has really made my career."

After allowing herself that split second of reveling, she quickly shifts back to grounded, practical details about the advantages of straw bale, particularly in Mongolia.

Wintertime temperatures there often plunge to -40°, says Lerner. Would that be Fahrenheit or Centigrade? She laughs: "Actually, that's where they meet!"

Nevertheless, Mongolian buildings had no insulation because Soviet builders didn't insulate, she says. The Soviets controlled the region until Mongolians staged a peaceful revolution in 1990.

Before the insurrection, most energy in Mongolia had come from the Soviets. Afterward, schools and social service agencies began spending three-quarters of their budgets just on heating. Social services went undelivered, and Mongolia fell into complete disarray.

The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), a nongovernmental organization, headed to Mongolia to provide relief assistance. ADRA Country Director Scott Christiansen soon realized that straw bale construction could be a great solution. He contacted Lerner, then working with Daniel Smith and Associates Architects in Berkeley, and she got right on board with Christiansen's vision.

As Lerner explains, straw bale meets many needs in a place like Mongolia. This natural waste product is fire resistant and highly insulative, but relatively cheap. By providing insulation, one can improve people's quality of life. Moreover, insulation reduces the amount of heating needed. In Mongolia, heating comes from burning coal, which releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide, hastening climate change.

From 1997 through 2000, Lerner worked in Mongolia for months at a time, teaching local engineers, architects and builders about straw bale construction, and providing rural and urban buildings.

She then shifted operations to China. Earthquakes in 1999 and 2000 had affected millions in that country, creating an urgent need for construction. Lerner and others rebuilt a school: China's first straw bale building. She then guided people to build more than 700 passive-solar-heated straw bale houses in that country.

Overall, Lerner says, her efforts succeeded far more in China than in Mongolia. That's because China has a long tradition of building, whereas Mongolians were nomadic until about a century ago.

The work continues in China without Lerner, who trained people to take her place. She disliked that her travel to and from Asia left a large carbon footprint. Plus, any solution from the outside (especially from an American) can come across as imperialistic and ethnocentric, she says: "It's important that whatever you introduce becomes Chinese. If there's not a Chinese version of it, it's not going to stick."

Co-author with architect Carol Venolia of Natural Remodeling for the Not So Green House, Lerner now focuses on problems in her own country. She says, "I think the way the rest of the world develops is incredibly important. But, man, we have so much work to do here in the United States to clean up our own house. Jesus said something about taking the log out of your own eye before you worry about the splinter in somebody else's. And that's the way I feel about what we need to do in the United States. We need to figure out how to stop using so much energy. We need to shrink our ecological footprint, and we need to do it fast."

For pictures and previous columns, go to evekushner.com and choose "on building."

August 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Waiting for the World to Wake Up

Part Six in the Outsider Series

By Eve Kushner

If you pour your heart into advocating a vision that the world hasn't accepted, how do you stick with it for 40 years? How do you keep believing that your efforts will come to something? The story of architect Malcolm Wells yields insights into these issues.

Born in 1926, he ceased to be an architect-for-hire in the 1980s, instead taking a higher-level approach to his profession. Rather than doing detailed designs and construction documents for clients, he focused on creating conceptual drawings. Thanks to his 1964 epiphany (discussed in Part 3), these almost exclusively featured underground buildings. As we saw (Part 5), he built several examples of underground architecture in the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrating that such buildings can be light, airy and a joy to inhabit. He has also written prolifically, producing 15 message-driven books (many chock-full of underground designs), plus dozens of articles.

These efforts have gone to advance one idea - that underground architecture enables us to build in a way that doesn't kill land, something on which our planetary survival depends.

Despite all his achievements, one can't help noticing that underground architecture hasn't taken off in this country, or any other. An unavoidable question arises: How effective has Wells been?

He has long enjoyed a solid reputation in his niche. He has lectured at most major American architecture schools, and people as far away as Ecuador, Japan, Scotland, the Czech Republic and Australia have solicited his underground designs. He notes, "Almost everyone in the English-speaking world who has built or planned to build an underground house has heard of me."

San Francisco architect Henrik Bull sees a wider effect: "All responsible architects have heard of Wells' work," he says, attributing the spread of green roofs and porous paving to Wells's efforts.

And Wells wouldn't have gotten this far if he weren't a master of rhetoric and persuasion. Eschewing the vinegar that often laces environmentalists' entreaties to sacrifice and conserve, he uses honey. Cartoons and jokey asides fill his books, though he doesn't shy away from a grave tone when alerting us to the plight we'll face if we don't mend our ways.

With a fl air for writing inspirationally, he infuses people with the desire not only to do the right thing but also to do so for the right reasons. "Be sure of your motives when you build," he wrote in Designing Your Natural House. He told me, "Almost all who design underground buildings do it primarily for energy-saving reasons (meaning, money-saving reasons). A few do it to show off (novelty)."

Despite his higher purposes, he remains keenly attuned to aesthetics. He said to me, "If the proper motive is not there, then I think the architecture will not be as good. It will look forced or out of place."

It seems that society still isn't ready for the vision of a man who's clearly ahead of his time. This doesn't discourage Wells in the least. In Gentle Architecture (1981), he wrote, "Gentle architecture is so close to becoming an accepted part of the mainstream it won't be 'exceptional' much longer." Some 25 years later, I asked how he currently views that statement. To my surprise, he called himself "very optimistic," explaining, "We're not going as fast as I'd hoped. But people like to brag about having added solar panels - little environmental things that make them feel they are environmentalists. And that's good, I believe."

He says he likes to plant seeds and sow dreams, letting the future take care of itself. His optimistic vision of that future gives him persistence.

When something doesn't pan out in his quest, he simply "moves onto the next." He believes he's always had a "rubber-ball" capacity to bounce back. Wells bolsters himself with daily book orders from colleges and individuals, plus an ongoing fl ow of mail. His voice swelling with enthusiasm, he told me, "Boy, I get great letters! Some people really catch fire! About once a week, there's a hot letter that comes in. Phew! It's all worthwhile then."

Like a prophet, he waits patiently. "All I have to do now is watch the world wake up and discover the gentle idea," he told me. "There's no way to tell how long it takes things to germinate."

July 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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The Vision Becomes a Reality

Part 5 in the Outsiders Series

By Eve Kushner

If you had the world's greatest idea, but it remained unrealized, what would you have truly proven? It's a key question for visionaries.

As we saw in this column two months ago, New Jersey architect Malcolm Wells had an epiphany in 1964 about how building underground would benefit the planet. Last month we saw how the vision took over his mind and his life.

In 1970, he had another epiphany; he couldn't merely revel in his idea. Rather, he needed to prove that it could work.

Determined to show that underground buildings could be beautiful and serene, the cash-strapped Wells spent $6,000 on a small lot in Cherry Hill and set out to create an office for his firm. Passionate about his experiment, he laid the bricks himself.

Wedged between busy Route 70 and Dale Avenue, the site wasn't appealing, but Wells blunted the highway noise by building the structure one story below ground level. A sunny pebbled courtyard around much of the perimeter enabled daylight to slant down through windows, creating a cheerful environment.

People took notice, including The New York Times, in both 1973 and 1976. One Times photograph captured Wells in the office, with arms outstretched under a skylight bubble. He looked like a man receiving life's bounty.

Clients expressed great interest in his way of building. Members of a cooperative Ohio community had him design a complex of solar underground houses. Before decade's end, clients in several mid-Atlantic states built Wells' earth-sheltered designs for houses, arboretum facilities and warehouses. (I said "earth-sheltered," not "underground," because some buildings were bermed but bore conventional roofs.)

Even as the word spread, he refused to wait around for others to discover his ideas. Instead, he published reams of articles, such as "Why I Went Underground" and "An Ecologically Sound Architecture Is Possible." In a weekly environmental column for the Philadelphia Bulletin, he lambasted polluters, irresponsible developers and politicians.

And, in 1977, he self-published Underground Designs. This handwritten, stapled book of plans sold more than 100,000 copies, partly because the energy crisis sparked interest in super-efficient homes. The profitability of this book enabled Wells to change his life yet again.

He and his wife fled the increasingly horrid New Jersey suburbs for Cape Cod, where Wells built a bermed house on a large, woodsy property. Completed in 1980, the house received ample television, magazine and newspaper coverage, also appearing in many books by Wells and others. Photographs showed greenery climbing from the ground onto the roof, enticingly hiding the building. A skylight ran the length of the house, bringing in bountiful light. Windows at ceiling height made the place even sunnier. And rustic trusses lent rooms a charming earthiness.

Three years after moving in, the couple parted ways. A builder-developer "Cape- Coddified" the house (in Wells' words) by tearing out the central skylight and shingling over that part of the roof.

When Wells remarried in 1984, he and his bride bought a sizable lot with a small aboveground house. He hoped to burrow underground again immediately. Lacking funds to build another house (because the divorce had wiped him out), he decided on an underground art gallery for his landscape painter wife, Karen North Wells, with an office for himself at one end. (He hoped to add a residential wing, but the money has never become available.)

Construction began in 1987. On the fairly level site, he excavated a large central area. Instead of carting away the soil, he mounded it to the side. In these ways, he made a small hill where there hadn't been one before. The dug-out space became a graveled parking lot. The rectilinear gallery sits under the new hill, with a wall of windows facing the parking lot to the south. Sun streams in through those windows, making the gallery bright and cheery. Ten knotted pine trunks from the site now serve as interior columns, adding further appeal.

Atop the roof lies a thick field of trees and grasses. Some of the plants drape down over the structure, as if providing a bit of modesty.

Beyond proving that underground buildings can be warm and inviting, the gallery realizes Wells' inside-out vision of how architecture should be. That is, the exterior makes a humble statement, rather than dominating the Earth, while the impressive architecture lies indoors.

June 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Going to Extremes:

Part 4 in the Outsiders Series

By Eve Kushner

Passion and balance seldom go hand in hand. And on the path to realizing an extraordinary vision, an architect can easily go to extremes. Frank Lloyd Wright was hardly balanced, and neither was Malcolm Wells in 1964. As we saw last month, that's when this highly successful architect (then 36) realized that above-ground buildings kill all the land under their foundations.

