ORAL HISTORY OF EDWARD CHARLES BASSETT

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1992 Revised Edition Copyright © 2006 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available to the public for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv Preface to Revised Edition v Outline of Topics vi Oral History 1 Selected References 149 Curriculum Vitae 150 Index of Names and Buildings 151

iii PREFACE

On January 30, 31, and February 1, 1989, I met with Edward Charles Bassett in his home in Mill Valley, California, to record his memoirs. Retired now, "Chuck" has been the head of design of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's San Francisco office from 1955-1981. Those twenty-six years were a time of unprecedented growth and change to which Chuck not only bore witness but helped shape. Chuck Bassett was one of the SOM triumvirate of the postwar years: he was the West Coast counterpart of Gordon Bunshaft in New York and William Hartmann in Chicago. In 1988 the California Council of the American Institute of Architects awarded SOM, San Francisco, a 42-year award for "...the genuine commitment that the firm has had to its city, to the profession and to both art and the business of architecture." Although Chuck prefers to be known as a team player, his personal contribution to this achievement is unmistakable in the context of urban San Francisco since 1955. Chuck's talent and personality seems to have been a fortuitous marriage with the architectural tradition of the Bay Region.

Our recording sessions were taped on five 90-minute and one 60-minute cassettes which have been transcribed and reviewed by both Chuck and me. Chuck made corrections and some lengthy additions that he feels clarify and amplify his original intention. The transcript has been edited to retain as much as possible of the flow, tone, and spirit of the original narrative. For Chuck's thoughtful recollections that will be invaluable for future historians who seek a more comprehensive picture of SOM San Francisco during the postwar years, I thank him. For Chuck's cooperation throughout the recording process, I owe him my appreciation.

Chuck Bassett's oral history has been sponsored by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, whose reputation he helped to establish. We are grateful to SOM for their support of this oral history program that seeks to document the recent architectural past through eyewitness accounts from architects who created it. Thanks go to transcriber Joan Cameron and editor Sarah Underhill for their skilled contributions in bringing this document to completion.

Betty J. Blum April 1992

iv PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

Since 1992, when the previous preface was written, advances in electronic transmission of data have moved at breakneck speed. With the ubiquity of the Internet, awareness and demand for copies of oral histories in the Chicago Architects Oral History Project collection have vastly increased. These factors, as well as the Ryerson and Burnham Library's commitment to scholarly research, have compelled us to make these documents readily accessible on the World Wide Web. A complete electronic version of each oral history is now available on the Chicago Architects Oral History Project's section of The Art Institute of Chicago website, http://www.artic.edu/aic, and, as before, a bound version is available for study at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

In preparing an electronic version of this document, we have reformatted it for publication, reviewed and updated with minor copy-editing, and, where applicable, we have expanded the biographical profile and added pertinent bibliographic references. Lastly, the text has been reindexed and the CAOHP Master Index updated accordingly. All of the electronic conversion and reformatting is the handiwork of my valued colleague, Annemarie van Roessel, whose technical skills, intelligence, and discerning judgment have shaped the breadth and depth of the CAOHP's presence on the Internet. This endeavor would be greatly diminished without her seamless leadership in these matters. Publication of this oral history in web-accessible form was made possible by the generous support of The Vernon and Marcia Wagner Access Fund at The Art Institute of Chicago; The James & Catherine Haveman Foundation; The Reva and David Logan Family Fund of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region; and Daniel Logan and The Reva and David Logan Foundation. Finally, to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago and its generous and supportive director, Jack P. Brown, we extend our deepest gratitude for facilitating this endeavor.

Betty J. Blum February 2005

v OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Early Exposure to Architecture 1 Study at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor 11 Army Experience 18 Return of University of Michigan After the War 26 Relationship with Roger Bailey 31 Work in Alden Dow's Office 34 Master's Degree at Cranbrook 39 Work in Saarinen Office 40 Impressions of Eliel Saarinen 47 Impressions of Eero Saarinen 52 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Auditorium and Chapel 53 Decision to Leave Saarinen Office in 1955 for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, California 60 Impressions of Kevin Roche 63 Crown Zellerbach Headquarters, San Francisco 71 John Hancock Building, San Francisco 80 Different Working Methods at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Offices 84 Mauna Kea Beach Resort Hotel, Kamuela Bay, Hawaii 90 Alcoa Building, San Francisco 98 Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Complex, Oakland, California 102 Weyerhaeuser Corporation Headquarters and Technology Center, Tacoma, Washington 104 Relationship of Architect and Developer 115 United States Embassy Building, Moscow 119 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, San Francisco 125 Influence of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on Skidmore, Owings and Merrill 139 Personal Goals on Entering Architecture 143

vi Edward Charles Bassett

Blum: Today is January 30, 1989, and I'm with Chuck Bassett in his home in California. You were born in 1921 in Port Huron, Michigan?

Bassett: September 12th, right.

Blum: And educated at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at Cranbrook—an education that was interrupted by military service in the Pacific Theatre. You worked for the Saarinens from 1950 to 1955 and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill [SOM] from 1955 until 1981. Are you still a consultant?

Bassett: Not any longer. I'm still in and out. They ask me to get in the way once in a while, but I'm generally through.

Blum: I see. How did your long-standing career in architecture begin? Do you have early recollections of thinking about architecture?

Bassett: Well, that's very simply answered. My father was an architect in Port Huron, and at the time I was growing up, he was not registered. He had a small town practice, but at that early age he was a member of a firm maintained by a man by the name of Walter Wyeth, who was at that time about the only architect in Port Huron. My father, who was born in 1900, just because of the way things were then did not go to the university. I think it was a product of lack of money and his high school graduation then being followed almost immediately by army service near the end of World War I. Then he and my mother were married. There was nothing in his social situation at that time that would have provided funds for him to go on to school. Because he was an excellent draftsman and, I think, had a fine natural sense of architecture, he began working in Wyeth's office, and also for a bridge company in Sarnia, Ontario. In this little office my father became the number two man, the chief draftsman. He learned to do

1 everything. It was a wonderful kind of practice. When the site had to be surveyed, he could do it, he could design it, then render it, and do the working drawings including most of the structural and mechanical documents. Then the secretary, who was very experienced, would write the specs. The practice was mostly medium size residential work with some commercial and institutional buildings distributed throughout Michigan's "thumb" area. There was work in Canada, too. Anyway, I was conscripted at a very early age to help around the office, especially for the task of making blueprints. They were made in the old- fashioned way, I doubt if there are many people left who remember that.

Blum: How was that?

Bassett: Well, there was a machine into which the blueprint paper, with the tracing resting on top of it, was introduced. After a timed exposure to light, it emerged and was dipped in a trough of water and placed against a vertical metal surface above the trough, then painted with a chemical bath and rinsed by water running down. Then you laid the wet piece of paper that had been exposed but not developed against this flat plane, and painted it with a bright yellow chemical with a big brush. All of a sudden, there was the blueprint.

Blum: It turned blue?

Bassett: It turned blue immediately. The paper was originally kind of a pale yellow. Then you rinsed it, because you had valves on the side and the water came down from a pipe at the top and rinsed the blueprint clean. Then you squeegeed it dry. Then you lifted it off and draped the blueprint over the wires, where it dried. Then, using a ruler you straightened out each sheet so it was reasonably flat, because it dried all curly. Then it had to be trimmed, collated, bound and stapled. It was a lot of work doing a print. I used to hate being caught, particularly when I was an adolescent. I started this when I was probably in the seventh grade. Later on, when I became interested in young ladies and in spending more time at the beach because that's where the action was, I hated to be caught on a weekend by being told that they had finished the drawings on the addition to an elementary

2 school up in God knows where, some little town, and that I was to produce thirty sets of ten drawings each.

Blum: Was that how you spent many of your weekends?

Bassett: Yes, my weekends went. Of course, I was making money—something incredible like thirty-five cents an hour. But it took the weekend.

Blum: You were about fourteen at the time?

Bassett: Most of my adolescence. Eventually I started being helpful on the board.

Blum: To design?

Bassett: On, no, not at that early stage.

Blum: What does "on the board" mean?

Bassett: Working on the drafting board. I became proficient in lettering and rudimentary drafting. I'd be given notes and be told where to put them, also the dates and the titles on each sheet and all the usual necessaries. Eventually I was drafting by the time I was out of high school, it had never occurred to me that there was anything else I wanted to do. Without any real instruction in the sense of "Well, now, we're going to teach you to be an architect," I'd just sort of soaked it up by osmosis and the fact that my father's interest in these things was important. He took his examinations when he was forty-eight years old, which would be in 1948, two years after World War II, and then became Walter Wyeth's partner. No, I'm sorry. He did that in 1946, but then he died almost immediately.

Blum: Oh. But he had a lifetime in architecture.

Bassett: Yes.

Blum: Without a license?

3 Bassett: Yes, but practicing in the traditional way of having served an apprenticeship. I remain very proud of the fact that he did this all himself.

Blum: Who was his master architect?

Bassett: It was Mr. Wyeth, of course, who I think graduated from the University of Illinois and had come to Port Huron and established his practice. It never grew beyond a local, sort of micro-regional practice, but he was active and did interesting, nice things of that time.

Blum: Was it your connection to your father or the work that actually inspired you?

Bassett: Both, I was surrounded by architectural magazines, and my father's work and the office.

Blum: Was it just assumed that you were going to go into architecture?

Bassett: No, no. Nothing was ever said. My parents never put any pressure on me to go in any direction. I'm sure my father had certain doubts because I was not an eager scholar in school. Most of my efforts scholastically had to do with doing just enough work to be eligible for class office and the basketball team. That was why I maintained a reasonable average. Otherwise, my head, like it is with most adolescents, was somewhere else. During the real depth of the Depression, of course, the architectural offices were fallow. No one had any work. Although my father went into the office, there was nothing there. There were several commissions that he was able to get independently of the office because of contacts he had. These things were done at home. The furniture was shoved aside in the dining room and the drafting table was there. My grandfather on my mother's side who had retired was living with us at that time for the same reason of the Depression. My grandmother had died. He was a master carpenter. He and my father put together a complete shop in the basement, so between my dad working on buildings and my grandfather doing things with wood, it was a nice atmosphere for a boy if he was interested. There were relatives in Detroit that we

4 often visited, driving there in our 1928 Chevy. My father depended on the magazines and buildings in Detroit to nurture him about what architecture was really about—the nicer buildings were never built in little towns. So, I remember detours that would be made once in a while so we could see a fine little church or something else by an architect my father admired. There was a building I saw regularly because of our route in the car. It was built by that terrible man, the priest who was such a rabble-rouser in Detroit, Father Coughlin. Did you ever hear of him?

Blum: Yes, I've heard of him.

Bassett: He drummed up a considerable following for someone who preached what he preached. But also he drummed up a lot of money, and he built a very fancy church and compound, which included a tower. It was very richly done. I found it wonderfully impressive because it had detail and ornament and it looked like someone who knew what they were doing had really spent a lot of time working it out. I think I became conscious for the first time that there was a dimension beyond just simply getting something built. Then, of course, there was Cranbrook, which was under construction at that time. We used to go and see that grow, along with the girl's school at Kingswood. They represented another kind of world beyond the kind of architecture practiced day-to-day in a small town.

Blum: Like your father's?

Bassett: Yes. But the magazines were full of wonderful things by important architects, soul food for my dad. There were magazines then that haven't existed for years. There was a wonderful magazine called The Architect, with a great antique paper binding and full-size rotogravure tinted photographs, magnificent photographs with wonderful details of fine buildings. At that time, Architectural Forum was published in two volumes every month. One was devoted to technical matters of construction and the other to architectural plates. The Architectural Record also and Pencil Points, which became Progressive Architecture. At that time Pencil Points

5 was of great interest to me because it emphasized fine draftsmanship and the art of being an architect.

Blum: So was this the way in which your father learned what was happening in the world of architecture, and you as well?

Bassett: I think so. It fed him and turned me on. He was an excellent natural draftsman. He drew well, even as an untutored child. There were wonderful drawings in all of these magazines. To this day, I remain interested in these people and how they drew and what they drew.

Blum: I did not know your father was an architect and that your interest came so naturally and that the exposure was so practical.

Bassett: Yes, and imperceptible.

Blum: Maybe you were too young to have an opinion, but in 1933 and 1934 the Century of Progress was held in Chicago. Did that make any waves at all with you or your father?

Bassett: Well, because I was only twelve, I don't remember discussing architecture with my father ever.

Blum: No, but I mean going on the Sky Ride or whatever.

Bassett: No, we didn't go to Chicago. There was no money and Chicago might as well have been on the moon.

Blum: Surely there were photographs that were published.

Bassett: Oh, yes. Then the Royal Scot came through on its way there. It was one of the great British trains. It had streamlined enclosure, and there it sat at the Grand Trunk station after coming through the Sarnia tunnel, sort of breathing and steaming with those great, wonderful color schemes that all English locomotives

6 have as compared to ours. The papers were full of wonderful photographs of the art-deco exhibition buildings and their displays.

Blum: And there were these futuristic projects.

Bassett: Oh, yes, all over the place, but you hardly related them to architecture. You related them to the future, to dreams.

Blum: Do you have any recollection of looking at photographs of the House of Tomorrow, Keck's house?

Bassett: No, not at that time. No, no. I saw that later because I've always been interested in the history of architecture, including the modern movement and, of course, SOM's participation. I remember the Keck stuff. They were very austere sort of things. George Fred Keck. Didn't he have a brother?

Blum: Yes, Bill. But George Fred Keck was truly the designer and he is now deceased. Bill is still in Chicago.

Bassett: Oh, really. That's interesting. I wonder if anyone pays any attention to him. Probably not.

Blum: Well, not in the way that the firm had attention for what they were doing at an earlier time.

Bassett: Well, keep track of him. Some of these wonderful people sort of fall off the edge. As Warhol said: You get to be famous for fifteen minutes. We came to San Francisco in 1955, and just because of the need to survive and feed the family, I was immediately busy working at the office and keeping our act together and commuting and doing all those things. I had no idea that Arthur Brown was still alive, and he was the architect for many of the important buildings in San Francisco, including the City Hall, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a magnificent example of the Beaux-Arts period. The dome and its proportions are

7 far better than the Capitol or any of our normally adored buildings. In 1955, he was still alive, and if I had known that, I could have gone and talked to him.

Blum: Sometimes we learn these things a bit too late. In 1937, you were sixteen, already with an established interest in architecture. In 1938, when you were seventeen, both Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe came to the United States and settled in Chicago. Did that have any impact on you at all?

Bassett: No. I was a voracious reader at sixteen or so, but not about architectural matters. It was three years later before Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture was published and I became truly interested and aware of the seeds of the modern movement.

Blum: When you were in high school, was there any instruction that you received either in drafting or drawing or just generally anything that would have promoted your interest or skill in architecture?

Bassett: No. The curriculum was very basic and did not include the arts. There were fine teachers. I had teachers I admired, but there was little input. I didn't take drafting because I had taken elementary drafting when I was in secondary school. I think it was in the ninth grade. When my father saw what they were teaching and how they were teaching, he made me stop it and wouldn't let me take any more drafting courses.

Blum: What was the problem?

Bassett: It was sort of a standard mechanical drawing format that was really based on true mechanical drawing, that is, drawing machine forms, a sort of patent drawing attitude. My father, who was a naturally very good architectural draftsman, in the sense of not only making nice drawings of buildings or sketching well, but also that when he did a working drawing it was a very handsome thing indeed. He was, I think, upset by the nature of what was being taught me and thought that I was wasting my time and might be irrevocably

8 hurt. So I didn't take any more drafting, and there was no other situation in school that was related. There were no art courses.

Blum: So the only opportunity you had to somehow further your skill, your father objected to. I understand the reason.

Bassett: I guess so, except that that's at the most mundane level anyway. There were books on art at the library. I could look at them at my leisure and wonder about things, and then we'd talk about these things at home, but not a great deal.

Blum: And you were working in your father's office at this time.

Bassett: Yes, after school and then some weekends.

Blum: What else did you do in the office other than the blueprint process that you described so thoroughly?

Bassett: For example, at the end of the month, the office secretary, a marvelously proficient gal named Addie Patzke would make the checks out for all the bills that had to be paid and I'd be handed a great pile, and I'd just run all over town delivering them. They were not mailed. I was a three-cent stamp with legs. When I had reached a point where my father could trust me to be careful (and accurate) I would be dispatched to obtain measurements at buildings that were going to be renovated and information he needed. He'd tell me what he needed and I'd go and do it. Knock at the door and explain who I was and what I wanted. Another time they were pouring a floor slab at the local Catholic school for a wing that was being added. He came to the school and got me—told the teacher that he needed me. I was eleven or twelve years old. He took me to the job and he introduced me to the foreman, and then said, "Now, look. They're pouring this concrete. You see all the reinforcing wire lying there and the blocks to keep it up an inch or so above the sand. They're going to pour and some of the blocks are going to be displaced. See this guy? He's got a hook, and he's supposed to reach down and get the wire and pull it up so that it's not on the bottom of the slab. Now, I want you to make sure he does it. You stand there and watch, and every

9 time you see him not doing what he's supposed to be doing, I want you to go and tell the foreman." I remember other times when there was a house under construction and I would go with him. Dad would have a big piece of chalk and when the house was framed and nothing was closed in, he'd do it room by room. As soon as the ground floor was framed, he'd go and look at it. He'd look at every stud, and if it wasn't bearing properly on the floor plate and if the ceiling plate wasn't seated tight, a big X would go on and the carpenter would have to make sure that was all secure. Then he'd come back the next day and say, "Okay, okay, okay." There would be times when the finish carpenters were working that additional information was needed, he'd do a full-size drawing right there on the job for a mantel or whatever. That was the way it was done in those days.

Blum: And this was your instruction? This was your on-the-job schooling, training?

Bassett: Yes, but it wasn't that intense. These things would only happen sporadically. There was no rhythm or organization, but it did cause me to become familiar and comfortable with the routine of architecture. There wasn't any mystery about it.

Blum: Did you have a sense of being proud of the fact that you were twelve or thirteen years old and your father relied on you?

Bassett: Well, no, I don't remember that. I remember, "How come I can't be swimming with the guys?" Because that's the way boys are. But I do remember being proud of my father for knowing all these things and doing them. He had a nice relationship with people.

Blum: It sounds like you had a nice relationship with him.

Bassett: Yes, but he was not a textbook father. He wasn't full of fatherly affection. He didn't dote on me. He was busy making a living and being a father. We got along fine.

Blum: And in the process he gave you a lot.

10 Bassett: Well, yes, that way. I'm saying this because the current fashion is for fathers to...

Blum: Be buddies?

Bassett: Yes, but there was none of that. I was the kid growing up and he had his work to do, and our relationship was never anything but friendly. I had chores to do.

Blum: Did you have brothers?

Bassett: No, I had a sister a year-and-a-half younger than I. We were both given work to do around the house. We were trained and domesticated. We weren't spoiled.

Blum: Well, you certainly were trained in the profession of your choice by your father.

Bassett: That is true, but I wasn't aware of that until I actually started school. Then I found that there were areas of knowledge that I took for granted, and that were unfathomable mysteries to my fellow students, who had decided to be architects without the advantage I enjoyed.

Blum: At the university?

Bassett: Yes. They often remained mysteries all through school because there was never an opportunity to come in at the basement level.

Blum: How did you decide to go to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor?

Bassett: Well, first of all, it was one of the top schools. I'm not talking about the architectural schools, I'm talking about the fact that Ann Arbor has always been a top school. It was within a reasonable distance and I could afford it because I was a state student. So I could afford to go there. I graduated from high school a year late because of my mother, sister and myself catching scarlet fever in sequence.

Blum: Did you begin at the University of Michigan in 1939?

11 Bassett: Oh, no. Not until the fall of 1940 did I start at Ann Arbor. When I left high school, I had to raise money because it was still the tail end of the Depression. There wasn't the money to send me to school. My father had noted my reluctance to be a great scholar. He said, "Look, we can help you some, but if you want a college education, you can do it on your own." So, the first necessary thing to do was to get a job, to escape from the office. There was a man in our town who owned three hamburger stands. They were local, small-scale versions of what you know as a White Castle. They did a good job. They filled a need. That was the earliest phase of junk food, I guess. But, anyway, he decided to start one in Niagara Falls, of all places.

Blum: Niagara Falls, New York?

Bassett: Yes. I had been there, but that's another story. Anyway, he sent two experienced people and myself. I thought, "I cannot only get out of the office, but I can get out of Port Huron!" So, off we went to Niagara Falls. In those days Niagara Falls had two separate parts to it. There was the part that was grouped around the Falls itself, and then there was the town proper connected by an important street. The owner decided to situate his little white porcelain enamel box with all the stainless steel inside midway between the two parts of the town. We went there, and it was our job—the three of us—to keep this thing open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. You can imagine, it was only because we were so young and idiots to boot, I think, that this worked. Our situation was aggravated because the armory was just two blocks away. That was at the exact moment that FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt] called up the National Guard. The poor guys in the National Guard were arriving in droves. They were putting them in cots, filling the armory. They had nothing else to do with them. They had no uniforms, no mess kitchen to feed them, and we were suddenly inundated by these guys. Anyway, after six months that crisis passed and we survived it, but I went back home.

Blum: Well, you must have learned how to make a hamburger.

12 Bassett: Oh, yes. I made a good short-order cook. Very good. I could do lots of things. It satisfied my latent athletic interests because there's a choreography to working behind the counter. When your work companion says, "I need a glass," you could pick up a glass and flip it behind you because you knew exactly where it was going and he knew that it was coming. The whole thing had a nice rhythm and an art about it that the customers were not unaware of. Anyway, I went back home and got a job in the Mueller Brass Company as an inspector. I worked in that for a year. The deal was that I could live at home, and my folks would not charge me room and board as long as I saved my money, which I intended to do for school. So I worked for a year, and at the end of the year I'd saved, I think, fifteen hundred dollars. That's pretty good considering the fact that the salary was sixty-five cents an hour. I was on the swing-shift, from three-thirty until eleven o'clock. That way I couldn't get out and spend the money. I was occupied every evening. It was a successful ploy.

Blum: Was that your idea or your father's?

Bassett: It was my idea.

Blum: You had to put temptation beyond your reach?

Bassett: That's right. "Know thyself." But anyway, in September of 1941 I started school in Ann Arbor.

Blum: And you spent two years there.

Bassett: That's right. Artie Dubin and I met as freshmen.

Blum: Now that you can look back—maybe at the time you didn't have the perspective to assess it—what system did they use? What was their mode of instruction?

Bassett: Ann Arbor was, I think, if not the first, one of the very first, to throw the Beaux- Arts system out. To get rid of it.

13 Blum: In 1941, what was happening there?

Bassett: It was gone. At that time, the dean was Wells Bennett, but the school had been really shaped by another dean. Now, I've got to remember his name.

Blum: Was it a Professor Hammett?

Bassett: No, but Hammett was a senior faculty member. I knew him well. The dean was Emil Lorch. He was a very strong individual, and had literally got the building built by going out and beating up and cajoling suppliers and contractors to contribute. He went out and did what had to be done to get an architecture and art building built. He accomplished all of this by himself. Prior to that, the architectural school had been buried in the engineering school. It was still organized outside of the liberal arts context.

[Tape1: Side 2]

Blum: Could you go on with your thought about someone being more academically inclined than the engineering or the architecture department offered?

Bassett: I think that the architectural school had two emphases. One was in design and one was in the technical side. Neither side could escape without taking certain requisite courses on the other side of the ledger.

Blum: Do you mean you had to have classes in both?

Bassett: Yes, you had to have both. It attempted a balance. There were excellent technical instructors in the architectural school. If you were a person who was able in technical matters and less so in matters of design, you followed that natural inclination. You never went over to the engineering school unless you were lacking something very basic like physics. The technical courses in structure were terrifying to me because I don't think in those terms.

Blum: In terms of construction?

14 Bassett: No, in terms of the kinds of abstractions which deal with structure—the methods of figuring concrete or stress distribution. Such matters remain arcane to this day—every examination in structure was a trauma for me. I survived mostly by memorizing everything. It never came naturally to me. I got through it, but I certainly wouldn't want to do it again.

Blum: So they had no Beaux-Arts connection at all?

Bassett: No, they had structured themselves to do it another way. They had thrown out a very definitive and, I think over the years, well-honed methodology about teaching design, and they had not really found an adequate substitute. That problem still existed when I was at Ann Arbor. For example, the student associations exchanged school projects amongst themselves, and we always looked forward to getting the exhibit from the University of Illinois, because it was still in the Beaux-Arts system. Their projects were always absolutely beautifully accomplished in an opaque tempera and watercolor. The sections and elevations were gorgeously done. We didn't think much of the architecture because the problems seemed unreal, but we sure as hell thought they knew how to present it. We were worrying about architecture in the contemporary sense as the solving of realistic problems within an aesthetic that was austere and somewhat messianic in its quality. The need of the architect to have the skills to make visible his ideas to himself and to others was given little, if any, attention.

Blum: Are you talking about the Beaux-Arts system or the University of Michigan?

Bassett: I'm talking about Ann Arbor. Under the old system, even the most incompetent person became competent at being able to visually express himself. That was not true then in Ann Arbor or many of the other schools. If you were not a naturally adept person at expressing yourself visually, then you would always have an important handicap. Your inability to come to grips with design and then present it in a very interesting, legible, understandable way to other people would be a handicap to you.

15 Blum: If you were in school at the University of Michigan at a time when they were searching for a method to do this, how did you find your way?

Bassett: Well, first of all, I had the advantage of prior acquaintance. I knew how to do many things, how to go about achieving a completed idea. I was comfortable with the process of expressing an idea, how to get it out in the open.

Blum: Excuse me, but what I thought you were saying is that it was a new idea and then the presentation of that. It wasn't just executing a drawing. What was it that you say they were in the process of looking for?

Bassett: At Ann Arbor they had adopted a contemporary attitude about the design process. You were designing contemporary buildings to solve a realistic need you would meet in your professional practice, a program, a building. It's the motor that drove the contemporary movement. They had shucked away all of the old artifice in order to do this, but it meant at the same time they did this, that the natural craft of teaching people how to express visually what they were thinking, went down the drain.

Blum: Well, the old drawings are gorgeous. They're tinted on the back side.

Bassett: They're beautiful. It's interesting with what's happening in architecture at this moment. Even though you may not like what they're doing, the craft of drawing has been reborn. There are people out there doing marvelous drawings.

Blum: Was there ever any conversation among students at the University of Michigan after such an exchange with, say, the University of Illinois...

Bassett: Not in a formal sense, no, but we all said, "Look at how they did it," or you wondered how they did it. We had never done a wash or worked with tempera and opaque, watercolor and casting shadows. The Beaux-Arts drawings had a tendency to look, on the basis of what we were doing, magic. But then there were other schools that we'd trade drawings with like Rensselaer and God knows

16 who, and they were in the same ball park as we were. They were out there sort of looking for the ground, trying to find a place for their feet.

Blum: What texts did the University of Michigan use?

Bassett: I don't even remember.

Blum: Did they use Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture?

Bassett: Well, it was there and it was recommended reading, but not required. The architectural history was taught by Hammett. He did a syllabus of his own, which was complete and structured the way he thought things should be presented. The emphasis was on the history of architecture with little attention to the modern movement.

Blum: I was told that several years before you were there he was one of the few professors who promoted modern architecture or contemporary architecture while the University of Michigan was still with the Beaux-Arts system.

Bassett: I did not know about him in that sense.

Blum: Maybe at that time it didn't stand out anymore.

Bassett: I don't remember him as a building architect. I never saw a building that Ralph Hammett did. He taught architectural history. He was very able and had several books to his credit. There were some who were able architects and carried on a consistent practice while they taught. They did contemporary that were carefully worked out and self-effacing by current standards.

