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Is the “performance” of a house—its overall finished quality and appeal to its user (both measurable practical factors and the visceral)—dependent solely on the merits of its design, or does the building’s construction in fact matter, too? Consider the topic in relation to a special object of clothing. Does sewing and assembly, the overall “construction,” have an important role in the end quality of a great dress or suit, or when evaluating a garment should we only be concerned with the lines—the drawing or pattern from which it originated? It’s an absurd question, right?

Lately, in my house-scouting travels for California Green: Eco-Movement Home Design, from Handmade to High-Tech, my follow-up to Handmade Houses, on several occasions I’ve been asked by homeowners and frustrated owner-builders, “How come the builder and the construction in general seldom get celebrated (often, not even mentioned) in architecture books and in shelter magazines such as Architectural Digest and Dwell?” Certainly, I’d heard this one—and pondered it myself—long before.

Funky, one of a kind, and a total work of art full of painterly surprises, Northern California’s Wood Castle is a recent discovery that will appear in greater detail in my next book. Its design and construction evolved in step with the Arts & Crafts revival that burned brightly in 1970s California. A veritable showcase of unconventional handcraft, it’s the most creatively ambitious redwood wine-tank house I’ve encountered in all my far-reaching house hunting.  (For more on wine-tank houses, see my book.) For years, the house has sat vacant, a casualty of a complicated ownership change. It’s never been published. Even in this condition, the house has precisely what storage-container architecture and most “prefab Modern” cannot: Soul. Photo by Richard Olsen. Thank you, Bruce Johnson.

I’ve been involved in architecture-and-design book and magazine publishing only since the late 1990s. During that period though, as an editor, I’ve had the great fortune to work for years at a time, often one on one, developing books for and otherwise supporting leading writers, critics, and scholars of architecture and design—residential A+D history primarily. On these subjects I’ve edited some five-dozen books and hundreds of magazine stories. But it wasn’t until I took an active interest in the history of first-generation environmental design, the practice of “design-build,” and the back-to-the-land movement’s owner-built-house phenomenon that I became cognizant of the plight of the builder, the “invisible craftsperson,” in my genre of publishing. Moreover, it’s only been since the making of my last book that I’ve come to fully understand what a craftsperson, an artist-carpenter for example, can bring to a building endeavor such as a house. In all those books and magazine articles I worked on, in so much of what I’d read and studied, where were they? Why had they been left out of the discussion?  It’s actually very possible that their creative contributions to a project can amount to measurably more than those of the commonly heralded party behind many a house’s inception, the architect. So, then, how come the craftsperson and the builder are so frequently overshadowed, if not excluded entirely from published accounts of architectural work? Is it just part of the old Art vs. Craft debate?

The Wood Castle’s U-shape floor plan includes three wine tanks.

In the mid-2000s, while senior editor for architecture at Architectural Digest and editing a story involving a timber-and-log house that had craft and construction features that defined its character beyond anything architect-designed or decorator-installed, I posed the craftsman/builder question aloud to my colleagues.  (In total, I was with the magazine a few months shy of five years but some of them had been there for decades.)  No one, however, seemed to have an answer to the question. While we did extensively cover the work of architects (we even did special “architecture issues”), it was customary to exclude the contributions of those who’d been charged with interpreting and articulating the architect’s designs for the client.

In a den in Wood Castle (which had no electricity at the time of my visit), narrowly spaced redwood trusses and a wall of stained glass in an abstract pattern stimulate the naked scene. Photo by Richard Olsen.

Intent on understanding how AD had gotten to that practice and hoping to find clues about it in its past, I reviewed the entire publication history, all the way back to its 1920s founding. It was like taking a walk along the leading edge of  20th-century residential architecture-and-construction history. It was impressive to see how the magazine had addressed the stylistic trends of the day, not to mention all the sweeping societal change in America (the war and post-war years, the birth of the suburb, the new role of the “housewife,” the advent of interior decorating within the middle class, still more wars, and on and on).

Wood Castle’s redwood shake work, which is actually present on large expanses of interior walls of certain rooms, lends a pronounced sculptural character and, again, is the most artfully complex I’ve seen. Photo by Richard Olsen.