Horrified to think that he had paved over 50 acres, Wells decided to dedicate himself to underground architecture. The gamble eventually paid off; in ensuing decades, he became known as a pioneer in that field. He has spoken at nearly every architecture school in the nation and has published 15 books on environmental problems and solutions. But early on, his about-face may not have seemed sane.

Soon after his awakening, he informed his sizable staff that they'd be designing only earth-covered buildings. And he urged his main client, RCA, to put their factories underground. His contacts there laughed, knowing they couldn't sell their bosses on the idea. Although RCA tossed him a few above ground bones (which he took), the work dried up, and the relationship ended. Wells had made his first strides toward freedom.

As he began forging a vision of how humans should build, the ideas came in a feverish rush. He would later write about this heightened state: "Within days I had designed underground cities, underground highways, underground shopping centers."

He imagined "a world made green again not in spite of the built environment, but because of it." In this fantasy, buildings would fit their leafy contexts so well that one wouldn't know "where the land ends and the buildings begin." Such structures would encourage reverence for the Earth, not a sense of domination.

He could see his vision from every angle - from the high-up philosophical plane down to the subterranean space where engineering and waterproofing would be critical. He figured, "All I needed to do was let the world know about it and a new architecture would be born."

Endowed with the "truth," he says he spoke out "with complete authority on all my new discoveries. Little escaped my wrath ... I had found the way." In 1965, Progressive Architecture printed Wells' "polemic against everything that had ever been built on the surface of the Earth."

Determined to put ideas into action, he formed the group Rebels in Search of Beauty, crusading against billboards, litter and overhead wires. But as he soon realized, "None of that stuff meant anything environmentally. It was just a froth of an expression of the real problems."

On a personal level, too, he cleaned house. He stopped smoking. Instead of driving, he started walking 4 miles to the office where he padded around barefoot. He grew a beard and minimized personal hygiene. He recalls, "I had a lot of nutty theories about never washing my hair because the natural oils would wash it, the way they do with animal fur." Laughing hard, he says, "Pretty soon I had a big stinky mess of dandruff and horrible oil in my hair."

After converting to vegetarianism, Wells took his three kids to a slaughterhouse to witness the killing, skinning and processing of cattle.

He nixed Thanksgiving celebrations in the household, as well as Christmas trees and Christmas lights. Furthermore, he decided to compost the town's used Christmas trees and had them delivered to his yard. They sat in a pile as large as a house, barely decomposing.

His kids enjoyed playing in the aromatic pile but were less pleased when Wells swam nude in their presence. He'd been reading A.S. Neill's Summerhill, a nonfiction account of an English boarding school that gave children complete freedom. Inspired to dispense with inhibitions, Wells took his kids to a swimming hole and peeled off his clothes. The kids yelled, "Oh, Dad, no!"

Laughing at the memory, Wells says, "You just can't change too much, too quickly."

His relatives, friends and clients certainly believed that, telling him to slow down. His wife particularly encouraged him not to push underground architecture so hard.

But he disagreed. To her horror, the aptly named Wells dug a hole in the backyard to create his first underground space. He recalls, "I was just so fired up!"

To be continued!

Quotations come from interviews, personal correspondence and Wells's books: Underground Designs, The Earth-Sheltered House, Gentle Architecture and Infra Structures. For pictures and previous columns, go to evekushner.com and choose "on building."

May 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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The Great Shakeup

Part 3 in the Outsiders Series

By Eve Kushner

In his mid-30s, the highly successful architect Malcolm Wells overhauled his professional and personal life. He intentionally became an outsider in his field - an advocate of underground architecture. Even the idea of such a change must have shocked others, because Wells appeared to have everything.

In 1948, at age 22, he had built a house in New Jersey for himself and his bride. This striking modern structure landed on the cover of House Beautiful - twice!

After a six-year architectural apprenticeship, Wells started his own firm. His first job, a church, won an AIA award. With RCA as his major client, he soon earned enough to construct an office for his sizable staff. Wells was just 29. Some architects never achieve these milestones in a lifetime.

At 36, Wells reached even greater heights with an invitation to design the RCA Pavilion for the 1964 New York World's Fair. For two years he poured his talents into this project. As he would write in his book, Gentle Architecture, when opening day came, he felt sure that he'd "given the world something as near architectural perfection as man could devise ... great cantilevered roofs, reflecting pools, Wrightian ramps, a single repeating geometric theme and lovely gardens with big trees."

But Wells had changed since he began working on the building, partly because 1963 had brought a cluster of deaths. His father, John Wells, had died suddenly. Two weeks later, so did John F. Kennedy. Soon afterward, Pope John XXIII (who had seemed poised to unite people of all religions) died of natural causes. The deaths of the three Johns shook Wells' equilibrium.

Coincidentally, on the day his died, Wells met Laurie Virr, then an architecture student and now a top architect in Australia. Wells hired him. Eight years younger, Virr nevertheless reshaped his boss' thinking. Wells recalls, "I might say something about taking the kids to the zoo. And he would say, 'Oh, it's animal slavery! You don't want to do that. It's horrible!' And I'd never, never thought about that before - how it might be from animals' point of view." Because of Virr, Wells rejected religion and began reading Thoreau and other writers.

In 1963, Wells also developed appendicitis and spent days in the hospital. "The world looked different to me after staring at those green, painted walls," he says. "Out there was a whole new world that I'd never seen before. I guess that's when I started to think about underground architecture."

Earlier influences had already planted the seeds of that idea. On a 1959 visit to Taliesin West (Frank Lloyd Wright's Arizona compound), Wells had stepped into an underground theater and realized that buildings nestled into the earth could provide respite from scorching heat. As he came to understand, this doesn't mean that underground buildings are cold. Instead, because of the earth's relatively constant underground temperature, subterranean buildings barely reflect extreme outside temperatures.

A few years later, when Time magazine published drawings of free-form, earthy, underground houses by French architect Jacques Couelle, Wells was so impressed that he arranged for their publication in Progressive Architecture. He then designed an underground house that sprouted from the earth like an onion. In 1965, Progressive Architecture published this design - Wells' first underground house to appear in print.

The budding environmental consciousness of the 1960s also seeped into his mind. As he worked on his World's Fair contribution, he felt mounting shame that after the fair, the building would be demolished, sending $2 or $3 million worth of copper, steel and other materials to the dump. All the magnificent structures built for the occasion would meet the same fate. Dismayed by the "acres of phony, throwaway architecture," as he wrote in Gentle Architecture, Wells wondered at what cost those buildings existed.

Furthermore, he considered how their very existence damaged the environment: "Every one of them ... shed torrents of precious rainwater. For the first time in my life I asked, and was told, where all the sewage was going. It was bad news, all of it ... wasted materials, wasted energy, wasted years, wasted land!"

He then cast a critical eye on the factories, offices and churches that had brought him fame and fortune. As he concluded, "I'd already paved to death over 50 acres of the American land. Those 50 acres had been wiped out in order to provide a single species with shelter."

(To be continued!)

For pictures, visit evekushner.com and choose "on building."

April 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Fringe Benefits

Part 2 in the Outsiders Series

By Eve Kushner

In 1980, two young architecture students (a married couple) sought an alternative to the isolating way Americans live. As the couple later wrote in books, we Americans tend to live so far from friends that we must arrange casual get-togethers weeks in advance. We go almost everywhere by car. Furthermore, many of us live in single-family, detached houses - structures that once made sense for families with stay-at-home moms. Nowadays, most adults work, and at the end of the day, we come home exhausted and hungry, peering with dismay into empty refrigerators. Our housing arrangements no longer support our needs.

Seeking a solution, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett explored Danish communities in which people have clustered smaller -than-average (but self-sufficient) houses, leaving abundant green space around the buildings. The residents spend time in common areas and cook communal dinners in a large kitchen. They share playground equipment, books and tools, help each other with childcare and generally look out for one another.

Environmentally, economically and emotionally, this set-up struck McCamant and Durrett as ideal. Tremendously inspired, they brought the idea back to California, forming the CoHousing Company, also called McCamant & Durrett. With offices in Berkeley and Nevada City, CA, the firm has now designed more than 40 American cohousing communities. The founding partners lived in one for 13 years and recently moved to a second. The communities have long waiting lists; residents love these living arrangements, as do McCamant and Durrett.

But what has cohousing meant for the couple professionally? In building communities where residents sacrifice personal space for the common good, McCamant and Durrett run smack up against typical American expectations. To many Americans, bigger is better, especially when it comes to personal space. According to architect Brad Gunkel, who heads the firm's Berkeley office, "Americans have bought into a dream where their house is their kingdom." Fearful of the unknown and of strangers, Americans are determined to create an isolated existence for their families and to protect their relative anonymity, he says.

Is it crazy, then, to promote cohousing in this country? The architecture in McCamant and Durrett's communities looks completely traditional, but confronting American norms certainly puts these architects on the fringe.

Specializing in cohousing may also seem masochistic; the architects must sit through years of meetings with residents who make decisions by consensus while custom-designing communities. "You really have to believe in the process to have patience for that," says Gunkel.

Idealism can easily create rigidity. Those in "activist architecture" (to quote Gunkel) may define their niche within tight lines that they never cross. Accepting less idealistic projects might strike such architects as a morally objectionable compromise.

But the architects at McCamant & Durrett have a different take. "By doing cohousing, we're not preventing ourselves from doing other work," says Gunkel. "If we were doing adobe communes," he adds, laughing, "yeah, we would be out there, and we wouldn't be able to get the kind of work we do get."

McCamant & Durrett accepts projects that they deem socially responsible. In addition to cohousing, the firm does affordable housing, urban planning and child development centers. The architects also consult with those who want their projects to invite more community interaction. Gunkel says, "I don't think anybody in our office feels bad about doing any of that work. It's not against anybody's principles."

In fact, the firm benefits from this expanded focus, he says: "If we only did cohousing, we might be more isolated in our vision, and we might not be as responsible to the community as a whole. I think our work in urban planning definitely helps us be responsible to the larger neighborhood and community."