Blum: One of the texts that I think had an impact on some students at the time and had recently been published was Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture.

Bassett: That came much later.

17 Blum: No, that was published in 1940. Was it presented to you?

Bassett: It was not presented to me. I didn't see that book until I was in an army hospital in late 1945 and 1946 in Galesburg, Illinois. I had been able to get a hold of good reading matter, and wrote my father with a list of books, one of which was Space, Time and Architecture. I read it when I was in the hospital. At that time I was trying to decide what I really wanted to do. Should I go back to Ann Arbor? I entertained the idea of going to Black Mountain College, which had nothing to do with architecture, but had to do with where my head seemed to be at the time.

Blum: You had two years at the University of Michigan and that was interrupted by three years in the army in the infantry in the Pacific theater. Was there anything you did in the army for three years that promoted your skills, your interest in architecture? What did you do besides march?

Bassett: Oh, yes. There was nothing the army did, of course, but the army had a program called ASTP, Army Specialized Training Program, which I didn't know anything about when I went in. We skipped a couple of years—you're aware of this? You're hopping around, is that what you're doing? It had two parts. First of all, the army got me out of my context of being a small-town boy from eastern Michigan. I saw things that I had not seen before. But I should intercede that there was another important thing that happened. I had read a book by Dubose Heyward called Porgy. Porgy was the book that gave Gershwin the inspiration for Porgy and Bess. The war was declared December 7, 1941. We finished school. I had signed up for the ASTP, because if you signed up, then you weren't going to be drafted. School was out, and that summer I discovered that the first revival of Porgy and Bess was going to be playing in New York. I conned one of my best friends, who couldn't have been less interested, into hitchhiking to New York with me. We had a ball. Once in a while, somebody would shout out of a car window, "How come you're not in the army?" That kind of stuff. Anyway, we got to New York, where we had a third friend, who after high school had worked for the same factory that I worked for, Mueller Brass, and had been transferred to East Orange, New Jersey. So he was a big-city boy. He was a little bit familiar

18 with things, and after obtaining information and some help from him, we spent a week in downtown Manhattan. Now, that blew my mind. I'd seen photographs, but, my God, there it was, with all those buildings. Rockefeller Center was built and there was magnificent masonry everywhere, including the McKim, Mead and White clubs, etc. When I discovered the galleries along 57th Street, I just ran through them with a big paper bag, grabbing catalogs. It was an orgy, like the kid being put in a candy store for the first time. I picked up a lot of magazines and books I had never had a chance to see anywhere else. See, this gets back to your point of where did things really start to happen to me? It was on that New York trip that I really got a sense of who the movers were, who the people were that were doing these things.

Blum: It must have been an astounding awakening.

Bassett: It was. There were quite a few avant-garde journals and magazines I had brought home. My dad said, "My God. What are you doing? Where'd you get all this junk?" Anyway, it was an interesting trip, and it paid off. This was the summer of 1942. I went back to school that fall, and we were called in March of 1943. The contingent from the University of Michigan was sent to Rockville, Illinois. That's where we went into the army.

Blum: What was ASTP? What did that entitle you to do other than not go into the army?

Bassett: Nothing. That was all it did.

Blum: You didn't get any special training?

Bassett: Well, that comes later.

Blum: Oh. It was just like a draft deferment?

Bassett: Yes, a draft deferment. After they put us through the system in Rockville, we were sent to Little Rock, Arkansas, for basic training, where we took the standard

19 thirteen-week intense infantry basic training. At the end of that, to our surprise, they suddenly started giving us tests. They didn't give them to us under very nice circumstances. We'd spend the day crawling around in the mud and the dust of Arkansas in these maneuvers and doing things, and we'd go home at night and suddenly we'd all be marched into the mess hall. Instead of being fed dinner, we were given these examinations.

Blum: Paper examinations?

Bassett: Yes, paper examinations. Then it quickly became known that these were to decide what to do with us.

Blum: Aptitude tests?

Bassett: In a sense, but they went beyond the aptitude tests we took when we were in Rockville. These had to do with in what area with further education you might be the most useful to the army. As an indication of how far off-base the army could get, they decided they could make an engineer out of Bassett. So I was shipped with a group to Lake Forest, Illinois—Artie Dubin also. We started together as freshmen, we were in the ASTP, we went through basic training, and we went to Lake Forest together.

Blum: What did you do in Lake Forest for the army?

Bassett: Well, of course, college. We went to school to become engineers. That was my first scholastic trauma, because I had to take courses that were pure terror. Because of pure fear, I passed. Worked my tail off. Anyway, Lake Forest was a good deal because we had the weekends off. After you'd done your homework, you were a free agent. Artie's parents were just a couple of miles south, in Highland Park, and the girl I had been dating would come home from Ann Arbor to where she lived in Highland Park. Artie and she had known each other because they all went to the same high school. It was wonderful for me because the Dubin seniors were fine and welcoming people. I enjoyed Henry and Anne Dubin very much.

20 Blum: I was going to ask how you felt about the Battledeck house.

Bassett: I liked it, it seemed the ultimate brick house. I remember the story of its fireproofness.

Blum: Now this was in the 1940s.

Bassett: Yes. They had not built their other house on the ravine, the one with the glass wall. They lived in a brick house. But the site for their first house was close by.

Blum: That was the white one.

Bassett: There was something about Henry and I that struck the same chord. I found him interesting. He loved books. He was truly interested in architecture. He had graduated from Illinois as a pure Beaux-Arts graduate and was a brilliant student. I think he'd achieved the highest sort of record that anyone up to that point had had at Illinois. He had been awarded a traveling scholarship that would let him go to Europe. Through some incredible accident of fate, an aunt, I think, trying to find something to give her nephew who was going to become an architect, bought a book for him. It turned out to be Towards a New Architecture, which he read on the boat. By the time he arrived in Europe, his head had been turned a hundred and eighty degrees. It changed the course of his stay and the course of his architectural career.

Blum: These landmarks in one's life.

Bassett: Yes, I loved that whole thing. Anyway, in Highland Park there were a couple of Wright houses and immediately below in Glencoe there were a couple of beauties. There are several on the North Shore, but these are ones that I immediately became aware of. Then, of course, the Robie house was in town.

Blum: Well, how did something like the Ward Willets house impress you?

21 Bassett: It blew my mind! The first time I saw that damn thing, it was colder than anything. It was the same climate I had grown up in. The ground was like a rock. They had done something preparatory for spring, the people who owned the house, and there were evenly spaced hunks of earth that had been placed on the ground that would soften when spring came and then they'd be able to distribute it. So it was very surreal. Each one of them was about that big around, just sort of like someone had come in from the beach and just placed them on this flat plane. And there was this incredible building, with the trees. It was something. Probably through Artie's father, I was able to get in it. At that time, it still had all of the original Wright things.

Blum: The glass windows or the furnishings?

Bassett: Not only the windows, but all of the furnishings—the rugs and the wonderful furniture and the fireplace equipment and various fabrics. This was the first time since Cranbrook that I'd really run into a hell of an architect. Because I had weekends, I decided I was going to see as many of the Wright houses as possible. At that point I could not find a bibliography of his works, so I went to the library in the Art Institute and I made one along with a freehand map of all the houses that I could find recorded. I had a thirty-dollar twin-lens Voightlander reflex camera that took two-and-a-quarter-inch pictures. I started tracking down those houses out on the West Side, and along the North Shore, and then a few on the South Side, including, as I remember, several apartment houses. I think I saw everything there was to see, including many interiors. I'd get going early and on a Sunday morning I would appear, say, at the Heurtley house in Oak Park, a beautiful brick building with an incredible entrance. I'd knock at front door at nine o'clock on Sunday morning, and this poor man would appear at the door faced with this gawky kid in an ill-fitting olive drab uniform who'd say, "Gee, I love your house. Can I come in?" He'd even be in his pajamas! And without exception they were just marvelous.

Blum: They were probably so disarmed…

22 Bassett: They didn't understand what the hell I was all about, but I must have had a certain sincerity about me, so I saw all these houses.

Blum: Well, that was a marvelous project even if it wasn't army inspired.

Bassett: Oh, yes. Well, you know, the tragedy was that finally things got so bad in the Pacific that they stopped the Specialized Training thing all together, and they called up all the people in the various schools. We were taken up en bloc, put on the train, and shipped to Medford, Oregon, to join the 96th Division at Camp White who had just come off maneuvers in Bend, Oregon. Anyway, I had taken all these photographs, and I sent them home to my folks. I had a whole box of them, and, you know, the tragedy is they were lost in the mail. They never arrived.

Blum: We are looking at the only pictures that survived from that Wright project.

Bassett: Even though the photos were lost, it was an opportunity to see those incredible buildings. Then, of course, while I was doing that, I was able to pick up the Glessner house by Richardson on the South Side, and also I became aware of Carson Pirie Scott and the Auditorium and all of that Sullivan stuff. So that was a major educational event that happened to me while I was in the army.

Blum: Facilitated by but unrelated to the army?

Bassett: Yes, made possible by the army. Absolutely made possible. Chicago is such an incredible city. You walk around downtown, and you come around a corner and there is the Monadnock Building. And then you go to the Goodman Theatre and see Eugene O'Neill. It was just a lark, that whole thing. So it was kind of an oasis in a situation that you never would have expected to happen. I could have been shipped off somewhere else. But to go to Chicago...

Blum: Was this all on the weekends?

Bassett: Yes, I filled them up.

23 Blum: Did you, in fact, gain any insight into engineering, which is what you were selected for in the army?

Bassett: No, these were all basic courses. They had to do with chemistry and physics and mathematics. You have never seen anyone as scared as me when I was trying to get through calculus.

Blum: And when you went to the Pacific, were you an engineer there? Did you function in that capacity?

Bassett: No, Artie and I and everyone else joined an infantry company with the 96th Division. They'd just come off maneuvers and we joined them at that point, and then the Division went down—this is another chapter in my education. We went to I think it was Camp Callan, which was adjacent to La Jolla, a gorgeous little town just north of San Diego. It's where Louis Kahn's Salk Center is.

Blum: And where they have a beautiful pink stucco hotel. You went there?

Bassett: Yes. We went there. At that point, because the great population press in California had not started, it was unbelievably beautiful. The temperature and the rocky coast and the surf and the tidal pools and the eucalyptus trees just seemed so exotic and so gorgeous. We were there so we could take amphibious training. We still had our weekends and we had our time after duty. After dinner, we didn't have to be back to camp until eleven o'clock so you could wander about and look at these wonderful things. There were some nice buildings in town, including those by Irving Gill. That was my first exposure to such an environment. That kind of warmth, that kind of light, that kind of sun, that kind of grace. At that point I knew I was never going to settle back East. It hit me so hard. It was so beautiful. We finished our amphibious training. You go out in ships and then you climb down nets and you get in the landing craft and then you hit a beach. We did that a half a dozen times up and down the California coast and then at San Clemente Island. Then a furlough before we reported back to Marysville, California, which is north and east of the Bay Area.

24 That's where we were outfitted before going overseas. We were brought down to a place on the Sacramento River where we boarded ferryboats, and then to San Francisco to get on the transport. We knew it was our last weekend before going overseas, and we decided that we were going to go to San Francisco because none of us had ever been there. So we went AWOL on the weekend. I can't believe that they didn't know we were going to do that. It's just one of those things they let you do. God, we thumbed and took buses to get down here. By the time we arrived it was literally time to go back. But we saw it. We saw a wonderful city that wasn't very big. It was a village compared to Chicago. But it had the water and the bay and that kind of light.

Blum: And were you already completely taken by California? It sure must have made an impression.

Bassett: I never forgot San Francisco. That was the thing that got us out here.

Blum: Were there other things about your army experience that were significant in the way they shaped your attitudes toward architecture?

Bassett: Architecture? No. None at all.

Blum: You came back to the States in 1946. Was there any question in your mind about returning to the University of Michigan?

Bassett: Well, only what I've mentioned previously—should I go back there or go to the East Coast. I had become aware that maybe there was more things happening at Cambridge and MIT.

Blum: Was that a possibility for you at that time?

Bassett: Well, it was at that moment, but as soon as I was discharged and returned home, I found that Dory had been discharged from the WACS a month earlier. She and I met in fourth grade and had our first date together. In high school, we dated each other but we dated other people, too. We were sort of each a member of the

25 other one's family. As a matter of fact, it was a little too much, because our mothers were rather obvious about how they felt and of course, because of that kind of pressure, we would have none of it. I'd think, she's my sister, she's not my girl. That feeling persisted, but we stayed in touch. Then I came home from the army and the first thing I did was to go the West house and there Dory was, and bang!

Blum: She was no longer your sister.

Bassett: She was no longer my sister. Something had changed. We were married at the end of May and then headed for Ann Arbor.

Blum: Is that the big reason why you stayed in Michigan?

Bassett: Yes, because I think it became apparent that it would have been much more difficult for us to go east when I already had a good start at U. of M. The fact that Dory was a veteran meant that we both had the GI Bill. So she enrolled in the design school and I went back to architecture. Those were interesting times. That was the fall that we all came back. There were forty kids in our class, probably twenty-five or thirty of them were veterans.

Blum: These were some of the same people that you were with for the first two years?

Bassett: When I started in 1941, one of the people in my class was Charlie Moore. We knew each other but that was all. He and several other people were obviously talented, but it was so early that there wasn't a lot of architecture emerging. They were just interesting people. Moore was still there when I returned. He had not been in the service for medical reasons and was in his fourth year—I think—in 1946. There is more about Moore later on, but I'd like to stay in 1941-42 for the moment because of a man named Don Albinson. Don, who was from Detroit, was extraordinarily able. He was a natural, and became Charlie Eames's right- hand man for many, many years. He had another kind of connection with Cranbrook. My father and I had gone there just to look as interested admirers. The Academy was pretty well finished. I think the museum-library was newly

26 completed but all the other buildings, studios and things were in hard use and, of course, the splendid boy's school was next door. Don—I don't know what the circumstances were—was familiar with Cranbrook and knew the people, and I, on several instances, went to Cranbrook with him on weekends to spend the day. I met Carl Milles, who is still there. Harry Bertoia was head of the metal shop and Maija Grotell was the potter and Marianne Strengell was the weaver.

Blum: That's quite a cast of characters.

Bassett: And, of course, Eliel Saarinen was there. I saw him, but he was much too august to be met. I don't think Don knew him either. But I did get an inside view and a sense of how it worked. Those were magical days.

Blum: That was a nice introduction to Cranbrook.

Bassett: Yes, because it was real. I think after the war because of Pappy's age and the fact that most people around were veterans, it changed completely.

Blum: Cranbrook or the University of Michigan?

Bassett: Cranbrook. Well, Ann Arbor, too. We were not kids anymore. We were mature people, and three years behind. We were married and some had already started a family. We all wore army clothes that had been dyed. Those poor people who, through an accident of fate, were studying architecture in the normal way and at the same time that we veterans returned, didn't have a chance. We were so wound up, so intense, and wanted to do it so quickly and get on with our lives. We worked three times harder than they did.

[Tape 2: Side 1]

Blum: I have been told by other people who returned to study architecture after the war that there was a sense of not only personal urgency but a mission they felt they had been charged with to rebuild the world after the terrible devastation they witnessed. It was like a cause they were taking up. Did you share any of that?

27 Bassett: Well, yes, but not in that way. As usual, America escaped physical damage.

Blum: This comment was usually made by people who were overseas and saw the devastation.

Bassett: Saw it, but did they stay in Europe to rebuild Europe? No, they came back here. So, I think my point is there certainly was some of that intensity of feeling. It was almost a messiah-like commitment, but it really had to do with the natural sort of way one embraced the contemporary movement. Architects tend to be a little bit over emotional about these kinds of things, and their commitment is almost like a religious calling—the purity of the contemporary movement and the repulsion of the old and the rejection of everything that went before and the lightness (and righteousness) of what you were doing even though it was terribly wrong, the conviction of this path that architecture was taking. We all thought simplicity and austerity and toughness and elegant geometry, as versus the things that had gone before were terribly, terribly important to man's welfare. Baloney.

Blum: Did you share that?

Bassett: Well, sure I shared that and the conviction that architecture can solve all of man's problems, which, of course, it can't. But when you're young and you're interested and excited and full of energy—I mean, good housing is going to make people better, is it not? Not true. None of this is. But it's a part of the calling. Architects remain that way to this day, you know. I mean, look at the little group that collected around Louis Kahn. He was a fine, fine architect, but he would say something like, "What does a brick want to be?" And there were all these kids who would bow down and face east, and I wanted to vomit. But it's indicative how the young are about architecture and about what it is and the importance of what they're doing. I shared that. My world didn't need rebuilding. My world was here. It was intact. If I'd been an architect raised in Europe and my whole environment had been destroyed and I was going back to school, that would be my main impetus. But that certainly could not be true of any American.

28 Blum: These were American architects who said this to me. They had in some way participated in the Beaux-Arts system prior to their military service and after the war came back to study with Mies. And Mies was their hero.

Bassett: Yes, but I think they were bullshitting you. I imagine many of them had European backgrounds. It is a kind of religious mystique, not uncommon among architects. They thought that the simple, spare quality of the aesthetic, its austerity and apparent sensible pragmatism was a cleansing agent. A sure way to architectural heaven.

Blum: At that time when you had an opportunity to return to school—you said you considered going east because you thought more things were happening—did going to IIT and studying with Mies enter your thinking at all?

Bassett: No, never. I think I was just too aware of the whole spectrum of what architecture had been and was and could be to sort of limit myself to what I would only consider a tunnel vision of architecture. I think the great van der Rohe buildings were truly fine, elegant, gorgeous things. But they only solve a certain kind of problem in a certain kind of way, and they should be admired for the purity of the expression and the quality that comes out of that. But I can't imagine anything more terrifying than living in a world of van der Rohe buildings.

Blum: Well, this was at the beginning.

Bassett: Oh, yes, but that changes, too.

Blum: This is after this devastating war.

Bassett: You know, Kevin Roche came from IIT and worked for Eero. He was about as uptight a Miesian as you could find. It's a long way from where Kevin is now. Things change, people change. There was a marvelous simple-minded simplicity about things then, it seems to me.

29 Blum: Was there any of this messianic idea of rebuilding the world attitude on campus when you returned to the University of Michigan?

Bassett: Sure, there was some of that. It never occurred to us for a minute that good housing design couldn't solve many of our social problems. I read everything I could find on the great planners and the Greenbelt towns and Clarence Stein. I had a sister who lived in Washington, D.C., and when I visited her, I went out to the Greenbelt towns and walked them and examined them and looked at the plans. And asked, why can't we do it? What would the world be like if it were like this? Actually, it would be boring as hell.

Blum: That's your assessment today. But at that time what did you think?

Bassett: I believed it. It is interesting that my Cranbrook time was instigated as much by city planning as by architecture, because of Eliel's reputation and the great plan he did for Helsinki, which I was familiar with. But the more I got into it and looked and saw things, the less interested I became in planning, because nowhere did I see it succeeding. Rather than being a successful result, I finally decided that planning was a way of avoiding some mistakes rather than making wonderful leaps forward. I'm not coming through very clearly. I don't know how the hell else to say it.

Blum: The only thing that occurred to me as you said that was that perhaps in a natural development over time, things happened because they were needed, whereas if you plan something all at one time according to one idea, you are not allowing an opportunity for flexibility.

Bassett: That's true. It's just that the presumption of being able to know what's coming down the pike and the fact that man—despite what is wrong with him, is fantastic in his infinite variety and his attitudes and his energies. You simply don't know what's going to happen next. You cannot. I tend to be off the wall as far as planning is concerned, although I started just at the other end of the stick.

30 Blum: So you got a degree in architecture in 1949 from the University of Michigan, and you were a very determined student the second half of your...?

Bassett: Well, I was a pretty determined student when I started college. I had paid for it with my own money, and I was doing something interesting for the first time. There had been nothing in my earlier education to cause that to happen. I was dealing with new and exciting things in Ann Arbor the minute I started. I was surrounded by people who were of like interest, and people were teaching me who were oriented the same way.

Blum: Was there a particular professor or instructor that stands out in your mind who really inspired you?

Bassett: There was one very wonderful, sweet guy named Roger Bailey. As a matter of fact, Roger died in my house five or six years ago.

Blum: What did he teach?

Bassett: He taught third-year design and also a course in watercolor. He was a brilliant draftsman. He had graduated from Cornell and won the Paris Prize. That was the prize of prizes in the early 1920s. He traveled all over Europe. He'd been a part of great American expatriate thing of the twenties, a la Hemingway. Then he came back and taught at Yale. His return was at the worst time because it coincided with the crash. He taught at Yale and then came to Ann Arbor. He was attracted there by Dean Lorch. Because of that, he'd never built many buildings. He taught there for many years and married one of the daughters of Lorch, who had long since died. Betty lives in Carmel. The faculty was stumbling along in a nice, comfortable barely competent way. There were no architectural stars—to me that was one of the virtues of the school. Roger had a marvelous grace and sense about life and a feeling for architecture. He transmitted that. We would go on watercolor sketching trips together.

Blum: The two of you especially?

31 Bassett: Yes, but with others also.

Blum: If he died in your house, there must have been something special about that relationship.

Bassett: Well, the relationship did continue. While we were in Ann Arbor, Dory had to quit school because Chris, our first child, was born. That meant that when Dory's GI Bill disappeared, we required new sources of income. We found an apartment where I was the caretaker for an apartment building. I fixed things and collected the rent and swept the halls and emptied the incinerator.

Blum: What kind of job did you get? Landlord?

Bassett: Hardly, how about janitor? Roger had kind of a funny little business. There were four of us in it! A fellow named Cle Allison, and another fellow who was a friend of Moore's. With Bailey, we had an office about the size of a kitchen, with one window that opened into an area way, up against a brick wall. A little bit of light would trickle down. The room was jammed with drafting tables. We designed houses and their working drawings for mostly faculty members at the university, who came to Roger because they knew and liked him. Architects from Detroit with large practices came to Roger because we four were quite able in helping with the rendering, doing the layout and the under-drawing. The clients were always in a rush. We would work like hell, pack it up and head for Detroit to beat the deadline.

Blum: Did you ever dare sign any of your drawings?

Bassett: Oh, no. Never. We were helpers, you know, but I got so I could handle quite a few things, and Roger would always put the masterly finishing touches on. At the end of the month, there was always some money. It was all divided equally among the people who had been working.

Blum: Well, that sounds like it was perfect for you because you said that the school didn't fill this gap.

32 Bassett: Yes. Roger left Ann Arbor a year before I graduated because he was offered a chance to start the architectural school at the University of Utah. He had a wonderful time there and was very successful. The school has continued to prosper. Anyway, Roger had, I think, a very successful life. Now, Chuck Moore had built a fine little house for his mother in Carmel, Pebble Beach, to be exact. Then his mother died, and it apparently coincided with the fact that Roger was retiring and the Bailey's were leaving Utah. So, he made the house available to them and Betty's still there. It is a very nice contemporary house of that time—well worked out and interesting. We stayed in touch with Roger and Betty and saw them from time to time. I was aware that he had a large collection of exquisite travel sketches from his European years, as well as fine Beaux-Arts studies and competition drawings. I've a couple of them. I'll show them to you. It had occurred to me that Roger's things could be made into a very beautiful exhibit. I couldn't think of anything that would be more beneficial to the current architectural community either. I said, "Why are you sitting on these things? We've got to do something." So a fellow architect and good friend of mine, Richard Tobias, and myself organized and mounted a show at the AIA headquarters in San Francisco. It was a great success at every level.

Blum: When was this?

Bassett: I think in the mid-seventies. It was just magic. Suddenly he was surrounded by all these people adoring him. By that time, he was in his mid-seventies, you know, and he enjoyed the whole thing immensely. He sold quite a few things. He was ecstatic. We used to see each other. Then one weekend he and Betty came up for a few days to go to the symphony and enjoy each other. He may have become over-tired—after all he was well into his eighties—and he died in the night.

Blum: It sounds like he was more than just a professor to you.

Bassett: He was. He was a truly sweet wonderful person. I've never known anyone like him.

33 Blum: Were there people you went to school with at the University of Michigan that you have had exchanges with over the years or remained friends?

Bassett: No, as a matter of fact, there hasn't been very much of that. Artie Dubin of course. Artie called me a month ago.

Blum: Was he in California?

Bassett: No! He was just thinking about us. Oh, I guess something happened. He had been looking for something, and in the process of not finding it, he had found something else, which turned out to be a photograph that was taken of a bunch of us in the army. Then that started a train of thought. If he's anything, he's one of the most sentimental people I've ever known.

Blum: That can come through very easily, especially to old friends, I think.

Bassett: Yes. He just got on the horn and called us up. Dory and he and I have been friends for such a long time. His first wife, Lois, died a number of years ago, and the girl that he went with before he married her was also a good friend. Artie and I are fifty-year friends.

Blum: When you graduated from the University of Michigan in 1949, you then went to Cranbrook?

Bassett: Not immediately. I graduated out of phase because I came back in 1946, I carried a more-than-normal load, usually eighteen or twenty hours instead of the usual sixteen. I also went to summer school. So I left a half year early.

Blum: In 1949 in February?

Bassett: Yes. Before school was out, Cle Allison called me from Midland. He was up there working for Alden Dow. He had told Alden about me and Alden asked him to call to see if I was interested in Midland. I told Cle that I had been accepted at

34 Cranbrook for the fall, but I was interested in working there for six or so months. I did need a job, and this was special. I was interested in working in that office.

Blum: You knew you were going there?

Bassett: Yes. By then I knew. There had been some nervousness on my part about this. It was known that Saarinen did not like Ann Arbor because of something that happened in the past. When he first came to this country, he went to Chicago briefly, then to Ann Arbor and was on the faculty there. Something had happened that apparently caused a lasting rift. Ralph Rapson was one of the few Michigan people that were able to get into one of his classes after that. I applied with some trepidation, because I...

Blum: Was there any question whether you would be accepted or not?

Bassett: I didn't know. But there was no problem at all. Anyway, Alden invited me to come to Midland to work, and so I did for six months.

Blum: How many children did you have at that time?

Bassett: Dory was eight months pregnant with Annie and we had Chris. So, two children by then.

Blum: Who was your second?

Bassett: Annie.

Blum: I know there's a Tony, because he walked in the door.

Bassett: Yes, whose real name is Joseph Antoine. He's after my grandfather, who was French, Joseph Antoine Bassett. There is another boy, named Peter. While I was working in Midland, Dory and Chris were with her folks in Port Huron. I roomed with Allison in Midland. I would work until Friday at five o'clock, then leap into our 1939 Chevy and drive the one hundred and twenty-five miles to

35 Port Huron for the weekend. Late Sunday night, I'd drive back and get to bed at one or two o'clock in the morning and then get up and do the whole thing all over again. I'm sure our life at this time was much more uncomfortable for Dory. Annie was born in Canada, because there was a problem in the Port Huron hospital with baby fatalities. An epidemic.

Blum: Which city in Canada?

Bassett: Sarnia, Ontario.

Blum: When you worked in the Dow office, what did you do?

Bassett: Well, some design, detailing, working drawings and presentation. I had enough experience by then to be of real use.

Blum: Was anything built that you designed?

Bassett: Not that could be separated out and identified as such. Do you know the Dow house in Midland? Unbelievable house. Alden Dow went to Taliesin and was a follower of Wright. These houses are very Wrightian, but not totally. They have their own flavor for a variety of reasons. The Dow house is one of the most wonderful romantic places I've ever been. It is magic, with a nice ambience about it, too, in addition to being physically marvelous. Dow's office was not large. I think there were less than ten people, some of them were much more able than me because they were older and more experienced. There was one indisputable genius there.

Blum: Do you remember him?

