Detailing the Hard Way

They didn’t teach working drawings at Clemson—those were for trade schools.

In those days draftsmen were draftsmen and architects were vastly superior creatures. Does the symphonic composer know the second chair violinist? Not unless she’s good looking… except back then none were other than the male of the species… as it says in the bible. But think about it: we were in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, the better products of which were smiling dairy cows and stock car drivers.

Successful stock car drivers made more than architects even then.

Presumably you were supposed to pick the meat of the work in the summer for an mentoring architect, only I had zero contacts, and after four years I drove down to Hot ‘Lanta to learn the trade.

Clemson taught us to draw, or we changed majors. So if someone would explain what member went where— I could draw it. I would have continued at Clemson, except they said I needed to take a year off to learn the trade.

What’s a come-along?

In Atlanta, I found a day job running a blue print machine and errands for a big name firm, and worked evenings for a small start-up—up until my mother called to say I’d received a late acceptance into Yale. It wasn’t a hard choice—hardly a choice at all.

I parted ways with the hippie downstairs with his altar to Tennessee weed and with Hot ‘Lanta. I drove my little uncomplaining German four banger from Georgia to New Haven and never looked back, leaving my soulmate, Miss DC in Clemson for Lewis to look after her. He owed me; his girlfriend’s gray Persian had knocked up my precious virgin kitty.

Once ensconced, if not engulfed in wisdom, in a down-in-the-dumps Victorian right off Whitney Avenue in New Haven, I received several droll letters from Lewis saying stuff, so I knew Miss DC survived in that brick pile on Clemson Avenue. I could go about seeking greater things in New Haven, of all the sad sack places in New England, with only the gothic calling. Holy shit was it calling.

And I’ll admit to sipping some Ivy League kool aid, but my favorite shortcut to the Art & Architecture building was through Eero Saarinen’s Morse and Stiles Colleges, avoiding the worst of the fake gothic piles. A little known stupidity: The steps leading into several of James Roger’s spasmodic gothicisms at Yale were spec’d as soft stone to let them look as worn as in Oxford and Cambridge. Fake is fake.

I never thought I’d lose track of Lewis. I did follow him down to Florida after grad school, a spot of land I’ll maintain till I die wasn’t meant for more than mosquitoes and alligators—and the last remaining Florida panthers. I’ll swear by it. I wrote Lewis into the trilogy that will never be completed; he gets a star turn in the second book. I wrote about the Florida panther I saw in the headlights in the first book.

Passing on to when I escaped Florida with son and wife, Sean was thrilled to be in monster Ryder truck and his mother was just happy to vacate Miami—much of which may be under water too soon.

I had pleaded a case to the firm’s president, Stan Allan, and like a miracle of the waves, he’d found a seat for me in the DC office. The Weese office in DC had been built by Stan and was brimming with talent. All of which I came to realize.

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At a further point in the saga, I was offered the chief designer’s position in the Weese office in LA, and the mother of my sons said she’d sooner die in the Everglades than find herself in an LA earthquake. Hadn’t we just survived Florida’s hurricanes and now I wanted to go to a perch just above hell? The lady drew her line.

Sitting with Stan Allan, I laid out the story, and offered to commute weekly cross country. I didn’t love flying, but this was an excellent shot. Stan knew what my personal outcome would be. The outcome a few years hence had nothing to do with architecture. Though to the lady’s credit, she agreed, in the midst of our separation, to a Bank lien on our townhouse to buy a piece of what became the Lukmire Partnership.

Had I gone to LA, I might well have become a transit architect for life making a solid income bored as hell. The seven or so years designing transit stations after graduate school hadn’t expanded my working knowledge of building technologies, but boy did I learn about cast-in-place concrete vaults, ninety-foot escalator runs, and how much space Redskins fans leaving a game took on station platforms.

Noon times, I ran miles with the two top dudes, Jerry and Elias, more often with the second in command, a wild Greek who ate garlic for his digestif after lunch and was quick as hell on the runs.

Harry Weese & Associate won the AIA Firm of the Year for the Metro work. Then we landed a national competition to study the “Federal Triangle” between Pennsylvania and Constitution. Weese won the competition by arguing to save the threatened old Post Office—now Trump managed.

More significantly, we were to re-plan the parking lot on 15th Street. I was tagged to join that team, a move to L'Enfant Plaza that seemed like being sent to Siberia.

Bored with being stuck, I sent up a sketch to Harry’s office showing extending 13th street through the site, seeing as it was on axis with the Washington Monument opening a new view of it, which Harry agreed was the right move. What stands there now, the Ronald Reagan Building was a repeat of more official Washington.

When Jerry Karn, the local office chief, insisted on a blander master plan, Harry sent Stan to DC to fire him. It was a bloody mess.

Sadly, the studio bifurcated—some stayed with Harry and others set off to found their own firm. A sad story I may get around to telling. When Stan Allan, the firm’s President, said regardless of what happened with the Metro contract, we had jobs, I voted for staying. The rebels never asked me to come aboard, so I didn’t.

Chief Designer for the Metro system—great promotion in title only. Though the well was running dry on the Metro contract. But I needed a job. When Reagan cut off funding for transit systems across the nation—no respectable conservative rode with the commoners—it was time to go—the entire eight story Metro building knew it was time.

