COUNTING

Ron Witte, Editor 2 COUNTING

Ron Witte, Editor

In honor of Anderson Todd’s 90th birthday. Rice School of Architecture

2011

3 4 CONTENTS

PREFACE Sarah Whiting ...... 7

ALMOST HERCULES Ron Witte ...... 9

HONOR Stephen Fox ...... 45

AT HOME WITH ANDERSON TODD Frank Welch ...... 85

ANDERSON TODD AT RICE Nonya Grenader ...... 97

CREDITS ...... 114

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... 115

5 6 Preface

T.O.D.D.

Time Out for Daily Discussion.

Lots of words can replace that last one. Diatribe. Disturbance. Diversion. Dalliance. Drawing. Dunno. Discretion. Whatever D it might be, there is always some moment in any given day that is undeniably Andy-Time.

Anderson Todd makes time stand still. Hallway conversation is a sport, sometimes a blood sport. Todd’s points are punctuated by two-step shuffl es, outbursts, and his trademark broad smile underscoring every bon mot. Even the time outs have time outs. Andy will mull a point, returning to it weeks later, boring into it like a 6H pencil that leaves tiny trenches in a sheet of Strathmore paper.

Architecture and the conversations that surround it take time. And we – those of us who know no world other than the one that is fi lled with Google-induced shorthands for doing what we do – are evermore reluctant to value time. Anderson Todd doesn’t just value time. He makes time… even as he stops it.

Taking Todd’s cue, we might all pause and ask: ‘When is the best time?’ My guess is that Anderson Todd will say: ‘Right now.’

Happy Birthday Andy.

Sarah Whiting Dean, Rice School of Architecture

7 8 8 Almost Hercules

ALMOST HERCULES

Ron Witte

The last century has been riddled with Nothing. Silences, abstractions, minimalisms,…Nothing has come to us in a dense chorus of mantras. It makes little difference where the compass of cultural production is pointed. Artists, musicians, writers, and architects have all clamored for, and often about, Nothing. Our collective preoccupation with Nothing has had a vertiginously rising and falling volume (it turns out silence is deafening). In a remarkable sleight of hand, Nothing is both an antidote to too much and an enticement for everything. It is a salve for the darkest of evils and a catalyst for the brightest of optimisms.

Nothing: she loves me, she loves me not.

9 COUNTING

10 Almost Hercules

11 COUNTING

Anderson Todd in the Bolsover House

I fi ll up a glass with water in the dark…I’m very conscious of how much water is in the glass.

—AT

12 Almost Hercules

Nothing is exactly half of a zero-sum game. You can’t have Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918) without the years of darkness that were World War I. You can’t have John Cage’s 4’33” (1952) without the intrusions of a breath, a heartbeat, a creaking chair. Samuel Beckett can’t tell us that “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” (1969) without uttering those words. Nothing always runs alongside something.

For architects, the something that runs alongside Nothing is always Almost, as in Almost Nothing. We have a particular fervor for Mies’s declaration. We get it, or at least we like to think we do. Almost Nothing is the architect’s coda for abstraction, simplicity, essentialism, universality, timelessness, modernity, responsibility,… It is nothing short of extraordinary how these two words have been made to signify vast tracts of what we want to believe.

Once Almost Nothing is in our heads, it makes its way into our thinking in the most insidious of ways. We love and hate Almost Nothing. It admonishes us to think that form has disappeared. It triggers a state of reverie (what this reverie is about is diffi cult to say but rest assured it can be pretty much anything). It makes us think that inside and outside will be indifferent to one another if we can just make that goddamned sheet of glass disappear. It may well make us believe that we have ourselves disappeared, left to hover in an ineffability of our own making.

More than anything else, the history of Almost Nothing is the story of making things go away. Vast amounts of thought, labor, and ink have been expended on the second of these two words, perennially leaving Almost in the lurch. This, of course, makes perfect sense. Whenever it makes an

13 COUNTING

Suit House, 1970

14 Almost Hercules appearance, Nothing evokes a kind of veneration, a quasi- mystical authority emanating from its enigmatic echo. To enter the history of Almost, on the other hand, sounds like we’re entering into some bad story about horseshoes and hand grenades. Nothing = perfect. Almost = less than perfect. Seen in one light, Nothing’s mandate is to make Almost disappear. But let’s face it: you can’t have Nothing without Almost. Almost is the only way we can succeed in Nothing. Almost is everything.

No one understands Almost better than Anderson Todd. A very good friend of Nothing, Todd is Almost’s paramour.

Todd’s Almost appears in unassuming matter: sheetrock, bricks, glass, and steel. It is spoken in the diffi cult precisions of proportions, distances, and cadences. It is wedged into the impossibly narrow gap between his excruciatingly discerning grip on what is/isn’t architecture and the remarkable openness of his instincts.

There is no fl atter ceiling than a Todd ceiling. His ceilings aren’t just fl at in the technical sense (though it is surprisingly hard to turn four-by-eight sheets of gypsum board into a tautly singular plane). Their fl atness is an enticement to stare. Todd’s ceilings compel us to stare. The intensity of looking at something in this way produces a sensation that is, as Susan Sontag wrote of staring at silent art in 1967, “as far from history, as close to eternity, as contemporary art can get.” There are no lights in or on these surfaces. They have no coffers, beams, or soffi ts. They have a few holes to let columns go through them, letting you know that these white planes are uselessly thin. They won’t protect you from the hazards of collapsing structures and the vicissitudes of weather outside. They hover, pulled back

15 COUNTING

Image: Ceiling / Column / Glass W

16 Almost Hercules

Wall of Shadowlawn or Bolsover.

17 Bolsover House, 1994

18 19 COUNTING

20 Almost Hercules a short distance from the walls at their edges so as to not oblige their thinness to capitulate to the corner they would otherwise have to make.

After taking in these ceilings for a moment or two, your eyes run to their limits: into other rooms, into the courtyards beyond their perimeters, down the walls that bound the spaces you’re sitting in. Without your even realizing it, these ceilings are gone. Todd ceilings have no greater, and no lesser, obligation than to appear and disappear, always with a perfect sense of timing.

Todd loathes the air grills that incessantly try to poke holes in his ceilings. Why is it okay for a column to make a hole in a ceiling and not okay for an air grill to do the same thing?

