As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s October 2001 issue.
Charleston, West Virginia
In the field of architecture, there is no shortage of eccentric visionaries. But few are as endearing as Henry Elden. His singular worldview is what led him to design Top-O-Rock, his stunning home and studio that is resolutely unlike any other in the city, let alone the state. But unlike a Wright, a Johnson, or a Howard Roark, the spry 87-year-old (he’d just returned from a ski vacation in Europe when we met) doesn’t characterize his home as a work of genius—he calls it “a real party house. I’ll be here ‘til they carry me out feet first.”
Top-O-Rock, named for the ledge on which it sits, is located in a former stone quarry overlooking downtown Charleston and the Kanawha River. Its design makes the utmost of this spectacular panorama, thanks to 10,000 square feet of floor-to-ceiling glass. The house is composed of two circular structures. The larger is the office, the smaller the house. Elden designed this “live/work space” in the late ’60s before the term “live/work” really meant anything. “I’ve worked at home since 1948,” he recounts. “I think my daughter was 12 before she realized her dad had a job.” His constant presence clearly influenced the paths his children have taken. Daughter Barbara Scavullo is an interior designer now living in San Francisco and son Ted, who lives next door in a house he designed and built, became an architect.
“I crawled around on his drafting table, played with building blocks. It was sort of inescapable,” explains Ted. Whereas Henry’s house is all circular forms, Ted’s (dubbed “LittleRock”) is straight lines and angles. Though father and son were trained as architects, they are clearly quite partial to the complexities of structural engineering. The younger Elden learned a lot from his father and is quick to give credit where credit is due.” For my house, I went with hyperbolic parabolas—you know, like a Pringle’s potato chip,” he explains. “It’s a complex form with a simple generation. As for Dad, his house is a jigsaw puzzle, quite elaborate in its framework. Every curve in the place is different. His intelligence and cleverness are evident.”
The two work together in an architectural practice devoted mostly to hospitals, offices, and schools. Given the conservative architectural climate in West Virginia, they have yet to receive any commissions for Rock-style residences. But they soldier on. “There is nothing like this [house] in Charleston. And I’ve never had a client ask me to do anything like it,” Henry muses. “But I had an idea and I was able to execute it. How many people can say that?”
Grand Rapids, Michigan
In certain parts of America—say, Southern California or the beach communities along the South Fork of Long Island—no one would give a boxy, flat-roofed house like Ray Kennedy’s a second glance. Grand Rapids, Michigan, however, is not one of those places.
But Kennedy, who lives with his wife, Ann, the manager of a medical office, and his teenage daughter, is the director of Herman Miller for the Home, known for manufacturing and selling a line of furniture dominated by midcentury all-stars Ray and Charles Eames and George Nelson. He is by trade—and by inclination—a modernist.
“I follow the works of Richard Meier,” explains Kennedy. “I adore his sense of scale.”
“He came to me and said he wanted a white box,” recalls Kim DeStigter, a partner in a local firm, DeStigter/Smith Architects, best known for its work in historic restoration.
From certain angles, the big house (2,900 square feet) on Dean Lake, just outside the city of Grand Rapids, bears a passing resemblance to something Meier might have built. And there is a hint, if you look at it from the back, where it steps down to the lake, of the Cubism that Kennedy says he was after.
But, when it comes right down to it, the house that brings a whiff of the avant-garde to the cottage-lined waterfront was designed from the inside out.
“Kim forced us into focusing on programming aspects,” Kennedy recalls. What was most important to the Kennedys was a wide open space for entertaining, a unified kitchen, living room, and dining area with floor-to-ceiling glass. “The view was a primary design feature,” says DeStigter, who notes that walls of glass are extremely rare in Michigan homes, which are primarily intended as places to hide from winter’s fury.
DeStigter adds, “It was nice to have somebody who didn’t bring me five Better Homes and Gardens and say, ‘This is what I want.’”