Being an outsider architect often means being poorer than one would otherwise be. The poverty may actually appeal to some idealists, as it conveys a Gandhi-like moral cleanliness.

But McCamant & Durrett employees needn't starve. Gunkel says that because his firm does cohousing, "We get opportunities that might not exist otherwise. We do pretty substantial projects for a firm our size." He adds, "It's not something that's necessarily going to be a financial windfall. But it is steady work for us. And that's because we've become specialists in a niche where most architects lack experience, knowledge and patience. In that regard, being outsiders has proven to be a benefit."

For pictures of cohousing projects in Denmark and by McCamant & Durrett in the United States, visit evekushner.com and choose "on building."

February 2008 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Rebels with a Cause: Part 1

By Eve Kushner

Imagine that you had a thriving architectural practice, complete with committed employees, media attention and prestigious awards. Imagine that you then walked away from this life to pursue an architectural approach reflecting your deepest principles. You would never again have steady work, and your family would sometimes subsist on beans. But you would make a name for yourself in this niche and you would eventually inspire some people to build in another way. Most important, you would spend decades advocating a type of architecture you valued, rather than structures that filled you with guilt.

Now imagine that 20th-century architecture never appealed to you. Rather, from childhood onward, you felt a strong affinity for the Roman and Greek aesthetic. In architecture school, your designs referred back to those ancient times, prompting professors and classmates to sneer that only modernist, abstract architecture was acceptable. Nevertheless, you felt compelled to follow your own path. Although architects continued to deride your work, you found an appreciative lay audience.

Finally, imagine that when you attended architecture school in Denmark, you discovered wonderful communities that residents had built by consensus, matching the designs to their values. People in those intentional communities chose to share resources and live cooperatively (e.g., hosting joint dinners). After seeing how much the residents enjoyed such environments, you decided to introduce their lifestyle to the United States. You knew, though, that many Americans fear anything smacking of communalism. Careful not to threaten all norms at once, you designed communities with utterly conventional architecture.

Clearly, there are many ways of becom- ing an outsider in architecture, as well as abundant reasons for doing so. In some cases, architects move to the sidelines when profound beliefs compel them to change their ways. That was true for the architect in the first paragraph. He's a real person: Malcolm Wells, the Massachusetts-based pioneer of underground architecture. In other cases, outsider architects choose to march to the offbeat rhythms of their own aesthetic drummers. That's the case for Oakland architect Kirk Peterson, the historicist in the second scenario.

The third description referred to Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, who established the CoHousing Company in Berkeley, bringing co-housing to this country.

In coming months, I'll focus on these and other outsider architects, exploring what a deliberate move to the fringes has meant for them and their practices. I hope to investigate the following issues:
- As an architect, what do you gain when you step to the margins? Buckminster Fuller said, "All true innovation takes place in the outlaw realm." Once you shrug off norms that feel constricting, will you find the freedom you crave?
- What might you lose by going your own way? Will you risk your financial well- being and your reputation?
- If you accepted mainstream work, would it violate your principles? How rigidly will you define your niche?
- If you blaze your own trail, how will you know where to go? Architects initially learn through apprenticeship. What happens when you run out of role models?
- If you've started down a conventional path, how quickly should you make the change from mainstream to maverick?
- When you remove yourself from the flow of conventional architectural life, do you gain a clearer perspective on the ills of society and possible solutions? Or do you merely lose touch?
- If you're angry at the establishment and take a devil-may-care attitude toward the world, will you be able to work in a client-centric way? Or when you hang out your shingle as someone with the answers, does client-centric behavior fall by the wayside?
- What if no one jumps on board with you? To what degree can you go it alone? According to one fortune cookie, "A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd." But without an orchestra in his midst, a conductor is just waving a baton pointlessly. If you move away from the mainstream, can you still orient yourself toward the general population enough to communicate your ideas and find clients?

Every outsider architect responds to these issues differently. (Otherwise, they wouldn't be rugged individualists!) But a wide variety of iconoclastic architects have felt a passion so strong that they've veered off the main road, regardless of the consequences. One last question: How have they avoided landing in a ditch? Answers coming up soon!

November 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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A Dream World Made Real

Last in a Series

By Eve Kushner

In the last five columns, we've explored ways of creating from a deeper place. This discussion would be incomplete if we didn't consider the work of 53-year-old Oakland architect Eugene Tsui (pronounced "Tsway"). Though he uses natural shapes (e.g., insects and sea creatures) as models for buildings, his designs strike me as having come straight from the unconscious. Take his drawing of an unbuilt office: A massive eyeball-like mass hangs over the front door. Behind it lies a bulbous, clawed structure, resembling a tulip crossed with a Venus flytrap. Is this not the stuff of dreams?

But it's not as if Tsui floats in a dream world, never facing the realities of life as an architect. His completed buildings include the well-known Fish House in West Berkeley; the Watsu Institute's School of Shiatsu & Massage in Middletown, CA, an Ohio house, two offices for himself in Emeryville and remodels of homes. He has published widely and his work appears in numerous compilations about innovative architecture. Television programs and documentaries have featured Tsui, and a graduate student in Portugal wrote her thesis on him. Hundreds of people seek unpaid internships at his research facility. When I went with him to tour the Fish House, I was amazed by the adulation he received from passersby, including a frustrated male architect and a middle-aged woman who hugged Tsui spontaneously, though they had never met.

However, his unearthly imagery isn't for everyone; Tsui's designs often make me uneasy. At the same time, they make me wonder how he can completely dispense with norms. Most of us don't do that; we tend to stifle strangeness and produce things more certain to gain approval. This does not aid creativity. According to Donald W. MacKinnon, a psychology professor who formulated theories about creativity, "Repression operates against creativity ... because it makes unavailable to the individual large parts of his own experience." Creative people, he said, generally choose expression over suppression or repression.

Tsui apparently feels no embarrassment as he brings his dream world to the light of day. Proud of his individualism, he essentially tells the world, "Here I am. Take me on my own terms."

Then, too, he has managed to retain an essential childhood asset - an unlimited imagination. He blocks out the dampening sentiment that "adults" so often express: "Things just aren't done that way."

Like a child, Tsui looks at everything with a questioning mind. In early life, he gazed at brick buildings and gabled roofs, asking himself, "This is architecture? Why does it have to be like that? Why do buildings need to be so heavy?" He wondered, "What should a building be? How should we live?"

He continues to question fundamentals. When designing a doorknob, he doesn't start by considering brass versus glass, ovals versus circles. Instead, he backs way up and asks, "How does the hand work? Is a doorknob such a good idea?"

Before designing, he tries to erase all preconceived mental images and to start with "nothingness." Tsui told me, "Oftentimes, I catch myself getting too realistic, too conscribed by the requirements. Then I just throw that out, get another sheet of paper, and say, 'OK, let's just free ourselves up and see what comes out.'"

Whenever he creates something unlike anything that has existed before, joy overtakes him and he feels a surge of energy. He wants his buildings to stimulate joy in others, too. "Architecture ought to make us feel like life is a lot of fun," says Tsui. If he had his druthers, buildings would be colorful. They would "make you want to touch them, make you feel you're part of an exuberant life."

I once commented to Tsui, "You're in a make-believe world."

He laughed hard and then disagreed: "I don't think I'm in a make-believe world. 'Make-believe' usually means that you're satisfied with the dream. And I'm not satisfied. I've got to go out and do it. I've got to make it happen, make it real."

Tsui feels that people with a total commitment to a clear vision can be "unstoppable." Of all the fundamentals that he questions, the most crucial one is the word "can't." Tsui told me, "When anyone says, 'You can't,' be careful, because it's probably not true. Nothing can't be done."

That includes turning dreamlike imagery into buildings.

For pictures of Tsui's designs, visit evekushner.com and choose "on building."

October 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Demons as Muses

Part 5 in a Series

By Eve Kushner

When the past haunts us, it rarely feels like a boon to creativity. Old, unresolved issues can stifle confidence, sap energy, cloud perceptions and prevent us from presenting our talents in a full, unmediated way. How unusual, then, that Berkeley architect Dan Liebermann, 76, draws on deep pain as a fertile source of inspiration.

In my March column, I described his soaring elliptical houses, which feel much bigger than they are. The May column examined the way his architecture unifies opposites: small and big, narrow and fat, heavy and light, rough and smooth, yin and yang. These contrasts create a dynamic space, but Liebermann aims to make far more than an aesthetic statement.

He also seeks to resolve the conflicts that worked their way into his core for decades while his parents took their unhappiness out on each other. "Absurdly different" from each other, his mother was a frustrated medical genius and a firebrand, his father a phlegmatic civil engineer. "They gave it to each other," Liebermann told me. "I had an inside front box seat into the opera of human struggle."

The impact on him became apparent in the mid-1970s, just before his mother died. Liebermann, then about 45, repeatedly had nightmares reflecting deep-seated turmoil. In these dreams, he says, "The energy between my parents was so completely negating, it eviscerated my entire personality. It completely sucked out my ego, my will." He likens the experience to being caught between two big magnets, the forces "castrating you, neutralizing you, taking the juice out of you."

He says this family pain "caused a tremendous need for integration and synthesis in me," launching a lifelong quest to reconcile contradictory components in his architecture, "to find a commonality in opposites or a meaning in opposites." Liebermann explains, "To create something to balance the negative, I had to do something equally complexly positive."

Liebermann maintains that his architecture ties together "economy and yet harmony, beauty and frugality, energy and quiet, peace and dynamics, revelation but restfulness, spirituality but also neutrality." He notes, "Architecture can be quite animated and deep in this respect. I think my buildings express these tensions and the vibration of life." He observes, for instance, that ample skylights open homeowners' eyes to the shifting of light and shadow throughout the day and year.

His buildings also tie together disparate, found materials. An inveterate scavenger, Liebermann salvages junk because it's a cheaper and more environmentally conscious way to build. When people tear down mansions and high school gyms, he shows up to claim the lumber. Frequenting reuse centers, such as Urban Ore in Berkeley, he delights in finding a stainless steel prison toilet or a $5 door. In one Mill Valley house by Liebermann, the skylights originated as airplane windows, including the navigator bay of a B16 Flying Fortress. Like a bird, he gathers these treasures and weaves them into a tight nest.