A column accentuates difference and an air grill stabilizes sameness. A column rises through a room, passing into an opening in the ceiling that is larger than the column itself (this gap is fi lled with inky black nothing), and further up toward a beam that one cannot see. We lose sight of the column’s aim at the instant it moves through the ceiling. We know it holds the roof up, but how it does this no longer matters (that it does not matter is far more important than whether or not we know how it holds the roof up). The column’s below-ceiling importance is intensifi ed by its above-ceiling irrelevance. The reveal cleaves the ceiling from any immediate tie to the column. In technical terms, the column holds a beam above, which holds the secondary structure, which holds the sheetrock along its bottom edge, which allows the sheetrock to cantilever slightly back toward the column as the tidy hole is fi nished. The column and the ceiling are distinguished by fi ve degrees of separation. Every layer of distinction strengthens the

21 COUNTING

Fred Sandback, Untitled (Sculptural Study, Two-part Vertical Construction), ca. 1986/2008, black acrylic yarn.

22 Almost Hercules ceiling’s role as the top of the room and, conversely, weakens its role as the bottom of a structural system. The ceiling’s uselessness, its remoteness from structure and weather, is its virtue. Like one of Fred Sandback’s acrylic yarn planes, a Todd ceiling delineates a resolute limit in the most tentative of terms. His ceiling’s fl attened certainty aligns precisely with its volatile ambiguity.

An air grill, on the other hand, moves air from above the ceiling to below. Regulating air as it makes its way into a room, the grill assures that the air above and below the gypsum sheet are one and the same. As you stand in the room looking up at it, the grill confesses everything about what is happening inside the thick space of the plenum. It replaces fi ve degrees of separation with one-hundred percent disclosure: “this is the end of a duct that comes from an air conditioner somewhere over there.” Todd knows full well that technical honesty is overrated (he may try to tell you otherwise…do not believe him, no matter what). The not-fl at-enough grill—its lumpy assembly of adjustment knob, louvers, frame, and mounting screws— is a clamp of sorts, a clip that holds the ceiling onto the thick zone of support systems above. In addition to being remarkably ugly (HVAC grill manufacturers are staunch holdouts of bad design), the grill works hard to guarantee that a ceiling is not the upper limit of a room but, rather, the outermost wrapper for the technical hardware above.

Todd elaborates his hole/grill protocol further still: the reveals around the columns and along the edges of the ceiling are themselves gentle diffusers of warm and cool air. If the air grill and its puncture render the ceiling lifeless, the column and its hole make the ceiling literally effervescent.

23 COUNTING

I was sitting up in my chair, and I think,‘Oh my God, why did he do that?’

—AT, at a lecture by Ben van Berkel

24 Almost Hercules

Todd’s affections for the ceiling translate to every part of a building. A terrazzo fl oor. A door jamb (with some help from Raymond Brochstein). A kitchen cabinet. Brick coursing. Flashing that wraps a fascia. Buildings have vast numbers of places in which to situate attention. Their details command attention, but so do their procedures: the way in which drawings are done, the sequence of construction, the way in which economies can be achieved, the order of decision-making. It isn’t hard to see that any building contains a vast number of decisions…the ceiling is the tip of the Almost iceberg.

The full spectrum of Todd’s encounter with architecture aligns around the single most signifi cant attribute of his work: judgment. Whether as an architect or a teacher, judgment is where the most deeply-rooted, the most important, and the most sumptuous lessons can be gleaned from Todd. Judgment invades every aspect of Todd’s work, and nowhere more so than in the 1961 Shadowlawn house. Why a column hole and not an air grill? Why symmetry here and not there? Why should that painting be one-and- half inches lower on the wall? Judgment supersedes the details, professionalisms, problem-solvings, and on-time, on-budget protocols that have strapped architecture to its moribund present. Judgment doesn’t deny the importance of any of these traits. It denies that any of them on their own can constitute architecture. They can’t. Judgment can.

Judgment places architecture’s parts into a swirling constellation wherein parts exceed themselves. It lets parts govern wholes and wholes govern parts. Judgment prevents the detailer from becoming a fetishist. It keeps the intellectual from staring at his navel. It lets Todd’s

25 COUNTING

Still from “The Belly of An Architect,” Peter Greenaway, 1987.

I’d take my children to an art exhibition and when we came out I’d ask them ‘If you could steal one, which one would you take?’ And they’d do it.

—AT

26 Almost Hercules unassuming matter, his sheetrock, bricks, glass, and steel, revolve around the defi nitions of space that are at once confi dent and susceptible. Judgment lets life trespass in architecture.

Judgment always raises stakes, an assertion that is invariably foregrounded with “for better or worse.” An architect’s declaration of his or her subjectivities is inherently risky. Far more hazardous, however, is the presumption that we are somehow free of our entanglements with subjectivity, a tragic intellectual malignancy that goes hand-in-hand with making judgment a dirty word.

Curiously, Todd’s career has spanned an especially volatile period with regard to judgment. Having begun his architectural studies at Princeton in the fall of 1939, Todd’s introduction to architectural judgment paralleled the onset of modern architecture’s widespread acceptance. The criteria for judgment were directly pinned to modernism’s success. And modernism was very, very successful. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, buildings were ever more emblematically modern. But modernity also took over what people wore, ate, heard, believed, earned, discussed, saw, and drove. Modernity was a kind of kudzu that climbed over all of life. Todd’s sensibilities, in turn, were synchronized with modernism’s insatiable acquisition of any and all cultural turfs: aesthetics, economies, politics, intellectual life, and science. It is no wonder that he is fearless. In the decade-and-a-half following 1930, modernism’s rarifi ed aspirations became a fully formed code for a new post- war world.

These were heady days, full of exhilarating, and triumphant, judgments. They were also heady enough to turn

27 COUNTING

28 Almost Hercules

29 COUNTING

Well, you can look at it. See if you can tell me. You’ll have to move the ash tray. I’ll give you a hand. I said ‘you’ll have to move the ash tray!’