At AD, which to its credit has always published the full range of popular design styles, matters of handcraft and construction had indeed been a prominent and even glamorized part of the magazine’s focus. But that was during the 1920s and ’30s. Keep in mind that that was the time when the American Arts & Crafts era (think Greene & Greene) was giving way to the similarly handcraft-heavy period-revival-style phase that included Spanish Colonial, Mediterranean, and Tudor.  Through those decades, the artisan of ceramic tile, stone and brick, ornamental plasterwork, heavy-timber framing, stained glass, or wrought iron enjoyed high demand for his skills. The architecture that was then popular very obviously relied on idiosyncratic handmade complexity. Then, in the ’40s, came the conclusion of that run. The ever-increasing popular acceptance of Modern architecture’s message, which in America had been gaining ground since the late ’20s, had squashed it. This is where the design culture has been stuck, with limited interruptions (Postmodernism, Deconstructivism) and with overwhelming enthusiasm since the ’90s rediscovery of “Midcentury Modern,” ever since. Certainly in Los Angeles, judging by recent and new construction, it looks as if Midcentury Modern had never faded. It’s back in a big way.

As with so many handmade houses, Wood Castle boasts one-of-kind stained-glass windows. Photo by Richard Olsen.

THE PRINCIPAL MESSENGER

In 2001, I edited a book by Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation professor Kenneth Frampton and the late architectural photographer Roberto Schezen called Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century, a survey of the Modern master’s greatest buildings. (Le Corbusier is probably the most influential Modern architect in history, more so than Mies Van der Rohe, more than Walter Gropius. To this day, Le Corbusier is revered in the architecture community.) Now looking back at the book we made, I’m reminded both of how much I learned that year working one to one with Professor Frampton and, yes, the paucity of builder information we included in the work. Ironically, Corbusier, besides being a shrewd and aggressive self-promoter, was famously fond of having his photo taken on his construction sites, ensconced in rebar and concrete, as it were. But who were these sweaty and dirty people, tools in hand, standing around the always-dapper and meticulously groomed architect? Some of them at least probably ranked as artists in their own right. In books, we seldom get to find out. Within the world of architecture and design publishing, it’s largely accepted that this is how it’s done. And the builders have been conditioned to put up with it.

Le Corbusier’s own cabin, now known as Le Petit Cabanon, the only house he ever designed [and had someone else build] for himself, is a balloon-frame box of 2 x 4s sheathed in plywood on the interior and timber clapboard outside. The basic structure, which is attached to a neighboring cafe, was prefabricated (cut and readied for assembly) in Ajaccio, Corsica, by Charles Barberis and built here on this hillside in 1952 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, by a crew (Jacques Michelet and Andre Wogenscky included) that seldom receives mention in books about LC. While there isn’t an inch of the building that escaped his rigorous design attention, with all of it meticulously conforming to his Le Modular scale of proportions, the construction details of the building strongly suggest that he held little regard for the crafting of the tiny cabin; only Design mattered. Photo by Richard Olsen.

In the book “Nature and Space: Aalto and Le Corbusier,” authors Sarah Menin and Flora Samuel write, “The seriousness with which Le Corbusier took the subject of geometry can be seen from the lengths to which he went to make sure the cabanon was built to exactly correct proportions. ….Indeed, in building the cabanon in accordance with the Modular Le Corbusier believed it would become radiant, in harmony with nature, exercising a beneficial influence on all those who dwelt in it.”                                                                                                                                                                Notice how the architect placed the head of the bed right beside the toilet. That bed was for his wife. (Le Corbusier slept in a bed on the adjacent wall.)  Imagine how “beneficial” she found the place each time her head hit the pillow. Snapshot by Richard Olsen.

The hundreds of books written about Le Corbusier always paint the picture of a complex and often contradictory character. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that early in LC’s career, in the 1920s, the architect devised an ingenious system of wall construction that used salvaged rubble from war-torn buildings. Certainly there’s no gray area, though, when it comes to interpreting his purist mantra of the house as a “machine for living.”  Throughout most of his career, he aggressively pushed for it—a house free of idiosyncracies, a house in celebration of standardization, one made of parts not crafted by an artisan aiming for one-of-a-kind character but, instead, fabricated by an anonymous factory somewhere—capital-”I” Industry. And he believed the same should apply to the furniture—no artistic embellishment, no decoration, nothing charged with emotion or meaning. Make it in a factory by an anonymous worker and mass produce it.