Moreover, the buildings draw together his beliefs about perception, sustainability, efficiency, communalism and more. "I learned to survive by synthesizing all my visions and all my dreams," he says.

In Liebermann's mind, his houses can heal their occupants, not just the architect. "I think of the house as a great nurturing place for families," he says. "I believe dysfunctionality can be healed by a salutary architecture." While acknowledging that this "may be naive and idealistic," he attributes poor family dynamics to the way our culture "derails" us from a deep, creative fulfillment, thereby stifling dreams, hopes, ideas and the imagination. If so, one could conclude that an abundantly creative atmosphere would help resurrect those atrophied parts of the personality, reducing frustration and aggression.

Liebermann, who has been building a hillside colony in Inverness Park (Marin County) since 1996, plans to make some of the space available for political conflict resolution. He feels that his buildings lend themselves to that type of activity: "My architecture is conflict resolution."

According to Liebermann, architecture frequently springs from people's need to exercise demons: "Architects are liars when they say, 'Oh, we're professional. We do this for the public.'" His voice cracking as it rose an octave, he said, "Bullshit! Artists are artists because they're self-therapeutizing. Look at Vincent van Gogh. The guy was a psychopath unless he painted. I may not be that bad, but I think serious artists do function that way. They reconcile, they pacify, they harmonize."

September 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Becoming Unstuck

Part 4 in a Series

By Eve Kushner

Donald MacDonald, architect of the new San Francisco Bay Bridge span, strikes me as abundantly creative. I was therefore shocked when he told me that, more often than not, he feels stuck. To become unstuck, he uses a bevy of techniques. "These can liberate you," he says. "They give you more space and freedom."

SEEKING ANSWERS IN UNLIKELY PLACES

When stumped by architectural problems, MacDonald searches for answers in forms unrelated to architecture. On seeing a broach, he'll think, "That could be a bloody building." Similarly, "I'll look at a woman's hairstyle, and it could be a thatched-roof house." The form might not realistically transfer to architecture, but it gives him a new take on a problem. Gazing at paintings helps, too.

To see how nature has solved design problems, he studies photographs. By analyzing cobwebs, he figures out how to prop up a tent efficiently. Seashell shapes yield ideas for catenary bridge structures. To improve a rough transition in a bridge, he'll look closely at a crab and the graceful joint between its central section and claw.

CHANGING SCALE

In studying the powerful persuasiveness of the ad world, MacDonald realized that advertisers change scales dramatically. Billboards present 50-foot-tall faces and bumblebees twice as large as men. "Changing scales makes you think totally differently. It makes you invent," he says.

But changing scales also creates problems. When an architect likes a sketch and blows it up, the drawing no longer looks the same: "You can't get the shadings right. You have a little line, and when you blow it up, it's fat." MacDonald usually wonders, "What am I going to do with all this space?"

Viewing this exercise as a great opportunity for problem solving, he notes that architects face this very challenge when sketching buildings or bridges. According to MacDonald, going from 2-D to 3-D modeling is also stimulating, forcing architects to consider more details than they did while drawing.

USING COLORED BLOCKS

Architects can benefit from using colored foam blocks for preliminary designs, says MacDonald. The colors indicate function: bathrooms might be red, bedrooms blue and common areas yellow. Assembling the blocks into a semblance of a building helps architects focus on big-picture concerns and avoid distracting details.

This technique has helped MacDonald's employees design more efficiently. He recalls that when he used to give them a building program, "it would take them forever to get it all in their heads." He told them to represent the program with blocks so as to "get the program down instantly. The colors come together like a Mondrian painting. You look at it, and it starts to suggest what the design can be."

Then, he says, "You can take photographs of that and sketch on top and fantasize, saying, 'That's what it should look like.' You've got this model that you can work around. You can punch windows in it, put on different roof systems. When you hit the right one, intuitively it feels right. You've given yourself all this information quickly."

LIMITING PARAMETERS

MacDonald believes that limitations give rise to creativity. Sketching in black and white makes you work with just shapes and shadows, honing in on what's important. "With colors, it gets much more complicated because you have to balance all the colors."

When you work with a limited number of tools, "it forces you into another way of looking at things. You learn how to invent, how to solve a problem without all the tools." He cites Picasso, who intentionally imposed gross limitations on himself with his blue and pink periods, thereby making himself more resourceful.

Limiting a choice of materials similarly helps architects. They can lift the constraints later, of course. By then, a vision may have emerged.

PAINTING TO RECONNECT WITH A FREE FEELING

"I use painting as a real relief from architecture," says MacDonald. "When you paint, you're free of everything, except what the medium can do." On vacations, he paints as a means of self exploration. Pointing to one crazy-looking, four-panel abstract, he recalls, "I just let it fly, you know?" After painting, he brings the freeness back to architecture: "For me, it opens up the range of possibilities. And they're not always rational."

September 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Pulling Ideas into Reality

Part 3 in a Series

By Eve Kushner

San Francisco architect Donald MacDonald told me, "I don't like total order, and I don't like total chaos. It's the mixture that makes ideas develop." One could say the same of the fine line where his down-to-earth mind meets his off-the-wall imagination. Among many other projects, MacDonald has designed both the new Bay Bridge span (an eminently practical structure) and playful infill housing projects. I've never met anyone who shifts so fluidly between the artist's and businessperson's mindsets. In one instant he'll explain how he primes the pump by sketching unbuildable structures. In the next instant he'll say, "Any time you do what I do, you have to have a strategy for how you're going to sell it."

He learned to work with both states of mind after his fantastical college education. For architecture students influenced by Bruce Goff at the University of Oklahoma, reintegrating into normal life after graduation was a rare feat. "Most of his students never really made it," says MacDonald, laughing. "They were so far out that they had a terrible time adjusting. I'm one of the guys who adjusted." Even so, "It took me five years to get into reality." He accomplished this with the guidance of Victor Christ-Janer, a philosophical architect who helped MacDonald verbalize his intuitive ideas about architecture. Having exercised such skills for decades now, he finds that he is rare among his colleagues in being able to explain his work effectively.

When he starts a design, he generally puts realistic concerns aside. "I have a free-for-all with myself. I'll just have a blast with it," he says. At a later stage, "I start to mull it down, eliminate, bring it to order. I pull it into reality." In other words, he figures out everything from the locations of windows to waterproofing. As he explains in his down-to-earth way, "No matter how far out you go, you gotta make it so you don't have to run a mile to get to the toilet."

There's plenty of reality for MacDonald to face. Because he often designs San Francisco projects, he must contend with some of the country's toughest planning and zoning restrictions, as well as hard-to-please neighborhood groups. "It's just a bitch to do this kind of stuff," he says. "You can intuitively go through it &mdash organically, you might say &mdash and then the public can whack at it. The idea is to put enough bones in it that when they're done, they haven't wrecked it. If you can pull off a beautiful building, it's a bloody miracle."

Because of those pressures, not to mention budget constraints and site restrictions, MacDonald hasn't built anything like his free-form drawings. He says, "I've never been able to pull it off where I've gone from this really wild poetic sketch to reality."

If he's to design something like a low-cost housing project, he tends not to start at the wackiest possible point but rather in a more realistic place. With the Cypress Ridge Village housing development in Santa Rosa, he knew the developer could never afford to build curvilinear structures. MacDonald therefore "played outside the unit," positioning homes along the contours of hills, which made the houses "more livable and not like military barracks." He thereby found a cheaper way to be creative without fully acquiescing to dull practicality: "You still have the freedom, but it's at a different level."

Working at this midpoint doesn't feel remotely like a sacrifice to MacDonald: "You make compromises, and the compromises are the invention of it. You invent ways to make it work." That is, although reality is indeed a constraint, it's one that provides a fruitful creative challenge.

MacDonald neither regrets having to scale down his wild imaginings nor kicks himself for indulging in such whimsy in the first place. Each process has its place. Motioning to his crazy sketch of an unbuilt dune house, he says, "You can do stuff like this, but it's antigravity! It's got all kinds of problems!" Nevertheless, such sketches serve a valuable purpose. When "you're not working out too many problems," he says, "you have tremendous freedom to fantasize." And you can bring along that sense of freedom "when you go back to reality."

August 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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An Untutored Process

Part 2 in a Series

By Eve Kushner

Advertisements tap into the unconscious mind, so the ad world has long fascinated San Francisco architect Donald MacDonald. While working on a master's in architecture at Columbia University, he investigated "hidden persuaders" &mdash colors and forms that impel people to buy. After studying Jung and Freud, he wrote a thesis on subliminal feelings. Such pursuits may seem irrelevant for architects, but MacDonald intended for them to cross-fertilize his architecture. He can't understand why his colleagues don't draw on the abundant psychological knowledge in advertising: "You would think architecture would dig into those zones, but it never did."

Given that MacDonald, 72, designed the new Bay Bridge span, several innovative San Francisco infill housing projects and buildings at Stanford, UC Davis and other institutions, his less pragmatic side may seem surprising. He has taught courses on intuition at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts and the University of Oklahoma. According to MacDonald, students and professors don't know how to access or even discuss this fertile resource. In "Creating with Intuition," his 1989 article for Oblong (a UC Berkeley journal), he wrote that when architects bury creative impulses under stultifying layers of Cartesianism, "the results are predictable: sterile design and ... a gnawing lack of self-fulfillment."

By intuition, he sometimes means acting on a hunch without having knowledge to support that feeling. MacDonald says intuition has helped him make some highly beneficial, quick decisions in life. "There's a certain feeling, and I just act on it. When things come together, you really know it's going to hit. And it hits, and you're right on target." He believes life experience enables people to make accurate snap judgments and "take a gamble that really isn't a gamble. To other people, you're really taking a chance. But because you've got this background, it's not such a big deal."

When he speaks of artistic intuition, he means "moving into an unknown space in your mind" and letting yourself be guided by whatever feels good as you create. In such a state, he draws fluid, "personalized" and "emotional" lines that "I could never reproduce, because of the way I did it." At such times, "I've got a direct connection to my head, and it's coming right down my arm and into the pencil." Mesmerized while his head-arm-pencil creates something, he doesn't ask what it means. Rather, he enjoys an "untutored process."