—AT

30 Almost Hercules architects into loyalists and judgment into inertia. Within another decade-and-a-half—Todd was now in Houston— architectural discretion, principle, and formula became strange bedfellows, all too often inseparable from one another. By the mid-60s judgment was squaring off with that decade’s liberal transformations. Judgment came to signify elitism, hierarchy, and, generally, cultural haughtiness. Making a wall or hanging a picture or designing a garden or speculating about a life “just so” had become the province of old-school squares…fuddy duddies in bow ties. In many ways, judgment was condemned by its associations with knowledge and connoisseurship, both deeply distrusted notions throughout the cultural debates of the 1960s and 70s. Discretion was on the ropes… and by the time Mies died in 1969, judgment was every bit as dead.

Judgment may well have been, and may well remain, the only tenable route through the impasse between knowledge (read: positivism) and connoisseurship (read: taste). Recent decades have given us remarkable insights into architecture’s double life, its subjective objectivity. We now know, which is to say we are at least willing to say, that knowledge depends on taste and taste depends on knowledge. We now know that architecture is delicious and good for you.

Across these decades and then some, here stands Todd, airing an endless stream of judgments. “This is good!” “That can’t be!” “No, no, like this!” Taller!” “Shorter!” Let’s face it: letting people know what you think is not an easy way to go through life. It isn’t even an easy way to go through dinner. Nonetheless, it is remarkably invigorating. It is architecture’s lifeblood. The importance of Todd’s judgment can’t be overestimated. Neither should it be

31 COUNTING

32 Almost Hercules mistaken for the doctrinaire judgment of his lesser modern siblings.

As a teacher, Todd invented countless techniques through which to instill a capacity for judgment. A set of twenty nearly identical white mugs was presented to students, who were asked to articulate why one or another of them was best. “Its handle is better proportioned”… “Its top edge is better to put your lips on”… “It will make your boyfriend look better when you have breakfast with him”…hours of hairsplitting adjudication…hours of jousting…hours of what was surely a student’s worst nightmare. Not much there, but everything at stake.

These weren’t exercises in right and wrong. They were judgment calisthenics, meant to strengthen the discretionary muscles of students who were about to face the relentless onslaught of decisions that come with being an architect. More importantly, these exercises were meant to exploit architecture’s complexities rather than tame or manage them. By today’s standards, Todd’s students produced work in an idiom that was remarkably (some would say harrowingly) homogeneous. Nonetheless, within this idiom the nuances of spatial relations, material use, technical systems, and site planning led to endless experiments in exploitation and optimization. The difference between exploitation and management is profound, and that much more so today when so much of architecture is drowning in the brackish fl oodwaters of managerial overzealousness.

Todd likes symmetry, if an unstable brand of symmetry. The Bolsover (1994) and Shadowlawn houses are both entered laterally, along their broad sides. In each house, a wall appears directly ahead of you as you go through the

33 COUNTING

Pong, 1972, Allan Alcorn

I want to be able to wander.

—AT

34 Almost Hercules glass entry door. The kitchen is to the left. The living room is to the right. You enter, you teeter, you make a decision… the entire house is set in motion as you can’t help but fall off the centerline of the entrance. Going right means you’ll need to straighten your tie as you enter the living room. Turning left means putting down your groceries and rolling up your sleeves. The diagrammatic basis for these houses is neither formal nor functional. It is a choreographed doe- cee-doe of social instincts and private lives, of evening and day, of cocktails and cooking. Symmetry is here, but of the most precarious sort; the entries of these houses inscribe symmetry as though it is a knife edge on which it is impossible to stay perched.

The Shadowlawn house has a similarly vibrant longitudinal symmetry. It is a taunting symmetry that is continually assailed by Todd’s control over its approach. The front courtyard, living room, kitchen, bedrooms, and rear courtyard are a perfectly aligned series of spaces. The axial symmetry that skewers them is abstract; an architect’s plan-based conceit that only gradually appears through the accumulation of relations that comes with time spent in these rooms. What is understood at fi rst glance as an extremely rigid plan unfolds in the slow-motion manner of a game of 1970s Pong, which is to say, at an excruciatingly unhurried pace. Entries at the corners of rooms, diagonal views, rooms that blur into other rooms, lighting, furniture (ever important to Todd) that both impedes and describes your path,…all of it adds up to a languorously drifting, ricocheting, and realigning space-walk of household life.

Resonant ceilings, orbiting symmetries, door jamb experiments, programming scenarios, material metrics, and countless other explorations course through Todd’s

35 COUNTING

USS Idaho

I knew math pretty well, because when I went around on the battleship—the Idaho—with my father for a half year (he took me out of school) I was tutored by the fi rst-class Naval Academy...thirteen years old...I was doing diff erential equations.

—AT

36 Almost Hercules work. Todd’s speculations expose the depth of his commitment to architecture’s disciplinary terms. The twenty sheets of construction drawings for the Shadowlawn house include eight sheets with full-scale details. Other than being drawn sideways to allow them to fi t on their vellums, these drawings impart a what-you-see-is-what- you-get sensibility to the way the architect conceives of his work. These giant details do less to erase the possibility of technical failure (though they do this as well) than to open up architecture to the potential of additional layers of conceptualization. A glass wall meets a ceiling with the same tenacious consideration that a column is given as it pierces a plane of sheetrock. A wall edge between the entry and the living room appears to slide out of the core that it is attached to, kicking into motion the precarious symmetry that swirls around you as you enter the house.

In an odd reconfi guration of construction sequence, the terrazzo fl ooring of the Bolsover house was poured and polished before the walls of the interior subdivisions were framed, thereby reducing the high cost of terrazzo installation by eliminating the laborious polishing of many small units of material. Todd counts bricks. He determines the height of wall so as to never trim a sheet of standard sheetrock…and to allow for the 1” reveal at its top and the fl ush base at its bottom. To hear Todd describe why he does this, it has something to do with making the most of materials, and perhaps making the most of a budget. But these are little more than tepid asides. Todd’s ambitions lie in architecture’s endgame, no matter what the task, no matter how one gets from A to B.

Anderson Todd is a ridiculously obsessive man. His preoccupations have the doubly diffi cult charge of being

37 COUNTING

38 Almost Hercules agonizingly fastidious and necessarily just out of view. Put another way, seeing the signifi cance of Todd’s work amounts to not seeing Todd’s work…though no one should miss it. Obsessions and judgments are, in the end, the things that fi ll Todd’s days with the Herculean task of Almost, a task that involves the heavy lifting of very little and that guarantees an extraordinary view onto absolutely Nothing.