Le Petit Cabanon, the cabin of Le Corbusier. Once you get past the charm of its seaside site and its simple allure as a rustic “tiny house,” you can see clearly that the building’s craftsmanship is seriously wanting. Photo by Richard Olsen.

Le Corbusier’s 1920s vision of factory-made emotionless architecture is alive and well today in the pages of Dwell, the magazine founded in 2000 in response to the Baby Boomer’s rediscovery and Generation X’s discovery of so-called Midcentury Modern.  Month after month, what Dwell promotes is what Le Corbusier prescribed for the masses nearly a hundred years ago: The purist box made in a factory. (Nearly a hundred years ago. Really. It’s important to keep in mind that what’s Modern stylistically isn’t necessarily “modern.”) Through the recent housing crash and the subsequent closure of some of the nation’s leading prefab companies, including Dwell darlings Marmol Radziner Prefab, not to mention the discovery that prefab had become more costly than a site-built custom house, Dwell surprisingly rolled on with their prefab marketing message. But my real point is that the Dwell-endorsed house, costly as it is by comparison, is a rather generic object, an architecture empty of human idiosyncracies, a home in celebration of standardization, one composed of parts made not by an artisan applying *one-of-kind* character but by an anonymous factory somewhere—capital “I” Industry—engaged in mass production. In the house created by the craftsman builder, you can see and actually feel the love, the passion, and the pride he has in and for his art. How much love do you think exists inherently in shipping-container architecture?  The craftsman builder isn’t relevant to Dwell‘s mission.

Like Modern icons Mies Van der Rohe and Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier had little use for the “old world” made-by-hand repertoire of the craftsman builder.  Modern architecture worked aggressively in its early days to advance the notion that the architect was to be revered as an artiste, all knowing and practically beyond reproach. Builders of any kind, craftsman or not, belonged in a subservient role. But let’s hear about the great class divide between the architect and the builder as LC himself viewed it and described it in his 1923 book Towards A New Architecture:

“The purpose of construction is TO MAKE THINGS HOLD TOGETHER; of architecture TO MOVE US…. Architecture, pure creation of the mind.”

LIVING WITH THE MESSAGE

Modernism’s pioneers ushered into architecture a new snobbery, an elitism that plagues it to this day. None of the Modern masters were about to willingly share credit for their “creations” with a lowly builder. And why should they? When you’ve got the parts being made in a factory by “workers” and you’ve removed all personal artistic embellishment and decoration from the situation, you really can get away with using a builder of lesser talents and fees.

Modern architecture’s rejection and effective reversal of the strides made by William Morris and England’s Arts & Crafts movement, efforts that in some circles had the craftsman elevated to the level in society previously held by the great painters and sculptors, resulted in the craftsman builder being pushed out to the fringes of the custom-home industry and even out of work. In the United States, this is pretty much where we are now. It’s the answer to the question of why builders aren’t mentioned in architecture books and magazines such as Architectural Digest and Dwell. Until handcraftsmanship and the building arts—slow architecture, slow design, slow construction—are again held up, as they were in the 1970s, as vital to the culture, this predicament isn’t going away.

A California house by Valentino Agnoli under construction in the 1970s. Early in his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, Agnoli found it challenging to locate builders with the skills required to articulate his designs. Fortunately, in addition to his training in architecture Agnoli was also a carpenter with exceptional skill and flair. Out of necessity, then, he became a designer-builder. His buildings emphasize the art of construction. Photo courtesy Tamae Agnoli.

Certainly I’m not suggesting that all architects who practice Modern architecture are anti-handcraft or disrespectful of builders who emphasize it in their work. In my book Handmade Houses, I feature the work of a number of Modern architects and architect-builders who regularly defy convention. Some close contemporaries of Modern’s pioneers even had different ideas about it all. Eileen Gray, an architect and designer, also a Modernist, who was at one time close with Le Corbusier and had, herself, struggled with issues of credit for her work [in a notoriously male-chauvinistic field], saw it as so many designer-builders of handmade houses do:

“A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation. Not only its visual harmony but its organization as a whole, the whole work combined together, make it human in the most profound sense.”

“Human”—it’s the highly invigorated characteristic, that amalgam of personalized traits that can only come from the hand, that the artist-carpenter and other true craftsman builders instill in the process of realizing of a house. When you remove their talents, their individualism, from the enterprise and make it about mass production and a CNC machine’s predictability, what do you think happens to the “human?”

—R.O.