In MacDonald's view, the "twilight zone" (the period just before sleep and the hour or so after awakening) is the ideal time to harvest unconscious ideas. He believes his mind tries to solve problems as he sleeps, so he gathers information about a subject, then lets his brain work through it while he rests. To capture ideas bubbling up in the morning, he doodles in a sketchbook (one that provides ample inspiration whenever he reviews it). Unconcerned with the worth or meaning of an idea, MacDonald says, "I just accept it and put it down." This habit has helped him win two national design competitions, including a structural system that he dreamed about and whipped out that day. Most people figure they can remember early morning inspirations and record them later. But, says MacDonald, "They forget the damn thing. You have got to get it down."

Attributing his mental freeness to a rural childhood in Alberta, Canada, MacDonald says he was constantly inventing, reaching, searching and problem solving in the woods, "I did a lot of things that were untutored." He figures that in a gritty urban environment with noise, traffic, dirt and crime, people always filter out their surroundings. He never needed to do that.

His joyful explorations continued when he studied at the University of Oklahoma under Herb Greene, who followed Bruce Goff's methodology. "Goff really developed intuition," says MacDonald. "He never really criticized. He encouraged your own way of thinking." At Oklahoma, MacDonald learned to solve problems intuitively and independently. "I was a weed growing! Five years of that!" he says. "If I'd gone to an eastern school like Harvard or Yale as an undergraduate, it would have knocked a lot of that out of me."

At Columbia, he received a whopping dose of "historicism" and "rationalization," but says he remained impervious because "I was already so developed in my own way of thinking." Similarly, in ultra-urban San Francisco, he has maintained a childhood mindset for 40 years. MacDonald says, "I never changed my thinking patterns."

For pictures, visit evekushner.com and choose "on building."

July 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Creating from a Deeper Place

Part 1 in a Series

By Eve Kushner

On the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend, when most people struggled with turkey-induced lethargy, architect Malcolm Wells wrote me a two-page letter of considerable intensity. In the upper-right corner, he noted the time: 7:43 a.m.

"Nuclear and chemical wastes continue to pile up out of control," he wrote. After lambasting pesticides, he mentioned "the crisis right before our eyes &mdash green land destruction," then assailed architects, engineers, planners and contractors for their complicity in this disaster. Having spent decades advocating underground architecture, Wells subsequently made the case for earth-sheltered buildings: "energy efficiency, silence, fire resistance, permanence, ease of maintenance, bright and dry interiors, and best of all, the ability to heal the wounds of their own construction."

Such ferocity of purpose at 7:43 a.m, an hour when many of us can hardly bear to glance at the newspaper and all its bad tidings. The author of 15 books on environmental problems and solutions, Wells clearly feels that blocking out certain truths is not an option.

Sometimes I've wondered whether he misses the forest for the toxins. To arrive at the state in which he wrote that letter, does he absorb different information than the rest of us? Or does he notice the same things but draw different conclusions?

While visiting his home in Brewster, MA, I had the perfect opportunity to ask. On a gorgeous autumn day, we drove down winding roads, passing golden leaves on far too many trees to count. I thought things seemed right with the world.

But Wells had a different reaction. "To me, there's an overall sadness about all this," he said, "because it's third- or fourth-growth. This was a huge forest of trees of 4- and 5-foot diameter. And there were elk, bears, moose, eagles and mountain lions here." With a swooshing sound, he imitated a massive wiping out and said, "We came in and destroyed it. And it grew up, and we cut it down again for another purpose. And now we're on the third or fourth forest, and it keeps coming back as well as it can. It's just scrubby, straggly stuff that remains of a vast forest."

"When you're outside," I said, "do you continuously see things that are wrong with the world? What percentage of the time are you aware of such things?"

"I'm always slightly aware of it. Just yesterday I noticed that they've bulldozed an entire hillside of forest that goes way back and way up. It must be 1,000 feet. Totally cleared. I'm sure it's just so somebody can build his house at the top and be able to see the bay. In these times, it's so wrong to do that. And yet I'm sure the owner and builder just say, 'It's a good investment and a great view.'"

"When you're driving by that place, what does that feel like? What emotions?"

"Anger," he said emphatically. "You know the Monkey Wrench Gang from 30 years ago? People who started eco-sabotage &mdash wrecking bulldozers and pulling up surveyors' stakes? Well, when I see land destruction, I feel a little spike of eco-destruction." He laughed. "Then I calm down and think about other things. It's just the way the world is now. And you can't blame those people if they don't know there's an alternative."

"The anger stays with you five minutes? Ten days?"

"A brief time. Then I pass that site again the next day and ..." He inhaled sharply with an angry hiss. "But it's silly to worry about futile, futile things."

"You consider that futile?"

"There's nothing to be done," he said. "When the door is locked, the horse is stolen. How does that go?"

"The barn is unlocked?" I said uncertainly.

"It's over the dam. Gone. Forget it. You move on to the next," said Wells, his figures of speech back in working order.

"Do you prod yourself to feel outraged? Can you work if you're not outraged?"

"I guess I feel mild outrage all the time, half at myself for not being able to do more and half at the people who are perpetrating all this crap."

"What's it like to live with mild outrage all the time?"

"I think we need something to drive us. And maybe all creative people are needled by something. I guess moral outrage is a nice thing for an architect to have."

To see accompanying pictures, visit evekushner.com and choose "on building."

June 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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A Union of Opposites

(Part 4 of 4)

By Eve Kushner

High in the Berkeley hills, in a magnificent house by Berkeley architect Dan Liebermann, a two-story space contains so many features that it's hard to get a handle on them all. One first notices a stone fireplace, a black steel staircase railing and faceted windows placed in fractal patterns, alternately convex and concave. The panes rise two stories and extend the length of the croissant-shaped living room, giving off the air of importance, like full-height windows in a performing arts center. Rich wood divides the panes vertically. And those lines draw the eye up to a vaulted ceiling, warm and comforting with honey-colored, rough planks.

When I toured the place, I couldn't immediately grasp how all these elements fit together. Then I heard Liebermann describe the house as synthesizing "spatial grandeur and a barn-like, honest, working simplicity." Aha! When he mentioned this synthesis of opposites, he nailed a key issue. As he sees it, good architecture weaves together contrasts: "small and big, dark and light, narrow and fat, heavy and light, rough and smooth." He finds support for this approach in Asian ideas about contrasting elements (e.g., shibui and yin and yang).

His houses typically unite contrasting elements, resulting in environments that feel both spacious and human-scale. They're also dynamic, because joining opposites creates tremendous visual excitement.

You feel this, for instance, in an 850-square-foot Mill Valley house that Liebermann designed. When you enter the front door, a curving wall prevents you from seeing all the way to the back. And this slight barrier provides a "come-along visual suggestibility," says Liebermann, as if you were hiking a trail and wondering, "Oh, what's around the bend?"

Going beyond that, you find yourself in one of his trademark elliptical rooms, where a central column supports an umbrella ceiling. Near the perimeter, the ceiling hovers at about 8 feet, but it rises as you walk toward the center of the space. That's true in any of Liebermann's rounded spaces, but the effect is amplified in the Mill Valley house, because the central area also steps down like an amphitheater. All these changes cause you to experience "a succession of events," he says.

When you reach the column at the center, "Everything maximizes itself in one explosion," says Liebermann. That is, the column looks largest from that perspective, as does the ceiling height, the room itself, the fireplace across the room and the view of the outdoors. Then, as you continue walking across the space, everything "successively gets smaller again. So that's how you get a contrast. The big foils the little, the little foils the big."

He also contrasts materials. In some of his houses, the central column is "a light, evanescent, tubular structure," with pieces of steel woven like an Asian wicker stool. This plays off the nearby fireplace, a "solid, grounding, anchoring mass." His materials tend to be severe, including concrete in floors and steel in columns, with window glass adding more hardness. He chooses these materials to complement the rustic wooden planks that he otherwise uses, particularly in his ceilings. He then softens the appearance of harsh materials, for instance by sandblasting steel, which yields a "granular look." A coat of linseed oil subsequently makes the steel "greenish-yellow-amber, like bronze." Furthermore,he uses radiant heat under concrete floors because, as he explains, "There's a crossover between the felt warmth and the visual warmth."

If his architecture sounds "busy" (and people have told him as much), his clients see it differently. The owner of the Berkeley hills house told me, "Waking up in our house is like waking up in a kaleidoscope or a snowflake or a seed pod." She added, "If you're standing in our living room and looking at the spiderweb ceiling, all the ins and outs, it's just amazing. It's so complex that only a certain kind of mind would conceive of it."

In Liebermann's view, the "mind" that conceived of the house belongs largely to Mother Nature. He says, "I try to humanize the building by giving it the complexity of nature."

In creating a space that's simultaneously grand and comforting to humans, what better source of inspiration?

To see the projects mentioned, go to evekushner.com and choose "on building."

May 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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An Alice-in-Wonderland Challenge

(Part 3 of 4)

By Eve Kushner

My last two columns focused on making small spaces feel bigger. Once you've achieved that, you potentially face a new problem. When ceilings soar and when exterior walls are mainly sheets of glass, a house may feel more like an inhospitable showcase than a warm, cozy haven. The challenge is to retain a sense of roominess while also making such spaces intimate and human-scale. This brings to mind Alice-in-Wonderland's plight of suddenly growing larger, then rapidly shrinking. Fortunately, with architectural magic at hand, no mushrooms are required!

Kensington architect Bart Jones told me about three keys to humanizing space: proportion, scale and light. What's the difference between the first two? "Proportion is how one thing relates to another," he said, whereas "scale is how human beings relate to things."

"Oh!" I said, happily surprised. "It's about us!" Scale and proportion had seemed like dry words from geometry class, so I hadn't expected humans to be part of the picture.

"Yeah," he said, "we're not designing for tigers!"

When you notice his use of windows, you grasp that he definitely designs for humans. Take, for example, his Kensington office building, a long, narrow structure on a long, narrow lot. He created a wall of western windows to make the interior seem expansive, and he could have used massive picture windows on that western side. Instead, he divided each 12-foot-wide bay into four vertical lights. This division, he said, creates scale.