39 COUNTING

Geophysical Laboratory for the Superior Oil Company, 1967

40 Almost Hercules

41 COUNTING

City of Houston Fire Station 59, 1967

42 Almost Hercules

43 COUNTING

I can walk into this house this morning in blue jeans. I can look like one of your Welsh architects, one of your Welsh coalmen. And then at night I can come out in a white tie and tails. You don’t have a white tie and tails. You don’t have a derby. You don’t have a Homburg. I have a Homburg, I have a black jacket with a lovely velvet collar...

—AT

44 Honor

HONOR

Stephen Fox

Anderson Todd is complex and contradictory. To describe him in these words is provocative inasmuch as this phrase was given currency by his graduate school classmate and near contemporary, Robert Venturi. Venturi’s book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, launched the postmodern critique of modern architecture. Anderson Todd’s career as an architect and teacher has been identifi ed with modern architecture. This description therefore demands justifi cation. As an architect and teacher, Anderson Todd personifi es a subject position that sets him apart from other faculty members at Rice University and most architects in Houston. He is a gentleman.

Being labeled a gentleman might seem to contradict Todd’s fervent identifi cation with modern architecture, since the modern movement was historically associated with social democratic tendencies rather than a defense of

45 COUNTING

Notes taken by Anderson Todd in 1947, during his fi rst year back at Princeton as a Graduate student, following World War II. Todd assisted Robert Venturi with his thesis.

46 Honor patrician social identity and its subject types.1 This is where complexity comes in. Modern architecture, its design, construction, and teaching, has been, for Anderson Todd, a medium to demonstrate personal mastery and thus legitimize not only his individual achievements but his class identity. Modern architecture became an instrument for redeeming the masculine subject position of the gentleman from anachronism. The architecture with which Anderson Todd is identifi ed embodies the ethical qualities attributed to the mythical subject type of the gentleman: strength, truth, honesty, modesty, sobriety, generosity, integrity, and grace.2 Honor is the word that names this complex of attributes. Honor consists in the worthiness and esteem imputed to a man by his community. It recognizes his intelligence, courage, leadership, and fairness.

The most authoritative way to teach honorable conduct is to embody it. As a teacher, Anderson Todd instructed architecture students at Rice (as well as fellow faculty members) implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, on how to dress, speak, carry oneself, greet and address others, draw, dance, drive, ride, shoot, smoke cigars, and mix cocktails; in short: how to perform the subject position of gentleman with virtù, manly excellence. Todd’s buildings guaranteed the seriousness and substantiality of his instructional project. Their structural solidity, rational planning, material economy, constructive precision, volumetric liberality, and proportional expansiveness spatialize the ideological construct of modern patriarchy. Stability and order ensure the fl uid distribution of space within which the movement of people, the subjects of modern architecture, is choreographed. Rigorous adherence to measure produces sensations of the immeasurable. Todd’s

47 COUNTING

Mies was unpredictable.

— AT

48 Honor architecture frames, contains, and mobilizes modern patrician subjectivity by juxtaposing structural stability (materialized in exposed steel columns) with transparency (disclosing the essential decorum and superiority of upper class subjectivity) and internal spatial generosity (the term is Todd’s, a trope for the philanthropic ethos that permeates patrician subjectivity). The unyielding punctuates the ineffable. The meticulous architectural resolution of the intersection of materials and surfaces composes the background that frames domestic life. The architectural preference for serene perfection spatializes the impeccable assurance of the gentleman, the master of all he undertakes.

One facet of the appeal that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s architectural practices exerted on American architects of Todd’s generation was the challenge they laid down: display mastery of materials, construction, and spatiality. Produce logical, refi ned, rigorous demonstrations of modern architecture that fi gure as spatial metonyms of a unifi ed masculine identity.3 Mastering the techniques of steel assembly and the aesthetics of architectural detailing, organizing living spaces so that they sustain perceptions of spatial continuity while cohering with the subtle conventions of how interior partitions intersect perimeter enclosures, aligning a wide range of component parts in accordance with a modular system that needs to be imperceptible so as not to register as procrustean, and incorporating services (plumbing, lighting, climate control) in ways that neither emphasize nor deny their presence are areas in which skill is judged. Material economy was another area for competitive assessment: count brick courses and work with standard material dimensions to reduce waste and instill habits of rigor and precision. How can construction materials be exposed without making domestic interiors feel raw and

49 COUNTING

50 Honor unfi nished? How low can a ceiling get without seeming oppressive? The negotiation of these design problematics presented endless opportunities to demonstrate mastery. This method of thinking about architecture derived from modern functionalist practices formulated in the 1920s. Todd appropriated this method to modernize patrician identity.

Mies was assailed by progressive critics in Germany in the 1920s for employing marble, silk, and stainless steel fi nishes in his buildings. Yet his U.S. buildings, despite their material radiance, are not identifi ed with any one social class. They bestow their charisma with equal benevolence on corporate executives, middle-class apartment dwellers, even architecture students. It was Philip Johnson who surreptitiously advanced a class agenda for modern architecture in the U.S. in the 1940s through his promotion of Miesian practices.4 Johnson brought this advocacy to Houston in 1948 with a house he designed for the collectors Dominique and John de Menil, built in 1950- 51.5 As Ben Koush has shown, Miesian practices were absorbed into modern architecture in Houston in the early and mid-1950s by the architects Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr., and C. Herbert Cowell, Howard Barnstone and Preston M. Bolton, Burdette Keeland, and Harwood Taylor and J. Victor Neuhaus III.6 Hugo Neuhaus, who, like Todd, fi rst met Johnson when Johnson was an architecture student at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in the early 1940s, also grasped the class implications of Johnson’s Miesian project.7 The house that Neuhaus designed for his family, completed in 1950, began the process of affi liating modern architecture in Houston with upper class identity. It fused architectural method with social identity because

51 COUNTING

I was shot at and had to shoot back, successfully, luckily.

