An Interview with Will Bruder

In December we met with Will Bruder at the extraordinary Phoenix Central Library that he designed in 1989 as part of the collaboration bruderDWLarchitects. He spoke about desert light, a strict budget and what it’s like to work through the public design process of a civic building. Afterwards, Will was generous enough to chat via phone with us and elaborate on his 40-plus-year journey in architecture.

Burton Barr Phoenix Central Library, Phoenix, AZ. Photos: Bill Timmerman

A tour of your website indicates that you’ve got more than a dozen current projects, yet you still made time to give us a personal tour of the Phoenix Central Library. How do you remain so accessible?

The person is the brand; sharing, mentoring and navigating a dialogue are all part of the deal. In my own experience, I’ve knocked on very few doors that someone wasn’t kind enough to open. You never know what you’re going to get—sometimes it’s a five-minute conversation, and sometimes it’s an hour conversation, sometimes a lifelong friendship. The act of engaging with people is necessary to the process of discovery. There are always unexpected results from each interaction, conversation or experience; it’s less about knowing something and more about discovering something. The best work comes out of these investigations.

Years ago at a lecture we attended, you told the architects in the audience to “honor your clients. They could have gone out and bought a house on a credit card.” What traits do you continue to see in those clients who are willing to go on the adventure of architecture?

In their life experiences, these clients have caught that architecture has something unique to offer. For them architecture offers the potential of an armature for better living, so they become willing to take that step. Most clients approach me not for a certain style or because of what my portfolio looks like but for the possibility of inventing something for them. What matters to them is the process of design and how their lives will be changed by it.
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Ron van der Veen

With the last issue of ARCADE we celebrated our 30th anniversary! This got me thinking a lot about the implausible eight-year run of my Side Yard column.

The goal from the beginning has been to peer into the ironic and curious side of architecture and to poke a bit of fun at a profession that often takes itself VERY seriously. When I started I honestly didn’t think our profession was that quirky, and I never considered myself a writer.

Over the years, virtually all of my Side Yard stories have been at least semi-autobiographical. Many of our readers have helped me along the way, too. I actually get great suggestions from fellow designers with curious experiences or observations. I have come to recognize that architects aren’t as tedious as I thought. Pompous, yes, but not that dreary.

The toughest part of writing this column is typically selling ideas to Kelly Rodriguez, ARCADE’s editor. I keep lots of notes and reflections in my journal that are often the beginnings of these columns. But as fluidly as the ideas might flow, I must be prepared for Kelly’s heavy hand of denial. In fact, included here is a sampling of valid ideas that she has discarded.

Lawyers Are Destroying Architecture

I had just experienced a few tough run-ins with lawyers and sincerely wanted to get my jollies off on them with this article. Kelly put the thumper on this one, but I still think this topic is quite pertinent—because lawyers really ARE killing the profession or at least taking all the fun out of it.
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Howard Levine

In 1990 I was in the middle of a traditional academic career, teaching philosophy and logic at San José State University, when I received a call from a friend that changed my life. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the folks who accredit West Coast institutions, had just visited the California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) and informed them that since they granted the BFA degree, every student was required to take a mathematics course. Would I be interested in becoming the CCAC “math guy”?

When I interviewed with the Dean, he told me I had two responsibilities: (1) Make sure the course(s) had enough mathematical content to satisfy WASC, and (2) Make sure the courses were interesting enough so that my students didn’t occupy the President’s office. As a big believer in the McLuhan dictum that “Those who try to draw a distinction between education and entertainment know nothing about either,” I figured I could handle (2). As for (1), WASC never complained; occasionally a student did, but I guess not at the Presidential level. Here’s how I did it.

First, I set out to convince my students that, at their essential cores, mathematics and art are engaged in the same vital, important, intellectual activity—interpreting the fundamental nature of both the universe and our place within it. Second, since it would have been inappropriate and impossible to teach a traditional algebra, geometry or calculus class, I tried to help my students understand how mathematicians approach problems, the types of questions they ask and how such strategies might be applied to artistic endeavors. The capstone course requirement was always an individual project relating art and mathematics that was shared with the entire class.
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By Hal Foster
Verso Books 2011
$26.95

JM Cava

“If you ask me Jeeves, art is responsible for most of the trouble in the world.” — P.G. Wodehouse

These days I rarely read anything labeled “architectural research.” Call me curmudgeonly, but as far as I’m concerned, architectural research needs to be related to practice. Most of it, however, seems a collage of opaque, self-referential clouds of irrelevancy, unrelated to anyone’s practice on the planet, a closed loop, theory written for theorists. I find greater wisdom, and certainly wit, in Bertie Wooster anytime. But, like the inimitable Jeeves, Hal Foster’s newest contribution to the genre, The Art-Architecture Complex, stands alone. Recently, I was upbraided (by a theorist) for being overly generous with my praise in print, so take this with the proverbial grain, but for those of you unfamiliar with Hal Foster, let me introduce him: brilliant thinker, lucid and entertaining writer and – what really sets him apart – equal parts critic and socially committed human being, connected and sympathetic to architectural practice.