Bassett: Yes. His name was Robert Goodall, who at that time was Alden Dow's chief draftsman.

Blum: Was Dow's office connected to this house?

36 Bassett: It was in the house.

Blum: From what you say, I find many similarities between Paul Schweikher and Alden Dow.

Bassett: Probably. But do you know the house?

Blum: Only from photographs.

Bassett: There's a book by him, but it's not very good. He was not a very articulate person. I think he was a very able architect but not at a major scale. His drive and his intentions were right. He had a marvelous opportunity because he was a member of the Dow family, and was able to do a number of houses for important executives of the Dow group in Midland. They've never been, to my knowledge, beautifully and correctly documented. As I remember, most were a kind of textured block, inspired by Wright. Some of them are absolutely magnificent. But he's so out of fashion. He's so outside the architectural pale, and has been for so long. Anyway, it was a good office because of the ambience and the people, and the fact that they had a wood-shop. The man who ran the woodshop was a nice talented kid who had been a farmer and then become a carpenter-craftsman. Alden was always doing things in his houses that required considerable contrivance. You could never get an ordinary cabinetmaker to understand what the hell we were talking about, it was so complex in its geometry. So they were made right in our shop. But the facility was ours to use when there was time. That's how I filled up my evenings. All of us did—the youngsters. There was Cle, myself, and another fellow. We built furniture because we couldn't afford to buy anything. I built a radio and a couple of tables and some other things, then I'd take them back to Port Huron when they were finished. When we moved to start at Cranbrook, we had a start towards furnishing an apartment. The important point is that the shop was there and that Alden said we could use it. The weather was still cold when I started working there. The house had a slightly eccentric heating system and would die once in a while. It was just so damn cold you couldn't draw any more. Then we'd all gather in a little space where there was a fireplace with steps around, a sort of vertical inglenook, build a fire, and all sit

37 and drink coffee and talk. The talk was wonderful because of Bob Goodall. As I remember, he had been chief draftsman for Wright for many years, and had made Wright's buildings work. He knew how to put them together, he was a good, talented design architect, too. He was irreplaceable in Dow's office, and he was also a marvelous, droll personality. At that time, he had a severe drinking problem. He had an incredible collection of children's books and was also an expert on the Civil War. He could account for every damn bullet that had been fired. He was full of stories about the Wright office. I found him magnetic.

Blum: What was Alden Dow like?

Bassett: He was not a large man. Nice—a truly nice person. He was very serious about his architecture. He was very gracious. I remember a gentle, quiet person. I would never describe him as a force, as Wright was, or even Goodall, who was a very strong personality. I liked him. At the time, I went up to talk to him to talk about employment. I, of course, had never seen the house. That was something else. The living room was absolutely huge. It was not raining, but it had been raining, and there was a leak in this incredible room at the ceiling with a sterling silver bucket under it.

Blum: It sounds very elegant.

Bassett: It was terribly elegant. It was a smashing house. If I went back now, I'm sure my reaction to it would be completely different. After all, that was forty years ago. It was maintained beautifully, because he had the money and because he was that kind of a person, and Mrs. Dow made sure everything was just right. It was full of color. He loved to build in the Wrightian manner with ledges and long, deep sills and great tables, with sweeping expanses of floor. He loved to put brilliant, solid-color linoleum on the top surfaces—emerald green and yellow and assorted reds. You saw all of these things. And then he'd have nice accessories sitting around usually American Indian or Oriental in nature.

Blum: Did he influence you?

38 Bassett: I think so. I've never really known about myself. I think that he influenced me to the extent that between my very strong visual orientation, and having, without realizing it, an unspoken, unconscious sense of architecture in a historical sense—that observing people like Roger and Dow and Goodall, and becoming increasingly aware of the richness of our architectural heritage, I was coming to feel that there was more to architecture than embracing a single, idiomatic attitude towards what architecture was all about. I felt that that was the simple- minded way. To me, the architect who decides that architecture can only be his way is probably going to starve to death in a psychic sense. He's suffering from such an aggravated case of tunnel vision that he'll never grow. He'll never taste the real world. These people are followers. I've never been a follower—never been into hero worship.

Blum: In 1949, you decided to get a master's at Cranbrook. I suppose it's pretty obvious now why you selected Cranbrook. What did you find was the greatest difference between the University of Michigan and Cranbrook?

Bassett: Oh, I suppose the biggest difference was the sudden lack of being part of a large academic community, and instead being in a kind of oasis—almost a backwater, a quiet pool. It was so quiet. There were so few people in evidence. Everyone was busy in their studios, but even if we were all together, there were very few people involved. There were fifteen potters, and there was this, and that. But if you're moving about the campus in Ann Arbor you're surrounded by a kind of a wonderful, bustling atmosphere, which I did miss. I think the other thing was the fact that whatever it was you were going to do, it was something that you had decided you were going to do. When you're in undergraduate work, of course, that's all fairly preordained. There's a curriculum and there are courses that you have to satisfy. You do this and you do that. You have problems in design, and you have all these things to do. Suddenly there was this kind of void in which it suddenly occurred to you, "If I'm going to do something, I'd better decide, one, what I'm going to do, and then, two, get about it."

Blum: Did you have any preconceived ideas about what you wanted to do before you went?

39 Bassett: I was going to do a planning project, because that had been, as I mentioned before, the main impetus for my deciding to go ahead and get a master's degree. I had an idea that never was fully resolved in my mind and never bore any kind of fruit, that I might be interested in teaching. It turned out that I couldn't have been less interested in teaching, but I didn't know it at that time. I knew if I was going to do this that a master's was an important ingredient, that I had an interest in planning and felt that I should do something in it and that Eliel was the person to go to. Of course, I admired his architecture greatly, but when I was at Cranbrook, I didn't do any architecture. I did planning. I did a regional study on Port Huron and Sarnia, my hometown and the town across the river in Canada, because these two cities posed an interesting puzzle. Port Huron had always been the major of the two cities. When we were growing up, I'd say that Sarnia was half the size of Port Huron. By the time the war was over, the petrochemical thing had exploded into a basic and far more important part of our industrial technology. Imperial Oil of Canada had a major plant in Sarnia. That plant had quadrupled its size and the number of people involved, a good part of this during the war. Suddenly, Sarnia was a far more busy, prosperous city than Port Huron had been. So the roles had been reversed. I thought I'd do a regional study. It was fine, but in retrospect, it had a kind of emptiness that accompanies most planning.

Blum: Was that your thesis?

Bassett: Yes.

Blum: At the time, did you have any disillusionment about planning?

Bassett: Yes. Yes, I began to have second thoughts, but I had embarked on this. Meanwhile, I was doing architecture, because I had not been there long when I started working part-time at the Saarinen office. The reason for that was that I had to supplement our income. Dory and I had an apartment in West Pontiac, Pontiac being the nearest town that we could afford to live in, because the Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham area was far too fancy for the likes of us. We

40 found a house that had recently been moved from the city center to the outskirts and fixed up. We had an upstairs apartment that was fine, except it was extraordinarily cold in the winter because it was completely exposed to the west wind coming across the fields. By then we had Annie, our second child, and Chris. Dory was holding down the fort there, and I was at school five miles away. We needed more money, which by then seemed endlessly endemic to our way of life at that point. Anyway, I mentioned to Eliel, who visited each day and sat and talked with each of us, that I would not be there the next day because I had made appointments in Detroit to talk to several architectural firms to see if there was any part-time employment. He said, "Fine." I went about my work, and then, after lunch he suddenly was at my shoulder and asked me to come with him. We went out and got in his car, and he drove over to the office. At that time, it was in the old school building where Long Lake Road runs into Woodward Avenue. It was a Victorian school that was the offices of Bob Swanson, who was Eero's brother-in-law, and Eero, and his father. A wing had been added. The Saarinen office was in the school and the Swanson office was in the wing. We walked in. There was a conference room with no ceiling. It was simply a walled-off area at the edge of a single, high-ceilinged room. Pappy opened the door and we went in.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Bassett: Eero and Joe Lacy and John Dinkeloo were sitting at a table having a meeting. Eliel introduced me to them, and said, "This young man needs a job," and then walked out. It was interesting. Then they sort of sat there, and I stood there, none of us knowing what to do.

Blum: Did you know this was happening? Did you realize he was taking you there for employment?

Bassett: No. Well, I couldn't figure out what was really going on until it actually happened. I thought, "What's he doing? What's this all about?" But he'd decided that I should work there with Eero.

41 Blum: What did you call him? Did you call him Pappy?

Bassett: No. We called him Mr. Saarinen.

Blum: Mr. Saarinen?

Bassett: Absolutely.

Blum: But you referred to him just now as Pappy.

Bassett: He was always called Pappy.

Blum: When he wasn't present?

Bassett: Yes. Everyone called him that.

Blum: Mr. Saarinen. So this was your part-time employment during your years of study at Cranbrook.

Bassett: Yes, but the part-time didn't last very long. Mr. Saarinen died quite soon after that. I continued working at the office. It was originally supposed to be that I would work half a day, or twenty hours a week, but soon, simply because of the nature of the office and (I suppose) my personal nature and the fact that I became much more interested in what I was doing at the office than what I was doing at school, I was working almost full-time at the office and going to school, too. It was a typical situation, I think, with young people. It was a very small group then. I don't think there were over twenty people in the office.

Blum: Cranbrook is unique because of the integration of all the arts. When you were at school, as you got into the curriculum and noticed the difference, did you participate in other fields?

Bassett: No, that was one of the disappointments, and I think that was part and parcel of the discrepancy in age between the architects and the rest of the students because

42 of the war. Things were still out of phase with that ideal. Some of the painters and others were also married men or women with families. It was almost without exception the case with architects. We weren't able to live there and be there all the time, which that philosophy required. So, I didn't do that. You were at school and you had your work, and you saw and knew the students and talked to them and circulated through the studios. If there was a meeting or a small get-together, you were a part of that. But the long talks at the dormer doing things together was something really not true as far as the married people were concerned. I was three or four years older, and most of the architects were about the same.

Blum: So you weren't required or you weren't invited to make pots or weave?

Bassett: Oh, no. There was no requirement and I had absolute freedom to do as I choose. I just didn't have the time. If I wasn't doing something to supplement our income, then I was home where I wanted to be. I had a family.

Blum: You were there for planning, which was a variation of architecture, certainly under the architecture umbrella. Who was your primary instructor?

Bassett: There was only one person and that was Eliel. Only he.

Blum: How did you and your instructor, Eliel, relate in that way?

Bassett: Well, you set up your work plan. You, formalized what you wanted to do so that you could show it to him and talk about it and describe it. At the end of your project was a result, the visual character of which was fairly well formulated by precedent. In other words, people that were doing planning ended up with certain kinds of models and displays that demonstrated the plan, the idea. You examined that with him and talked about it. He'd say something and you responded. Then finally he was happy and you were happy. Then you started working. As you got into it, he would come around, I'd say almost every day and spend maybe anything from a half an hour to an hour with you, talking and doing things. But there were times when his schedule would require his absence

43 for a week or even more. Sometimes he would want to say something to all of us, so we'd gather around or come next door into the house, immediately adjacent, and which was always fun because it had all the things that he and Loja had done as original furnishings. Then he would talk or we'd all talk together. Often there'd be guests. One time, Wright was there. They went in that little raised area in his studio and the two of them talked. I think there were half dozen of us. We sat on the floor and listened to the talking.

Blum: This was an informal kind of situation?

Bassett: Oh, absolutely.

Blum: Was Wright scheduled to address the student body?

Bassett: No. It was much like listening in on two friends, who seemed to like each other, although I think they were very different kinds of people and they certainly were different kinds of architects. But there was a mutual respect there. We could participate. We could ask questions and talk. It wasn't made into a big deal. It was fun—unexpected.

Blum: Did you think it was an important event?

Bassett: Yes. I had seen this man's work, and there he was, you know! I'd heard about his theatricality and his various escapades and I knew his buildings, of course, so it was fun to see him.

Blum: Was he theatrical that afternoon?

Bassett: Not really, but I can't imagine when he wasn't posing. I think he was on stage the minute he got out of bed, the minute he picked his orange juice up in the morning. I think he was acting out some kind of fantasy.

Blum: Did anyone else, other architects or planners, come informally like this to Cranbrook?

44 Bassett: Yes, but I would have to clean out all the rubbish in my head to come up with a list. There were people in and out all the time, because it was that kind of place. I think it was at the very end of its high watermark. Lots and lots of architects and planners would come through. You'd exchange a few words, and hope that they would go away so you could get back to work. That was the critical thing to me. One of the important people who had gone to school there was Ed Bacon from Philadelphia. He, of course, had done and was into the middle of the big Philadelphia plan for the city center. This was in my second year. Pappy was dead and an architect named Bob Snyder had taken over the studio. Bacon seemed interested in me, and I thought I still had some interest in planning.

Blum: Now, was he at Cranbrook teaching?

Bassett: No, no. He just was visiting, really, I think, looking for new blood on his staff. He'd been one of the very earliest Saarinen students. There was a number of these people that would just drop by. They'd be there to see Eero and they'd come over to reminisce and be nostalgic for a few moments. Anyway, I think it must have been in the second year, because I was starting to worry about what I was really going to do. He invited me to come down to Philadelphia. I went down to see what they were up to. I spent a day with him looking at the plan and the city center and seeing all the exhibits and things. They had a model that looked to me like it was an acre, it was so big. But it wasn't, of course. When it was all over, I thought, "Good Lord. I don't want this. I don't really want to do this." You're just pushing little boxes around, and then when you go and look at what you've done, the spaces aren't good and the buildings aren't good, and what the hell is this all about. So I went back and thought about it and then wrote him a nice letter. He was a nice person, but I was not interested in Philadelphia. That turned out to be an academic exercise anyway, because I was still working at the office. Then Eero and Joe Lacy and John Dinkeloo made it apparent that they wanted me to come full-time, to be there as a permanent employee. There was no problem after all. I didn't have to worry about what I was going to do, because it was all there. Meanwhile, I was making a living now, for the first time, enough money. I'm not an extravagant person and Dory is very

45 good about organizing things, including me, so we were able to live comfortably within our means. It was a happy life. There have been few people from the group at school that we enjoyed and a number at the office who remain close friends to this day.

Blum: Were these people you worked and socialized with?

Bassett: Yes. There was one couple at Cranbrook. He was an architect, and we've remained very good friends with him, even though we're a world apart. That was the Nordins—N-O-R-D-I-N. Josta, J-O-S-T-A, and his wife Brigitta. He was a graduate of the Royal Institute in Stockholm. He was there to spend a year with Pappy. His project was not a planning project. It was a physical athletic plant, a stadium and a small coliseum, what we call a coliseum now. He was an interesting, careful, very Swedish person whom I like and got along with. Dory and Brigitta got along beautifully. Their son was the same age as our Chris. Anyway, Josta worked almost entirely with models and spare, elegant drawings.

Blum: Was this in school?

Bassett: In school. Meanwhile I was busy at the office doing whatever had to be done. At that point, because I was not steady, I was used as a utility fielder. I was moving all over the place and doing things, because I was able. When they told me to do something, I was able to do it. They were working on the General Motors Technical Center, the most important project in the shop.

Blum: You know, as you've been talking about your Cranbrook years and your Saarinen years, and as you talk about something, it's usually the work portion that seems to be the most interesting to you.

Bassett: Well, that's because it was truly like that. I should say one of the best things that happened is that we were able to move to a little group of pseudo-Georgian apartments on the south side of Pontiac on Woodward Avenue. When they came on the market, and because of our relative affluence, we moved from West Pontiac to these because they were much more convenient and they were new

46 and nice. The apartments were grouped around small courts, was a much nicer place for Dory and the girls to be. They started filling up, and then several happy coincidences happened. But let me slip something else in at this point. I had been at the office a year and a half, but the day that I came to work there permanently, that first official day, I arrived early in the morning. I had normally never showed up at eight-thirty because of my other life at school. Who should be there to start at the same time but Gunnar Birkerts. He was starting from scratch, having just arrived from Chicago but we both became full-time employees then. He and Sylvia and Dory and I have been good friends ever since. They moved in four apartments away from our new apartment. Adjacent to them was Jill Mitchell, who had formerly been the wife of the painting faculty member at Cranbrook, and who was a friend and confidant of Eero and Pipsan and Charlie and Ray Eames and much of the Cranbrook enclave. Jill was working on interiors and color work at the office.

Blum: It sounds like a star-studded cast.

Bassett: Hardly, but it was very nice. We were all working together, and we were all the same age and we all had our babies at the same time. The men were working too much, and the women put up with it. It's interesting that those relationships are the ones that we have maintained as much as geography and time would permit. When we see each other, we just pick up where we left off. It's been very nice.

Blum: Before we leave your student years, what was Eliel Saarinen like?

Bassett: To me he seemed to be always a very gentle and friendly person, and not like I've seen with so many northern Europeans—withdrawn. He was not that way. He loved to have, as I remember, a martini in the late afternoon. He dressed very carefully and was very careful about how he spoke. When he said something, it was organized. He would never run off at the mouth as I'm doing.

Blum: Was that his personality or was he restrained by the fact that English was a second or third language for him?

47 Bassett: He did speak with an accent, which was not difficult. I could understand him, and I'm not very good at that sort of thing. Under normal personal relationships, I think he was just a little bit on the formal side. We did have a formal relationship, he was the teacher, and the rest of us were students. That was also true at the office. He was never there very much, but you always listened very carefully when the boss spoke. He was always very nice. From time to time he would have—I guess for want of a better description—a cocktail party that included all of the architects and their wives and the children. He seemed to enjoy these. There would be an open bar, usually just wine.

Blum: Was this at the office?

Bassett: No, it was at the school. The little kids were crawling around under the drafting tables and the babies being changed on their tops. He enjoyed that. I don't remember Loja being involved, however but she must have been. I think that's just a mental lapse on my part.

Blum: Well, there certainly have been printed accounts about the fact that his family was run in a communal way and in many ways that extended to the students in the school. Did you find that to be the case?

Bassett: Well, I wasn't really conscious of that sufficiently to cause me to mention it, for example. I know that when he was young enough to be truly energetic and active and the older Booth was alive, that that school was run in much better fashion that it was later on. When I was there, of course, the school was no longer being run by Eliel. He'd given that up because he didn't have an interest in it any more. Within the family, he may have done as you say, although I would expect that the relationship of the family to each other was a little bit—well, I can't answer that intelligently. I was going to say tended to be a little bit formal, but I'm not sure that was true at all. I know that prior to the years when Dory and I were there, and before the war—that they often went back to Finland for a summer stay while Pipsan and Eero were young enough to be still part of the family group. They hadn't become adults and split off. When they did that, they would often take one of the kid's friends with them. For example, Florence Schust Knoll,

48 who was herself without parents through some circumstance I can't remember, became almost an adopted part of the Saarinen household. That was over with by the time I was there. I came to know Shu through the office, but by then she was in New York, had finished her training and was married to Hans Knoll.

Blum: Who were some of the other people who were studying at Cranbrook with you?

Bassett: I'd have to do a lot of rummaging to come up with names.

Blum: When you worked in the office full-time, were there projects that you shared with other people or were basically responsible for?

Bassett: I spent a lot of time working on the Technical Center. It was with Eero and John Dinkeloo. Kevin Roche was there by then and was more senior to us in the sense of having been there longer.

Blum: More senior as a designer?

Bassett: Yes. He had slightly more responsibility. He would be in charge of a lobby, for example, at one of the GM research buildings, and I would spend time helping him on it. There was other work in the office. There were buildings at Drake, and work at Brandeis in Massachusetts, and in Columbus, Indiana.

Blum: There was a drawing that was published I think in the Cranbrook catalog in the large exhibition they had several years ago that either belonged to you or was donated to Cranbrook by you. I'm just not sure what the credit line was, but I saw your name. It was of the MIT chapel.

Bassett: Well, they thought that was one of my drawings.

Blum: Was that something you worked on?

Bassett: Yes.

49 Blum: Was it one of your drawings?

Bassett: I couldn't tell, I would need to see the original. I was very heavily involved in both the auditorium and chapel at MIT along with Bruce Adams. Bru wasn't that involved in the auditorium but very much in the chapel and had a great deal to do with the design. He's a very interesting architect, ten years older than we were—had been brought to Eero by Harry Weese and John Dinkeloo. All three had been together in the early SOM days in Chicago. John Dinkeloo was the head of production at SOM in Chicago. But he was not very happy because he and Bill Hartmann did not get along. I have no idea of what that was all about. Probably because they were both obstinate, stubborn people. Anyway, Eero and Joe Lacy, Eero's administrative partner, who had come from Paul Cret's office in Philadelphia and was very able, found out about John and got him to come and take over as chief draftsman. Bru was working for Harry Weese. He's a chip off the same architectural block and, I think, every bit as good an architect as Harry, but has no facility or interest in being a star. I'm not saying that very well, but Bruce was not the kind of a person to move out and become someone. I don't think he liked that. Eero asked Harry if he knew of someone really good, and Harry said, "Bru Adams." So Bru joined the office and very quickly became the most important design person next to Eero. There were probably only twenty- five people in the office at the most.

Blum: This was while the General Motors Technical Center was being designed?

Bassett: Yes. We had associates in Smith, Hinchman and Grylls. We were doing the design and detailing. Smith, Hinchman had placed two or three good people in our shop who were working with our design group. The working drawings and specs were being done downtown by Smith, Hinchman from a very complete set of preliminary design drawings.

Blum: So in the Saarinen office was really just half of what was being...?

Bassett: Yes, and the other half was doing other things. It was an office that was very busy. Eero was intense and very energetic. We worked all the time. We seemed

50 to be on constant charrette, most evening and most weekends. We enjoyed it, except those of us who were married were conscious of the fact that it was costing us something in respect to our families.

Blum: According to the article you gave me to read last night, apparently you went three years without taking a vacation.

Bassett: Yes, but that was not uncommon. It was just that way, it was that kind of an office. It went on and on and on. But then we would discover that Eero had disappeared, and then we'd hear that he and Eames and Weese and their wives were all enjoying the spring flowers in Death Valley, or some goddamn thing.

Blum: Now, how did that make you feel after three years without a vacation?

Bassett: Somewhat envious. The trouble is, we weren't quite smart enough to be smart, I guess.

Blum: Eero was obviously exacting. Was he overly demanding?

Bassett: No, no. He drove himself—set the pace. Eero was not afraid of hard work.

Blum: But he also took time off to smell the spring flowers.

Bassett: That's because he was the boss. He was a nice person. He was not an easy person. He had little ability to make small talk. He couldn't kid around. Part of the chemistry of any successful office like that is the camaraderie between the people and their easiness with each other. He had some of that, but very little natural facility.

Blum: Was he a little standoffish, a little aloof?

Bassett: Yes, yes, he didn't know how to stand in. Do you see what I mean? He was not naturally part of the gang. He wanted to be, I think, but he just wasn't easy. He didn't know how to do it. But he was a nice person, a very nice person.

51 Blum: Was this like his father?

Bassett: No, no. I didn't know his father under the same circumstances. The father that I described to you had to be much different than the one who lived at Hvittrask. Eliel and Loja were part of their country's artistic community, the best authors, painters, composers, poets. Sibelius was a good friend. They'd all show up and have those incredible parties that Scandinavians have in the wintertime just to keep their sanity and stay warm. I can't imagine that the Saarinens didn't fit easily into the scene. So, who's to know. I liked him. He was difficult only because he was not easy socially. Never was. Eero could not make small talk. His father did not have that problem. Again, I'm doing some presuming or assuming here. We have a son who had a problem with dyslexia. Eero was dyslexic. He could write and draw backwards with both hands, and was easy with that when he was an adult as I knew him, but I suspect that as a child, it may have caused some problems that we recognize in our own boy like not being able to really fit smoothly into the standard mold. You know what I'm trying to say.

Blum: Yes, I have a dyslexic child too.

Bassett: Good, so you understand. All right, I think Eero had that same problem, aggravated, I think, because he was tutored as a child, without the advantage of the child out in the playground with others. Things changed when he and Lily Swann were divorced. She was an interesting lady who had considerable talent. I remember, also, that she was on an Olympic ski team when she was young.

Blum: Was she the ceramicist?

Bassett: Yes, she was. She had a nice, vague air about her, which when you combined it with Eero's own vagueness caused some confusion. I remember Eero inviting us to a dinner party at the house. They lived up the road in a Victorian house that they had changed over. When the guests (and Eero) arrived, we found out that Lily had forgotten about the whole thing.

52 Blum: That is a little confusing.

Bassett: We were used to it. Then Eero met Aline Louchheim. She was a senior art critic for the New York Times, and a very organized, attractive, worldly person about life out there. She was very helpful to Eero, almost a kind of finishing school. I remember a day he was going to New York. He appeared at the office in a Chesterfield coat with a velvet collar. You could hear a pin drop. We all stood there and looked at it and looked at him. Was this the same guy?

Blum: Did you think he had been dressed by his wife?

Bassett: No, but he had been talked to, we'd never see him in anything but jeans and sneakers.

Blum: He was a new man.

Bassett: Yes. This was the new one. Anyway, from then on there was a big switch.

Blum: When you worked in the office and worked with all these stars—it really was a star-studded cast, you included—how did all these very individual personalities mesh with each other to find agreement about a project? For instance, you said you did a lot of work on the auditorium and the chapel at MIT. Who else worked on that project?

Bassett: Well, Bru was active in both, as I mentioned. In the very earliest conception stages of the auditorium, the other person I have mentioned, Bob Snyder, who was also at Cranbrook was involved. Eero was heavily involved and myself. Then there was a Japanese-American, a very able person named Harold Tsuchiya, who later became Yamasaki's right-hand man for a long time. He was kind of a Bob Goodall type. He was just superb at keeping design types out of trouble. That was about it. It wasn't a big group at all.

Blum: What was the process of getting that idea onto the drawing board?

53 Bassett: In the incubation stage, we were all very busy, mostly cutting rubber balls up and doing all the...

Blum: Why rubber balls?

Bassett: Because it was a spherical form for the auditorium. We went down and we bought every rubber ball we could find in every dollar store. We would cut them into various shapes and look at them, and try to figure out what was going on. We brought in Ammann and Whitney, the engineers from New York. As I remember, it was Boyd Anderson. They were top-drawer concrete engineers, especially in shell concrete. At our early stage of design, they were being held back, but were involved. Eero wanted to ask them questions and have their answers. He didn't want them to start designing it. It was one of the normal love/hate relationships that engineers and architects have. It went fast and furious, and I think the idea fell into place much more quickly than it was able to be worked out. It was very complicated, and not a rational idea. If you're going to build a concert hall, you don't put it in a spherical form. It was an abstracted architectural idea and it took a lot of doing to fit in an auditorium, that is, an auditorium of a reasonable size. But you're just aggravating the problem when you use forms, a fan form with a spherical roof form. It tends to bring all the sound back to where it starts from. Bob Newman was helping us. He was on the faculty at MIT as well as a partner in BBN, the acoustic engineering firm. I participated very heavily in the design with Eero and Bru and several others. When it came time for presentation material, Jim Smith made the building models and I did the original rendering. At the same time, the office was starting to change somewhat. Most of all, the Technical Center was slowing up because we were at the tail end of the design effort. From now on a great deal of technical effort, testing, and supervision was required. That was John Dinkeloo's responsibility. The major part of the effort, except for perhaps three or four people in the office, was downtown at Smith, Hinchman, or out on the site. It was decided that we were going to start doing our own working drawings and really get into it, because the office was no longer monopolized by the GMTC. I think it was because I was more experienced and had a broader range than some of the other people, that Joe and Eero asked if I would be in charge of getting the

54 working drawings done on the auditorium and then after that, on the little chapel. It was fun and ideal because I had been a participant in both the design and the production processes. It was a complete situation, which is always the nicest, most wonderful thing to happen.