— AT on WWII

52 Honor of Neuhaus’s diligence in aligning modern architectural practices with patrician social forms.8

Anderson Todd’s formation as an architect occurred in stages. World War II interrupted his architectural education. Between earning a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University in 1943 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1949, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946. While a student, he worked as a draftsman for the Philadelphia architect George W. Pepper, Jr.9 In Houston, Todd was employed by various architects in the early 1950s. Working for Wilson, Morris & Crain between 1951 and 1955, he was involved with Rod Jones and Ralph A. Anderson, Jr., on the design of a modern, fl at-roofed, glass-walled house in River Oaks for Mr. and Mrs. Whitfi eld Marshall.10 He also worked for Staub, Rather & Howze, which is how John Staub’s Palladian ranch-type house for Mr. and Mrs. George A. Peterkin acquired its glazed, steel-framed rear terrace.11

Todd’s exposure to Mies van der Rohe while a member of the architect selection committee of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1954, and his involvement with the design and construction of Cullinan Hall (1956-58), the fi rst phase of Mies’s two-phase addition to the museum, yielded fi rst-hand experience of Mies’s method and practices.12 This was supplemented by the friendship that developed between Todd and Mies’s employee, David Haid, who carried Cullinan Hall through the Mies offi ce from inception to completion. Haid left Mies’s practice in 1960 to become an associate of Hugo Neuhaus’s. During this interval, Cowell & Neuhaus, David Haid, Associate, produced two masterpieces, the McAllen State Bank Building in McAllen, Texas (1961) and the Letzerich House near Friendswood,

53 COUNTING

Shadowlawn House, 1961

54 Honor

55 COUNTING

I’d go to his house and have dinner with him, and we’d both draw. He’d draw doorknobs, he’d draw glasses, he’d draw... He asked me to come over to have lunch with him. He said ‘I’m having lunch with Peter Blake.’ I said ‘Oh my God, do I have to go listen to that guy?’ And he said ‘You’ve got to go...I’ve got to keep others from writing lies about me.’

— AT on Mies van der Rohe

56 Honor

Texas (1961).13 These were also the years when Anderson Todd developed the design of the house for Lucie Wray Todd, his wife from 1953 to 1988, and their children on Shadowlawn Circle near the Rice campus. The Shadowlawn house, completed in 1961, is a masterpiece as well.14 It is not only a masterpiece of tectonic precision and spatial generosity, it is also a masterpiece of social construction.

Philip Johnson was quoted as describing the Shadowlawn house as “more Mies than Mies.”15 Although Johnson did not specify what its super-Miesian ingredient might be, it is tempting to suspect that it is the exhilarating way the house instills a specifi c kind of character in its occupants. As one visitor, Marley Lott, observed, people look good in the Shadowlawn house. And they feel good too: graceful, witty, superior, happy—privileged to be there.

The house materializes restraint and understatement. A brick courtyard wall, unbroken by openings, faces the curve of Shadowlawn Circle; guests approach the front door from the side of the house. Alongside the entrance, a thick, black-painted fascia, built up with layered planes of steel plate and angles, indicates the presence of the fl at roof spanning the interior portion of the house. The entrance stoop is a barely raised platform paved with polished, dark green terrazzo. Its breadth and amplitude materialize spatial generosity. The steel-framed glass front door, set between fl oor-to-ceiling panels of plate glass, swings outward to receive visitors. A foyer is directly ahead, one of two equally sized spatial reservoirs that bracket the central core—the kitchen—of the house. Like the entrance platform, the foyer feels expansive and welcoming. Guests move fl uidly across its terrazzo fl oor. The muted refl ectivity of the fl oor makes it the most animated fi nished surface

57 COUNTING

Shadowlawn House, 1961

58 Honor in the house. The core (faced with vertically aligned panels of walnut veneered plywood that delineate the house’s three- foot module) and the brick side wall that parallels it recede as one moves through the foyer and into the living room.

Entering the living room produces a sensation of surprise and elation. It is fi fty-four feet long, twenty-two-and-a-half feet wide, and nine feet high, an enormous expanse in a house of 3,800 square feet. Because the east wall of the living room, looking into the courtyard, is all glass, the space appears larger still as it stretches into the courtyard. A fi replace opening is centered on the paneled core wall facing the long glass wall. This opening subtly stabilizes space by occasioning a seating arrangement in the middle of the room. A light-colored square rug defi nes this space within a space. Two more islands of seating are stationed at either end of the living room, both anchored by freestanding walnut cabinets that are part of the architecture: a low hi-fi credenza marking the transition from foyer to living room and a tall cabinet screening the living room from the dining room, which occupies the reservoir of space on the north side of the core. The kitchen opens directly to the foyer and the dining room.16 Revealing this domestic workspace subtly democratizes—and modernizes—the elevated social ambiance that the architecture constructs with such determined consistency. The pairs of freestanding steel structural columns in the foyer, living room, and dining room also play a metaphorical role in this complex and contradictory process of modernization. They hold up the roof frame with such visual understatement that, like good servants, they enhance decorum with their effi cient and unobtrusive performance. Work is integrated by being ceremonialized; it is condensed into forms that inspire patrician subjectivity and enhance patrician identity.

59 COUNTING

60 Honor

In the Shadowlawn house two phenomena stand out (or don’t stand out, to again cite the complex and contradictory). A nine-foot-high ceiling should feel oppressively low when stretched across fi fty-four feet. But not at Shadowlawn. In concert with the terrazzo fl oor, the white-painted plaster ceiling constructs spatial continuity and lightness. At night, interior spaces are illuminated primarily by canister lights set on the fl oor. These up-lights produce an even, modulated light that is refl ected off the ceiling, enhancing the ethereal sensations of the overall space. Proportional alchemy—the transmutation of material determinants, phenomenal circumstances, and subjective reactions—is required to perceptually raise a low ceiling height. Todd, like other modern architects during the 1950s, demonstrated his ability to work within the methodical, modular limits of modern practice without sacrifi cing the spatial sensation of amplitude and freedom.17 Symmetry is another ambivalent phenomenon at Shadowlawn. It is clearly evident in some locations (the placement of exterior doors and openings on the east, south, and north sides of the house; the location of the living room hearth; the planimetric stationing of the house’s core). But centeredness does not lead to the projection of axes of movement and view. Shadowlawn’s symmetry stabilizes and tranquilizes; it calms the fl ow of space and bodies without evolving into a diagram for organizing all surfaces. Todd used symmetry to imply, without insisting upon, the transformation of movement from a propulsive current into a spiraling dance that ritualizes social life. As an architect, Anderson Todd not only weighs, counts, and measures, he also orchestrates and choreographs.