Lawrence, Kansas
“We decided to do this as a spec house because we couldn’t find anybody to have as clients,” says architect Dan Rockhill when describing the enclosed dogtrot house he designed and built on a once-vacant lot in Lawrence, Kansas. “So we produced a building we liked and hung a For Sale sign on it. Eventually Jennifer emerged as the champion of our interests—and of her own.”
Jennifer McKnight wouldn’t have been anyone’s obvious choice to move into this long industrial rectangle with flush steel windows and a corrugated aluminum roof. The owner of two used-clothing stores, McKnight had been living in a traditional Victorian and she wasn’t looking to move. Then she ran into a real estate agent friend who told her she just had to see the Rockhill house. McKnight, who now lives there with her partner, Spencer Sievers, her collection of vintage clothing, and her dog, fell in love with the place right away.
Dogtrot was influenced by local forms like the old GMC city buses that used to roam the streets of downtown Lawrence. Its galvanized steel staircase was inspired by the railroad grain-loading facilities nearby. Recycled materials are used liberally and inventively—the kitchen cabinets, for example, were made from reconstituted garbage bags.
But how does this modern structure play in an antebellum university town? Locals have egged Rockhill’s projects, and spray-painted them, too, but their objections, he insists, “only make me want to irritate them more.”
“There’s a lot of new concepts in Lawrence that everyone hates at first and then five years later become their favorite thing,” McKnight theorizes. “Dan’s work is like that. It has added a new dimension to the city.”
In response to which, the curmudgeonly architect softens his stance. “I’m very happy here despite all of my grumblings. I’ve been able to build 12 projects in town. What other city can you do that in?”
—A. A.
Belleville, Illinois
When Thomas Adams, director of the Bethany Place facility for people with HIV, called architects Philip Durham and Elva Rubio to say he wanted to build the new facility inside two Quonset huts, they thought he was crazy. “Most people do,” confesses Adams. “But when Phil came and saw how open the space was, he said, ‘This will work.’”
Adams and the architects had considered 12 sites, but had trouble securing one. “It had to do with local politics,” Durham explains. “Belleville is a conservative town. An AIDS housing facility was a tough sell there.”
In 1997, Rubio/Durham began to renovate the huts. They repaired exterior rust and dealt with abatement issues such as asbestos and lead paint. By 1999, the project was finished. Five bedrooms, a living area, and kitchen now fill the rear hut; the front houses a wide-open reception area and offices for case workers, project managers, and a nurse. A glass atrium connects the two huts. Windows on many levels fill the space with sunshine all day and, at night, radiate light onto the street.
Outside of New York and San Francisco, Bethany Place is one of the few HIV support facilities that provides transitional housing, along with day services. “At most AIDS service organizations, the services are not consolidated—clients have a series of places where they have to go. People tire. So they drop out of the system, or they get lost. We made a one-stop shop, because it just made sense.”
The building is so distinctive that it lures passersby. “Now,” says Adams, “other organizations borrow the space. Before, other people would never set foot in Bethany Place. They said, ‘If I go to Bethany Place, then it looks like I have AIDS. But now they come in and say, ‘What a great place. We want to be involved.’”
“I was on the Metrolink and ran into one of my clients,” Adams recalls. “He turned to me and said, ‘Thank you for that beautiful building. Every time I walk into it, it’s beautiful.’”
Sacramento, California
Shady politics, oppressive heat, and cheap real estate have for years cast a negative light on Sacramento. But lately, though the politics are still questionable, the warm climate and affordable housing are making the city a little more attractive.
Of course, Sacramento is not a new discovery to everyone, particularly not to locals Michael Heller and Nick Bagatelos, good friends since high school and co-owners, developers, and designers of a new downtown loft building. “Sacramento is awesome,” says Heller, owner of Sacramento-based Heller Pacific Incorporated.
For years, Heller had been thinking about what it would take to give Sacramento the lively downtown it deserves (“walking streets and downtown housing”), so when Bagatelos came across a one-story brick building six blocks from Capital Park downtown, Heller saw an opportunity to make his dream a reality. “Everyone has been talking about lofts here for years. We decided it was time to stop talking and do something about it.”