Blum: So the published drawing was probably yours?

Bassett: Well, it probably was, but when we were designing, I would do one of those every day. There would be minute adjustments, and Bru and I would say, "Well, what's that going to look like?" and then I'd draw it, or we would make a study model and then the next morning we'd say, "Hmm" and make more changes, and then another drawing. I did drawings far better than that.

Blum: Did you work mostly with drawings or models?

Bassett: Both. We worked with models, but the models were for study purposes. When you wanted to take something back to Cambridge, you could only take a finished model, and that was something that only Jim Smith of the model shop could make, and only after we had pretty much come to grips with what we wanted to do.

Blum: In the article you gave me to read, it talks about some of Eero's ideas, and one idea that they make a great point of emphasizing is that he felt that there was always more than one solution to the problem.

[Tape 3: Side 1]

Bassett: I think that was the most important lesson that I learned at the Saarinen office is that there was more than one solution to the problem. This gets back to what we were talking about before, to the people who have developed a recipe for what architecture is all about. That's not true. The solution is there very quickly because the philosophical stance does not permit a wide-ranging exploration of alternatives. Eero would come at a design problem from any direction, and we did the same thing because we were part of that thing. I think there was an

55 atelier sort of quality about the office, even though we were doing our own working drawings. We didn't stop fussing with the job. You just kept monkeying around with it. It could be disastrous. I mean, the fee goes down the drain and things get confused. But at some point, you have to say, "This is the way it's going to be."

Blum: Was that maddening to work with Eero and have him change his mind overnight?

Bassett: I would suspect that out of ten architects, there are four that are genetically just like that.

Blum: Here is a paragraph about a situation where Gordon Bunshaft and Eero had a cooperative project, and Gordon Bunshaft could not tolerate Eero changing his mind overnight endlessly. But apparently they found a way to live with it in some way.

Bassett: At Lincoln Center, yes. They got along. I think they admired each other.

Blum: I was thinking about Eero's working process. How is it working with someone when you don't know if what you did today and thought was final would be final tomorrow morning?

Bassett: It was not easy. There was many a time when all of us at that office would work and work weeks on an idea, and we were convinced that it was the thing to do. It was consistent with what he and we had agreed to. Then he'd come back, because he was away on a trip or doing this or doing that, and it would all go out the window. We'd start over, Joe Lacy would lose his hair and John Dinkeloo would wonder what was going on. We'd have to put a band-aid on our egos and start over. But that's just part of the process.

Blum: But no one really got hot about it?

56 Bassett: Oh, sure you got hot! There were arguments and lost tempers, but it was a wonderful group of people.

Blum: It appears to be such a closely knit group of very definite individuals and you socialized as well as worked together, what did you argue about?

Bassett: Oh, architecture, politics. I mean all the normal sort of things. That was an era with Adlai Stevenson. There were all kinds of wonderful things around in those days. We hadn't seen anything like that. There was reason to be encouraged about the political situation. I don't think that the cynicism which is rampant now, where the media creation of personalities and what kind of personality that you elect but you're really getting another one, none of that stuff had started. We were still simple enough in our enthusiasm and optimism about this to have not lost our interest. I couldn't care less now. I don't trust anyone anymore.

Blum: But you were younger then.

Bassett: Oh, yes. You read the New York Times Sunday edition and you read Time magazine and then you read The New Republic. There was a magazine from, I think, Chicago called The Reporter. Do you remember? You're too young.

Blum: I don't think I've heard of it.

Bassett: Anyway, we read all these things. We were vociferous and voracious in these things.

Blum: And you're not hopeful about those things any more?

Bassett: Not at all. I'm not hopeful any more. If you can have a guy like Reagan president for eight years, then there's no reason for being hopeful, because the electorate obviously can be conned by any snake oil salesman that appears.

Blum: Well, I certainly hope the mantle will be passed to another generation with that kind of optimism.

57 Bassett: Anyway, it was a perfectly normal situation. I think architects' offices are very often like that, particularly when there's a person who's—I don't mean this in a pejorative way—a prima donna.

Blum: Do you mean Eero?

Bassett: Yes, the person who was the motivator and the engine in that office was Eero. Whether it was the same quality or not is beside the point, but it was the same in Yamasaki's office or Ed Stone's or Marcel Breuer's, any of these people—offices in which the engine was a design motivation approach rather than an administrative.

Blum: Another issue that the article stated was that Eero believed that a design idea should be overstated because everything that happens in finalizing it, detailing and client's wishes and so on, tend to water it down. Is that your idea too?

Bassett: I don't remember saying that, but that certainly is a truism. Once you've got the design. There are certain types of architects who essentially think of themselves as artists, if I may put it that way, and who feel that once they have a conceptual idea, wherever it comes from or whatever its quality, that their work is done. In fact, it hasn't even started. Getting an idea to a point where it is really a working idea, doing all the things that it's supposed to have to do in addition to being a potentially wonderful building is at that point when you get down to business to make it into a building. You can't turn your back for a minute. Our office, because it was a small office and was not run with the kind of discipline or the depth of discipline that's required to accomplish that, was never able to really come to grips with it. I mean, we got buildings built well, but they don't really compare. SOM's the firm that put that together, who knew how to take an idea and to get the damn thing so it was the way it was supposed to be. That it was a perfect reflection of the original intent as you could get, and it didn't wander off. It was not diffused or diluted by subsequent parts of the design, or the construction process, all of critical importance. Except in parts of the Technical Center, the Saarinen office did not have the resources, or the know how that

58 SOM, and Kevin's outfit can exhibit. I'll give you a very simplified credo: "This is a model of the building that we want to build for you. These are the materials that it's going to be made of. And it's going to look like that model. You can look at the last doorknob on the last door and it's going to be right." There's not going to be a lot of untied strings.

Blum: Did you feel that lack of organization? You obviously had not seen what SOM was capable of, but did you feel that that was the weak link in the Saarinen office?

Bassett: No, no. I should say not. We had the interest and the intent, but neither the depth or the expertise. When Kevin took over with John Dinkeloo, who is himself a pragmatic person, that started to occur. The Ford Foundation building, for example, is a beautifully put together, detailed, carefully done building without inviting any frailties into its system. On the other hand, I think the TWA Terminal is ultimately a piece of sculpture, so you have to judge it differently. It's a piece of sculpture before it's a building. If that's true, is it a good piece of sculpture or is it not? What are the problems that go with doing a building that is so amorphous and arbitrary in its form? How do you make it do the work and things that buildings must do? I think that Eero was caught up, was terribly interested in the sculptural attitude. The Dulles Airport building is an extraordinarily beautiful thing. It has some very curious things about it, but it's a masterpiece. What a tragedy that he was starting, between that building and the wonderful, disciplined quality of the Bell Telephone Lab, to emerge as a really important talent. But it was all cut off, of course, by his early death. He remains ambiguous to this moment, I think.

Blum: In an Inland Architect article in 1981 about Eero's office and everyone's participation in it, one of the things that struck me was that you were one of the architects who did a building in Columbus, Indiana, Did that come through the office?

Bassett: Oh, no. That was much later. Nothing to do with it at all. No connection. I worked on the little bank building that's in Columbus for the bank that the Miller

59 family owned. Eero worked on it, and Willo von Moltke and I, and I think Harold Tsuchiya worked on it. You shouldn't write all these people down. But I did go down there once, and saw Eliel's Tabernacle Church. My City Hall was so many years later, there was no connection in any respect.

Blum: Did that commission come through Saarinen or through connections you made at that time in your life?

Bassett: No.

Blum: In an article, two buildings of yours that are illustrated—I don't know who selected them or why these two were selected, but they were the Weyerhaeuser facility and the Mauna Kea Beach Resort in Hawaii, both of which are sprawling in a natural setting, very expansive, working very well with their natural site. Is there anything significant in the fact that they were the two projects of your career that were selected for you in that article?

Bassett: I don't remember playing a part in that selection. It may have been Nancy Lickerman's own decision. She may have just remembered our discussion, because they certainly are important jobs to me. Are we going to get out of the Saarinen office into the SOM?

Blum: We sure are.

Bassett: Well, let's just get rid of this briefly. I was at the office for five years, and I was doing very well and Eero and Joe and John Dinkeloo were very happy with me. Everything was staying the same, there was no reason for me to want to leave. However, there was an uncomfortableness about the fact, and Dory and I were aware of it, that our roots were getting too deep. We'd been there a long time. Chris and Annie were achieving some size. Dory was pregnant with Tony, the boy that you met who's now thirty-five years old. We had started, in a very informal sense, to worry about what we wanted to do next. At the same time that that was happening, it remained that I hadn't taken a vacation in a long time. Work just seemed to go on and on. All the while, Eero's life and his attention and

60 interest were more and more gravitating toward the East Coast. This was because his work and his growing reputation pulled him there, and also because of Aline, a textbook New Yorker. It became apparent that the office was going to move that way. I was also getting ready—I wanted to take my exams and get on with being an architect.

Blum: You were not licensed then? What was the requirement for licensing other than academic degrees?

Bassett: At that time, I think you had to have five years of experience on top of your degree before you could take your exam. I was at a point where I was ready for that. We finally put it all together and decided what to do. I've got to give one thousand percent credit to my wife on this, I said, "Well, look. Why don't we go out and look at the West Coast?" And she said, "Let's go!" I had an uncle down the peninsula who was a retired admiral from the navy, who had been very close to my mother. There was a natural, comfortable relationship there between us. We decided that what we'd do is drive across the country, because I had a lot of vacation time. In Detroit, there was always an opportunity to find someone who wanted a new car delivered on the West Coast. It was all very mysterious. We still don't understand what was going on. But we picked up a brand-new Chrysler that already had Hawaiian license plates on it and started out for San Francisco. It was a beautiful big car. We'd never driven a car that fancy before. We drove out to San Francisco. I had a letter from Willo von Moltke to Bill Wurster because Willo knew Bill. I had done enough research to know that there were maybe half a dozen people out here that I wanted to talk to.

Blum: Architects?

Bassett: Yes. There's something that I remember that I should mention after I finish this little story.

Blum: Well, now you were still working for the Saarinens at that time?

Bassett: Yes, absolutely.

61 Blum: This was 1955? You were taking your three-year vacation?

Bassett: This was 1955. I'm trying to remember, because I was interrupting myself with a thought. We got to San Francisco and stayed briefly at the Palace Hotel. It was just great. It was in May and the weather was perfect. We did a lot of walking. Dory was then pregnant with our fourth and last child, Peter, but had not been pregnant long, so she was still comfortable and still had energy. We delivered the car and stayed with my relatives in San Mateo, from there we were able to explore the Bay Area. I talked to four or five local architects who had a reasonably high national profile. They were almost all doing smaller residential work, but they were well-known. I did go to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill [SOM], who had an office downtown. That's what made me think of this other thing I wanted to make sure I talk about. I went in there and several people had given evidence that they were interested in me. Bill Wurster told me that my credentials were too good for what was available as far as he knew. I was used to working on bigger, better, different kinds of buildings than were built on the West Coast. He suggested that my opportunities were probably better back East. Now, I don't know whether he was doing that purposely or just pulling the old California deal of telling people, "Why don't you stay where you are? We've got enough people out here." We've done that. We were told that by a number of people back in 1955. "We'd love to have you. You're very nice people. Go home." Bill in his own way might have been saying that, but I don't think so. I went into the Skidmore office, which was then run by John Barney Rodgers and Elliot Brown and Nat Owings when he was there.

Blum: Now this is 1955?

Bassett: It's May of 1955. At that time Nat was divorced from Emily and had not yet married Margaret. He was all over the map as was usual with him. He would just appear long enough to raise hell and then disappear again.

Blum: But he was connected with the office?

62 Bassett: Yes. he was responsible for the office opening on the West Coast. I was brought first of all to Elliot Brown who saw my portfolio and seemed interested. I don't think he'd seen anything like that. Then he said, "We'd like to give you a job." I decided to go with SOM because they were the only ones who would match my salary back in Michigan, which was something incredible, like a hundred and thirty-five dollars a week. The other offices, in no way could they at that point afford it. Elliot didn't seem to have a problem.

Blum: You accepted the job?

Bassett: Yes. Well, I told him I was interested. I would confirm it later, because Dory and I wanted to talk about it and decide. We had been away more than three weeks by that time. We flew home, and I had time to bone up for a week before the examinations. Then I took the exams the last week of my vacation.

Blum: This was to get a license in Michigan?

Bassett: Yes, but I took the National Council examination, which is an additional day.

Blum: Did that entitle you to a California license?

Bassett: If you had National Council, then you could get reciprocity. As long as I did a paper on seismic when I was in California. I gave my notice, and told Eero that we were going to move in August, and we started the process.

Blum: Was it a coincidence that that was the year that Kevin Roche took charge of design in the Saarinen office?

Bassett: Must be. I don't remember hearing that before, but it makes sense.

Blum: He was appointed the senior designer in 1955, according to the Inland Architect article.

63 Bassett: Well, that figures. There were a number of people who left at the same time as me. In addition, the size of the office had grown as Eero's reputation increased, and the office moved to a former automobile showroom in Birmingham with much more space. I can understand the need to restructure, giving Kevin rank to make up for Eero's increasing difficulty in keeping up. They were there, I guess, a year or two years before they moved to Hamden.

Blum: But you never moved with them? You had left already?

Bassett: Oh, yes, in August.

Blum: And that was the time that Kevin Roche apparently assumed another title or responsibility.

Bassett: Apparently. It must have happened later in the year. Gunnar had gone with Yamasaki and Willo had gone to Philadelphia, and Bru was teaching at New Haven.

Blum: What was it about SOM, other than being in California, that appealed to you?

Bassett: Nothing really. I don't think there was anything. Looking at the work by the other architects, it became clear to me that they never came to grips with putting something together very carefully.

Blum: And work by other California architects?

Bassett: They were doing very handsome, smaller buildings in which they never had to solve a lot of the things that I was used to being a part of architecture. I wasn't aware that the local SOM office had much to offer, except that they helped me get to San Francisco.

Blum: Were you aware of any of SOM's Chicago work at that time?

64 Bassett: Yes. While in Michigan, I can't remember what the incident was, but I had been bitterly disappointed by something that Eero had done on one of the buildings that he and I were on. It was a change-of-mind thing, and it seemed to me so capricious and arbitrary that it upset me unduly. I may have been just ready to have been upset. I was overly tired or some damn thing. I knew some of the people very slightly in the Chicago SOM office, first of all because there were certain relationships through Dinkeloo, et cetera, when they had dropped into the office from time to time. Also, Chicago was busy with work in Dearborn [Michigan]—and the New York office was occupied with the Ford headquarters, also in Dearborn. Anyway, I thought, "I think I'm going to call Chicago and see if they're interested in me." So I did. I took a day off and I caught a flight to the downtown airport—what's it called?

Blum: Midway. It's still operating.

Bassett: Is it still? I'd be as afraid of coming into Midway as I am of coming into National in Washington. It was the summertime and it turned out to be unbelievably hot. I knew about heat already because Michigan is not that much different, but I'd been working in the country for five years. We had this little office with the trees and the birds. Here, I'm in the Loop and I can't get across the street because the blacktop's so soft it's almost ankle deep. I get to the office, and I can't remember where it was because it's in an older building, not Inland Steel as I thought. I talked to Chuck Wiley, the senior person who had visited the Saarinen office that day when they'd come from Dearborn. He was very interested in me. Wiley indicated that he was an associate partner in design then. I don't think there was any partner in design in Chicago at that moment.

Blum: Was Bill Hartmann in Chicago then?

Bassett: Must have been, but I didn't meet him and didn't know him. Anyway, Wiley was very interested in me, and I knew enough to be able to use him as an entree for an interview. The building was so hot. There was no air-conditioning, of course. The windows were open and everything stuck to you. I remember him taking me around and introducing me to people. One was a very skinny person with dark

65 hair who was working on a building for Kimberly-Clark. It was Bruce Graham. Bruce is the only one that I remember outside of Wiley, but there must have been other people. Suddenly I was looking at the problem of, my God, where would we live if I was working here? Do I want to work here under those circumstances? I was spoiled. When it was hot where we worked and it was hot just like it was in Chicago, except we were out in the country. We could wear Bermuda shorts and pad around in our stocking feet and get down to a skivvie shirt. Those guys all had ties on. You could see sweat bands everywhere. So I went home and felt much more friendly towards Eero after that. That happened a whole year before we went to the West Coast.

Blum: So you had actually toyed with the idea of going to SOM.

Bassett: "Toyed" is an appropriate word.

Blum: But only for a moment.

Bassett: Only for a day.

Blum: But then in 1955 you didn't toy with it. You acted on it.

Bassett: We arranged our lives. I got everything packed, and then I drove the car out alone and found an apartment. Dory followed with the kids, but not until the furniture had arrived. We were in Hillsdale, down the peninsula, near my uncle and my aunt, who were dear, sweet people. They were a great value to us from a morale point of view. A move like that—I don't know whether you've ever done anything like that with a family.

Blum: No, I haven't. It must be very scary.

Bassett: It is traumatic, and you don't realize it. All of a sudden, Dory's there with three children and one who's due in December, in an absolutely strange place that she's never been in before.

66 Blum: And, at nine o'clock the next morning, you go to work.

Bassett: More than that. It was a long day from seven in the morning until six at night. I was commuting by train into the city. I was faced with the same old problem of being overly busy immediately. I was stressed because it was a whole new world. This happens with almost everyone who makes a move like that. Their health falls off, their morale falls off, and it takes a year or so before everything starts to come back together.

Blum: Before you decided definitely that you were going to make the move, did you meet Nat Owings?

Bassett: No.

Blum: So who was the person who ultimately made the decision to hire you?

Bassett: It was Elliot Brown, a partner who died not long after that of cancer. He was a young partner.

Blum: Was he administrative?

Bassett: Yes, as was Jack Rodgers. There was no real strong design strength in the office. There was a very able guy and nice person named George Stone, who was an IIT graduate.

Blum: IIT?

Bassett: Yes, it might even have been Armour then. I don't know. IIT—Illinois Institute of Technology. He was a Miesian designer, who had come out when Jack Rodgers came out to open up the office.

Blum: Did you see this as an opportunity for you in design?

Bassett: Since I was a design type, I hoped so.

67 Blum: What did you know about the architecture of the Bay Area when you moved out here?

Bassett: Well, there wasn't anything in San Francisco that was of any size, that was of any quality, that was new. The Equitable building, a bad building, was the only thing under construction at the time. It was the first major building that had been built in San Francisco in twenty-five years. Things were just about to happen. The office had the Crown Zellerbach job that Nat had gotten because he had a strong relationship with Jack Heinz. Jack Heinz was a good friend of J.D. Zellerbach of Zellerbach Paper Company, who was a San Francisco tycoon. They had been working on it for a considerable amount of time, and I was handed that project immediately. It was nailed schematically. The site plan had been decided on. The building's footprint had been decided. Both of these were products of negotiating with the city. There had been some altercations within the office about the job. There had been an architect, who is very able and who's still in the area, named George Goddard. He was, I think, the senior person on the design effort on the Crown Zellerbach building for the year or so previous to my appearing on the scene. He had arrived at certain conclusions that Owings disagreed with. I think Goddard had quit because of this. I've never met him, but I think that he must have had independent means. I didn't think that it was critical for him to keep his job. So he was gone. George Storrs's only experience was really in the firm and not that extensive because the office had had very little work up to that time.

Blum: They really needed someone like you.

Bassett: Well, I guess so, but I did ascertain very quickly that as little as I knew, I knew a hell of a lot more about what had to be done than the people that were there.

Blum: So that was a nice marriage, for them and for you.

Bassett: Yes. It was an interesting, nice group of people.

Blum: When did you meet Nat Owings?

68 Bassett: Well, I met him very soon. He was a great admirer of Eero and knew him because of the United States Air Force Academy. The fact of where I came from made Nat immediately feel good about me.

Blum: Because you came from the Midwest?

Bassett: No, because I came from the Saarinen office. He didn't know a damn thing about me except that Eero had said, "Well, the only reason he left the firm is because I refused to move the office to California," or some such.

Blum: Did Eero give you a letter of recommendation or something of this sort?

Bassett: No. I didn't ask for one.

Blum: Was he upset when you left?

Bassett: Well, I got the impression that they would have liked me to stick around. He gave that impression to Nat—but I don't know that for sure. There's a time when things have to happen. There's a time when you decide it's time for you to do something, to be your own self. There are other people who are perfectly content to stay within a context and work. There are people in Kevin's office now that have always been there, and they were there when Eero was alive. They're happy and comfortable, but I think it was my time to move. And there were other people like that. Leonard Parker went to Minneapolis and Gunnar moved out. Cesar Pelli left when Kevin made it plain that he was going to run the office. Cesar and Tony Lumsden left and went to L.A. All these things were going on.

Blum: Was that a difficulty in the office when Kevin took over? Up until that time, was everyone sort of equal?

Bassett: I think so.

Blum: And now all of a sudden there's a head of design or a senior designer?

69 Bassett: I think that Kevin is a disciplined person. When the office changed, when Eero died or got so busy and preoccupied with his life out of the office, and Kevin took over, then the office's complexion must have changed drastically. It would have to because Kevin is not an ambiguous person.

Blum: What was he like?

Bassett: He's organized. His attitude at that time was far more rigorous about what constituted architecture than it is now. He was an IIT, Miesian-motivated person. He changed over the years the more time he spent with Eero. He's doing things now that he wouldn't have done then.

Blum: Did that trouble you? Did that disciplined, rigorous approach, and maybe narrow-mindedness, did that trouble you?

Bassett: No, as long as I didn't have to participate in it. That didn't happen while I was there. Kevin and I have talked about this briefly. We've served on a number of juries together over the years and been thrown together under some circumstances. We would discuss it. I think he's a very nice person, and I respect him and admire him as an architect.

[Tape 3: Side 2]

Bassett: I don't know this, but I've always had the feeling from what people have said to me who had been a part of it, that it is essentially an autocratic relationship in the office.

Blum: The way Kevin ran it?

Bassett: Yes, the way he runs it, ran it. At some point it must be autocratic. There has to be someone who says, "Yes. This is the way it's going to be," but until that time, I personally always followed the policy of letting the people who I was working with to get a job done have their own say—not simply doing what I had decided

70 had to be done. I invited them to get as much out in the open very early on that had to do with what their response to the problem was. I didn't feel that it was reasonable to dictate immediately what was going to happen.

Blum: At SOM you became a general partner within five years, which was a rapid rise. When you came in, you went into design and you say you were given the Crown Zellerbach project at the time. Were you given pretty free rein?

Bassett: Yes, mostly because there was a void.

Blum: About that time you also did what was then the John Hancock.

Bassett: Now called Industrial Indemnity, yes.

Blum: They're very different buildings.

Bassett: Well, I think that the Crown Zellerbach building is a patchwork. It's a building in which the idea of the building is essentially a T-form so that you can get a clear space with the core attached. It's literally identical, for example, to the Inland Steel building. They're not very far apart in their dates.

Blum: Did Crown Zellerbach precede Inland Steel?

Bassett: I think it was just a little bit ahead of Inland Steel. I'm not sure of that. You know, Walter Netsch was in the San Francisco office briefly, but he was gone by the time I came.

Blum: But the Crown Zellerbach plan was there.

Bassett: I don't think that Walt had anything to do with CZ. Walt was in the San Francisco office because there was work in Japan after the war that had been done by the firm and Jack Rodgers had supervised that and it had been done out of the San Francisco office. Walt had, as a very young member of the firm, gone out there because he was brought from Chicago. He was free as a bird. He was a

71 bachelor. He could do anything they wanted him to do, and he had the energy. I don't think he had any experience when he went out there. I don't know. I shouldn't say the word "briefly." He was in San Francisco and that's when he did the Monterey Naval Postgraduate School, which I think is a very handsome group of what I would call Gropius-disciplined buildings. A very good job.

Blum: Then he came to Chicago.

Bassett: Then he went back to Chicago.

Blum: And the Inland Steel building appeared.

Bassett: Yes. That's a real building compared to Crown Zellerbach as far as I'm concerned.

Blum: Yes, except what's very interesting about what you say is it's a little unclear who claims that building as their design, whether it's Walter or whether it's Bruce Graham. They both claim it but I've never seen a designer's name attached to it officially.

Bassett: Isn't that interesting? I think that they were both involved and each one of them stands back. I think that they were both involved.

Blum: But I think even more important than who did what between Bruce and Walter is the fact that the inspiration for it may well have come from the Crown Zellerbach building.

Bassett: I would never presume that.

Blum: But the idea of a windowless service tower next to a steel-and-glass office building. Just visually, it seems that one is related to the other. I don't know how it happened.

72 Bassett: Well, that's fine then. You can go ahead with that, but I wouldn't. In the Inland Steel, the footprint makes sense because of the corner site. The Crown Zellerbach building is a freestanding building. Although Market Street was not an important street at that point in time, the building's owner really wanted it oriented to Bush Street, more towards the financial district—it was of some psychological importance—but the fact that it was a freestanding building and had a footprint that would not let it orient successfully to all three sides was a mistake. That need should have been the most important impetus for the plan. I suspect that that was the thing that Goddard and Owings had the argument about. Goddard knew the building should respond in a different way.

Blum: So, the building as it stands today was what you think Nat wanted?

Bassett: Yes.

Blum: And what you did.

Bassett: Which I had to accept, because it was nailed. It was all approved and everything. The only thing that had not been done was that it had not been architecturalized, if there's such a word. It was schematically designed and approved—what was going to be opaque, what was going to be all glass, how big the floors were, what the structure was, where the elevators were—all that was nailed. And how you got into the little garage and got out—it took years to work that out. And the fact there was going to be a garden.

Blum: What about the little round building?

Bassett: Well, that was added. I did that because there was supposed to be a gazebo in the garden. But that's a facetious sort of thing. I was not in control of that project ever. I was doing it, but I was not controlling it because I didn't have a primary relationship with the client, nor did I have any rank in the office. That was Nat's prerogative. He had been playing with it for a number of years, and wasn't about to change. He had brought Isamu Noguchi into the act, who appeared after the

73 building was committed architecturally and the hole was being dug. What a rhubarb that was.

Blum: He brought him in?

Bassett: To do the garden. Meanwhile, the garden that Nat had in the works prior to that was something that Bill Dunlap, who was from the Chicago office and was an associate partner and project manager in the San Francisco office, worked on. Myron Goldsmith and Jim Ferris were around, and Myron was working on the United Airlines hangar, which is a very fine industrial building that he did. Also they were doing a building up in Seattle.

Blum: Myron was?

Bassett: Yes. Bill Dunlap, who was the project manager at that time on Crown under Jack Rodgers, had brought Bob Royston in, who he'd become friends with. Royston was a well-known local landscape architect who had done a scheme I thought was abysmal. I don't know whether it was bad because he didn't understand the problem or because Owings had caused it to happen. Nat was very active in things out here in design.

Blum: What happened to Noguchi's plan?

Bassett: Noguchi came later. I was able to get rid of Royston on the job. Then Nat, in response to that, brought Noguchi in. Noguchi suddenly appeared—I shouldn't say "suddenly." I was told that Noguchi was going to show up. By that time, the job had been taken over to an independent space out of the office proper so we could have the room to do things. We were about a block away from the real office, on our own. We had a lot of room. Noguchi showed up, and I had assigned two or three people to help him. They built a very large model of what Noguchi thought should happen there. It was done in grey cardboard and in it Noguchi indicated what he thought it should be like. I was horrified at the scheme. I've always liked Isamu's sculpture. He had done some wonderful things for Gordon Bunshaft in New York. He had also done a garden for, I think, the

74 UNESCO headquarters in Paris, which I thought probably was the worst garden ever designed. It looked to me like he was about to do the same thing at Crown Zellerbach.