"How?" I asked. "Because it makes four smaller pieces of glass?"

"Sure. You can be in a high-rise with a 15-foot piece of glass, and some people won't get near it. They'll stay four feet back." Motioning to his window, he noted, "As soon as you do this, you create four vertical things. And you start to read that proportion in the space and joists above. And then it gets smaller in the 8-inch roof decking. This whole building, it's all members with proportion. You see it over and over."

Jones also creates scale by using symmetry. In the two-story living room of a small Kensington house, he centered skylights, arched doorways and windows between trusses. He notes, "We do relate to symmetry."

Upstairs, the master bedroom opens to the high-ceilinged living room via an interior window &mdash what one might call a Romeo-and-Juliet window. Hinged wooden shutters allow the window to be either open or closed, and Jones imagines that someone in the master bedroom might push the shutters open and call down to those in the space below. Although a two-story living room could feel dislocating or lonely, this personal touch allows people to make connections (or to give orders).

On the other side of the master bedroom, Jones nestled a window seat into a bay window. Whereas large, unified windowpanes might have seemed cold, Jones created an inviting space by once again dividing the lights.

If windows factor greatly into Jones's idea of humanizing a building, so do roofs and ceilings. The Kensington home could have had a massive roof peak, but Jones knew this would wreck the scale, making the house into a "gross thing" likely to annoy neighbors. Instead, he zigzagged the roof, creating two symmetrical peaks side by side. While reducing the potential interior space, this feature added charm, which strikes Jones as a worthwhile tradeoff.

He feels that a sloping roof can produce a snug, attic-like space that's eminently human &mdash scale. Even without a sloping roof, one can make a room more appealing by varying ceiling heights, says Jones, who used that technique in the two-story living room. After you enter that room through the front door, you pass under a low soffit. (Jones recommends tucking doorways, windows and fireplaces under soffits.) The adjacent space soars, with skylights pulling the eye upward. "So you have it both ways," says Jones. "When you enter, you're under this lower space, but you can look through the glass virtually to infinity."

To see the projects mentioned, go to evekushner.com and choose "on building."

April 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Defying Perspective

Part 2 of 4

By Eve Kushner

From the Egyptian pyramids to Taipei 101, humans can't seem to abandon their "bigger is better" mentality. How refreshing, then, when an architect calls an 850-square-foot house his best building. In 1958, Berkeley architect Dan Liebermann started building that structure in Mill Valley for his family. A half-century later, it still serves as the prototype for his solution to wasteful building practices.

Long before environmentalist ideas became mainstream, Liebermann developed strong beliefs about responsibly restrained living. In particular, this former shipbuilder insists on minimizing personal space. Inspired by Native American structures and cathedrals, he designs elliptical houses with soaring central columns that support parasol-shaped roofs. The bedrooms and bathrooms, tucked under the low-roofed fringes, tend to be meager. The owner of the Mill Valley house laughed while showing me her so-called airline bathroom. By contrast, gathering areas are centrally located and should be expansive, Liebermann reasons, because humans are social creatures.

Liebermann builds most houses on steep hillsides. Working with a hill's contours, he makes an elliptical cut, "a bite out of an apple," then creates a concave, curving retaining wall, like a bowl halved top to bottom. (Curved structures are stronger, he argues, so they predominate in nature, as in craniums, eggs and seashells.) His retaining wall doubles as the main interior wall of the house. And according to Liebermann, this concave wall creates spaciousness in a third dimension. Although you can't walk on the extra space, it fulfills the eye "enough to make a little house seem quite commodious."

Because such a wall could look forbidding, he softens it with a fireplace, sometimes a massive one with stacks of limestone that stretch the length of the room. This feature beckons aesthetically and emotionally, and it also alters perceptions of space. Liebermann discovered this when he lived in the pea-sized Mill Valley home and brought in a grand piano, expecting the instrument to overwhelm the house. Instead, the huge fireplace made the piano seem insignificant. He understood then that juxtaposition and relativity, not actual measurements, determine how large an object looks.

In an elliptical space, he maintains, length in just one dimension is enough to create a sense of spaciousness. For instance, in one Berkeley house by Liebermann, the great central room is shaped like a croissant, dwindling to a point at either end. The farthest reaches create a counterpoint to the main area, making it seem larger. As he explains, "When you have only one dimension that's big, the suggestibly smaller dimensions all around it make it appear bigger." He says that in a rectilinear room, the width and length are constant at all points, so this type of "basic play on natural human perception" can't occur.

He wields a bevy of other techniques to augment rooms visually. In the floor of a dining room, for example, a circular brick pattern continues beyond the exterior glass walls to the patio outdoors. The dining area therefore seems to expand past the confines of the house. Similarly, in a trick borrowed from Frank Lloyd Wright (under whom Liebermann apprenticed), brick arches in one house extend beyond glass walls. The eye discounts the walls and follows the archways, or looks past them, to the woodsy surroundings.

Abundant skylights bring one's eye up to the treetops, so one imagines the ceiling to be 50 feet up, not 10. And in Liebermann's soaring ceilings, wooden beams radiate out from the central columns. He notes that in rectilinear spaces, parallel lines appear to converge in the distance. But when beams in a wagon-wheel formation spread out from a central point, it "defies perspective."

According to Liebermann, a tiny house saves money all along the way, from construction to heating and maintenance. His clients don't think they've sacrificed anything by living in smaller spaces. Far from it, they feel quite fortunate. The woman with the circular brick floor in her glassed-in dining room says she continually gravitates toward that space, as it feels healing. "Even hard tasks like tedious paperwork feel better in that room," she says. "It's about being surrounded by good vibes." Two other houses by Liebermann make the homeowners feel as if they're simultaneously inside and outside. And as for Liebermann's Mill Valley masterpiece, the owner told me, "You don't need much. This is a very casual house. You sit on the floor."

Liebermann says his structures appear double their size. Perceptions, he asserts, are the most effective tool in creating sustainable architecture.

To see some of the projects mentioned, go to evekushner.com and choose "on building

March 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Tiny and Transparent

Part 1 of 4

By Eve Kushner

In his book, Gentle Architecture, architect Malcolm Wells considered the majesty of a wind-twisted tree growing from a crack in a rock. Then he imagined this tree grouped with its peers in a nursery, the whole dull crowd failing to arouse curiosity. By thriving in a difficult setting, the first tree moves us, he said, concluding that restrictions create vitality, especially in architecture. "Our cities and suburbs look no more interesting than the tree-rows in the nursery," wrote Wells. "Freedom of expression under really tight restrictions will give our cities character again."

Space restrictions have indeed produced masterful buildings by Kensington architect Bart Jones. On a 20-foot-wide lot inside a hairpin turn, he designed a house just 7 feet across at its entryway, where the structure wraps around a tree. The densely planted site had long served as a Kensington "green pocket," so Jones threaded the house through the trees, preserving them all. The steeply sloped site might have caused problems, but he stepped the house down the hill, creating an 1,800-square-foot, three-level "terraced treehouse," as he calls it, with decks, bay views and a garage.

Building small is one thing; making the space feel larger is something else altogether. To achieve this, Jones uses transparency. In his opinion, bringing natural light into a small room doubles the perceived size.

That's particularly true of his entryway, where transparency makes the staircase area highly appealing. He omitted riser boards for maximum openness, and the floating treads convey great airiness. A balustrade would have introduced a visual barrier, so instead a glass partition extends to the ceiling, providing necessary protection. Beneath this stairway, another one descends to the first floor. Jones viewed the entire stairwell as a way to illuminate the lowest level, which is built into a hill.

A Kensington office building by Jones is even more transparent. Psychologists and other professionals (including Jones) use the long, skinny structure, which lies on a pie-shaped lot (roughly 100 feet by 39 feet) where Ardmore Road meets Arlington Avenue. Full-height windows on the western side make the offices feel spacious. On the less-private, eastern side, windows are smaller and scarcer. Nevertheless, from across the street to the east, "You can see right through the thing," says Jones.

Transparency needn't mean a loss of privacy. Jones's long, narrow office runs along the western side, and a travel agent uses the adjacent, eastern space. The wall dividing their offices rises two-thirds of the way toward the 11-foot ceiling, with a glass partition completing the division. Western light spills into the eastern office, but both spaces feel private.

Jones also illuminates tiny buildings with skylights. "I tend to use a lot," he says. "They're inexpensive, and you get so much out of them." As you enter another small Kensington home he designed, abundant skylights draw your eye up, affording views of trees. The ceiling therefore seems higher. Deep skylight wells enhance the feeling of spaciousness, says Jones.

Skylights pair nicely with his penchant for high ceilings. In remodels, he often tears out low ceilings, incorporating attic space to increase the sense of roominess. Jones creates two-story spaces wherever possible, even when this means reducing potential square footage in tiny buildings. In the aforementioned house with skylights, he designed the living room to have a soaring ceiling, rather than an extra room above. In other words, he favored the illusion of spaciousness over the creation of usable space.

It's not that he has dogmatic beliefs about the size of homes. Jones has designed enormous houses. And he says of his three Kensington structures, "I wasn't searching out small lots. They just fell into my lap."

Then again, he finds itty-bitty spaces "irresistible," from narrow European streets, to a Mendocino hotel, where tall, fluffy beds fill the room, making guests feel child-sized. In Muslim countries, he has seen enormous stone walls with comparatively tiny doors. "That's beautiful. And we relate to it," says Jones. He notes that kids love crawling into little spaces, as this lets them relate to their own scale. But, he says, "I think all humans relate to this scale. It's innate in all of us. We all kind of like the idea."

Codes and practicality do limit how small things can be, he says, acknowledging that it's hard to design small, neat spaces well. "But I've found that when you're constrained by your lot or whatever, you come up with better design. You can really come up with pretty neat stuff."

February 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Warehouse Reincarnated

Part Three of Three

By Eve Kushner

Driving past warehouses recently, I felt completely blah. It's logical, I reasoned. What else can one feel in an industrial setting? But I also know that after adaptive reuse, former warehouse spaces can feel wonderful.