When the Shadowlawn house is compared to other steel-

61 COUNTING

62 Honor framed, fl at-roofed, glass-walled modern houses built in the 1950s, Todd’s patrician spatial agenda stands out. Todd especially admires the house that the Chicago architect Jacques C. Brownson built for his family in Geneva, Illinois, between 1949 and 1952.18 In both the Geneva House and the Shadowlawn house, visitors enter from the side, space is organized around a central service cores, and bedrooms are aligned in a single fi le across the rear of the house, fi tting them into the same width as the living room. Brownson’s Geneva House was conceived as an exploration of steel construction techniques: its steel-framed roof plate is dramatically suspended from the underside of four rigid- frame steel bents. The roof appears to fl oat above walls of fl oor-to-ceiling glass. The steel members of the Geneva House look monumental, given the 2,300-square foot size of the one-story house. Yet even so, the house is a built discourse on how structural engineering and open planning facilitate modern domesticity and its associated subject types.

When the Geneva House was published in House and Home magazine in December 1955, it was paired with the steel and glass house that a Texan architect, John G. York, designed for his family in Harlingen in 1952.19 The York House is a Texan version of Ray and Charles Eames’s Case Study House No. 8 of 1949, constructed of steel pipe

1 columns 1- /4 inches in diameter supporting exposed steel bar joists and an exposed steel roof deck. If the Geneva House monumentalized its defi ance of gravity, the York House appeared to dispense with gravity altogether in support of spontaneous, informal modern subjectivity as imagined in the postwar 1950s. The ideals of modern family domesticity that Brownson and York built into their

63 COUNTING

64 Honor steel houses were polar opposites of the modern subject positions that Todd built into the Shadowlawn house.

The Geneva House was also published in the Record Houses issue of Architectural Record in mid-May 1956. On the cover of the issue was Howard Barnstone and Preston Bolton’s Gerald S. Gordon House of 1955 in Houston, the most publicized of their steel-framed Miesian houses.20 Barnstone once described the Gordon House as his version of the Eames Case Study House. He and Bolton sacrifi ced the Eames House’s playful, improvisational subjectivity when they translated it into the Miesian forms of the Gordon House. What is missing at the Gordon House is the persuasive architectural construction of a unifi ed social identity that Todd achieved at the Shadowlawn house. Barnstone deployed steel and glass to frame elite modern subjectivity in terms of lifestyle. Todd deployed steel and glass at Shadowlawn to externalize patrician ethos.

Howard Barnstone was the University of Houston’s counterpart to Anderson Todd. A graduate of Yale University, he came to Houston in 1948. Like Todd, Barnstone was an instinctive teacher. Neither restricted instruction to architecture. Both taught through the medium of stories through which they sought to instill forms of conduct and advance subject positions that each identifi ed with modern architecture. Both loved words and phrases and their ability to ignite the imagination with unexpected associations. John Zemanek, professor of architecture at the University of Houston and a contemporary of Todd’s, represents another version of the charismatic modern architect and teacher. Zemanek’s architectural predilections differ from Todd’s; he has no interest in promoting patrician subjectivity. But in his rigorous methods of practice, his zeal for making,

65 COUNTING

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Cullinan Hall Construction Site, 1957

66 Honor and his devotion to tectonic clarity and precision, Zemanek pursues architecture as an ethical endeavor.21 Sustaining this intense identifi cation with tectonic rigor is an underlying narrative on the social construction of masculinity through architecture. In surveying this topic Joel Sanders observes that “a building’s architectural integrity derives from the masculinization of its materials, made to bear the weight of all the cultural values masculinity perpetually connotes, above all austerity, authenticity, and permanence.”22 Mies’s buildings and the subject positions with which they are identifi ed epitomize Sanders’s deduction. As Vincent Scully remarked: “Mies was the true father of this generation, even for the architects who have most reacted against him. And what an ideal father fi gure he makes: bulky, unfl appable, and always right, a real prewar man with a big cigar.”23

O’Neil Ford, Donald Barthelme, and William W. Caudill, with all of whom Todd interacted, were also men with big cigars who taught architects by extrapolating experiences from their own lives and work.24 Where they differed from Todd was in the types of modern subjectivity associated with their practices. During the 1950s their architecture materialized discourses on construction economy and ingenuity (each gained critical recognition for the design of schools). Ford and Barthelme, both born in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, came to the practice of modern architecture from eclecticism. Both lived in domestic settings that emphasized spontaneity and experimentation.25 Caudill, born in the second decade of the twentieth century and focused on a collaborative model of architectural practice, imaginatively externalized processes of exchange associated with teaching and

67 COUNTING

Who knows about people? That’s the only thing I don’t know about.

— AT

68 Honor professional practice. Ford’s and Barthelme’s dwellings, like Todd’s Shadowlawn house, refl ected the singular subject positions they advanced as architects and as teachers. In Caudill’s case, it was the studio building that CRS designed, the White House of 1969, with which his architecture practice was identifi ed, not his own house.26

Binding modern architectural practices and patriarchal subjectivity into a reciprocal relationship enforced the legitimacy of the former while modernizing manifestions of the latter. Todd, Barnstone, Zemanek, Ford, Barthelme, and Caudill were empowered as masters, teachers, and leaders to exert their authority through architectural design and architectural instruction. Their achievements as modern architects ratifi ed their claims to mastery and enhanced their personal magnetism. The postmodern critique of modern architecture, formulated in the second half of the 1960s, explicitly undermined the status of the modern architect as heroic fi gure. The art historian Kenneth E. Silver observed of Andy Warhol that “…like the art of other subversives…Warhol’s [art] threatens not only the status quo of a particular complexion, but the very nature of hierarchy.”27 In the hierarchy of American architecture in the late 1960s, Todd ranked highly, especially as buildings produced by the practice he operated with Bill N. Lacy and Gerald Tackett between 1964 and 1968 were published.28 Robert Venturi, whose personal subject position exhibits strong affi nities with Todd’s, advanced a set of arguments in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture that were antithetical to, and systematic in their rejection of, the constructional ethos of modern architecture as practiced in the 1960s. From a modernist perspective, the architectural projects Venturi illustrated in Complexity and Contradiction

69 COUNTING

Shadowlawn House, 1961

70 Honor

71 COUNTING

Geophysical Laboratory, Superior Oil Company, 1967.