Blum: Did you have any input about his selection when Nat Owings brought him in?

Bassett: No, absolutely not. Nat didn't operate that way. It's interesting, because Nat's been a very important factor in my life and my maturity, and we were friends, but it took us a while to get there. His freewheeling, not paying attention to what anyone else thought or did was not uncharacteristic of him. Nat, of course, was enthused about what he was doing, which was both cute and fussy. I felt that it should not be a garden in that sense at all. The site slopes about fourteen feet from the Bush Street end to the Market Street end.

Blum: And is that the reason for the raised walkway?

Bassett: To the deck that the lobby sets on, right. The garden floor was established by virtue of bringing the elevation of the natural grade at the low point in horizontally, so it ended about twelve-feet below the Bush Street edge. These garden schemes were all based on that. I thought that it should be an urban, public space rather than a garden, and that the plaza ought to be raised almost to what is now the deck level of the lobby. And that there was to be a block-long range of shallow steps along Bush Street that would get you down to that level. There would be handsome paving and the lobby would float just above it. People could go freely across it and there'd be trees and hedges and other plants as required. Nat forbade that, because his was the way it was going to be. At that point, it became interesting.

Blum: The way you described it, he sounded like the heavy in all of this.

Bassett: He was always the heavy.

Blum: And absolutely had the last say.

75 Bassett: That's right. But what happened was that I found out that the partners were going to have a meeting in San Francisco, because our office was in trouble. Starting a new office is a very expensive process. It takes many years for it to become a part of the local system. It's a go-broke situation for quite a few years until you're accepted. San Francisco is essentially a very village community, compared to something like Chicago or New York. The office in San Francisco was looked at as Nat's venture by the other partners, and the fact that it wasn't producing—caused a lot of complaining and a lot of unhappiness within the partnership. I found that they were coming out to meet about the problem. It included all the general partners. I had Noguchi's scheme, but I was going to do another of what I thought should happen. We had to do it independently of our workload that we had to keep the building moving—the final design detailing that was going into both working drawings and in some cases going directly into shop drawings. So we did a model, at the same scale, that Nat didn't know about. All the gang just chipped in. We came down nights and weekends and did it independently of our regular workload.

Blum: Everyone sort of agreed with you anyway?

Bassett: Yes. I mean, there was no question about this. Nat brought the partners over to see the Noguchi model, and there were two models instead.

Blum: Oh, was this a surprise to him?

Bassett: Yes.

Blum: Were you packed and ready to leave?

Bassett: Yes. In those early days with Nat, I always took it one day at a time. I had at least one tongue in one cheek. It was the only way you could be. The upshot of this was that the partners sided completely with what I wanted to do.

Blum: And what did Nat do?

76 Bassett: Well, what Nat did was that he, well, there was nothing that would get his hackles up more than having all these partners tell him what he was going to do, so there was no way that he was going to do my scheme. What he did do is that he agreed that the Noguchi scheme should not be done and that I would design a garden. I would design the garden and not Noguchi, but it had to be a garden. It could not be a plaza. Well, I found a way to rationalize that, and I did that garden.

Blum: You did a plaza and called it a garden.

Bassett: No, I didn't do a plaza. It is a garden. It's down in a hole, it has rocks, it's got all this...

Blum: It's a lot more rocks than growing things.

Bassett: Yes, but have you seen it now? They just tore it all apart.

Blum: Yes, I was just there on Sunday.

Bassett: Six months ago all the original stuff was still there, with the big pines and the olives. You missed it all.

Blum: Yes, it seems I did.

Bassett: Anyway, Nat was very upset, but, to my great surprise, he didn't fire me. We agreed to a deal, which was apparently a temporary truce, and I started designing the garden. Nat would not talk directly to me. I would work on the garden and then I would take my sketches to Elliot Brown, and Elliot would take them to Nat. And then Elliot—have you ever been to real burlesque? In real burlesque, there's always a clown at center stage and then there's a man and a wife who are having some terrible argument on either side of him.

Blum: Is that Elliot Brown?

77 Bassett: Yes, that was Elliot Brown. Surreal. This went on, I would guess, for about three months.

Blum: What kind of comments did you get back?

Bassett: Generally they were agreeable. He started to like what he saw and came to the conclusion that I was trying very hard to keep my end of the bargain. Meanwhile, other things were happening. Zellerbach was the ambassador to Italy and the Marshall Plan was in effect. J.D., for diplomatic reasons, or to gain some advantage or just to be a good guy, decided that the core of the building was going to be sheathed with Italian glass tile—I mean that wallpaper that's there now. It was supposed to be the same green serpentine granite as on the columns, so the whole building would be unified. I was informed of this. Several of us went out and sat in a bar all afternoon and got somewhat drunk. We didn't know what else to do. We had nothing to do or say about it. It seemed ordained. Meanwhile the garden was proceeding. Nat had a friend, Dave Tolerton, who was a very good iron man but not a sculptor to my particular liking, who had done a fountain. J.D. was in Italy and Nat would go there, and they would get all enthused about what they were going to do next. They picked a well-known Italian sculptor from Trieste by the name of Mascherini who did a piece for the lobby. See, I was not in control of that job. I've always thought of it as something that I did the best I could. The deck, the railings and the lobby are all things I did, and people left me alone. I'm very proud of the glass wall. In all modesty, it is the best wall in the country, with 5-1/2 feet wide by 11 feet sheets of glass and with the mechanical system floating above the floor and free of the glass.

Blum: How did it make you feel to take orders from both a client and Nat?

Bassett: Well, I have worked with difficult people before.

Blum: But these are major changes.

Bassett: I was dealing here with people who were not design-oriented. Part of Owings's biggest problem was that he was not, and knew he was not a design architect.

78 Blum: But I thought that's what made him so effective in Chicago, because he went out and got these jobs. He had a sense of hiring untried, very talented, young designers and gave them a chance.

Bassett: That's absolutely true. I mean, he did all these things, and you're right, but that wasn't where his heart was, and he couldn't leave them alone.

Blum: Where was his heart?

Bassett: He wanted to be an architect who caused things to be, and he was not good at that. He didn't have the patience. He was another kind of person, and he was incredible, but he was not that. I'm sure that was the reason why he and Bunshaft never got along, and why Louis Skidmore, who was reputed to be a talented designer went to New York and Bunshaft soon followed. They kept Owings in Chicago, but then Chicago started getting some real big work to do. Chicago had people like Bruce and Walter, and with Bill Hartmann they could handle anything. Meanwhile, Nat fell in love with San Francisco.

Blum: But he went there after his divorce.

Bassett: Yes, but he wanted to open a San Francisco office. The other partners probably thought of it as a way to get him out of their hair. I'm sure that's the way it was. Anyway, CZ has been made a local landmark.

Blum: And it took an award.

Bassett: Oh, yes, it took an award, but there's nothing quite as bad as the architecture of the 1950s.

Blum: What about what was then known as the John Hancock?

Bassett: Well, that's another ball game all together.

79 Blum: Was that all yours?

Bassett: All mine, except for the lobby. That was an agreement with Owings that he was going to stay out of my hair on that one. That was my first chance to do my own thing. That building is a very personal response to a specific problem. It was a fine site on an important street. It was my first chance to be what I really am, given the chance—a contextual architect, putting a building into an existing cityscape, where cornice lines and masses and window breakups and heights are already established. It's the sort of thing that really excites me. That building, just through the accident of the site and having a reasonable budget, turned out just great. I remain very proud and happy with that little building. It's very different, a very different building.

Blum: An architectural critic wrote that the building just hadn't really gotten the attention it truly deserved.

Bassett: Well, I think that's probably true. It's worthy of a twenty-five year award and that sort of thing, but why worry about that? It's a nice building.

Blum: It's been compared in the literature to a building by Sullivan. And also you as a designer have been compared to what Burnham and Root did within a few years of each other, considering the fact that you did the Crown Zellerbach building, which is so different and now you disclaim some of it.

Bassett: Well, I can't explain that.

Blum: And the Hancock, which is so different, has been compared to the Monadnock and the Reliance building of Burnham and Root's in Chicago, which were done within a few years of each other.

Bassett: The Monadnock building, of course, is one of my favorites, even with the addition. If you read the story of the building while it was being designed, John Root was having terrible client problems. He received phone calls all the time

80 saying, "I want it higher. I want it lower. Do this, do that." But somehow he was able to survive.

Blum: Apparently the reason it's so clean and simple is because of budgetary constraints that certainly worked to his advantage.

Bassett: That's the story of the John Hancock—Little Hancock, we called it.

Blum: One last question about the John Hancock building. While that was in progress, there were partners meetings and associates meetings going on. One of the things that goes on at partners meetings or associate meetings is an exchange and a critique of ideas. Was this building or the design of this building brought to the attention of other partners? I'm really thinking about the Chicago office now.

Bassett: Not that I know of. Our client, was in Boston, the Hancock headquarters. I had the model I was going to present to Judge Elliot. We were lucky there because he was a gentle, mild-mannered man, the chief executive officer of John Hancock at the time. That's before the Harvard Business School types moved in on them. Elliot and I went to New York with the model and showed it to Bunshaft. Bunshaft reacted very unhappily to the design.

Blum: What did he say about it? What was the basis of his objection?

Bassett: Well, he didn't like the building. I don't remember exactly what he said, except for his comment that I had very little future in the firm. He didn't bother being critical of parts or details. He simply made it plain that there was nothing about the building he understood or liked. I knew that was going to happen. Nat had probably told Elliot, "You better do this. You better show it to Bun." So we were making, in a sense, a gesture to Bun in the hope that at least if he didn't buy it, he'd been informed. That was a very singular three or four days, because of a very heavy snowstorm in New York at the time. We were staying at the Plaza. After seeing Bun, we had to go to Boston, but all the airports were closed down. We were able to get train tickets because the tracks were still open, even though it continued to snow hard. We had the model in a box that was probably 4 by 4

81 and 3 feet high. It was a very sturdy crate. There were no taxis because of the snow. Elliot and I got the concierge at the Plaza to find us a rope and nails, and we roped the crate and put our luggage on top of it, and we walked all the way from the Plaza Hotel to Grand Central pulling the crate behind us. It was really funny as hell.

Blum: You should have made runners, made a sled out of it.

Bassett: Well, it ran.

Blum: And when you got there, did you have a mess of broken pieces of wood?

Bassett: No, because the snow was so smooth and glassy. In Boston, the storm was still going on up there. We had the same problem getting to the hotel. I began to think about being eaten up by Bun, and I hardly knew him at all.

Blum: Was that the first time you had met him?

Bassett: No, he'd met me briefly before in the confrontation on the garden stuff. He may not even remember this kind of nonsense. I decided that there was a hex on me or on the job because of Bun and the storm. I didn't see how anything could happen at our presentation except that the client was going to say, "I hate it." As it turned out, he just loved it.

Blum: What did Nat say about it?

Bassett: Nat was extremely enthusiastic about the design because it had a characteristic that wasn't in any of the SOM work. You can see an obvious effort to pull the building into the surrounding city fabric, and a building with an individual quality that was outside contemporary mainstream. The architecture that the firm was doing was mainstream at that time.

Blum: Where did you get the idea for the building?

82 Bassett: It just emerged. You just muddle about until something starts to click. It was really the same thing I'd been doing for years at the Saarinen office. That's all real. I mean the building. There's nothing phony there, it's a poured-in-place concrete building, the bearing wall clad in granite, and resting on real structural arches that are taking the whole exterior load. It's as authentic as anything can be.

Blum: As a steel and glass building?

Bassett: I should say.

Blum: Do I see the arches in the interior of—was it a building at Vassar? Did you work on a building at Vassar?

Bassett: No, I did some preparatory work at Vassar, but not on that building. I know the new building is a dormitory. After I had given my notice at the Saarinen office, I was given only short-term work because I was leaving. They had the need for measuring up Old Main. That is the great Renwick central building at Vassar. At the time it was used solely as a dormitory. However, in its original state, it incorporated the whole school: dormitory, classrooms, labs, lecture halls, even the corridors were made wide so they could use them as a gymnasium. I was given the curious job of going to Vassar and measuring the building. It took about three trips.

Blum: Was this the dorm?

Bassett: The dorm, full of cute girls. I was able to get assistants to hold tapes and do whatever else I required. The house mothers had to clear the decks to avoid embarrassing moments occurring. It was a fun experience.

Blum: Did you have anything to do with the actual design of the interior of the Hancock?

83 Bassett: We did the space planning for the typical floors, designed and furnished the executive offices at the second or balcony level, including the hung ceiling in plaster that echoes the structural arches.

Blum: Could a building like that have happened in Chicago?

Bassett: In the Chicago office? No.

Blum: Had you been in Chicago, knowing the character and history of the city, would you have designed a building like that for Chicago?

Bassett: No. I don't think I would have lasted five minutes in Chicago or New York. I would have been fired immediately.

Blum: Why?

Bassett: I don't know. I can't answer that really except that I think that the climate of how things get done and who does them is very different in those offices. I must say that whatever Nat's and my problems were, he was a very open, receiving person. Neither Brown or Rodgers ever made design decisions, on any project that Owings considered his own. He was around just enough to cause problems, but not enough to screw things up permanently. In retrospect, I can't explain why I wasn't fired in the early days of my employment. I had no rank to protect me. I must have struck a chord with Owings or it was just an accident of fate that I survived.

Blum: I wasn't even asking so much about the personalities of the people involved as the character of the architecture of the cities.

Bassett: Well, I don't think that that building is too out of tune with a lot of the buildings in Chicago from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth.

Blum: Well, late nineteenth century, yes.

84 Bassett: None of the architects in the firm were concerned with context. You did your thing. That was part of the manifesto. It was a new, shiny world.

Blum: Where did you become so aware of context?

Bassett: I think an architect has a responsibility which goes beyond his own natural ego drive. He's building things that are going to be around a long time. How they affect people, how they age, how they wear, how they improve, and not diminish our built environment is far more important than how he feels about them. If it's just fun and games, he's going to change his mind ten minutes later and do something completely different without care.

Blum: Do you think Eero could?

Bassett: Well, Eero's problem was that he didn't recognize any ground zero. In the sense I am discussing, Eero behaved himself only once. That was the dormitories at Yale, where I suspect he didn't dare do anything else.

Blum: You say he dared not do anything else?

Bassett: That's right. Eero belonged to the mainstream of contemporary architectural thought, that a building is the thing, and can be abstracted from all but the program and any immovable physical constraints, independent of forces of surround, often even of climate, and anything else that is a bother.

Blum: It's interesting that you have a sense of a broader picture.

Bassett: I've always been interested in what architecture always has been. I feel that I am not someone who has license to do anything I want. Rather, I feel myself a part of a continuum, a tradition of building, and that my buildings, if at all possible, should fit into that. The two bellwethers of my attitude are: Is there a context and, is it worthwhile? If so, then you play that game. If you do not have an architectural context, but have a site with unhampered opportunity, then you do something in which the marriage of the building to the site and the landscape is

85 as fine as you can make it. Those are the two things which have always made me go. I've never been interested in doing a building in which its individuality, or I think a better word for today would be its novelty, made it important.

Blum: As head of design for almost thirty years in the San Francisco office, have you been able to somehow institutionalized that idea?

Bassett: No.

Blum: Many things have been written about the Bay Area tradition, which includes the natural site and the terrain.

Bassett: That's Lewis Mumford talking.

Blum: Do you think that's nonsense?

Bassett: No, but it mostly has to do with houses. It has to do with putting quiet little redwood houses that were carefully made to be unpretentious into lovely little sites.

Blum: But they respect the land.

Bassett: Yes. They respect not so much by their nature, they're simply doing as little as possible to call attention to themselves. They're not buried. I think Wright, in his country houses, or some of the things he did out in the desert house or the textile block houses in L.A. are beautiful examples of how you put a house in a site. He could do it much better. The Bay Area style was extraordinarily modest. These are very inexpensive frame houses with redwood siding and flat roofs and overhangs. They are bio-degradable. I think it was something that was true, but overinflated in its importance.

Blum: Did you know about that when you first came here?

Bassett: Yes. At one point, I'd read every word that Mumford wrote.

86 [Tape 4: Side 1]

Blum: Within the national SOM, it has been noted that the San Francisco office is somehow different. I think some of the words that have been used are, "It's not as rigid, it's softer, it's more gentle, it's different."

Bassett: I think so. All those things.

Blum: How would you explain it?

Bassett: Over-simplified. It's our remoteness from the much larger offices of New York and Chicago, the benign climate, the land and the West Coast way of life. It is different. I should add the posture adopted by us, when needed, of fierce independence as a defense mechanism against an unremitting pressure to centralize.

Blum: Well, I just wondered how deep Owings's influence was in the office, and as the office developed its own character if it was different from the other offices. Where was he in all of this?

Bassett: Well, he was important, simply because he was here and that the other partners liked him being here. That meant they didn't bother the San Francisco office. That was what I was alluding to when I said I could never have existed successfully in New York or Chicago.

Blum: I think the distinctiveness of the San Francisco office compared to all of the other offices is fairly well known but unexplained.

Bassett: It may not be explainable. I knew enough about the Chicago and New York operations to know that the relationship between the staff and the partners was often remote and impersonal. I also knew that I could never operate that way. My office was always immediately adjacent to the design group. To me, that proximity was more important than being with the partners.

87 Blum: Why?

Bassett: Because those were my people. We were together. When we moved into the Alcoa building, instead of having an office, I had a design room. It was a room thirty-feet-square with tack-board walls and flexible lighting in the ceiling. There were three large square tables, built to waist height with large hospital casters, so we could move them about in any combination we wished. My desk was over in the corner. We could use the room for day-to-day design sessions, for building big models, for charrettes and finally for major design presentations to clients. You could take that room and make it into something out of the Museum of Modern Art for our presentations. Two five-foot-wide doors on either side were always open. Staff going about their business used the room as a corridor. No one in the design group who had something to say had any problem with just walking in and sitting down. It was terribly important to the chemistry of the design group, and how I wanted to work. I know this sounds terribly simple but it worked. The room was a kind of mixing box and special to the design group.

Blum: But what you did was suitable for you.

Bassett: Yes, that's right, it was a working symbol of how I felt, that I wanted to relate to my people as a fellow architect before I was a partner, and always to be accessible. Never remote.

Blum: It's also been said the San Francisco works on the studio concept and the others on a department concept.

Bassett: No, you have it backwards. San Francisco had a design group until my retirement. The Chicago office has had a studio system for many years.

Blum: Okay, straighten it all out.

Bassett: Chicago went to a studio system because the office was so large that the only way they could break it down into manageable pieces was to have studios with

88 studio heads, and then, because the studios themselves became so large, they were expanded to include all the disciplines. You could almost describe Chicago as a group of offices, mini-offices that sometimes were bigger than most offices conducting architectural practices. Chicago had no other alternative. The work load there was huge and could not be handled well by any other means, but I should add that the problem was exacerbated by the presence of two senior design partners, causing the office to be broken into two separate parts: One under Graham and the other under Netsch. In San Francisco I fought the studio idea. First of all, because I think I'm an elitist about design, and secondly, because San Francisco was never big enough to have studios.

Blum: So the way the San Francisco office worked, if I understand what you're saying, is the design group did their work, and then it went to the engineering department or the construction partner.

Bassett: No. Our office structure was traditional, suited to our size. The disciplines worked together from the start of any project, as they must.

Blum: Did you find there was an advantage other than the fact that you didn't have the space? Was there any psychological advantage?

Bassett: To a studio?

Blum: No, the department.

Bassett: I thought there was an advantage, because we were all together, not fragmented. I thought the cohesiveness was very important to the esprit of the group. Equally important, the work in an office is never controllable in how it comes, how it progresses, stops, goes backwards before it goes forward again. The flow of the workload is often out of sync. While you've got to have a small core on any given project, your need to have more people or to have less people almost momentarily is constantly happening. With a department, you can let the ebb and flow occur very naturally and comfortably. It worked very well. I understand that the studio system that they have now in San Francisco is not

89 working nearly as well as everyone hoped it would because the amount of work in the office doesn't lend itself to be broken up that way.

Blum: Did you, either personally or speaking for the San Francisco office, feel competition for jobs between offices?

Bassett: That often happened.

Blum: How about between designers from different offices?

Bassett: There was always an in-family rivalry that "we" were better, and they didn't know what they were doing and, of course, each of the other offices felt the same way. But it was usually a good-natured exchange springing from a natural pride about your office. We often competed for a job. If a client was talking to a half a dozen architects about a project, two of them could be different offices of SOM. The work from each office was different, as were the personalities involved. Sometimes a client did not want to go to a particular SOM office because of some prior experience, but remained interested in the firm.

Blum: Can we talk about one of your projects that I wondered about, although certainly in terms of geography it makes sense. It was the Mauna Kea Beach Resort in Hawaii, which is, of course, close to San Francisco but the client was in New York. As far as the credits go, apparently Rockefeller brought in someone from the New York office to do interiors?

Bassett: Dave Allen. I brought him in. I brought in Dave because he was the best interior man in SOM, in the New York office. Laurance did not know that Dave existed.

Blum: What was Rockefeller like as a client?

Bassett: Rockefeller had been involved in a hotel in Hawaii for some time when we became the architects. As I remember, Jack Warnecke was the architect. He had designed a hotel in the spirit of a Polynesian village. The hotel was a Rock Resort project. That was the name of Rockefeller's corporate group that owned and

90 managed several hotels in the Caribbean. They were well established and enjoyed good reputations as being excellent luxury hotels. Laurance was drawn to the Hawaiian thing because I think he had been approached by Hawaiians of considerable economic and social importance about building a hotel on the big island. In this case, on the Kona Coast, where the Parker ranch comes down to the sea. The land form of the great slope falling to the coast, and a beautiful cove looked attractive for residential development, with the hotel and a golf course at its heart. In addition, the area suffered an unemployment problem, mostly people from the ranch, so that acquiring and training an excellent staff was possible. At this time, the only hotels in the area were small, cottage type facilities. Laurance was interested in conservation and in social issues and, of course, in making money with his hotels. I don't know how Nat became involved. He had know the Rockefellers for a long time, and was a good friend of David Rockefeller. David and Mary and Nat and Margaret often spent time together at each other's homes or at vacation spots. Nat apparently heard about the hotel at some dinner party that included Laurance, and soon SOM was given the job.

Blum: But was this project already underway?

Bassett: It was under design. It wasn't under construction.

Blum: It was my impression that the San Francisco office proposed to Rockefeller that it be a Polynesian village and one unit was constructed to which he said no.

Bassett: No. I will describe that later. I do remember that the office was very crowded, a lot of work. I was terribly busy with lots to do and very few people to do it.

Blum: Well, this was 1965. It's just on the heels of the Carmel Valley Manor.

Bassett: Yes, which was a tiny little project. Have you got the date on Tenneco?

Blum: I think that's probably about the same time.

91 Bassett: That was a very major project.

Blum: Let me get all my dates together, but you go on. I don't know if these dates are the beginning or ending dates, but projects for 1963, in addition to the resort hotel in Hawaii, are the Tenneco building, Old St. Mary's Rectory, Carmel Valley Manor, and the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum complex. So they were all within a year or so of each other. For Tenneco I have a date of 1963 and that could be a very early date.

Bassett: They're normally completion dates.

Blum: I think it would be helpful for scholars to know the beginning and the end dates of a project.

Bassett: Yes, wait until we talk about Moscow. The Mauna Kea was very slow and Tenneco was very fast. I expect they were in the mill at the same time. And the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum was probably underway, too.

Blum: How did this resort hotel take shape to everyone's satisfaction?

Bassett: The initial idea was not a Polynesian village at all. It could be best described as a North African village, of separate units, all white in the sun and sculptural in quality.

Blum: Were they prefabricated?

Bassett: No. They were to be concrete. The idea was that everything would be open air, with no air conditioning, and designed to let the air move through them. They would have individuality and be joined together in a variety of ways. There are similar things built since then, but at that time, nothing existed that we knew of. We weren't able to pull it off.

Blum: Had you been to North Africa?

92 Bassett: No, I had hundreds of photographs of the generic architecture of those parts of the world. The development of the idea reached a point where Laurance was interested but his advisors were dead set against it, because they wanted a recognizable, manageable, and identifiable luxury hotel that the visitor would not be apprehensive about. They'd say, "Ah, yes." But how can our guests get to the dining room without going out in the rain? We proceeded and carried the schematic development to completion. Meanwhile, Laurance had allowed me to retain Alexander Girard to do the interiors. Sandro, as he was called, was just the right talent to do our interiors. I knew him from the Saarinen days. He and Eero were old friends, and it was he who did the splendid interiors of the Miller house in Columbus. We then built a couple of units on the site, precisely as they would have existed. Sandro and ourselves designed the interiors and fine-tuned them to perfection. Everything was there, right down to the ashtray with its matchbox. They were very attractive, but it was determined that they were too expensive, true enough, and that the idea of having a non-air-conditioned, open sort of facility was far too risky and his advisors prevailed. At that point, the scheme was abandoned completely.

Blum: Were his advisors the investors?

Bassett: No. He had no investors. It was his own money, his staff. He had a dozen people of various expertise who ran his hotels for him, including one very nice architect named Henry Beebe. Then we screwed our heads back on and agreed to start redesign with a single-building concept. Through all of this, I had Charlie Perry, Peter Hopkinson, and Marc Goldstein working with me. Charlie became the project manager and Marc became my project architect, cutting his teeth on this job. Dick Ciceri became the project manager later, when Perry left to become a successful sculptor. Dick was excellent in a very difficult job. He knew how to get a building built and how to be political with a many-headed client, and how to stay out of the project politics. It was complicated, we had local consultants, but most subs and the general contractor were from the mainland. No land development of this scale had ever happened on the big island. All of the equipment and material had to come by barge. Experienced construction labor was brought in and a worker's village built. In addition, the Rockefeller name

93 and the amount of money involved was an open invitation to opportunists. Have you seen the hotel?

Blum: No, I've only seen it in photographs.

Bassett: Well, I doubt you've seen any recent pictures. They were probably at least twenty years old with immature landscaping and the easy quality a well-used building has. Something like that. We were able to talk the client into at least a compromise position on the air conditioning. Because the rooms were always open to the terraces and balconies on the outside, and on the entrance side open to an open-air gallery, each room could, or could not have air conditioning at the option of the occupant, permitting each room to survive without central air conditioning. We considered this a major victory. We had a talented interior group in San Francisco, but they weren't experienced enough for this hotel and didn't have the touch that Dave had. We wanted to do an exceptionally fine job, including the integration of Pacific Rim art into the interiors. I knew Dave and I knew how good he was, so I went and got him. He worked with Margo Grant from our office, who's now Arthur Gensler's senior partner in New York. It all worked out very well.

Blum: Did any of the Saarinen projects, the low-slung projects, influence you in this at all? Is there a connection?

Bassett: No, there's no connection. The building evolved naturally. I can't think of a connection.

Blum: I was thinking of Deere and Company.

Bassett: Oh, but wasn't that after Mauna Kea? No, it didn't even exist when I did Mauna Kea. Or did it?

Blum: Deere and Company was in 1957.

94 Bassett: Then it did exist. I've always known about Deere. I've also seen it, but I can't make any connection.

Blum: It's a visual connection that I'm thinking about.

Bassett: I know. But I'm still at a loss. I would have been half equally affected by Connecticut General. There are lots of two- or three-story buildings.

Blum: There was just a similarity from the photographs, the way the natural landscaping came in and the building itself provided a bridge between these two natural...

Bassett: You're talking about Weyerhaeuser now.

Blum: Weyerhaeuser also. Perhaps it is the way the photograph caught it.