Take Tokyo Fish Market on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. To create this space, Morimoto Architects of Berkeley combined the market's old warehouse and an adjacent site for car stereo installation. If that doesn't sound like a promising start, you'd never know it to see the well-lit market, where skylights draw the eye to a high, rugged wooden ceiling. According to Darren Matano of Morimoto Architects, exposing ductwork, sprinkler piping, concrete blocks and brick walls is all the rage now, so warehouse conversion is easier than 20 years ago, when clients wanted finished surfaces.

As manufacturing moves overseas, turning industrial corridors into ghost towns, warehouse adaptation has caught on vigorously. So says architect Kava Massih, who estimates that Kava Massih Architects has rehabbed at least 1 million square feet of industrial space, including the zingy Pyramid Brewery (on Gilman Street in Berkeley) and elegant Fonda (an Albany restaurant on Solano Avenue). Once, you could have had your car painted and repaired in these locations.

Massih sees financial benefits to adaptive reuse, noting that when you don't replace an entire building, it leaves more money for better finishes. This has become his "way of doing business," he says.

Adaptive reuse also saves time, says Massih, because existing buildings go through a much shorter design review process than those built from scratch. Berkeley architect David Trachtenberg agrees, saying that if a building already exists, "then hallelujah. You don't need to ask anyone's permission to put it there." In Berkeley alone, he has converted a Fourth Street warehouse into Cody's Books, an animal lab into the environmental design firm MIG and a truck depot into Addis Design Group.

Trachtenberg, Massih and Matano further value the environmental benefits of adaptive reuse. It takes energy to demolish a building, haul away the remains and produce new materials. Why throw out whatever you can reuse? Refurbishing a site means you're not sprawling out over virgin land. And when warehouse conversion involves cleaning up toxicity, that again helps the planet.

Urban renewal lifts people's spirits, too. It's easy to see this on a micro level. If I gaze at outdated materials in my office, it kills my energy and disorients me. Whenever I switch projects, I update papers on my bulletin board and books on my shelves, ensuring that those visuals align with current concerns. In the same way, abandoned industrial structures clash with modern needs, creating an uneasiness that disappears when architects invite those spaces into the 21st century.

Old transportation centers can make wonderful leaps forward; San Francisco's Ferry Building now houses a fantastic market, and for a while two Berkeley train stations became gorgeous restaurants: Santa Fe Bar and Grill (currently a Montessori) and Xanadu. Adapted structures can make great academic settings. For years I attended classes in converted farm buildings, always tickled by the spiral staircase in a former silo.

Sometimes, of course, adaptive reuse simply isn't viable. "You have to look at all sides," including demolishing the project, says Massih. Converting factories may require too big a metamorphosis, as their layouts and facilities (e.g., indifferently placed front doors, nonexistent parking spaces and inadequate infrastructures) might conflict entirely with today's needs. Bringing such places up to code can prove costly.

But old industrial buildings often have overlooked merits. In many warehouses, northern clerestory windows supply abundant, soft light. And according to Redwood City architect John Hermannsson, warehouses can have a great, uncomplicated "gutsiness." Gazing at the bow truss ceiling of his warehouse-turned-office, he said that being able to see the structure makes him feel he's in a vital space. A warehouse, he decided, can have the honest, unpretentious appeal of a barn.

Still, this doesn't entirely explain why walking into a wonderfully adapted warehouse feels thrilling. In Hermannsson's opinion, "Our senses are programmed to respond to change. Consciousness and change go together. If things don't change, we lose awareness." Adaptive reuse, then, hits us on a visceral level.

From another perspective, life is a cycle, or so we hope. After acute losses, we long for renewal. We know that naked trees will cover themselves with leaves and blossoms each spring, but human behavior tends to give us less optimism. When resourceful architects come along, creating beauty from industrial blight, it reassures us that positive change is indeed possible.

To see some of the projects mentioned, go to www.evekushner.com and choose "on building."

January 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Old and New Intertwined

Part Two of Three

By Eve Kushner

Beneath his painting of a pipe, surrealist René Magritte wrote, "This is not a pipe." The dissonance sends one's brain into a loop: "It's a pipe. It's not a pipe. It's a pipe that's not a pipe. It's ... huh?!" At 2211 Rose Street in Berkeley (between Oxford and Spruce streets), Berkeley architect David Trachtenberg has achieved a similarly fascinating dissonance with an adaptive reuse project.

A prominent old-timey sign says "Rose Grocery." But rather than the glassy exterior of a market, you find copper garage doors whose red-brown patina recalls soft leather. The visual evidence tells you, "This is not Rose Grocery." Yet the sign says otherwise, and because words shape perceptions, the brain keeps looking for groceries. Passersby have even entered this residential property hoping to buy wine.

A store did stand on the lot for years. German immigrant George Hunrick built Hunrick Grocery in 1908, operating it until 1923. The structure then served as a convenience store. Abandoned in 1966, it subsequently endured "any imaginable abuse that could happen to a building," says Trachtenberg, citing fires, roof collapses, rat infestations and homeless encampments. Berkeley conferred landmark status on this unsalvageable wreck, so Trachtenberg was both unable to preserve the building and forbidden to alter it much. For a while, he says, "It was not at all clear that there was a project."

But he found a clever solution. In 2004, he salvaged the "Rose Grocery" sign hand-painted on the siding, as well as smaller features, then razed the structure. Townhouses went up in the rear of the lot. In front, where the store once stood, Trachtenberg built a structure containing garages and an upstairs studio. To satisfy Landmark Preservation Ordinance demands, he reconstructed the store's Mission Revival parapet and facade. Salvaged corbels and wooden pilasters returned to their original positions. And after minimal touch-up, the Rose Grocery sign became the centerpiece of the facade. But Trachtenberg also made several changes (e.g., switching the windows and transom to create upstairs space).

In combining vintage and updated features, Trachtenberg didn't hope to minimize their differences. Instead, he aimed for a bold juxtaposition, preserving the feel of the old building while enabling it to serve modern needs. With the Rose Grocery sign above retractable garage doors, old and new coexist in a kind of zen koan.

The anachronistic tension lends tremendous vitality to the facade, partly explaining its visual appeal. But from an emotional standpoint, why does it feel so good to look at this building?

Trachtenberg asserts that architecture is a "healing art," particularly when it fills in a city's "missing teeth." He finds it quite gratifying to see how the Rose Grocery project has "healed that neighborhood, a place of tremendously negative feelings."

He's not the only architect to view adaptive reuse as healing. "There's a certain neighborhood texture," says Redwood City architect John Hermannsson, "and when a structure falls out of this network, it's like a person getting sick. An architect patches it up and brings it back into the web of life."

Such aesthetic improvements, he says, demonstrate great caring. When people express themselves with such feeling, he believes it touches the rest of us deeply.

So does creativity, especially the trash-into-treasures kind. Hermannsson cites an example in Cherry Hill, NJ, where architect Malcolm Wells once built an underground office beneath ruined land near a highway, thus turning a wasteland into productive space.

Healing blighted land also appeals to Trachtenberg, who says, "I like the difficult sites, the problematic sites, the sites that are unbuildable, because for me that's where all the opportunities are." Of course, he says, ramshackle buildings can present unpleasant surprises, from electrical and plumbing problems to failing foundations. Architects should budget time and money for such discoveries. But Trachtenberg finds tight parameters stimulating: "The constraints given by an old building force one to imagine solutions that just wouldn't come forth otherwise."

Old buildings also connect us to the past. "Reusing something historical sustains our culture and our heritage," says Hermannsson, who believes that we long for this sense of continuity. "People like to feel connected to their pasts. Most people want to know who their parents and grandparents were." Sensing this link to the past "gives meaning to your life," showing you that "you're part of a much bigger picture."

His words got me thinking. Adaptive reuse can transform a place while simultaneously bottling something essential from an earlier era. When buildings capture the best of the past and also meet modern needs, they become frozen spectra of time, bridging past and present in a 4-D way. It's no wonder that Trachtenberg's Rose Grocery wields such power. It says, in effect, "This is not the past or the present. This is both at once."

For before and after photos of Rose Grocery go to www.evekushner.com and choose "on building."

December 2006 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Unveiling the Essence

Part One of Three

By Eve Kushner

On Vine Street near Shattuck, a Berkeley wine shop called Vintage affects me in the strangest way. The structure long served as an East Bay Municipal Utility District pumping plant, then stood idle, cut off from the world by vine-choked chain-link fencing. With a recent transformation of the property, the fence has disappeared. But the building essentially remains hidden, because it's set back from the sidewalk. As I approach on foot, I notice only the surrounding shops, and then ... pow! I might as well be seeing the structure for the first time.

This simple building bears all the dignity of a Greek temple. In fact, the slope of the roof and the battered buttresses remind me of the Parthenon. With play- fully angled caps, the buttresses jazz up what might have been a stark utilitarian building. Experts tell me that this 1930 work by Italian architect A. J. Calleri defies neat categorization, but contains Art Deco, early California Mission and classical influences.

Despite all these assets, it seems that few people saw the abundant potential, until Peter Eastlake and Michael Werther bought the property and made subtle, judicious changes - first removing the fence. A concrete driveway in front of the building made it look cold and bleak, so that had to go, too. The owners hacked away bamboo that obscured the massive windows. Suddenly, the structure looked taller, "more pronounced," and "so much better," says Eastlake. At the owners' behest, a garden went in, along with cheerful stone walls, informally arranged benches and a charming roadway sign- post. These changes snapped the space into focus, revealing qualities that always existed, but somehow lay dormant.

When adaptive reuse succeeds to this degree and a solution feels this right, you wonder why nobody thought of it before. Of course, the morass of planning and building codes can strangle anyone's imagination. And in salvaging an old structure and changing its function, you often confront a bevy of practical considerations, including limited budgets, ADA requirements, zoning issues, parking regulations, neighbors' feelings and city governments that may instinctively oppose change. These are no small matters, though they're not insurmountable.

