The sketch, used for the masthead, was drawn in 1973 as a retrospective exercise. It is typical of several designs I produced in the 1950s period. The site is Southern California cliffs dropping to an ocean beach. The building method is gunite which I explored in several theoretical works and two actual, un built, commissions. These gunite (sprayed concrete) houses are ones which I would build today given the client opportunity. They were considered to radical then. Today they may be better accepted in terms of their form yet perhaps still radical in regards the lifestyle they were conceived to support. This later aspect is most likely the gap which stood between me and clients then and remains so today.

In 1960, I spent a summer supervising a gunite construction crew to gain hands on experience with the material. I produced several innovations with the technique which lead to my first offer of a Partnership with a successful architectural firm. The idea was to use pre cast concrete pieces, as “forms,” and shoot the gunite into them. This way precision edges can be accomplished while taking advantage of the superior materials-handling and “free-form” attributes of sprayed gunite for the majority of the walls and roofs.

Unfortunately, to this day this method remains, to my knowledge, unexploded. However, the idea of combining shop built precision components with built-in-place field work has been employed by me several times - most recently with the soffits of the Hilton Head KnOwhere Store. The Bay Area Studio [link: bay area studio] will employ this technique in wood. It no doubt will become a mainstay in any postUsonian houses which we do.

My stepfather was assigned to the Pentagon in 1949 so we moved to Falls Church, Virginia that Fall. The general environment of Washington D.C. stimulated my slowly growing interest in architecture. One of my favorite places today, to go sit and think, is the Rotunda and fountain-rooms of the old National Gallery off the Mall [link: national art gallery - february 2005]. Even though I have never worked in the classical idiom, It is interesting (and enlightening) that one of the most influential buildings, that had great impact on my subsequent work, was done in the “Federal Style.” My parents gave me a drawing board and tools [link: matt history 1949], along with some mechanical drawing manuals, and turned me loose. I taught myself to draw. From that time on to this day I have never been without a drawing board by my side (now augmented with computer) and have always had at least one conceptual project in progress. In 1955, I took a high school extension course in drafting and found out that I had covered the equivalent of several semesters of the subject on my own. By the time I started working professionally in June of 1956 [link: the promise - 1956], this was - and remains - my only formal training in architecture. What I have learned of this art has been a combination of sitting at the feet of giants, direct work experience, extensive reading and traveling to see great works, and a demanding self-critical analysis of every line I draw and stick I build. The intensity of this process has never abated.

Seven conceptual projects supplemented this process:

And, one infrastructure project:

These projects covered a wide range of problems, materials and modular forms. They spanned the period from my own nascent thoughts through my first four jobs working for other architects, my time with Frank Lloyd Wright and my seminal week of tutoring with Bruce Goff. In sum, this was about as good an architectural education as it was possible to get at the time.

As can be seen, I did not pursue a great many different conceptual projects in these beginning years but worked - and reworked - a few sketches over and over. Each explored different basic ideas and each presented a different set of challenges to my evolving sense of architectural grammar. This body of work, in addition to articulating my own architectural viewpoints, became the medium by with I developed ideas and lesions I learned from those who taught and influenced me during this period: Wright, Goff, Schindler, McCallester, Maybeck, Drake, et.al. These sketches are long gone - yellowed and torn, ultimately lost. I will reproduce them here as a documentation and history of my seminal learning path and note what problems were being “worked” and what influences I felt in each work. In a certain sense I am still reworking these projects - there is much left to explore in them and I consider several of them buildable to this day.

At the end of this period, I felt myself to be a competent designer - in other words, I could conceive a building in my head clearly and expect no surprises when it was built - it was the building process, itself, that I took on as my main focus throughout the 60s.