mentioned he had signed Zaha’s petition, which tipped the scales for me in hiring him! He is currently a partner at Williams Partners Architects. Thank you, Zaha! What experiences can you share that are unique to being an architect practicing in Idaho? Aside from being dug out of an avalanche by strangers, being stuck in 9 a.m. sheep traffic, or getting my second design commission from the neighbor’s dog wandering into my first locally designed residence, it’s the caliber of clients and their connection to the landscape. All of them are trailblazers in their own fields of expertise, and by association encourage me to raise the bar while creating an authentic connection to local history using locally sourced and native materials. What brought you to Ketchum? I moved to Idaho with the intent of taking a break with our then-two-year-old daughter. I didn’t know a single person here. I wasn’t actively looking for work, and instead, wanted to support and meet the local art community. I purchased a Pat Steir lithograph from a local gallery, which led to my first design commission. Pat Steir has been my lucky charm ever since. Tell me about your first project in Idaho? It is commonly referred to as “The Steel House,” located in Sun Valley near the world’s first chairlift. At the initial meeting, my clients stated, “We hate river rock, we hate log cabins, and we hate pitched roofs … we want everything to be low maintenance.” The exterior steel panels require no painting, the flat roof requires no gutters nor overhangs to clean, and the interior floors are concrete with radiant heating. To expedite construction, minimize costs, and to create a direct connection to the panoramic mountain views, the house is based on a 3’-6” module repeating 111 identical steel framed glass door panels that are 13’ tall. Approximately one third of the frames are operable with exposed industrial barn door hardware, and the other two thirds are fixed. The frames were installed in just two and a half days. Both my clients and I have received numerous phone calls from both local and out-of-town architects asking us to share the details to the custom designed doors at the insistence of their own clients. In 2004, the design received an AIA Idaho Honor Award: “Bold and elegant, the simple volumes of this home are artfully arranged on the small but heavily wooded site, becoming both a neutral backdrop for the landscape, and viewing portal from the interior. The use of straightforward materials — raw steel plate cladding, steel windows, river pebbles and cordwood ‘fences’ — in unusual ways complements the strong forms. Warm, daylight two-story spaces, tone-on-tone finishes, and inventive, deceptively simple detailing create a house both raw and sophisticated, exuberant and restrained.” — AIA Awards Jury Comments. Tell us about your experience mentoring others. Recently, AIA members were invited to mentor “Far & Wise” students from the third-grade class at Bellevue Elementary School. They were seeking insights from “a real architect” regarding their 3D projects inspired by their reading of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. The recurring question from all the students was, “Why did you decide to become an architect?” Expecting this question, I brought a book I had found by coincidence in a creek 54 years ago and passed it around the room for each of them to flip through the pages. I also brought a second book and explained that 25 years later after finding “How to Plan a House,” my design contributions were featured on the cover. I asked each student to pass the book around the room, so that they could see that the same materials used to build the model on the book cover was the same cardboard glued together with the same glue guns that they used to make their own 3D Hansel and Gretel inspired models. I was 10 years old when I found a book “by chance” that would inspire my path to become an architect — the exact same age of the Far & Wise students. Inspiring the next generation of architects comes In the early 1990s I received a call out of the blue from Frank Gehry, FAIA. He asked if I would help him “uncork” the design of a house located in Cleveland for Peter Lewis, CEO of Progressive Insurance. Other collaborators on the project included Philip Johnson, FAIA, Richard Serra, Claes Oldenberg, Larry Bell and Maggie Keswick Jencks. Each design team member’s contributions and Gehry’s iterative design process are featured in the 2004 award winning documentary film by Telos Productions “A Constructive Madness: Wherein Frank Gehry and Peter Lewis Spend a Fortune and a Decade, End Up with Nothing and Change the World.” The film is narrated by Jeremy Irons and written by Jeffrey Kipnis. Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic at The New Yorker, says in the film “I know of nothing else in architectural history quite like it, where there’s a single project that serves as a laboratory paralleling other built works along the way.” To watch the documentary, scan the QR code. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OMrptF9HoAk The Buckhead Branch Library designed by Scogin Elam and Bray Architects Inc., completed in 1989, was under threat to be demolished by a neighboring developer in 2008. Zaha Hadid, FAIA, penned an open letter to the Fulton County Commissioners signed by five other Pritzker Prize winning Architects and subsequently an international petition circulated the globe. Signatures of practicing architects as well as architecture students tipped the scales in saving the building from landfill. Awards for the design include a 1993 National AIA Honor Award of Excellence, a 1992 National AIA/American Library Association Award of Excellence, a 1990 Georgia AIA Award of Excellence, and a 1990 Urban Design Commission Award of Excellence. In 2014, it received the 25 year “Test of Time” award from AIA Georgia. Around the same time the library also received a historic marker from the Colonial Dames XVII Century. Meanwhile, Caleb Spangenberger, AIA, contacted me to relocate from Atlanta to Ketchum. During his interview, he casually 25
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTg3NDExNQ==