But aside from practical concerns, does something else constrict the imagination when we gaze at abandoned buildings? Perhaps we become stuck in the status quo. After all, an existing structure is much more real than whatever one has yet to envision (or finance). And when you look at an ugly building, such as the dingy windowless box that once housed Copeland's Sporting Goods on Shattuck in Berkeley, how easily can you think of a soaring, light-filled Elephant Pharmacy, as did architect Kava Massih?

With adaptive reuse as his niche for a decade, Massih has created Epicurious Garden (formerly a dull-looking electronics store), Fonda (previously an auto repair shop), Pyramid Brewery (originally a factory) and Cedar Center (which now contains Cafe de La Paz, but was once a mortuary!). Massih says he re- envisions such places by poking around under unappealing facades in search of "good bones." He then performs "urban dentistry" to "scrape off the plaque" that accumulated on buildings "in the name of progress in the '50s, '60s and '70s."

Many old buildings have intrinsic character that needs only to be coaxed out and emphasized. In doing so, one carries over something from the past. With a professional baker for a wife, Massih conceives of this along culinary lines: "I liken it to baking bread, where you've used some of the yeast from the last batch to bake the bread, and it makes it so much better. And these buildings, having a little bit of the history and the memory, they're like the yeast to these projects."

Is that why people have such strong, positive responses to adaptive reuse projects? Partly. As we'll explore in next month's column, salvaging culture and history triggers a primal reaction.

But why else do Vintage and other adaptive reuse projects have such power? I consulted Santa Rosa architect and author Carol Venolia, who has never seen Vintage, only heard my description. She observes that the owners have brought an industrial space down to human scale. With the addition of greenery and gathering spaces (such as benches), the owners have sent the message, "This is now a human place." They have effectively invited people to come use it. She notes that we're biologically hard-wired to respond positively to vegetation, as well as to places of refuge (which one now finds in this tucked-away, serene garden).

When a building assumes a radically new function, the intellect also takes notice. The greater the contrast (for example, a pump house turned wine shop), the more it tickles us. According to Redwood City architect John Hermannsson, Dadaists strove to challenge our perspectives in such ways. They gave everyday objects shocking new contexts and functions - for instance, displaying a urinal as a fountain. As soon as we realize that a rose isn't just a rose, nor a cigar just a cigar, countless possibilities open, and we look at things differently. Great creative adaptations thereby play with our perceptions.

Hermannsson believes that we like to see evidence of the human mind and spirit at work. In a free-flowing conversation, he and I decided that when successful adaptive reuse projects strike us as inventive, they tune us in to our own creative potential. They give us permission to be unrestricted in our self-expression.

A sensitive transformation also clarifies our vision about a building. "You unveil the significance of what it is," says Hermannsson. Just as a haiku captures truths concisely, successful adaptive reuse projects strip away the inconsequential and show us what matters. And just as a haiku prompts an "aha!," clarified spaces, such as Vintage, allow us to feel the thrill of discovery. We discover not only a revitalized property, but also capacities that lie too well hidden in ourselves.

For "before" and "after" photos of Vintage, go to www.evekushner.com and click on "on building."

November 2006 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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Turning Frustrations into Creative Freedom

By Eve Kushner

If it's hard out there for a pimp (as we learned at the Oscars), it's even harder for architects. Chronically working overtime for a pittance, many have to stifle the beautiful visions that initially drew them to the profession. Rather than spending time on inspired designs, they smile politely while asking clients where they'd like to place appliances.

Two summer films depicted these frustrations well. To portray a man who would want to skip over large portions of his life, the creators of Click made Adam Sandler's character an underpaid architect. Though he slaves away at work, he fails to produce anything of merit. His boss accuses him of spending too much time with family, and his family complains that he's always working. Maybe architects don't stand a chance.

The Lake House ups the ante, showing three architects in varying levels of frustration. They talk about architecture nonstop, jabbing each other about professional failures, but also raving about certain buildings. Their love of architecture drives the film, making architects' suffering seem worth the price. And this passion intertwines neatly with romantic yearning; when the Keanu Reeves character helps the Sandra Bullock character see beloved Chicago buildings through his eyes, the two fall deeply in love. The eponymous lake house serves as the locus of all these desires. Perched on stilts in a lake, with a tree growing through its center and a roof that opens like a flower, this glass house seems as fragile and unattainable as architects' fantasies.

But Hollywood rarely gets things right, so one might wonder whether real architects feel as miserable as those on-screen. One need only consider the staggering rates of attrition, divorce, alcoholism and depression in the field. Architecture is "the profession that eats its young," according to architect John Preston of Bloomington, IN. After working toward a professional degree for five to seven years, interns might be paid less than high school teachers, who generally have less education. Firms overwork new hires, "ruining their health (and certainly their social lives), then dumping them without a thought when work slows," says Preston.

In past decades, even Frank Lloyd Wright's granddaughter, architect Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, tried to deter anyone who told her, "I want to be an architect! Can you give me advice?" All too aware that society relentlessly rejects designs with deep principles and passion, she responded, "If you can be anything else, be it." So says Marin County architect Dave Deppen, who worked with Ingraham in the 1970s and shared this anecdote with me.

Through interviews for an as-yet-unpublished book on visionary architects, I've heard how the field smothers practitioners' vitality. One such insight came from Malcolm Wells, 80, a recently retired Cape Cod architect. Although he has never lost enthusiasm for underground architecture, a concept he pioneered, he understands why few architects embrace ideals. "Every bit of their environment - school, architectural magazines, materialistic clients - tends to corrupt the idealistic dreamers they were when entering universities," says Wells. From the moment fresh graduates take jobs, their passions fall into jeopardy: "They're told to do nothing but stair details for the first 10 years," so these novices "just get trampled down to nothing."

Bringing a building into existence can further frustrate architects. Wells told me that when he first imagines a building and renders it on paper, "It's never quite as good as the dream in my head." The newly constructed building drags the vision "down another step." As he explains, "One starts out by picturing the ideal, which is never possible. And then the finished thing has many other people's interpretations in there, from building inspectors, to contractors, to everybody who puts in a little bit. So it's all kind of blurred."

Over the years, he could have been an irascible Frank Lloyd Wright type, fighting to keep his visions uncompromised. That was never Wells' style, though. He notes, "I've avoided lots of hassles by letting draftsmen or clients win at least the little battles. But losing them is what keeps most of us run-of-the-mill architects well below the Wright level. Would Picasso let you fix up a painting of his?"

Oakland architect Eugene Tsui, 52, can relate to this frustration. He can't stand to look at houses where he had to compromise his vision. "You feel demeaned if you compromise," Tsui told me. "You're creating a work of art, so you've got to fight for it. If we're not creating something distinctive, what's the point?"

His work is indeed distinctive, even when "compromised." His boldly colorful buildings resemble insects, reptiles and sea creatures. As nature has the soundest design principles around, Tsui draws on these as models.

He finds, unfortunately, that the tedious architectural process cannot match the pace of his imagination. Tsui mused, "I have so many ideas that I'm in a constant state of impetuous frustration." Laughing, he sounded pained rather than jovial. "I think I could do much more," he said, "but it takes so much time to do things. I see people dashing a little sketch on paper, and then two years later, it's a big building."

If Tsui comes across as a pent-up racehorse, 75-year-old Berkeley architect Dan Liebermann said as much about himself. To be precise, he said this first about his mother. Born in 1898, she earned a Johns Hopkins doctorate by 1923, long before society could accommodate brilliant women. Though she worked at a malaria institute and eventually taught medical school, Liebermann says, "I conceive of her as a racehorse that never had an opportunity to win the race, to show what it really had. She bilked most of her potential by doing what she was told to do. Her genius was not allowed to fulfill itself. And given the potential of the human spirit, how can you not regret that?"

Professionally speaking, Liebermann shares his mother's frustrations. "I identify with her passionately," he said. This is somewhat surprising. He has seen roughly 45 of his designs built, many with a trademark radial shape that reflects his philosophies about ecology, neurology, social justice and more. But those who crave artistic expression rarely feel satiated.

Fortunately, as long as their imaginations remain in working order, architects can keep their dreams alive. This is true for Wells, who holds fast to his vision of an earth-sheltered, radiantly green built environment. In his book Infra Structures he says, "It's hard to imagine part of Newark, NJ, or the industrial section of Los Angeles looking clean and alive ... but it will happen." That is indeed hard to imagine, so I asked Wells, "To what degree do you truly believe this?" He replied, "I can't state my belief in degrees, but in percentages it's 100."

To be sure, he has endured innumerable frustrations, because people shy away from the concept of underground buildings. Only 12 of Wells's "earthies" have been built, though he has designed hundreds. "Since most things you design don't get built, is it like never having the orgasm of building the building?" I asked. "No," Wells said, "they get built instantly in my head, and that's the important part."

In a world that wants to play it safe when it comes to building, imagination might seem to harm the architect. If not for their wild minds, creative architects wouldn't encounter as many disappointments. But if you took the daring out of their proposals, what would be left? Passionlessness, for starters.

Every field needs radicals and conservatives; there's room for both. This profession needs practical thinkers as well as people who supply a creative nudge. It's best when these strains coexist - when designs are whimsical but also achievable, out of this world, but resting on firm foundations.

Most architects are well-versed in practicalities. With endless regulations, how could they not be? That isn't the part that needs encouragement. But what about the injured creative side, the side that has met with sneers or outright dismissal?

That's the part that interests me. As a freelance writer, I've long ruminated about the creative process. I've profiled people in a variety of creative fields: architecture, symphony conducting, harpsichord building, photography, glassblowing, papermaking, mural painting, magazine and book publishing, maze drawing, kite artistry and more.

Of all these creative types, I've been most impressed with certain architects who have preserved their imaginations despite a society that scorns idiosyncrasy. These architects can even explain how they keep their minds wild and free. When I shared their secrets in speeches at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture and at its annual Eco Wave conference, the enthusiastic responses showed me that people thirst for such knowledge.

So in Builder/Architect over the next year, I'll present architects' ideas about achieving creative freedom. I hope to explore the following topics: - Repurposing spaces and materials; - Finding creative stimuli in initially frustrating restrictions; - Accessing intuition; - Using "what if?" thinking.

Stay tuned and feel free to e-mail me your thoughts. I look forward to a fruitful conversation.

October 2006 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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