Bassett: It must be. I'm forgetting that you are at a real disadvantage if you haven't seen these buildings. At the hotel, the land falls off and the building sets into the land form much differently than the photograph indicates. If you're there, there are shelves, terraces, in the land and in the building. One of the shelves becomes a major thoroughfare and a great porch. It's the place the bar opens onto, that the lobby above looks down into. There's an auditorium, and steps up to the entrance of the garden. It's like the promenade deck on a ship. If there's any precedent for the architectural idea, it has to do with a ship, a ship you move back and forth along.

Blum: And the interior was finished. The landscaping was done. This seems like a complete package.

Bassett: Everything was done. Don Austin did a great job on the landscaping.

Blum: In the credit lines, John Weese was listed as the partner-in-charge.

95 Bassett: I'd forgotten that. He had so little to do with the job. There had to be an administrative partner and it wasn't about to be Owings, so we stuck John with the title.

Blum: Let me just read my notes: John Weese was the partner-in-charge, you were the partner-in-charge of design, and Marc Goldstein was the project designer. Davis—is it Davis or David Allen?

Bassett: It's Davis Allen, but he's called Dave.

Blum: Davis Allen did interiors and Richard Ciceri was the project manager. What's the difference between partner-in-charge and partner-in-charge of design, and project designer?

Bassett: The partner-in-charge of design has the responsibility of making all important design decisions, and ensuring that all details are to his satisfaction. The project designer is the architect who worked for me on the job continually. He is always a talented design architect assigned permanently to a project. I could not be on the job all the time. I had perhaps half a dozen projects that I was involved in. They were all in different phases of design and of different qualities. Also, some of them were slow and some were fast, and some we thought to be important jobs and others less so.

Blum: What was John Weese's participation?

Bassett: John was a figurehead in this case. He was busy on other projects in the office. Tenneco, for example, and our planning work in Washington. Ciceri was an excellent project manager and got things done. When a project manager was experienced and able, the managing partner's input was often minimal. You know, I was the design partner. I only messed in administration matters if it affected the job or me. If something was wrong, then we had a big fight and got it over with.

96 Blum: It's sometimes difficult to untangle all these things and understand where one person's responsibility stops and another's starts.

Bassett: You shouldn't try to be so neat. Doing architecture is not neat.

Blum: The project was finished or you considered it finished, but at a later date an architect was hired and made the statement that Rockefeller considered this project unfinished. This architect, George Wimberly, proceeded to add another story to the building itself.

Bassett: Yes. They added a wing, too, which is adjacent and does not impinge on the original building.

Blum: Did you think at the time that Rockefeller considered it incomplete?

Bassett: I doubt that. This pattern is common with hotel developers. To start, they decide how big a hotel they can build that will turn a profit but minimize their investment risk. After it is built and successful, they then feel they can enlarge without risk and make even more money. There are guests who come back to that hotel every year since its construction. They wouldn't miss a year without going back there. We still get letters and praise about the hotel, even though it was built so long ago that other hotels have long since surpassed it. I can't really explain about Laurance's attitude. It may have been because the costs got out of control, for the reasons I've explained. Maybe not. I found Laurance's thought processes somewhat arcane.

Blum: That addition, for budgetary reasons, was in different materials and not nearly the quality as the original.

Bassett: It was not. It was not nearly the quality. It was also ill-advised from an architectural point of view. It disturbed the mass and the sections and the ventilation. It was not in character, either. It was done just to add a few rooms because his people felt they ought to get as many rooms as they could. That's the way hotel people think.

97 Blum: And today it's not owned by Rockefeller at all.

Bassett: Oh, no. He sold it to the Westin people, Westin Hotels. They are out of Seattle and run a good shop. The original Rockefeller manager, who was an excellent man named Butterfield, stayed on for years after Westin bought it, until he retired. He became an institution. I understand the hotel is now owned by the Japanese.

Blum: Were you pleased with what you did?

Bassett: Yes, very happy. It's a gorgeous building. I've never gone back since it was finished, for reasons I'm not about to go into here. I had a very bad taste in my mouth about the job.

Blum: About a year later, the Alcoa building was on your boards. Unlike Mauna Kea, about which I have read almost everything good, positive, complimentary, just glowing, the Alcoa building has sustained some criticism from some architectural critics.

Bassett: Oh, really?

Blum: For instance, one of the comments was that the diagonal bracing was just too heavy for—what was it, twenty-five stories—for as short a building as it was. Height just didn't justify this heavy bracing.

Bassett: I don't remember that criticism, nor do I accept it. There isn't any part that is any larger than it has to be and the scale of the members feels right to me.

Blum: And they said the inconvenience of having this diagonal bracing cut views from inside was just not worth doing it. How do you feel about it?

Bassett: Wrong. I can only say that I worked in the building for ten years and did not observe the bracing as a problem to anyone, including myself. I might add that

98 the building is prized by its tenants and, if I remember correctly, has the lowest vacancy factor of any prime space in the city.

[Tape 4: Side 2]

Bassett: People say: "You did this building before Chicago did Hancock and therefore, you had the idea first." That's not true. The idea of a diagonally braced building had been around a long time. Myron Goldsmith did some school exercises, but even Myron's things were inspired by diagrams from the earliest days of the modern movement. That's true of the bracing at the Oakland Coliseum, too.

Blum: I think architectural historians would like to establish connections by saying it came from Myron to you then to Bruce Graham and the Hancock in Chicago.

Bassett: That is difficult, but let's try.

Blum: Now, in Chicago, the diagonal bracing was done for wind bracing.

Bassett: Sure.

Blum: In San Francisco, were they done for earthquakes?

Bassett: The answer is yes and no. Let me tell how Alcoa got that way. When we started design on Alcoa, we knew that we had a pleasing architectural mass: a 1:2 rectangular footprint, and sufficiently tall to yield a very pleasing proportion. Also, it was symmetrical on both axes with an interior core, and ideal for a very neat, non-eccentric framing system. The site was atop a low two block city park, a podium, so that our building enjoyed a very visible position, unencumbered in all directions. From the start, I felt that the site was asking that the building be a set-piece, a jewel, if you like. Furthermore, the surrounding buildings were of generally opaque masonry with punched windows, or otherwise limited amounts of glass. Therefore thought I, the building should be as monochromatic, dark and polished as possible. This is the precept we started with. I remembered that some years before, Myron had designed the Norton building in Seattle. This

99 was after he had finished the UAL [United Air Lines] Wash Hangar. He had several framing and wall treatments under study. One of them, not used, employed a diagonal system set flush in the wall. In that early study model, it looked tentative and graphically anemic. But it started me wondering about the possibility of a diagonal system for Alcoa. I soon concluded that the building's dimensions and geometry were ideal, and if we could successfully move the exposed frame of verticals and diagonals out and free of the glass plane, that we would have a hell of a building. Independently of these design efforts, we were studying various framing systems to reduce the structural. It was not a high- budget building. Our basic frame was an inexpensive twenty-foot bay. After study we emerged with a design that utilized a forty-foot bay in both directions of primary columns and another system of secondary columns set between, except that these were in tension instead of compression and therefore, very small in section. In addition, these worked beautifully with the intersection of the diagonal members. It all fell in place and we were off and running. Our framing system was able to reduce our structural cost by twenty percent. This was due to tension columns and, more importantly, that our exterior frame did all the bracing far more efficiently than the normal method of incorporating the bracing into the core walls. There was more than enough money saved to easily pay for the extra aluminum cladding needed by the free-standing members.

Blum: Now, the Golden Gateway Center was another architect's project. How did you get the Alcoa building in the middle of it all?

Bassett: I can only speculate. We took part in the original competition, and lost out to the Wurster office. It was their master plan. They were the architects for the garage, the slab and point block apartments, the town houses, the Alcoa podium garage, as well as the landscaping and design of a park. To my knowledge, the Perini Corporation of Boston was the prime developer for all of the Wurster architecture. Perini was represented in San Francisco by one of the sons. The office building was a joint venture development of Perini and Alcoa. I can only speculate that when it came time for the office building, Alcoa was very clear about who they wanted to do the building. Alcoa was well aware of our ability to use aluminum beautifully, and of our reputation as architects. The definitive

100 design phase proceeded smoothly. We were ready to start working drawings and had a beautiful display model that had been presented to our client representatives and the redevelopment authority with unqualified success. We thought. Suddenly we were told that the building was not approved, that we were to return to a conventional twenty-foot bay, abandon the exposed diagonal frame and sheath the tower in a standard curtain wall. As you might expect, I was very upset. We had an elegant, even spectacular building and now this had happened. I called Nat and I said, "Nat, what can we do about this." He said, "Well, that's terrible. We've got to do something. I'll get back to you," and he reached—I don't know how he did it—but he got a hold of the senior Perini in Boston, and of the CEO of Alcoa, and said, "Look. This cannot happen. We're going to come and talk to you. Can you both be in Pittsburgh? Tell me when." They told him when, and he and I took off the next day with the model and flew to Pittsburgh, and we sold them on doing it! They liked the twenty percent savings, but more importantly, they really did like the building. The Alcoa CEO especially, and Perini backed off because he had acted solely on his son's dislike of the building. I'm afraid that the practice of architecture is littered with such terrible near disasters. There was an ironic twist: the job was then delayed for something like eight months. It had to do with the bureaucracy of redevelopment and other official matters. They exceeded the time limit on the preliminary bids that reserve so much tonnage in the mill at an agreed price. When the thing got back on track, the twenty percent was lost. The building went ahead and has been very successful in every respect. My one regret was not being able to have an appropriate curtain wall. If Alcoa could have had the Zellerbach wall!

Blum: Was there any exchange between this building and the Hancock, between you and Bruce, or you and anybody as that project developed?

Bassett: No. Alcoa had nothing that was relevant to the scale or character of the problems that Bruce and Faz faced on Hancock. They dealt with them just right. Hancock and Sears are two splendid, bigger-than-life buildings. They make me feel like a farm boy.

101 Blum: It's also easy to think there might be some connection because of the same office and the visual similarities.

Bassett: You should be beware of easy connections.

Blum: At about the same time, you were working on the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum complex. I have some confusion about it because I thought that Myron worked on this as well.

Bassett: He did. More than a year before the Oakland-Alameda project became, in fact, a project, the office did a promotional package for the group that wanted to build the facility. They needed a model and diagrammatic drawings with sufficient additional factual material to present a brief but reasonably complete idea of what such a facility might look like, what would be in it, including spectator capacities, and a very tentative projection of costs. Myron and a member of my design group, Chuck Stickney, were the people most involved. I participated, as did John Merrill and several others of our staff. The original model and the built facility can be compared easily, since both have been published in the SOM books. After our package was submitted, the project was fallow for a long time while the normal political and financial aspects were worked out. When it became real, we began serious programming, a long arduous process, and site development so the controlling dimensions and geometries could be established. Various consultants were engaged, including seating and structural, audio and lighting, theatrical and parking. The list seemed interminable. The design effort had to accommodate all these complexities and at the same time, keep the architectural character intact. When the dust settled, the general concept had survived. The disposition of all elements remained the same, but the structural system of the stadium changed completely except for its circular form. The raised berm with the exhibition space below remained, and most importantly, the coliseum, for design purposes, could be considered completely intact, unchanged from the concept derived by Myron. The complexity and size of the project required a large staff in every phase. John Merrill was very involved throughout, including design. Myself also, with Jim Alcorn as my project architect. Myron had returned to Chicago long before.

102 Blum: But Myron participated in the original scheme with Chuck Stickney?

Bassett: Yes. As I have described, Myron and Stickney and myself worked together on the total scheme, but I think it is fair to say that the coliseum is Myron's. I think the idea was a continuation of work he had begun when he was with Nervi in Rome.

Blum: He said that at one time he proposed something similar for, I think, Portland, but that was not accepted.

Bassett: That's right.

Blum: But he left San Francisco. And then what was left to do?

Bassett: You jest! We had to turn it into architecture. Our contract on this job was somewhat risky. We agreed that if the project cost, when the construction bids were taken, was more than the project budget, that SOM would do all revisions to the documents required to reduce the cost accordingly, at our expense. Merrill and I had to stay close to the job. It was very difficult to ascertain the cost repercussions of almost everything we were doing. We worried a lot. One of the most important sponsors of the project was a heavy construction outfit named Atkinson. They normally built dams and bridges instead of buildings, but they were going to build this. The message was clear that we could help the cost problem a lot if our design was a no-frills, basic and tough approach to materials and details. I think that attitude contributed a great deal to design quality of the project, and Atkinson could do it.

Blum: That he could build?

Bassett: Yes. As it happened, the prices came in fine and we were underway. Not only that but we had been able to keep the final design faithful to the original intent. Any differences, except for the Coliseum roof, would be difficult to see, even to the practiced eye. The roof, as a structural problem and as a repository of a large

103 mechanical plant, various kinds of theatrically important flexible light, communication and plumbing and God knows what else, was an enormously complicated design. When it was finished, we also had a ceiling in the Coliseum that was far more beautiful than originally contemplated.

Blum: What about the raised platform that the stadium and coliseum...

Bassett: The original and most important reason for the raised platform level was to have the spectators enter both structures at the most advantageous elevation in respect to the seat forms. When those levels at each building were continued across the space between them a public circulation plaza was created, which at the same time became a roof for the exhibition hall. The hall then disappeared from view, leaving the stadium and coliseum to stand free on the platform, rising about a sea of cars.

Blum: Were you satisfied with this project?

Bassett: I think we were a little nervous at this time because newer facilities around the country have larger seating capacities and it seems inevitable that pressure will be brought on the facility management to do something about it. It is vulnerable to harm.

[Tape 5: Side 1]

Blum: A project that has been spoken about in glowing terms was the Weyerhaeuser project. Would you talk a little bit about that?

Bassett: That job started originally in the New York office, but a management change in the headquarters of Weyerhaeuser in Tacoma then decided that the New York office was too remote and that they wanted the job moved to San Francisco. At that point, the existing scheme that had been developed in New York for a site near Tacoma was dropped and we began work on a new site. It had advantages that the other lacked. It had much more public exposure. It was adjacent to the main freeway between Seattle and Tacoma, and had easier access to the airport.

104 Best of all, it had an interesting character which immediately suggested a solution. The land itself had been cut up badly over a long period of time by county roads, abandoned access trails and spotty, semi-rural development. After we had determined how the building was to be placed on the site, Peter Walker, our landscape architect, and ourselves began to work on a plan to reclaim and heal the property under the stewardship of Weyerhaeuser. That has happened, much to my satisfaction, and I am as happy with that as if it were architecture. The building has been one of my most satisfactory experiences. I wanted to find a point where the landscaping and the building simply could not be separated, that they were each a creature of the other and so dependent that they could hardly have survived alone. It's a very simple statement, there's nothing to it. Simply a number of terraced floors moving across from one side of a swale to the other. It's a low ridge, so that you enter at the fourth level, a communal floor, with the three office floors below you instead of above. As the building progresses across the swale, forming a kind of dike or a dam, it gets broader as it goes on. The terraces are then planted with ivy that sweeps from the natural land form at either end. It's elegant and understated and essentially un-architectural.

Blum: There was a new vocabulary that was associated with the Weyerhaeuser project.

Bassett: That was open-space planning.

Blum: Open-space planning—what is that?

Bassett: It is a kind of office planning which is hardly new, but was receiving a great deal of attention then. It pertains to certain kinds of office uses. It's one in which the partitions and the private office as such, literally disappear. The space is left open and subdivided by work centers and stations. The partitions are only shoulder- height. The spacing of the work stations and the acoustic treatment of surfaces, including the walls or the work stations, are such that privacy is achieved. The relationships between people who are working together as teams on projects or have similar kinds of duties are much more immediate. It can be a very successful method. There had never been a major open-space installation in this country. There were smaller ones, that is, a part of a floor or perhaps an entire

105 floor of an office building. In this case, we were considering a commitment of, I think, between four and five hundred thousand square feet of space. It was an idea that required a building be designed specifically for open space, the nature of which could not be converted back to traditional office layouts. It's very deep space. Up to that point, almost all open-space trails in our country had been converted for space in typical office buildings. We made a crash trip to Europe. In two weeks, we were in something like ten different countries, saw probably twenty different installations.

Blum: By installations, are you talking about the building, or the outfitting of spaces? Are you talking about the interior, the furniture?

Bassett: No, we're talking about the utilization of open floor areas with work spaces instead of partitioned offices. They were almost all in northern Europe and in England. When we were finished, Weyerhaeuser was convinced that was the way to go.

Blum: Was this an architectural or an aesthetic decision or a management decision?

Bassett: Strictly management.

Blum: So it indicated the kind of management they wished to pursue within their office?

Bassett: Well, it indicated that they were both open-minded and gutsy about what might be done in order to increase their ability to respond to changing techniques of office procedure. There appears to be an easier, more comfortable relationship between fellow workers, and a commensurate increase in efficiency, especially communication. When there is a programmatic change in the work pattern it can be responded to immediately in open space.

Blum: Can you cite an example?

106 Bassett: Well, a given group of people could go home one evening and come back the next morning and find an utterly new arrangement of work stations changed to facilitate a new function, a new project, or a special team effort.

Blum: You're saying wall partitions and things?

Bassett: Not traditional partitions, but specialized workstations. The station as a way of office life is well established now and the design of the stations is much advanced, particularly because of our electronic communication advances.

Blum: Was open planning and open spaces and flexibility in a floor plan considered a new idea in 1971?

Bassett: Yes, in the context we are discussing, of facilitating the flow of information, work processes and kinds of occupations that were traditionally closeted in private offices. There has always been a need of very large, open work areas. In the pre- data processing era of an insurance company, for example, huge rooms full of clerks all doing the same chore was common. The emergence of the work station as a design entity, specifically arranged, technically and acoustically, to facilitate office tasks is pivotal to open landscape.

Blum: How was the system developed for this?

Bassett: Flexibility of arrangement is most important to an open landscape plan. This means wide and deep space, far different than the thirty to forty foot dimension one finds in normal office space. In Weyerhaeuser we were dealing with spaces of several hundred feet in either direction. Architecturally, it requires a full commitment to the philosophy if it is to be successful. That's why I used the word "gutsy" a few minutes ago.

Blum: Was the system that was given the Knoll name the Stevens system? Was that the furniture used?

107 Bassett: Yes. Stevens was the Knoll designer. When we started the project, our people worked with Stevens to develop an appropriate, advanced and high quality work station. That was done and it became a standard in the industry. I am sure it still exists and is constantly being updated.

Blum: And Weyerhaeuser apparently agreed to use some of these pieces?

Bassett: Wrong. It was designed for Weyerhaeuser initially, and was used exclusively throughout the project. Charles Pfister was head of our interior group then, and worked hand-in-glove with myself and my project architect, Dick Foster. Pete Walker of SWA was of critical importance. He and I had worked together years before on the Golden Gateway and Carmel Valley Manor. Have I forgotten anyone?

Blum: Rodgers Associates was mentioned.

Bassett: Rodgers and Associates was an open-space consultant out of New York that had been promoting the open-space technique for years, and had managed some installations, but only in buildings not designed for that purpose. They were active in the very early stages, when we went to Europe, because they knew where to go to look, and they were instrumental in recommending to Weyerhaeuser that they use open landscape. At an appropriate time, the Rodgers group tapered off.

Blum: Was this a whole new concept for you?

Bassett: Assuredly, and interestingly, because between the fact of open landscape and the character of the site, a very different kind of building emerged. There are but three working floors, all large in area but different in conformation nestled into the land. As a visitor, you enter at the fourth level that contains the cafeteria and dining room, meeting rooms, lounges and lobbies. Its elevation coincides with the top elevation of the low ridges at each end of the building. The car parks are terraced. You walk down an allée of sycamores and directly into your floor from

108 the parking lot. The floor above the entrance level is the fifth or executive floor. That, too, is open space. There are no private offices in the building.

Blum: That sounds like a very unusual arrangement.

Bassett: It is. George Weyerhaeuser is out there with everyone else. As you might expect, their work stations are somewhat larger and fancier. There were small conference rooms for confidential talks or for meetings in which the amount of talk involved would disturb adjacent occupants. The fact that George is out there says something.

Blum: This somehow reminds me of something you described in your own work situation where you had your office adjacent to your design studio.

Bassett: Yes, but the traditional architect's drafting room continues to this day and remains an excellent example of open landscape.

Blum: That was the accessibility.

Bassett: Right. Accessibility. The office can, with certain personalities, become a little private empire with a shut door. I guess no one knows whether you're working or taking a nap. If your office goes, you cannot escape a one-to-one relationship with your fellow workers. Initially, there were a lot of people who were terribly upset, usually for hierarchical reasons. It can be traumatic for certain types of people.

Blum: So, it's been eighteen years and the management and everyone else has had a chance to live with that concept. Is it still a viable concept to your way of thinking?

Bassett: Apparently. I know they have updated the workstations several times. I never heard anything but happiness with it. Visitors tell me that the building and grounds are well maintained.

109 Blum: Now they obviously were very pleased with your design and the whole project because they hired the San Francisco office and you again for another project.

Bassett: Yes. It has been a happy relationship. We are friends to this day.

Blum: There are several monumental works of art in that building, three being tapestries. Was it unusual to have tapestries of that dimension?

Bassett: No, there are tapestries from medieval times of unbelievable size. The largest at Weyerhaeuser is a seven by thirty-foot piece by Mark Adams. It is very beautiful. There are two others on the executive floor by Helena Hernmark. They are extraordinary and beautiful. They were amongst her first major pieces. She has since gone on and accomplished a great deal of fine work all around the country.

Blum: Helena recently installed two important tapestries in lobbies of new buildings in Chicago.

Bassett: What a delight. We awarded one of her earliest commissions in Melbourne for the Australian Mutual Provident Society, an insurance group. The two pieces at Weyerhaeuser are very successful and instrumental, I think, in obtaining subsequent commissions.

Blum: How did you hear about her if she was unknown?

Bassett: She came to me. Helena was born and trained in Sweden and had migrated to Canada. She was traveling about, beating the bushes, trying to find work. She came into the office and I found her work attractive and interesting. Scandinavian weaving is much more open than, for example, Mark's piece. He weaves in the Aubusson style. The open weave tends to be quite impressionistic, especially at close range. Helena has a fabulous eye for color and value and the effects of distance. I am happy for her success. She and her husband, Niels Diffrient, are good friends.

110 Blum: The drawing of the Burnham Plan served as a model for one of the tapestries she did for the Philip Johnson building in Chicago.

Bassett: Really? If Philip's using her, then she's arrived. Right?

Blum: She did another of a Louis Sullivan stencil design for the lobby of an SOM building in Chicago.

Bassett: That makes sense. At Weyerhaeuser there's a third major piece of artwork which is probably not identified as such. That is the guardian stone at the main entrance.

Blum: Yes. There are two. One very large wood piece and one stone.

Bassett: The wood piece is inside. It is a monolithic, large piece of wood carved in part both by sculptor and nature. It is by a very talented man with the unlikely name of Blunk.

Blum: J.M. Blunk.

Bassett: He lives in Inverness just north of here and is a wizard at working with the natural forms of pieces of wood. The wood is usually the great burl knots from the root system of redwood trees. He obtains most of his material through the lumber companies.

Blum: Well, it was difficult to tell how large it is because there was nothing there to use as a measure and no scale was given.

Bassett: They're not an insignificant size. One of his early, most successful pieces is in the entrance lobby of the Oakland Museum that Kevin Roche did many years ago. Blunk's work has a wonderful visual and tactile quality, something of the feel of a beautiful pipe bowl that someone's hand has rubbed for a hundred years. That sort of thing. The guardian rock was my idea. It came to me early on, when the

111 building's character began to appear. I knew that I did not want another piece of ritual corporate art.

Blum: Was this outdoors as well?

Bassett: Yes. The climate in the Northwest is so beautiful with the mists and fogs and the grayed greens. Very Whistler-like, very oriental. I must have been on a Morris Graves kick. Anyway, my conclusion was to have a great, monumental stone, a guardian stone, placed at the east entrance. Traditional Japanese gardens usually have such a stone. It is a spirit stone to protect the garden. The idea was so romantic that I had no trouble getting client approval. Then I was put back by the fact that there weren't any beautiful stones. That region of the Northwest is essentially volcanic or basaltic in nature. I started doing research and discovered that there was an area in the Little Sierra foothills, east of Fresno that had such things. I knew of a splendid man named Gordon Newell, a stone sculptor I'd come to know because he lived in Big Sur where Nat and Margaret Owings lived. He was always looking for stone to use. He was the kind of sculptor who would take a piece of stone and then, using its natural qualities of form, turn it into something really quite wonderful. I enlisted him to help me find the stone. We rendezvoused in Fresno with a Jeep. We headed east up into the foothills and drove and drove. I think we drove for two days, every road and track we came to. He knew where he was going, and I kept looking.

Blum: Did you have an idea of what you wanted him to do?

Bassett: He knew what I wanted. He did not misunderstand that. It was just a question of going up road after road until we happened on it. Eventually we came around a bend on a dirt track, and, my God, there was something. We kept looking at it. There were two stones in there. One was very large and the other less so and then it suddenly occurred to us that they were parts of the same stone that had broken apart eons ago. We were at a considerable elevation by then. It was very, very beautiful. We decided that if it were stood on end and the smaller part put in place, that it would be perfect and just the right size. We found that the land belonged to a private summer camp for boys. They were very happy to sell stone

112 because they needed money. Then it became a question of getting the damn thing out. That took a bit of doing. A little bulldozing was needed to get a rig to the location. We used one of those trailers that has eighteen wheels. You've seen the kind with the bed that hovers just above the road. Because Gordon has practice at the problem of wrestling with stones for his own use, he was finally able to get it on the trailer and down to the highway. We had to get special permission to move it north because of the weight and the size of the trailer. It had to have a pick-up truck in front of it and in back of it with lights blinking. Then they started north. We were somewhere north of Portland, a good part of the way to Tacoma, when the weight broke the back of the trailer.

Blum: Well, when I hear stories like this, I wonder how the pyramids got built.

Bassett: Yes. I assume that they were far more competent than we were. They had all those slaves! Eventually we got it in place. It was just exactly what I had hoped for.

Blum: Well, the photographs are quite striking. But the way you describe it, it must be absolutely gigantic.

Bassett: Large enough. When the building was finished, I gave a present to George of two white swans and two black swans from Australia for the lagoon, for the pond. We had built a swan house out in the water of shingles and copper. It had a platform about six inches above the water, and that's where they lived and nested.

Blum: You had your hand in every detail of this project.

Bassett: That was not unusual especially if I was excited by the architectural potential.

Blum: Was the area open enough so people from the outside could come in?

Bassett: Yes. There's a loop road that you use, purposely left open so people could enjoy the site.

113 Blum: Well, to have such a large project turn out so successful and for you to be so satisfied and involved in all the details, it must have been very easy to work with the client.

Bassett: They were very nice people.

Blum: Did they take your word for most everything?

Bassett: Yes. They often didn't really understand what Bassett was babbling about, but they tried to understand and went along. Without exception, they were happy with the result. George is a very nice person and obviously an expert businessman, but he is not a visually interested person, not visually oriented. He really took me on good faith, which was a nice compliment.

Blum: With clients, who decides?

Bassett: I don't think it's ever the same. There are almost as many answers to that question as there are clients. Much of SOM's work is with developmental organizations. Jerry Hines and his group would be an excellent example. They have a site, they develop exactly what they think they want in square footage and they know exactly how much money they're going to spend. There is a staff experienced in every stage of development—programming, supervision of the architectural and engineering effort and the construction process. They have standards that they've developed with other buildings that will apply to the one you're going to work on for them. They know right down to the last penny what the rental rates are going to be, and what kind of return they must have.

Blum: Is that when it's a speculative venture?