Even Stan Allan told me I needed to bugout. So I screwed my courage to the post—literally posting my courage to several firms in the Washington area. Stan had brought me from Miami to Washington, and he was still on my side.

When The Architecture of Harry Weese by Robert Bruegmann was published in 2010, I came to the book party—a reunion of all the architects who’d passed through the DC office, including Stan Allan. He was in his last years at the evening reunion, still polite, still kind, and I tried to express how much I appreciated him. Chicago Tribune Obit.

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I was left with uncommon skills in designing things few other architects were doing, and had an uncommonly hard time getting interviews, let alone job offers. I received but a few, one from a known office building sweatshop and a second that wanted to me to work between the design architects and the draftsmen, to mediate design issues.

The third was an offer to follow a great man to meetings and such, taking notes and bringing him coffee. Gag. His design work was top notch, but I’d heard too many stories about his wife, the office manager, and how no one was ever going to be promoted, so I passed.

I yearned for a mentor but wanted to design my own buildings.

The fourth offer came from LBC&W, a firm where the average age of the architects was only exceeded by the dreariness of the Skyline office building they were waiting to retire from. One of the few there my own age ran the architectural group, by the name of Greg Lukmire, who himself was from that ridiculous school in Cambridge where everyone who couldn’t get into Yale took second best. I kid the Harvard grads. Greg struck me as brighter than the firm’s work was known for. What put me off was the general atmosphere.

The job I took instead was a mistake. Good reputation—the design principal had first come to Washington to oversee construction of Dulles Airport—working under the truly great Eero Saarinen. Kent’s problem was he liked to mentor young men, and I was a tad nervous about how far the mentoring might go. Plus, being in my thirties by then I wasn’t as naïve as he seemed to like them. There was a definite pecking order that felt incestuous, and my first paycheck was weeks late. So nine months later I was back at LBC&W, asking Greg, did he still need another architect?

…

Greg was a fast designer. He could program and lay out a plan faster than most can fix coffee. Where we butted heads was in the details. My years at Harry Weese had inculcated an ethnic about understanding the details that have never left me. We argued and reached our compromises for thirty years—with less yelling later.

…

Perhaps if all those old men with cigarettes and fewer teeth retired from LBC&W, I could get a shot. Bearing in mind, I had two kids and a wife who had no great ambition toward helping enough with the family income to help us move from the townhouse for which we’d signed a mortgage. It was my income or the highway, so to speak.

I learned working drawings at LBC&W from a grizzled, chain smoking draftsman named Cliff. It was a branch office from an old line South Carolina firm, whose principal had been caught up in illegal contributions to the Committee to Re-elect the President. You may recall CREEP from All the President’s Men.

LBC&W was so old school the design architects worked in a separate room from the production team, consisting of a gruff ex-navy architect and the draftsmen (yes, all men) and a few field men—yes again. Though Greg had hired two women in the design section. The old school rule of developing working drawings was as follows: daydreams & concepts, design and lastly working drawings, with never the twain meeting up except periodically. The handoffs between weren’t always pretty—recalling HDR’s offer for me to work as a mediator between the two departments.

Cliff Hudgens had an uncommon talent for figuring out where the design problems were by cutting plan details every few feet from foundation to roof. Most detailing is still done by wall sections, but Cliff drew plan sections nearly as frequently, wherein he would gleefully uncover problems the design architects had missed. The latter didn’t like Cliff so much. I didn’t necessarily like his being delighted to find mistakes, but appreciated his process. And it gave me a second shot at refining the design, something I was convinced was important, god being in the details, or the devil one.

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Before the software reached wide use in 3D, everything was designed in 2D. I added axonometric drawings which one could scale to the mix, but essentially, architects needed to visualize the third dimension from 2D drawings, something you either had an innate skill at, learned, or changed your major to English.

Young designers today have 3D sketch tools, but when it comes to developing a final product, we continue to revert to 2D drawings to describe the inner workings of a building, though what lies on the near horizon is the computer-generated manufacturing of buildings. It’s been a thing in factories for years, and is slowly spreading into the building industry.

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Having spent my entire career in the public sector, I learned what a 100-year life span building needs. Systems such as electrical and HVAC systems will require refurbishment at some point, but the bones of a building should outlast the time it was built in. It was a creed from my first office, Ferendino, Grafton, Spillis and Candela, one that I took to Harry Weese and finally to the Lukmire Partnership.

So herein lies the problem with designing this damn beach house: I need to make it last for 100 years—on the Outer Banks…

I’ve never designed so many houses I could phone it in, let alone on the Outer Banks. Plus, the details matter in so many ways. The house we live in today was a fabulous design experience—looking back. Week nights and weekends while I was plugging away at it, not so much. And I’m convinced my drafting hand was guided by people I can never thank enough. I can draw if someone will tell me what’s needed, but I’ll not advertise myself as a gifted house architect.

As far as the beach house is concerned, I’ve been plugging away, requiring more brain cells than the coffee will provide, making progress slowly. Questioning, getting one part done, restudying it, going to another part, all with software I should be able to set on cruise control…

Photo from the mid-70s © Robert Catasus

Back in Miami, I was miserably ‘pining for the fiords’ while living in Florida. To this day, I’ve yet to visit the first fiord, but I can tell you about Miami if you have time to listen. Robert, meantime, has kept aiming his camera. You can find him on Facebook.