72 Honor were incomprehensible. His preference for surface instead of structure, sham instead of strength, distortion instead of clarity, contradiction instead of resolution, and ambiguity instead of generosity posited a postmodern subjectivity that was radically “other” than the grounded, authentic, honest, affi rmative, and masculine subjectivity identifi ed with modern practices.

As an architectural movement, postmodernism was as relentlessly deformed and consumed by capitalist practices as modern architecture had been, and in less than a third the time. But postmodernism, deconstruction, and subsequent critical practices make it possible to analyze architectural practice and education in ways that subject their empowering narratives to skeptical questioning and dislodge the contradictions and complexities those narratives seek to elide. Postmodern methods have expanded the ways in which works of architecture can be examined to recover the social implications embedded in their designs and the subtle but insistent spatial messages they transmit to those who occupy them. It is this postmodern critical perspective that makes it possible now, with hindsight, to appreciate the ways complexity and contradiction animate the architecture of Anderson Todd. His gentrifi cation of modernism derives its credibility from the clear and compelling patrician subject position that emerges from his buildings and with which he identifi es personally. Postmodern skepticism warns against the seduction of myth, and in particular of aggrandizing myth. But this cautionary warning can also be weighed against evidence that accrues, over time, of personal conviction and architectural achievement that accompanies the ascription of honor. Todd’s buildings, his manners, and his

73 COUNTING

74 Honor vocation as a teacher attest to the constancy with which he performs as a gentleman and seeks to inculcate in others the virtues and responsibilities this subject position entails. That this position is bound up with patriarchy, privilege, and exclusion makes its defense challenging. Yet the sensations of spatial generosity that Todd’s buildings release in those who experience them are their guarantee of architectural integrity and can perhaps be achieved only with the kind of ethical certainty with which Todd identifi es.

Honor is sustained by merit. You learn to take Anderson Todd’s subject position as a gentleman seriously because of the rigor, refi nement, and inspiring power of his buildings. They vindicate the practices of modern architecture by transforming the daily lives of those who occupy them, even as they also implicitly sustain patrician identity. Todd’s approach to architecture does not involve externalizing complexity and contradiction but wrestling with their manifestations to subdue, master, clarify, and order matter and space. Anderson Todd and his architecture demonstrate that, even under the sign of postmodern skepticism, honor can still be earned for ethical determination, charismatic ardor, and virtuoso performance.

75 COUNTING

Notes (Endnotes)

1 Identity and subjectivity are reciprocal conditions. “Identity” refers to the formation of imagined communities on the basis of such shared traits as language, religion, ethnic or racial affi liation, sexual orientation, or social class. “Subject” and “subjectivity” describe the imaginative projection of ideal personifi cations of desired sets of characteristics as individuals seek to subjugate themselves to an identity position. On the concept of the “subject” see Max Horkheimer and Thedor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming, London: Allen Lane, 1973 (originally published 1944), especially the chapter “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” pp. 168-208. On the concept of “identity” see Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, 1967. 2 On American patrician ideology and practice, see Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., Old Money: The Mythology of America’s Upper Class, New York: Vintage Books, 1988. 3 Stanley Tigerman, “Mies van der Rohe and His Disciples: The American Architectural Text and Its Readers,” in Mies Reconsidered: His Career, Legacy, and Disciples, ed. by John Zukowsky, Chicago and New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Rizzoli International Publications, 1986, pp. 99-107. 4 Kazys Varnelis explores Johnson’s skill at advancing agendas in “Philip Johnson’s Empire: Network Power and the AT&T Building,” in Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change, ed. by Emmanuel Petit, New Haven: Yale University Press and the Yale University School of Architecture, 2009, pp. 120-135. 5 Frank D. Welch, Philip Johnson and Texas, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000, pp. 36-57. 6 Ben Koush, Booming Houston and the Modern House: Residential Architecture of Neuhaus & Taylor, 1955-1960, Houston: Houston Mod, 2006, and Koush, Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr., Residential Architecture, 1948-1966, Houston: Houston Mod, 2007. See also Jason A. Smith, High Style in the Suburbs: The Early Modern Houses of William R. Jenkins, 1951-1958, Houston: Houston Mod, 2009. 7 The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A. M. Stern, ed. by Kazys Varnelis, New York: Monacelli Press and the Buell Center/Columbia Book of Architecture, 2008, pp. 78-79. Anderson Todd told Frank Welch about meeting Johnson in the early 1940s and getting invited to a cocktail party at Johnson’s Cambridge house in Philip Johnson in Texas, p. 20. 8 “Roman House,” House + Home 2 (July 1952): 67-73, and “In Texas, An Air-Conditioned Villa,” House and Garden 105 (February 1954): 50-53. 9 “Todd, Anderson” in American Architects Directory Second Edition, edited by George S. Koyl, New York, R. R. Bowker Company and the American Institute of Architects, 1962, p. 707; American Architects Directory Third Edition, edited by John F. Gane, New York: R. R. Bowker Company and the American Institute of Architects, p. 921; Who’s Who in America, Vol. 36, 1970-71, Chicago: Marquis Who’s Who, 1970, p. 2288; Who’s Who in America 1980-81, 41st Edition, Chicago: Marquis Who’s Who, 1980, vol. 2, p. 3303; and Who’s Who in America 1992-93, 47th Edition, Chicago: Marquis Who’s Who, 1992, vol. 2, p. 3361. 10 “Forecast ’58,” House and Garden 113 (January 1958): 22, 36, 38-40, 44-45, and “The Cool Contents of Summer,” House and Garden 118 (July 1960): 52. 11 Howard Barnstone, The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979, pp. 292-293. 12 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: An Architectural History, 1924-1986, edited by Celeste Marie Adams, Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 15 (1-2, 1992), pp. 64-97. 13 “David Haid,” in Mies Reconsidered, pp. 138-139 and 162-163. Also “What Is Happening to Banks?”; Architectural Forum 115 (October 1961): pp. 100, 102-103, 105; “Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr., Architect,” Arts and Architecture 82 (October 1965): 12-13; and Anderson Todd, “Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr., 1915-1987,” Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston, Winter 1987, pp. 19-20.