Bassett: Right, but they try to eliminate the word "speculative." As an architect, you have to be experienced and able enough to buy into that arrangement and be able to satisfy them and still get a building that keeps you happy. That takes some

114 practice. I think the firm has been successful that way with Jerry as well as with other developers.

Blum: From what you've said about the San Francisco office, Nat Owings seemed to have a lot to do with clients.

Bassett: Well, Nat could be very successful with certain clients. He needed a one-on-one relationship, that of the patron-architect tradition. He could transmit ideas and enthusiasm beautifully, but he had little patience. He especially had trouble with the layers of decision making common to bureaucracies and many corporate structures. Nat loved to be expansive about what he saw as the possibilities of a new project. Unfortunately, speculators usually don't follow that route. They've already decided. When Nat was dealing with people who were building their own building for their own use, he could be very persuasive. The Tenneco job is a perfect example and Tenneco's CEO was Gardner Symonds. He was originally from Chicago. So I imagine that Nat had some advantage going in, a little of the old boy network from their Chicago days. Owings was just right and I was experienced enough to keep him on track. At least I was old enough to not look like a kid that had wandered in by mistake. Symonds handed the project over to one of his top people, Charlie Lingo, saying only that he wanted the building as quickly as possible. Lingo was the only man we dealt with. He listened hard, did not try to play architect and gave fast decisions. He never talked about money unless he felt he wasn't getting his money's worth. We built one of our best buildings and set all kinds of scheduling and construction records along the way.

Blum: Is that the ideal situation for you?

Bassett: I should say, but that kind of job has almost ceased to exist.

Blum: You've been quoted as saying that developers are very difficult to work with.

Bassett: My comment must have been unprintable. Sometimes impossible, never easy. But, as I've explained, people like Jerry Hines are a different bag. My remark stems largely from my acquaintance with the developers' art during the late

115 1950s and the 1960s. During that period, most developers' buildings were shaped by a urban real estate and investment mystique that said that an office floor could only be certain ways, that only certain dimensions were successful. That you had to have a certain kind of wall and a certain amount and kind of light, and it had to have regularity of plan and a maximum of flexibility. They stripped everywhere except the lobby and elevator cabs to keep costs down and used assumptions in their financial calculations so conservative that they almost completely eliminated risk. The buildings were terrible and our cities are littered with them. We architects did our share, including SOM. The Equitable buildings in Chicago and New York are excellent examples. Emery Roth people did so many of them, and there's an equal number of them in Chicago. They developed the mystique of what an office building had to be.

Blum: Was this based on market research or their budget or what?

Bassett: Yes, and old-fashioned greed. The architectural profession fell right into step. We all loved doing flat walled, elegant and largely featureless buildings. It was a fateful coincidence of clients with austere budgets and architects whose credo was austerity.

Blum: You designed the John Hancock building, now Industrial Indemnity. Was that done partially for rental?

Bassett: Right, but that building was a novelty. Although its typical floor met best standards for layout, the quality of materials and the detailing were far superior.

Blum: How did you get away with it?

Bassett: The building was for an institutional client whose investment portfolio included real estate, but not the developing of buildings for investment.

Blum: But part of that building was to be rented.

116 Bassett: Yes, but the building's main purpose was as the John Hancock western headquarters. They would expand into the rented space as required. Remember, I told you how fortunate we were in dealing with the president who, at that time, was an old-fashioned businessman and had not graduated from the Harvard School of Business.

Blum: And he hadn't read the reports about rental buildings?

Bassett: I don't know. The developer who broke out of the straightjacket was Hines, with Philip Johnson's help. The two of them began taking considerable liberties with all the sacred cows of development. Floor plans changed, the walls and tops and entrance levels suddenly started doing interesting things, even good materials and expensive detailing made an appearance. Hines proved that if a building was attractive and well put together, people would rent it because they wanted to be there. Soon the more timid followed suit, and suddenly the smoke screen blew away.

Blum: But you're quoted as making the statement that developers are difficult.

Bassett: That's right. It is in my blood to regard developers with suspicion.

Blum: And developers were the bulk of SOM's clients from 1970 on.

Bassett: Developers of the second order, with or without partners, usually do mediocre buildings. San Francisco has many such buildings. Major developers usually have an important partner who is in the same community as the project. When that partner is institutional and intends to be an important tenant in the building, then the equation becomes more complicated, but the opportunity of an interesting building increases. Hines's venture with the Southeast Bank in Miami for example. It's the biggest bank in the region. They intended to play a part in the design because it was going to be their headquarters. There was an additional reason also. It was that the wife of the CEO was Florence Schust Knoll who, as you might expect, had considerable interest in the quality of the project. Her husband's name was Harry Hood Bassett. A very important gentleman in those

117 parts, but no relative of mine. His antecedents were English and mine were French via Canada.

Blum: You know, I've wondered whether there was any connection between the Bassett she married and you.

Bassett: Betrayed again, but it was a fun coincidence. They were a force, so the combination of Hines always well-motivated to good design, and Southeast Bank was such that I had a far better opportunity to do a really good building, with a developer yet!

Blum: How did you in San Francisco get a job in Miami?

Bassett: I was interviewed with three other architects, and they decided on me.

Blum: Architects from around the country?

Bassett: Yes. That is quite normal. Very seldom nowadays, particularly with developers, does someone say, "We want you to do our building. It does happen, but usually the interested firms appear by arrangement with their dog and pony show, and over a two-or-so-day period, they talk.

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Bassett: They may start out with a list of twelve architects who appear and make a presentation of work. Then they make a cut. The building committee, or whoever, makes a cut, and they're down to three architects and then you go through it again in more depth with longer discussions. Then they choose.

Blum: A process like interviewing for jobs or anything else.

Bassett: That's right. It happens all the time.

118 Blum: You've talked about the developer as a client, both good and bad. You did the United States Embassy in Moscow. What was the government like as a client? How did you get that job?

Bassett: I was recommended by a panel that was advising the State Department, and to tell you the truth, I don't know who was on the panel. They were eminent architects.

Blum: I know Nat Owings had a connection in Washington because he was involved in the Pennsylvania Avenue improvement plan. Was this the connection?

Bassett: Good heavens no. You are pushing the connection thing. The Pennsylvania Avenue thing was under the Pennsylvania Committee, and I had some involvement in that. No, the State Department has an advisory panel, which I subsequently served on years later.

Blum: Are you still an advisor to the State Department?

Bassett: No, that's always a three-year contract. As a matter of fact, I think the Reagan administration was able to eliminate the enlightened program all together.

Blum: Oh. Were you paid for being a consultant other than for your expenses?

Bassett: No, just our expenses. In respect to the Moscow project, the selection took a funny pattern. I received a phone call saying that they wanted to talk. I went to Jack Rodgers, who was the senior administrative partner in the San Francisco office. Nat wasn't around much. We met with them in a private room in the Pacific Union Club. They indicated what the nature of the thing was and that they were interested in us being the architects and were we interested.

Blum: Who in the government is responsible for hiring architects for embassies?

Bassett: The State Department has a separate branch called FBO, Foreign Building Operation. The FBO handles all physical aspects of the State Department's

119 overseas operations. All the land and all the buildings on the land in all the countries that we are represented in, or literally every country in the world, the amount of money involved with the maintenance, purchase of new or selling, the furnishing and the construction, is the FBO's charge.

Blum: Every word you say makes it grow by leaps and bounds. Who appointed you to the panel?

Bassett: I was asked to serve by the outgoing members. It is a rotating panel with overlaps so it was an ongoing thing.

Blum: When you designed the complex for the American Embassy in Moscow, did it get built as designed?

Bassett: Oh, yes. It is a huge project, with many parts. It is all in use except for the chancellery office building, which is the only building you hear about.

Blum: Well, of course, I read in the papers as everyone else did that it was bugged. I understand the bugs were in the precast portions.

Bassett: That's what they said, yes.

Blum: Is that true?

Bassett: Who is to know? Probably, but I don't take it seriously, if that's what you want to know. It all had to do with the chancellery or office building. But in addition to that building, there is a ten-and-a-half acre site, with a school, workshops, and a marine barracks. It has a whole community underneath the commons. You can get your hair done, go to the store, bowl, go to a little bar, have lunch.

Blum: But it's all in one walled-in area.

Bassett: True. But do you know how large ten and a half acres is? It has a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a hundred-and fifty apartments, car parking. It's a city

120 within a city. At the time the project was being programmed and designed, the relationship between the Soviets and ourselves could only be described as tenuous and essentially hostile.

Blum: Is that why everyone was protected in one area?

Bassett: In a sense. Not protected, but in one group. The American government has always had a policy in foreign installations to have as much staff as possible living outside of the compound, out in the community. That, as you would expect, was anathema to the Soviets.

Blum: So what you designed was contrary to that?

Bassett: No, the program assumed that the U.S. would still successfully insist that a certain number of staff would live out in the community. This is difficult to talk about. It's very complicated and it would take a day to discuss. Even if Russia and the United States were suddenly the closest of friends, Russia is still, from a cultural and language point of view, a strange and difficult culture. It is natural that the American staff be together where they can communicate and share their natural and commonly shared lifestyles. When I was first in Moscow, the staff in the Moscow installation had to send their dry cleaning to Berlin. You couldn't get it done in Moscow. That is just an example.

Blum: Isn't that perpetuating the image of the ugly American?

Bassett: Hardly. The big shots in the party had to do the same thing to get things done. I told you, it's a very complicated story.

Blum: I'm sure it is. When you went there, you saw the site.

Bassett: Yes. I was in Moscow with my people a number of times, in several cases for one or two weeks at a time. With the FBO I had to deal with the City of Moscow authorities on a number of practical issues.

121 Blum: Did they dictate any program in the sense...

Bassett: No. Most importantly, they gave us a zoning envelope. It maintained consistent and quite low heights along both long sides of the site and at the north end. Beyond assuring good surveillance of the installation, the intent seemed designed to protect good views of a Stalinist wedding cake, that was five hundred meters north of us.

Blum: Was there any effort on your part to make the American compound sympathetic to what was on either side?

Bassett: No, there was not a worthwhile context. One of the Soviet athletic clubs had a park on one side. There was a disparate series of apartment buildings and a very early important contemporary cooperative apartment by a famous early Russian modern architect named Ginsburg, which appeared to be beyond repair. There were two main roads adjacent to the site, and then the tall building to the north I've mentioned previously.

Blum: So the American compound had to have some integrity within itself.

Bassett: That's right. In that respect, we knew from the start what we hoped to achieve. We wanted to build a kind of precinct of rowhouses at small scale, place them around a park, a commons, keep everything as domestic and residential, and intimate in character as possible. The whole thing is done in brick of nice color and texture. There are trees and plantings with low walls, and trellis and brick paving. The project's architectural character stands in startling contrast to the gigantic and dismal apartment slabs that are everywhere in Moscow.

Blum: The question that has to occur to anyone reading the newspaper accounts is how did the bugs get in? Were Americans not allowed to supervise the precast portions?

Bassett: No, we had nothing to do with that. That was the government's responsibility.

122 Blum: U.S. government?

Bassett: FBO had their own inspection group. Our inspections were limited to insuring that the architectural design was being adhered to. Our inspection trips to the site were constant, but irregular in timing.

Blum: For you?

Bassett: Yes, or our people as required.

Blum: Am I misinformed to think that when American buildings are built, whether embassies or what, in other parts of the world, they are built by American service personnel with American materials at great cost? Is that something of a myth?

Bassett: It is not a myth. It is simply misinformed and terribly over simplified. Our country's needs around the world, I should say, encompass every possibility as well as every impossibility of getting something built. The FBO's responsibilities include impossible situations.

Blum: But this was a high-risk area.

Bassett: In our case the Russians did all the concrete work, including excavation of the foundations. Also the steel frame of the chancellery and masonry, although we provided the brick. The concrete work included all poured-in-place, precast panels, and precast structural members.

Blum: And we did not supervise those things? In retrospect, it would have been good if we did.

Bassett: Well, apparently. There's no reason why the State Department could not have had people at the plants if necessary, unless their budget would not permit.

Blum: Then I don't understand where the architectural firm's responsibility ended.

123 Bassett: Architectural inspection has to do with the accuracy and quality of architectural materials and workmanship both off and on the site. The FBO dealt with the technical supervision of the construction process. Security inspection involved specialized people and equipment and, appropriately, was none of our business.

Blum: So your responsibility was getting a plan that was acceptable to them, drawings, and seeing that they were...

Bassett: Design and construction documents. Then we had enough surveillance, that we insisted on, to go to the site periodically to make sure the project was being built as designed.

Blum: And you didn't know what was inside.

Bassett: No, and I'm not so sure anyone knows. And I'm not so sure that it's real and it's not just a boondoggle and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's no reason for us to talk about this any further.

Blum: Okay. Was that the first government project you worked on?

Bassett: I think so. Yes, first and last. Thank God!

Blum: What were they like as clients?

Bassett: Well, the FBO people were fine. They assign a project manager to you, and he shepherds the job. Then you make trips to Washington and make presentations all the way through the process of the earliest schematic idea and further development, and, final design. You meet with whom ever the panel is at that time who's advising them. The presentation room is full of FBO people as well, including specialists, and important visitors from the State Department. They look at everything, question you, argue amongst themselves, criticize, suggest. You keep going through a number of such meetings, and finally the job evolves. Meanwhile there've been innumerable trips to Moscow to discuss problems with the staff, to get their ideas to make sure that the function that needed to be

124 fulfilled is, in fact, like that and that this is the way things operate. We do that even though the staff that we're talking to will have long since departed.

Blum: How many people are involved?

Bassett: In the Moscow installation? There's three or four hundred people on the site. The apartments from large, nicely appointed quarters for the senior officers to modest but comfortable studio accommodations for the most junior clerk. The DCM is the most important after the ambassador. The DCM lives on the site, the ambassador lives at Spaso house, some distance away.

Blum: Was that an interesting experience for you?

Bassett: Yes. It was great, and we are very happy with the project, but saddened by the security brouhaha.

Blum: Can we talk a little bit about you and SOM? You advanced from being a brand- new employee to a partner in five years, which is very fast and unusual. The average time now is at least twelve years.

Bassett: I'm not aware of these statistics. I came in 1955 and I became a partner in 1960, didn't I?

Blum: Five years, yes. What part did Nat Owings play in your rapid promotion?

Bassett: I think he played an important part. He was a staunch supporter. On the other hand, I think that I must have been getting along okay because it couldn't have happened without the other partners, of which there were fourteen or fifteen at that time.

Blum: You mean nationally?

Bassett: Yes, nationally. A new partner is elected by all of the partners. Knowing that a lot of my architectural intentions or at least things that became evident, I thought I

125 was somewhat out of step. I really was very surprised that this had happened. Bruce in Chicago, Roy Allen in New York and myself, all design types, were made partners at that same time.

Blum: According to what's been published, full partners meet twice a year and all partners meet twice a year.

Bassett: Yes, there's a spring and winter meeting.

Blum: And there's a ladder that one climbs to get to be a partner and that's on a local level. First an associate partner and then a general partner?

Bassett: The lowest ranked level is a participating associate. The participants are usually young and noticeably able for their experience, worth watching closely. The associate partners are proven people of considerable ability and who carry a great deal of responsibility. Partners are elected out of the A.P. group. When I joined SOM in San Francisco there were, say, twelve participants, four associate partners, and two resident partners.

Blum: How many people were in the office when you arrived in 1955?

Bassett: In the office there were between fifty and sixty people.

Blum: That wasn't so small, but compared to other SOM offices it was.

Bassett: It was tiny compared to Chicago and New York. It included the mechanical department and two or three structural engineers, several field people and the clerical staff. Probably thirty-five architects or engineers.

Blum: You went straight into the design area.

Bassett: Yes, it was so small. Design hardly existed.

Blum: Were you aware of the fact that SOM placed a premium on designers?

126 Bassett: Naturally. The firm had a national reputation. Eero and Bun were peers and knew and liked each other.

Blum: You went into the design department. How long was it before you were head of that department?

Bassett: In the sense that you are speaking, not until I became a partner.

Blum: Was Chuck Wiley the main...?

Bassett: Wiley was the designer with most rank. The partners in New York and Chicago kept a lot of pressure on San Francisco. Our workload was not large, and our contribution to the firm's financial health was questionable. It was an uncomfortable time. I think the partnership finally decided that San Francisco could not survive unless important reductions in staff occurred. At that time, a number of senior people left, including Wiley.

Blum: Did he leave before you came?

Bassett: We overlapped for at least a year.

Blum: You were ever asked to leave?

Bassett: I survived. As a matter of fact, I was asked to decide who should stay in the design group. It was a confusing time for everyone, including myself. I became head of design through default. The design section was tiny, only five to eight people and increased some as our workload grew. By the time I was an associate, I was running the group and, in some cases, doing what a partner had to do out of necessity even though I was not one yet.

Blum: Was it at that time that you decided your office should be near the design people?

127 Bassett: For a long time we were so small, it was hardly a problem. Let's see. We were located in Zellerbach from its completion in 1959 until 1969. I was able to finally pry loose a tiny office adjacent to my group. The door opened to design and away from the front office.

Blum: Did the office in San Francisco or did you personally have any interest in entering competitions?

Bassett: Well, we entered a few but there weren't that many opportunities on the West Coast. We entered one for the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. We were invited along with Kevin Roche, and Anshen and Allen, a local firm. We did not win. Kevin didn't win. The winning solution left much to be desired. It must have won for reasons I cannot even imagine. No, we were a small group with enough work to more than keep busy. We went for years, by the standards of the New York and Chicago offices with very, very few people relative to our workload. I think the reason for that was because I was green and should have fought for a bigger slice of the fee. We chronically had fewer people working a lot harder and longer. When the office started rolling with more substantial commissions, the design group reached an appropriate size. Generally, the firm has been very careful about the necessary balance between labor, overhead and income.

Blum: It is known that early on, Nat Owings would use a technique to come up with the best design or the most appropriate solution. He would give two design teams the same problem to work on in competition with one another and he called that "creative tension." Did you ever use such a technique?

Bassett: Never heard that before.

Blum: Is that something you would consider using?

Bassett: I don't think so. Normally, our first step in the design process was to explore how many alternatives were available to solve the problem at hand. We wanted to avoid grabbing at the most obvious solution.

128 Blum: Within one group?

Bassett: Yes, within one or two people. I've never heard that story. Where did you hear it?

Blum: I read it.

Bassett: That must have occurred in the early days.

Blum: Yes, the early days.

Bassett: The only case that I know of was in the New York office when they were given the commission for the Manufacturers Hanover Trust building on Fifth Avenue. He used a technique like that.

Blum: Bunshaft or Owings?

Bassett: Bunshaft. They had an in-office competition. I think Bun has described it somewhere.

Blum: Well, this technique was attributed to Nat Owings early on.

Bassett: I believe you but I don't know anything about that.

Blum: This sort of identifies the problem that architectural historians are up against right now with SOM nationally and with each regional office individually. That the SOM office in San Francisco has a stricture against identification of individual creative roles only whets one's appetite to get into the sociology of the partnership. An article about SOM has said, "Let teamwork reign for now, and leave questions of authorship for future architectural historians." Are we now at that point?

Bassett: Who wrote that?

129 Blum: Oh, it was written in Architectural Forum in 1972.

Bassett: Who wrote it?

Blum: Well, let me just see. In fact, it was at the end of an article on Weyerhaeuser.

Bassett: Really. Well, that is true. No one argued with me. I had a personal attitude, hardly a policy, which was generally agreed to in San Francisco, including the senior designers. No personal credits, just to the San Francisco office. We were able to get away with this attitude for quite a while in San Francisco, but the other offices felt differently. I'm sure there would be less confusion if there was a firm wide policy. Gordon has always been identified with his work, as have Walter and Bruce. I am unhappy when my name appears, but I do not know what can be done. An author will say what he chooses. He has that right.

Blum: Well, often they say, "And it's no doubt the work of Chuck Bassett."

Bassett: I'm afraid so. Soon it will be like the movies. You go to a movie for an hour and a half, and at the end of it there's another hour and a half of credits, including everybody down to the kid that makes the peanut butter sandwiches for the star's lunch.

Blum: Why did you want an anonymous quality to surround projects?

Bassett: I didn't think of it as anonymity. I thought of it as appropriate recognition. One would have to go to great pains to be unaware of how many talents and energies share in the creation of a fine building, or of the discrepancy between that truth and the myth kept alive by an obvious cynicism that a building is born full- blown out of a single person's head. To perpetuate that myth, when it takes so many people, so much talent, so much technical expertise, so much dedication and commitment to a professional work ethic of a profession they love, it has always bothered me. Always has. I know that someone has to be in charge. No matter how democratic you like to be in the design process, it is at best a benign

130 autocratic system. Eventually someone has to be the one that says, "Well, okay, we've looked at all these things. Now this is what we're going to do." When someone starts to wander too far off course, it's that person who says, "Hey, come on. Quit kidding around. You're spending money and we're not getting the job done." These things are bound to happen, are part of the process. But I've always, in my own group, extended as much leniency as I could so that everyone felt that they had a chance to have their say and that when we decided what to do that they had been given full voice, that I had listened to them. I'd either agreed or not agreed, but it had been talked out. If possible, nothing happened in a preemptory or other way that indicated arrogance or uncaring about how they felt. There is no reason to single out a fine building as a product of a single mind. We don't do that for a Boeing 747, and the 747 is arguably one of mankind's greatest feat. So what is this nonsense?

Blum: Well, that's a very democratic and respectful and caring way to operate.

Bassett: No. As I just said, it is a benign dictatorship. Nothing is about to change. I'm aware of that. My complaint is one small part of the problem. Our culture is drowning in a sea of words, far too many words for what there is to say. I'm afraid that architecture, at the moment, is a little different than high fashion or the current contemporary art scene.

Blum: What you say is no doubt right on target, but I'm coming from a different point of view.

Bassett: No, I understand that.

Blum: What we say and record here will be put in a library for future research, and documents such as these could help scholars untangle the problem of authorship.

Bassett: But that's their problem.

131 Blum: There have been more and more articles dating from the years of the 1980s on trying in some way to look back and evaluate.

Bassett: Yes. You'll find the authors of these articles just the right age to indulge in nostalgia, remembering the good old days. It's much too early to look back and evaluate.

Blum: Well, SOM is fifty years old.

Bassett: I know, but the firm keeps growing. It remains as healthy if not healthier than it's ever been and keeps growing in its abilities.

Blum: One observation that continues to be repeated is that in the beginning, and this was probably related to publishing as well as buildings, there was real individuality and now there's a great anonymous quality. The implications, the meaning of which is that this anonymous quality allows SOM to produce on schedule and on budget using all the organizational talents that Americans seem to be known for around the world, but the quality of the design is mediocre.

Bassett: Let me see—how to respond to that? I guess that it is not surprising. In most cases, the critic's loyalty seems to lie with the small practitioner doing small but interesting work. A firm like SOM has always been anathema to these people and our national culture. Mostly due to media, has always been involved with the personality cult, whether it is a rock band, an architect, or the latest movie star. The situation is even more confused by the current state of American architecture. It looks cheapshot and plastic revivalism to me, but that is what you would expect me to say. My point, in reference to your remark is that a firm the size of SOM cannot help but reflect these stylistic trends. SOM has many young people in its lower ranks—talented, energetic, and of the current persuasion. They are affecting the character of SOM's work. Are you aware that Bunshaft was terribly upset with the firm's work? He, of course, was speaking mostly of the New York office. Bun felt betrayed. I can understand that, but I want to point out that his reaction was parallel to the comments you just referred to, reactions from people who were part of the modern movement.

132 [Tape 6: Side 1]

Bassett: My own opinion is that the firm is healthy, and more adventurous than ever. It has the momentum, the expertise and the resources that no other architect has ever had. It will use them when the opportunity is offered. It is also, as any single architect or firm will, reflecting the nature of the moment in our culture. Don't forget that architecture is a service industry.

Blum: Now that's very interesting because Nat Owings has been quoted as saying, "We've become a service firm and not design."

Bassett: Architecture's always been that way.

Blum: Well, not according to his quote. He was quoted as having criticized...

Bassett: Yes, but he was dead wrong. He could not have been further off the mark. That is the kind of remark that Corbu or Wright would make. Mies, bless his heart, had no such pretensions. The architect provides a service. It is nothing to be ashamed of. I don't understand where Nat or anyone else for that matter achieves such grandiosity of importance. Michelangelo took orders from the Pope, Haussmann from Louis and his generals, ad infinitum.

Blum: His exact words were, "We are order takers."

Bassett: Yes. Good lord, Bernini and Borromini and Brunelleschi and Michelangelo all had to argue with popes. And the pope was always right. Jerry Heinz, who is not a pope, at some point or another decides to agree or he decides he doesn't want to do it that way, and we have to find another. There lies the incredible myth in the mind of the layperson. One of the great perpetrators of that myth was Ayn Rand who wrote that terrible book.

Blum: The Fountainhead?

133 Bassett: The Fountainhead, yes. That the architect is bigger than life and decides everything. Nothing could be further from the truth. An architect is a person who hopefully is talented, who loves the process of building, who loves the aesthetics of building, and who is in love with love. To think for a moment that he stands ten feet tall astride mankind, waving his arms around and deciding. That's just pure baloney, even when it's Gary Cooper.

Blum: Does someone like Daniel Burnham fit that description?

Bassett: I don't think so. Burnham and Owings were similar types. They were movers and shakers, energetic, charismatic people. I'm not sure they were visionary. They certainly were optimists and concerned people. Burnham had the impetus of the city beautiful movement. It seems to be that Owings had a larger, more urgent stage to play upon. Burnham's America was full of unbounded optimism and, they thought, unbounded opportunity. Owing's America is full of tragic mistakes, a threatened environment, battles to be fought. For Owings, I think I would substitute the word "concerns" for "vision." He was a concerned citizen about issues far larger than the art of architecture.

Blum: But you know, Nat Owings seems to have had a vision in the beginning for what he wanted SOM to be. He didn't want it to be just a little Chicago office.

Bassett: Maybe. I'm sure that in the early days he was out there scrambling around, trying to find work for the office. But I guess you are right. SOM was born out of the exigencies of World War II and was equipped and ready after the war to be a new kind of architectural firm.

Blum: Do you think he was just a lucky recipient of conditions?

Bassett: Nat was more likely to create the condition. "Good Lord, look at Pennsylvania Avenue! What a mess. It's a ghetto between the Capitol and the White House! We've got to do something!" He had the ability to find an entree and to bull his way into the innermost sanctums, from president to cabinet member to business tycoon and then get interest, excitement, eventually action. The reconstruction of

134 Pennsylvania Avenue was a huge contribution, bigger than architecture. It begot the fight that defeated a federal plan to run a huge avenue across the face of the Capitol, cutting it off from the mall, replacing it instead with a beautiful reflecting pool. It begot the elimination of traffic on the Mall and the appropriate replanting needed so desperately. It begot the design and construction of constitution gardens, a large and beautiful new park at the side of the Mall on land that was defaced for years by the Navy's temporary sheds. There was the fight to save Baltimore Harbor, the Big Sur Coast, lots of monkey business in the National Park Service. The list goes on and on.

Blum: The way you're describing him, he sounds like he had vision and energy and the capacity—maybe catalyst is the very best and most appropriate word.

Bassett: Catalyst is appropriate. Nat did have certain "bigger than life" characteristics. He could be wonderful or a terror. There was very little between. He had neither the talent or the patience for the building process. It always bothered him because he loved architecture and loved talking about it. He used the shotgun technique, throwing out ideas left and right in the hopes than one would take hold.

Blum: Were you used to his technique and happy about it?

Bassett: It was fun to watch. I enjoyed it.

Blum: I think that I'm coming from the idea that a designer was an artist. Now is this an archaic idea?

Bassett: No.

Blum: Historically architects come out of that tradition.