After convincing the owner to sell the property, they mapped out the plans themselves.
“We wanted a place where at least two people could stay comfortably,” Heller says. “The whole space is open, there’s no privacy—I’ve known Nick too long to worry about privacy.” In the kitchen they constructed Corian countertops and went with all Viking appliances, topping it off with glass cabinetry designed and constructed by Bagatelos. After shopping trips to LIMN Sacramento and Living Space Interiors in Vancouver, the unit was decked out with Ligne Roset everything, from the couch to the “overly nice” dining room chairs.
But is Sacramento ready to step out of the backwater and into the sophisticated high life? Heller and Bagatelos certainly think so. “People are excited. People want to live downtown,” says Heller. “This is a dynamic place to be and it is only going to get better.”
Seward, Nebraska
The Midwest is no stranger to architectural curiosities: Mitchell, South Dakota, boasts the world’s only Corn Palace, and Hayward, Wisconsin’s National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame, comes in the form of a four-story muskie, the official state fish. Now Seward, Nebraska, can lay claim to the world’s largest orchid, metaphorically speaking.
The Ore residence, when viewed from the south, resembles a blossom like those growing on the vines of the exotic phalaenopsis, cymbidium, and cattleya orchids Charles Ore tends in his downstairs greenhouse. The other three facades (clad in speckled brown and green roofing tile) blend seamlessly into the verdant Nebraska landscape. So seamlessly, explains, Lincoln-based project architect Deon Bahr, “you would never know there was a house there.”
After spending the better part of 35 years living in a large federal-style house with “endless rooms and corridors,” Constance and Charles Ore wanted a house that would serve them better in their retirement. Although they had a firm grasp of what they wanted functionally (“no rooms waiting around for something to happen”), they left the design to their friend Bahr. A professional musician, Charles Ore respects the creative process. Input, he believes, has its place, “but the [actual] design can’t be a committee project.”
The Ores love spending their time entertaining guests in the spacious kitchen and “great room,” gardening, both indoors and out, going for walks on the acreage surrounding the house, and looking after a host of wild visitors (nine pairs of cardinals took up residency last winter). As for the lack of musical instruments in the house, Charles says, “I’m trying to separate the concept of my work space and home space. As soon as my doctor brings home his operating table, I’ll have an organ in my house.”
Lubbock, Texas
At Ransom Canyon, a rare rupture in the brutally flat West Texas plains just outside Lubbock, is a steel structure, startling in its originality yet somehow perfectly situated. The result of more than 27 years of sweat and personal dedication, this complex, welded-steel sculpture at first appears to be a site-specific art piece, but it will, eventually, be the home of its maker, sculptor Robert Bruno.
“I never intended the design to be seen as a style or prototype for others,” says Bruno, who was trained as an architect. Instead, he acknowledges the unique nature of his design and hopes that it will inspire people to think more boldly about their homes. When asked about his motivation, he simply states that he is in the midst of an extended “personal experimentation.” In other words, process, for Bruno, is everything. “It’s not about owning a home,” he stresses. “It is about building one.”
After teaching himself welding techniques by working on a smaller sculpture, Bruno started the house in November of 1974. One reason the construction has taken so long is Bruno’s critical eye. If he feels a completed portion needs revision, he dismantles the area and begins again, sometimes for the most minor changes. He has done almost all the labor himself and he even purchased an ordinary ranch house directly across the street, so at any moment he can walk a few feet and get to work. Now that Bruno is getting closer to occupying the house—maybe within a year— local observers have argued that the house is better suited as a sculpture than as a functional home. Bruno believes that “such arguments are okay but not that relevant. It is both house and sculpture.”
People often ask Bruno if he will be happy when his house is finally done. Predictably, he finds this question irrelevant. He says he is happiest while working. His obsession with the crafting of this house/sculpture suggests that Bruno may never be finished.
—Darwin Harrison