As an academic (Princeton), there are times when Foster can get a little professorial, but don’t hold that against him—he always brings it back to ground within a page or two. He’s really a cultural critic, with art/architecture as his lens of provocative observation. It’s refreshing to find writing on design that isn’t attempting to force a straight jacket of idiosyncratic theory onto the world at large. Foster writes because, through the fog of our distraught culture, he perceives an outline, the shape of something important and useful to our collective evolution and well-being, drilling into the complexities of contemporary architecture and art with unmatched clarity and social concern. No other academic of his stature (except Kenneth Frampton) has the humility to introduce his work by admitting to “…the fatigue that many feel with the negativity of critique, its presumption of authority, its sheer out-of-date-ness in a world-that-couldn’t- care-less… .” Explaining his persistence in the field, he muses that “one sometimes becomes a critic or a historian for the same reason that one often becomes an artist or an architect—out of a discontent with the status quo and a desire for alternatives. There are no alternatives without critique.”
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Hillclimb Court at 30

Jeffrey Karl Ochsner

Photo by Michael Burns

“The world’s crummiest site to put a building on,” was how Seattle architect Rick Sundberg described the location of Hillclimb Court when it was published in Architectural Record in February 1984. Yet the project, which turns 30 this year, is a remarkable achievement and proof that constraints can often help produce great buildings.

The City of Seattle issued a request for proposals for the 27,000 square-foot parcel in 1979. The project was daunting: Not only was there a 45-foot grade change between Western Avenue and Alaskan Way, but the west side of the site faced the two-level Alaskan Way Viaduct, a source of continuous noise that also blocked views. The RFP required a garage for 200 cars and the project, to be constructed on top, was to be visually sympathetic with the Pike Place Market.

The project team of Cornerstone Development, Olson/Walker Architects and Gulf Landau Young Construction Company won with a proposal to create an oasis in the city, a complex of 35 condominium units (ranging in size from 520 to 1,150 square feet) and two retail spaces, all framing a shared courtyard atop the podium of a four-level parking garage.

Hillclimb Court achieves maximum effect with limited means (in mathematics, this is the definition of elegance). The design team (Gordon Walker, Rick Sundberg, Rick Worrell, Todd Heistamnn, Tom Rasnack) arranged the residential units in two rectilinear bars enclosing the west and south sides of the courtyard and sheltering it from the Viaduct. The retail and entrance pavilion frames the east side of the courtyard and presents a pedestrian-friendly commercial front along the sidewalk at Western Avenue.
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Design and the Gypsy Lifestyle

Kurt Wolken

More than a year ago, my graphic design studio Wolken Communica decided to shed our office of 10 years. We didn’t move to a new office—we decided to drop the whole office concept altogether. We’re still Wolken Communica, but as we went mobile, we also started calling ourselves Studio Gypsies.

The idea was to avoid the traditional studio in order to challenge ourselves—to reconsider how we work and how we look at the world. Laptops at the ready, we bunk down with our fellow designers, clients and friends, changing our location like we change our underwear—every two months or so.

Having worked in the same building for more than a decade, we’re making up for lost time. We’re traveling the city of Seattle, truly tasting it in a way that no other business can say they are. We’ve been seemingly everywhere—a warehouse in SODO, a Post Alley overlook at Pike Place Market, an underground bunker on Capitol Hill and a dock on Lake Union. That’s only the beginning. And, peripherally, the neighborhood coffee joints and pubs we’ve been to? Multiply the number of places we’ve worked seven-fold. (Maybe eleven-fold. OK. Fourteen-fold.)

No longer is there a worn path from our beds to desks— we now have to think about where we’re headed every day. More than a few times we’ve started our morning commute headed in precisely the wrong direction. And we’ve frequently mumbled Dude, where’s my car?! as we end the day. It may be a new set of work hazards, but they’re better than the old, traditional ones.
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