Bassett: That probably came out of the renaissance when architecture, sculpture and painting were inextricably bound together and the people involved were accomplished in all three disciplines. Painting and sculpture have spun off. They are no longer necessary. Architecture, happily, has always needed to perform.

135 Blum: How do you feel about architectural drawings now being saleable commodities?

Bassett: I think that's fine. I've always been captivated by beautiful architectural drawings. The art of drawing. There has always been a thriving market for good examples, particularly from the Beaux-Arts. The current interest in draftsmanship is one of the few parts of the present architectural scene that I can admire—marvelous, talented graphics of fantasies, buildings invented for the drawing, to display the technique without any pretense that they will or could ever be built.

Blum: In the last issue of Architecture California, there's a photograph in the article about Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in San Francisco receiving a forty-two year award, in which nineteen buildings are identified as the work of the San Francisco office of which eight are yours.

Bassett: Yes, it could be.

Blum: How does that make you feel when you look at the face of San Francisco and realize over a period of thirty years you've shaped this?

Bassett: Fine. Generally they are pretty good buildings, as good as we could get under the circumstances. We struck out on several but there are a number of them that I am damn proud of. A stranger walking around would be hard put to identify them as the issue of a single firm.

Blum: I won't ask the question, what's the hallmark of your work. You've just answered it.

Bassett: Yes. You meet each problem as it occurs. You solve it on its own terms. You do the best job you can, never stop fighting for the building. Be aware of the need for as much variety and richness as you can introduce into the urban fabric, that it's far more important than you keeping your life simple by doing the same building over and over again.

136 Blum: There's also other buildings in San Francisco that are yours but they're simply not visible in this photograph. I thought that was pretty remarkable to have eight out of nineteen.

Bassett: To tell the truth, that is not the kind of statistic I dwell on. The firm's heavy involvement in the San Francisco scene was the product of two circumstances. First, a large and intense increase in commercial construction because of the city's attractiveness and the ensuing demand for office space, and secondly, SOM was the only resident firm with solid experience and an enviable track record in both design and professional performance. You are more aware of our buildings in the photograph because San Francisco is a small town. The high-rise core here is scarcely larger than a square half mile to a side. You couldn't find our buildings in a real metropolis like New York or Chicago.

Blum: Do you think SOM buildings in Chicago still have the distinctiveness that early work had like Inland Steel?

Bassett: That may be asking a bit too much. Inland has an advantage. Its tiny size and the purity of its expression, particularly in the preciseness and the nature of the cladding, gives it a special image like no other building in the Loop. I suspect that SOM's reservoir of talent, and of opportunity, are greater than ever. My central concern is the one we've already mentioned: the unremitting pressure towards greater centralization, using increased efficiency as the reason.

Blum: Do you think efficiency is worth the price?

Bassett: No. As a design type, I am skeptical of the word. It is frequently a smokescreen for power and control. There is also an anomaly using architecture and efficiency in the same sentence, especially if there is any pretense at doing thoughtful architecture. Unless you're doing recipe buildings, an architect usually has to stand around and scratch himself before things get going. You don't know when the idea is going to come, how it's going to get there, how good it is going to be, or if the client is going to buy in.

137 Blum: This photograph is evidence of the change that you have brought to the face of the city. What kind of changes that are not measured in numbers like eight out of nineteen buildings in the San Francisco office have you observed over the past thirty years?

Bassett: Oh, I think that would be very difficult for me to answer.

Blum: Does anything come to mind?

Bassett: As the office has matured here in San Francisco, it has also become more like Chicago and New York. The characteristics that emerged out here were, in part, both a reflection of the cultural, topographic, and climatic differences, and the presence of Owings, at the start, and then myself. The attitude and the architecture were different. We were both feisty in our defense of the small San Francisco office from incursions by the big boys back East, and we were also doing some pretty good architecture. That necessary orneriness seems to have disappeared with our retirement. Meanwhile, every aspect of our culture is steadily being homogenized into a level, featureless plain. I suppose it is natural that we echo in miniature the shape of the land. How many people are there in the West? Fifty million? That leaves two hundred million east of the Mississippi. That is the important fact. Almost all of the political and economic muscle, power that is, is east of the Mississippi. And that is true of SOM also.

Blum: I didn't realize that. That's quite a difference.

Bassett: Well, despite being a decidedly smaller part of the action, I am very proud to have shaped a piece of SOM. It is, and has been, an extraordinary adventure. I doubt there are very many in our profession who have the slightest conception of its accomplishments. I can't imagine how some future, and optimistic architectural historian is going to sort it all out. All those, literally thousands of buildings all over the world, always competent at the very least, often very good, and sometimes brilliant. The hundreds of people involved, the great range, and often conflicting nature of the talents! How can an organization of such size and

138 diversity maintain the commitment and the momentum? How did all those partners keep from killing each other? What tolerance!

Blum: You think that's part of the strength of SOM?

Bassett: I should say! A loose, but still cohesive structure of peers, open-ended so that there was room at the bottom for new blood, and the old ones had to leave, tolerance of different attitudes toward design but with a shared, consistent standard of professional performance. I doubt that any of these qualities could have thrived if SOM had a corporate structure. To me, the most important single factor of the firm's success is that it has been a traditional partnership.

Blum: On the publishing topic for just one more minute, SOM has published what seems to be the official SOM books with essays written by important architectural historians, the first one written by Hitchcock followed by Drexler and Albert Bush-Brown. Not many are more respected in the field of architecture than those three names. It seems that in the first volume, which covered SOM's work from 1950 to 1962, and maybe I was super-sensitive to this, coming from Chicago, but I sense in what you're saying is the same thing that Hitchcock said and that was that Mies developed a style and became frozen in that style. He never deviated from it but SOM has the ability to go beyond and try other things. Is this what you're saying? If Miesians were to speak about Mies they wouldn't see it quite that way. They would say that he continued to refine and try other things, all within a narrow range. Was Mies the foil against which SOM measured itself from 1950 to 1962?

Bassett: You are greatly over-emphasizing the importance of Mies. His presence in the Chicago scene was an inescapable influence on SOM, mostly because so many SOM people were graduates of IIT.

Blum: Well, why? Bunshaft had done Lever House and you had done the Crown Zellerbach, both of which could probably in a broad sense be said to be of that type.

139 Bassett: You are right. I am saying that. To me, Mies's work has always been circumspect and I must admit, downright dull. There has been a persistent thread of Mies's influence in SOM's work over a long period of time, but I disagree about using Bunshaft and Lever as an example. And pulling Zellerbach and me into your argument is really far out. Gordon was his own man, and although he may have used Miesian motifs from time to time, I think his architectural interest was elsewhere. It seems to me that Roy Allen, consistently and very ably, was the New York partner most interested in Mies. Some very fine things have been done in Chicago, presumably under Bruce and in several cases, Myron. As Hitchcock said, "These buildings were often far better expressions of the Miesian doctrine than Mies himself had attained." The point I would like to make is that there is a far larger group of buildings that came out of New York and Chicago of very high quality, often very original, sometimes amazingly austere and beautiful and to me, not Miesian inspired so much as true products of SOM. I'll give you examples: Hartford in Chicago, the Air Force Academy, Kitt Peak, the Haj and on and on. The Sears and Hancock buildings are magnificent and pure SOM.

Blum: So are you saying that comparing Bunshaft with Mies during those years is not a fair comparison?

Bassett: Yes and no. Your argument seems to say that Bun was a follower of Mies but had the ability to go beyond him. I say that Bun's development was largely unaffected by Mies. Bunshaft was his own man from the start. I think you are trying to tie Mies into the firm too strongly. You are trying to make another connection. It is much easier to select individual buildings that are Miesian in their inspiration—for example, the Sears Tower and Big John [Hancock].

Blum: But Bruce Graham was of a younger generation.

Bassett: Naturally.

Blum: They had the advantage of standing on Mies's shoulders.

140 Bassett: That's right, but also the shoulders of those architects of Holland and Germany and the rest of northern Europe that were busy up to WW n. The best examples of Miesian architecture to me are those buildings which have the same quality as much of classical architecture. They're most successful when they have the least to do.

Blum: What do you mean, the least to do?

Bassett: They have the least function, the least amount of real work to do. To me, his best buildings were those that permitted him to demonstrate his aesthetic and still obtain a reasonably usable building, such as the Barcelona Pavilion that had no need to perform, just be. Or to provide large amounts of unspecific space, as in office buildings or a large hall. It is interesting to me that in the Tugendhat House Mies showed a willingness to find an equation between his aesthetic and the reasonable demands that any real house makes, but in the Farnsworth House he almost abandoned any such pretext. One would have to be mad or incredibly barren to live in it—to try to live in it. I can look at a good Mies building and enjoy it, but I don't have to go back again. There is not enough there.

Blum: What about Crown Hall?

Bassett: Crown Hall would be exactly like that.

Blum: And they have the open plan inside.

Bassett: So? Crown Hall is a nice Miesian building, but I'm glad I didn't have to study architecture in it. I don't feel that way about buildings that capture me. Good Lord! The Robie House is within walking distance of Crown, and it is one of the great masterpieces. And to walk around a corner and suddenly confront the Monadnock Building. The way that the damn thing starts at the street and goes up perpetually captivates me. There's nothing like that about the government center in the Loop by Mies.

Blum: The Federal buildings?

141 Bassett: Yes. As a matter of fact, the courts building, which is interesting, is obviously a Miesian—the big Cor-Ten steel one.

Blum: That is the Civic Center, now called the Daley Center.

Bassett: The one that has Bill Hartmann's Picasso in front of it? Is that the Daley Center?

Blum: Yes.

Bassett: Oh, I didn't realize. That's magnificent. Not by Mies, but a Miesian building.

Blum: Well, it was designed by Mies's student, Jacques Brownson.

Bassett: But a very good one. It is a beautiful building, with enough scale and character and quality about it to rise well above the usual Miesian formula.

Blum: Jacques Brownson would probably be pleased to hear you say that.

Bassett: It's true, but Bill Hartmann's contribution of accomplishing the great Picasso is terribly important. Neither New York or any other city in the country has the kinds of monuments that Chicago has: the early pioneers, as well as a building like the Daley Center with its plaza and sculpture. I don't know Brownson, only of him. SOM had a little bit to do with that, didn't it?

Blum: Well, there were three firms that cooperated, but the design was Jacques Brownson's.

Bassett: I take my hat off to him.

Blum: He was with Murphy at the time.

Bassett: That would make sense because Murphy was so politically connected.

142 [Tape 6: Side 2]

Blum: What we talked about very briefly while turning the tape over was renovation. You spoke about the renovation of Charnley House, now headquarters for the SOM Foundation.

Bassett: Our conversation wandered. I brought up Charnley out of the pride I feel about SOM. I am proudest of the firm's very large body of work, which expresses a careful, responsible, often very creative and always professional response to the problem at hand. In addition to all of that, SOM has funded a foundation with a primary focus upon architecture and purchased and restored an important Chicago architectural landmark as its headquarters. To my knowledge, there is no precedent for that, and I am very proud. Against that kind of responsibility you can put many of the current crop of highly visible practitioners and their work. They are creatures of users of media hype. Their buildings are vehicles for advancing their notoriety and little else. Your state office building in Chicago is a good example.

Blum: The State of Illinois building by Helmut Jahn?

Bassett: Yes. That is a terrible building. A piece of junk. It's a waste to talk about this stuff—let's change the subject.

Blum: Did you have any personal goals when you entered architecture or entered SOM?

Bassett: At the start I imagine I was as inarticulate as any other youngster. Enthusiasm, energy, and hopefully some talent are all you have to offer in the beginning. I don't remember any goal then except the goal of surviving in the very competitive situation at the Saarinen office. Much too busy to philosophize. I do remember the good feeling of doing my full share, and doing it well, and the confidence that came. I should add that I'm not the type to stand around scratching myself, wondering where my place in the architectural heavens might be. The intensity of the workload continued at SOM. The big difference was that I

143 was responsible for the product. There were less people to do more work, and the atmosphere, the work climate, was very different. The Saarinen office was an atelier, a workshop. SOM was a large commercial partnership committed to doing good contemporary architecture. We have to get on with it! At Eero's we explored various design alternatives in considerable detail before they were abandoned in favor of a given scheme. At SOM we seldom had that luxury. The firm contained every discipline necessary to the art of building and the design effort had to toe the same line as everyone else. It was an advantage in disguise. Now, when I look back at the buildings I am most proud of, they are more often than not the projects that had back-breaking schedules. In the end I think the Saarinen and SOM experiences played off against each other, each a kind of foil for the other, and I gained a balanced view of the design process and its relationship with the other disciplines of modern architectural practice. I did not have a "goal" in the journal sense—that is, an identified objective I wanted to achieve. I did have the good fortune of spending my career working with fine and talented people and accomplishing a few good buildings.

Blum: As you look back at all these wonderful opportunities, what do you think was your greatest opportunity?

Bassett: That's easy. It was coming to the West Coast and joining SOM, especially at a time when Owings was still very active in the firm. An incredible person—both a good friend and a terror.

Blum: Was he a mentor for you?

Bassett: Yes. Nat's interests went way beyond the single building and included the site, its surround, and the environment and the effect of the building on it. He was pushy and tough. A good part of my education came in defending myself against him. I became an architect at SOM. It is a tough business, and he knew the ropes.

Blum: You said that at one time you thought that you would like to teach, and, in fact, you didn't teach in an academic institution, but in many ways I think you did teach a new generation of architects in your office.

144 Bassett: Not me. The firm. All the offices have been postgraduate schools for young architects. The number of architects that are working in the San Francisco area that can be thought of as graduates of our shop is huge. It must be the same in Chicago and New York.

Blum: But as for you personally, as their teacher or mentor, if you could transmit something very important to the next generation of architects, what would it be?

Bassett: I don't think I have the foggiest, at least I don't have any big, blinding truths that light the path to success. I am not a cynic, although these are cynical times. I am certainly less than sanguine about what goes on in our culture, including architecture. All I can offer are a few Bassett/Will Rogers type homilies that have as much to do with myself as a human being as with my architecture. Take your architecture seriously, but not yourself. If you lose your sense of humor about yourself and the world at large, then you are in trouble—you may even become messianic, a disease that is to be avoided at all costs. The wholeness of yourself is going to show in your buildings. The architect whose life is all architecture has tunnel vision and is a bleak person indeed. Beware of icons. Observe them with tongue in cheek. They are not as good as they seem and will diminish and rob you of the well-spring and the confidence you need to be yourself. There is much wonderful—sometimes great—architecture everywhere. Go look at it. Don't make slides of it. Look at it. It will inspire you and keep you humble, but don't plagiarize. Do not confuse novelty or originality with creativity. True creativity is not always possible or even desirable. When it is there, it is always appropriate and not always obvious. Buildings have good or bad manners, just like people. Finally, architecture today is an immensely complex effort and involves many critically important disciplines besides your own. Don't think for a moment that you can do the whole thing yourself. End of sermon.

Blum: I have one last question. This oral history will be produced in a hard copy and eventually be available in Ryerson Library for future researchers. If someone wants more information about your career, where would they go to find it?

145 Bassett: I don't know. There isn't that much to find out about me. I'm a low-profile type.

Blum: What has happened to your material at SOM?

Bassett: Whatever has survived.

Blum: Is that available at the firm?

Bassett: The firm's not very good at records. I suspect much has disappeared.

Blum: I have heard they are considering placing their archives in an institution. Would your materials be part of the SOM archives?

Bassett: I think so. Much of that would be the construction documents of built buildings, but as far as preliminary drawings and sketches, I doubt that much has survived.

Blum: Has the San Francisco office saved their materials?

Bassett: Only the obvious.

Blum: Has it been microfilmed?

Bassett: I don't think so. Do any of the other offices do that?

Blum: I don't think they've microfilmed, but I think they've saved material.

Bassett: They've probably saved one out of every hundred things. The firm has never had a historian, an archivist. Architects don't usually think that way, unless they're egomaniacs. Then they save everything.

Blum: Well, what about when you have to go back and do something else to a building? You'd like to have the working drawings.

146 Bassett: The working drawings are always there—the originals as well as photographic negatives, along with the specifications. But as far as all the related work—the records, photographs, models, sketches, the preliminary drawings—some may survive, but not much. The amount of material is monumental—architects go on to the next project.

Blum: You mean the San Francisco office itself has no facility for storing?

Bassett: We lease space from a commercial storage company. Almost all of the material there has to do with management and accounting records for legal reasons. You want to hear an interesting story?

Blum: Yes.

Bassett: In the early 1950s, Eero decided that he no longer wanted to share office space in the old school with the Swanson firm. A very simple wood-framed and all-glass building was designed and built right across Long Lake Road from the school, and we moved over. Much of the labor was done by the staff. When an architectural office moves, the amount of material thrown out is immense, mostly because architects usually never throw away anything. They just let it accumulate until it reaches crisis proportions. Anyway, during the move I noticed a roll of tracing paper protruding from a can of trash to be burned. When I examined it, I recognized what appeared to be a preliminary sketch by Eliel for an entry in the St. Louis Competition, and a large church for Columbus, Ohio, also by Eliel. I decided to save them, not because of what they were, but because they were original drawings by J. Barr, whose draftsmanship I admired very much!

Blum: Were those the drawings you gave to Cranbrook?

Bassett: Yes!

Blum: And I assumed you had worked on those projects.

147 Bassett: No, hardly! More than that—over thirty years later the quarterly bulletin arrives from Cranbrook. In it they discuss the plans for the exhibit and their need for appropriate materials. Then I remember those drawings. They were in the attic. I hadn't thought about them in years.

Blum: And they were published in the catalog of their exhibition?

Bassett: Yes. I don't like to think about what was probably thrown out during that move.

Blum: Well, that is really a pity. Perhaps material won't continue to be discarded from now on with an interest in it and a new archival awareness prompted by the Freedom of Information Act that has forced so many companies to develop archives. Chuck, we have been doing this for three days now and recorded about eight-and-a-half or more hours of tape. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

148 SELECTED REFERENCES

Abercrombie, Stanley. "Evaluation: Alone with SOM on a Tropical Island." American Institute of Architects Journal 71 (March 1982): 72-78. Architecture California 10:5 (September/October 1988): entire issue. "A Building That Makes Its Own Landscape." Architectural Forum 136 (March 1972):20-27. Bush-Brown, Albert. SOM Architecture and Urbanism, 1973-1983. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1983. Danz, Ernest and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Architecture of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1950-1962. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963. 'Environment for the Elderly." Progressive Architecture 45 (April 1964):136-153. "Four Office Buildings: Four Different Schemes." Architectural Record 125 (April 1959):163- 174. G., L.W. "Configuration in a Landscape." Interiors 131 (March 1972):76-91. Halik, Nancy Lickerman. "The Eero Saarinen Spawn." Inland Architect 25:4 (May 1981):14-45. Heyer, Paul. Architects on Architecture. New York: Walker and Company, 1966. "In Texas the Glass Box Goes 3-D." Architectural Forum 119 (September 1963):124-131. "Mauna Kea." Interiors 125 (May 1966):118-124. Menges, Axel. Architecture of SOM, 1963-1973. Introduction by Arthur Drexler. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1974. Miller, Nory. "Staying on Top, or Just Staying Alive?" Chicago (May 1982):156-157. Rottenberg, Dan. "SOM: The Big, the Bad." Chicago (May 1982):151-155, 196-202. "Sand, Sea, and SOM." Architectural Forum 124 (May 1966):80-87. "Seismic Sculpture." Progressive Architecture 49 (December 1968):84-91. "Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's New Directions in High-Rise Design." Architectural Record 169 (March 1981):114-128. Stephans, Suzanne. "SOM at Midlife." Progressive Architecture 62 (May 1981):138-141. Temko, Allan. "San Francisco's Newest Tower." Architectural Forum 112 (April 1960):104-111. Woodward, Christopher. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

149 EDWARD CHARLES BASSETT

Born: 12 September 1921, Port Huron, Michigan

Education: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, B.S. Architecture, 1949 Cranbrook Academy of Art, M.A. Architecture, 1951

Military Service: United States Army, Infantry, Pacific Theatre, 1943-1946

Work Experience: Saarinen and Saarinen (later Eero Saarinen and Associates), 1950-1955 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, San Francisco, 1955-1981

Honors and Awards: Arnold W. Brummer Prize in Architecture, 1963 American Institute of Architects, Fellow, 1977 San Francisco Arts Commission, Award of Honor for Architecture, 1985

Award-Winning Projects: Alcoa Building, San Francisco, California Bank of America Headquarters, San Francisco, California California First Bank Building, San Francisco, California Carmel Valley Manor, Carmel Valley, California Crocker Center Tower and Galleria, San Francisco, California Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, California Louis M. Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, California InterFirst Plaza, Houston, Texas Mauna Kea Beach Resort Hotel, Kamuela Bay, Hawaii Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Complex, Oakland, California Tenneco Building, Houston, Texas Weyerhaeuser Corporation Headquarters and Technology Center, Tacoma, Washington

150 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

Adams, Brewster (Bruce) 50, 53, 54, 55, 64 Crown Zellerbach Headquarters, San Adams, Mark 110 Francisco, California 68, 71-75, 80, 139- Albinson, Don 26-27 140 Alcoa Building, San Francisco, California 88, 98-101 Daley, Richard J., Civic Center and Plaza, Alcorn, James (Jim) 102 Chicago, Illinois 142 Allen, Davis (Dave) 90, 96 Dinkeloo, John 41, 45, 49, 50, 54, 56, 59, Allen, Roy 126, 140 60, 65 Allison, Cle 32, 34, 35 Dow, Alden 34-35, 36, 37, 38-39 Anderson, Boyd 54 Dow, Alden (house), Midland, Michigan Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 36-37 22 Drexler, Arthur 139 Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 23 Dubin, Arthur 13, 20, 34 Austin, Don 95 Dubin, Henry 20 Dunlap, William 74 Bacon, Edmund 45 Bailey, Roger 31, 32, 33 Eames, Charles 26, 47, 51 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 141 Eames, Ray 47 Battledeck House, Highland Park, Illinois 21 Farnsworth, Edith (house), Plano, Illinois Beebe, Henry 93 141 Bennett, Wells 14 Ferris, James (Jim) 74 Bertoia, Harry 27 Foster, Richard 108 Birkerts, Gunnar 47, 64, 69 Blunk, J.M. 111 General Motors Technical Center, Detroit, Breuer, Marcel 58 Michigan 46, 50 Brown, Elliot 62, 63, 67, 77-78, 84 Gensler, Arthur 94 Brownson, Jacques Calman 142 Girard, Alexander (Sandro) 93 Bunshaft, Gordon 56, 74, 79, 81, 129, 132, Glessner, John J. (house), Chicago, Illinois 139, 140 23 Burnham, Daniel Hudson 111, 134 Goddard, George 68, 73 Burnham and Root 80 Goldsmith, Myron 74, 99-100, 102-103, Bush-Brown, Albert 139 140 Goldstein, Marc 93, 96 Century of Progress International Goodall, Robert 36, 38, 39, 53 Exposition, 1933-1934, Chicago, Illinois Graham, Bruce 66, 72, 89, 99, 140 6 Grant, Margo 94 Charnley, James (house), Chicago, Illinois Grotell, Maija 27 143 Ciceri, Richard 93, 96 Hammett, Ralph 14, 17 Coughlin, Charles Edward, Father 5 Hancock Building (now Industrial Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Technology Building), San Francisco, Hills, Michigan, 1, 5, 22, 26-27, 30, 34-35, California 71, 79-81, 83-84, 116, 117 37, 39, 40, 42-43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 53, Hancock Center, Chicago, Illinois 80, 99, 147, 148 101, 140 Cret, Paul Phillipe 50 Hartmann, William (Bill) 50, 65, 79, 142 Hernmark, Helena 110

151 Heurtley, Arthur (house), Oak Park, Nordin, Josta 46 Illinois 22 Hines, Jerry 114-115, 117, 118 Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Hopkinson, Peter 93 Complex, Oakland, California 92, 99, 102-104, 111 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 62, 67, 68-69, 73, Illinois 29, 67, 68, 70, 139 74, 75, 76-77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 91, 101, Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown 112, 115, 119, 125, 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, Hall, Chicago, Illinois 141 144 Inland Steel Building, Chicago, Illinois 65, 71, 72, 74, 137 Parker, Leonard 69 Pelli, Cesar 69 Johnson, Philip 111, 117 Perry, Charles (Charlie) 93 Pfister, Charles 108 Kahn, Louis 24, 28 Keck, George Fred 7 Rapson, Ralph 35 Keck, William 7 Robie, Frederick (house), Chicago, Illinois Knoll, Florence Schust (Shu) 48-49, 117 21, 141 Roche, Kevin 29, 49, 63, 64, 111, 128 Lacy, Joseph (Joe) 41, 45, 50, 56 Rockefeller, Laurance 90-91, 93-94, 97, 98 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret Rodgers and Associates 108 17, 133 Rodgers, John Barney (Jack) 62, 67, 71, 74, Lever House, New York City, New York 84, 119 139-140 Roth, Emery 116 Lorch, Emil 14, 31 Royston, Robert 74 Louchheim, Aline 53 Lumsden, Anthony J (Tony) 69 Saarinen, Eero 29, 41, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52-53, 54 McKim, Mead and White 19 Saarinen, Eliel 27, 30, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43, 47- Mascherini, Marcello 78 48, 52, 60, 147 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Saarinen, Lily Swann 52 Auditorium, Cambridge, Massachusetts Schweikher, Robert Paul 37 50, 53-55, 95 Skidmore, Louis 79 Mauna Kea Beach Resort Hotel, Kamuela Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Chicago, Bay, Hawaii 60, 90, 92, 94, 98 Illinois 50, 58, 65-66, 87, 88-89, 126, 127, Merrill, John 102-103 137, 139, 140 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 8, 29, 67, 70, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, New York 133, 139, 140-141, 142 City, New York 65, 79,81, 84, 87, 90, 104, Milles, Carl 27 126, 127, 129, 132-133,140 Mitchell, Jill 47 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, San Moholy-Nagy, László 8 Francisco, California 62, 63, 64, 71, 82, Monadnock Building, Chicago, Illinois 87-90, 126, 128, 129, 134, 137, 138, 146 23, 80, 141 Smith, Hinchman and Grylls 50, 54 Moore, Charles (Chuck) 26, 32, 33 Smith, James (Jim) 54, 55 Mumford, Lewis 86 Snyder, Robert (Bob) 45, 53 Stein, Clarence S. 30 Netsch, Walter 71-72, 79, 89, 130 Stickney, Charles (Chuck) 102, 103 Newell, Gordon 112 Stone, Edward Durell 58 Newman, Robert 54 Stone, George 69 Noguchi, Isamu 73, 74, 76, 77 Strengell, Marianne 27

152 Swann, Lily (see Lily Swann Saarinen) Swanson, Robert (Bob) 41, 147

Tenneco Building, Houston, Texas 91-92, 96, 115 Tobias, Richard 33 Tolerton, David (Dave) 78 Tsuchiya, Harold 53, 60 United States Embassy Building, Moscow, Russia 119-125 University of Illinois, Urbana 15, 16 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 11-12, 15-17, 30, 31, 34, 39, 63

Von Moltke, Willo 60, 61, 64

Walker, Peter 105, 108 Warnecke, Jack 90 Weese, Harry 50-51 Weese, John 95-96 Weyerhaeuser Corporation Headquarters and Technology Center, Tacoma, Washington 60, 95, 104-113, 150 Weyerhaeuser, George 109, 113, 114 Wiley, Charles (Chuck) 65-66, 127 Wimberly, George 97 Wright, Frank Lloyd 21, 22, 23, 36, 37, 38, 44, 86, 133 Wurster, William (Bill) 61, 62, 100

Zellerbach, J.D. 68, 78

153