76 Honor

14 “An Open Plan for a Family Home,” Architectural Record 135 (March 1964): 173-176; and “4 Environments: You Are How You Live: Spaced Out,” Houston Home and Garden 5 (October 1978): 109. 15 “An Open Plan for a Family Home,” p. 174. 16 At the Bolsover house by Anderson and Iris Todd, the kitchen is also pivotal in shaping sensations of space. It is hidden from the awareness of arriving visitors, only to have its centrality revealed as it goes into operation. Secreting the kitchen at the Bolsover house cleverly facilitates visitors’ perception that the house is extremely spacious in spite of its compact plan. 17 Frank Lloyd Wright is associated with low ceilings, which he used to construct sensations of intimacy but also sensations of expansiveness where he juxtaposed higher ceilings with lower ceilings. Mies installed low ceilings in all of his American residential 1 buildings, except the Farnsworth House. At the Farnsworth House, the ceiling is 10- /2- feet high, the same dimension as at Philip Johnson’s Glass House and also the Menil 1 House. Hugo Neuhaus was truer to mid-century practice in installing 9- /2-foot ceilings in his house. The most virtuoso display of an unusually low ceiling that doesn’t seem low is at the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, by Eero Saarinen, Kevin Roche, and Alexander 1 Girard. Its ceiling is 8- /2-feet high over interior dimensions of more than fi fty feet. “A Contemporary Palladian Villa,” Architectural Forum 109 (September 1958): 151-158. 18 See the oral history interview with Jacques C. Brownson conducted in 1994 by Betty J. Blum for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, The Ernest R. Graham Center for Architectural Drawings, Department of Architecture, posted on the website of the Art Institute of Chicago: http://www.artic.edu/aic/libraries/research/specialcollections/ oralhistories/brownson.html 19 “Heavy Steel in Rigid Frames Can Span Great Spaces,” House and Home 8 (December 1955): 146, and “Light Steel Framing Introduces New Decorative Patterns,” House and Home 8 (December 1955): 147. David Haid’s house for his family in Evanston, Illinois (1968) also displays similarities in plan organization to the Shadowlawn house. See “9,” Architectural Record 149 (Mid-May 1971): 48-49. Neil Jackson’s international survey The Steel House (London: E. & F. N. Spon/Chapman and Hall, 1996) does not mention Brownson’s Geneva House or any of the Texan examples. 20 “Glass House is Suspended From Steel Frames,” Architectural Record 119 (Mid-May 1956): 206-207, and “Disciplined Elegance Marks House Design,” Architectural Record 119 (Mid-May 1956): front cover and pp. 134-138. 21 “Lesser Materials, More Labor,” Progressive Architecture 50 (June 1969): 118-121; “One Architect’s Dwelling Place,” Texas Architect 23 (July-August 1973): 22-24; Mary Uhrbrock, “Eastern Exposure,” Houston Home and Garden 6 (November 1979): 140- 143; Gary McKay, “Orient Expressions,” Houston Home and Garden 11 (April 1985): 74-77; William F. Stern, “Home on the Range: the Gibson House by John Zemanek,” Cite 25: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston, Fall 1990, pp. 22-23; Carlos Jiménez, “The Light Between Gardens,” Harvard Design Magazine (Summer 1997): 65- 67; Michelangelo Sabatino, “Small Houses for a Big City,” Cite 70: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston, Spring 2007, pp. 25-26; and Carlos Jiménez, “Architecture is about Life: A Conversation with John Zemanek,” Cite 75: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston, Summer 2008, pp. 30-34. 22 Joel Sanders, “Introduction,” from Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, edited by Joel Sanders, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, p. 14. 23 Vincent Scully, “Foreword,” in John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, Conversations With Architects, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973, p. 7. 24 On O’Neil Ford see Mary Carolyn Hollers George, O’Neil Ford, Architect, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992, and David Dillon, The Architecture of O’Neil Ford: Celebrating Place, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. On Donald Barthelme see Stephen James, “Donald Barthelme: Architecture and the Road to La Mancha,” Arris 16: Journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (2005): 56-58. On William W. Caudill see Jonathan King and Philip Langdon, The CRS Team and the Business of Architecture, College Station: Texas A&M University, 2002, and Paolo Tombesi, “Capital Gains and Architectural Losses: The Transformative Journey of Caudill Rowlett Scott (1948-1994),” Journal of Architecture 11 (April 2006): 145-168. 25 On Barthelme’s house see Steven Barthelme, “House of Ideas,” Elle Décor (June-July 1994): 70, Ben Koush. Donald Barthelme: A Modernism Suitable for Everyday Use, 1939- 1945, Houston: Houston Mod, 2005, and Frederick Barthelme and Steven Barthelme, Double Down: Refl ections on Gambling and Loss, Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1999. On Willow Way see Frank Welch, “A Day With O’Neil Ford,” Texas Architect 42 (July-August 1992): 48-51 and “Willow Way’s Sale Marks End of an Era,” Texas Architect 56 (January 2006): 15.

77 COUNTING

26 “Out on Buffalo Bayou,” Progressive Architecture 51 (September 1970): 104-107, and Jay Baker, “CRS Serene,” Cite 37: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston, Spring 1997, 40-41. 27 Kenneth E. Silver, “Andy Warhol, 1928-87,” Art in America 75 (May 1987): 141. 28 “Decorative Structural Angles for an Oil Company,” Progressive Architecture 49 (February 1968): 114-117 and ”Fire Truck Showcases: Fire Station No. 59, Houston, Texas,” Progressive Architecture 49 (March 1968): 106-109. Bill N. Lacy was brought to Rice by Bill Caudill from Caudill Rowlett Scott in 1961. In 1965 Lacy became the founding dean of the architecture program at the University of Tennessee. Between 1971 and 1977 he was director of the architecture and environmental arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts and, concurrently, director of the Federal Design Project. He was president of the American Academy in Rome from 1977 to 1980, president of Cooper Union from 1980 to 1988, and president of Purchase College, State University of New York from 1993 to 2001 while also serving as executive director of the Pritzker Prize architecture jury (1988-2005). Gerald Tackett is a Houston architect and a lecturer in architecture at the University of Houston. From 1970 to 1986 Anderson Todd collaborated with William T. Cannady on the Amigos de las Américas Building in Houston (1973), a house for Susan and Raymond Brochstein (1973, with Raymond Brochstein), the Children’s Mental Health Services of Houston Building (1976), the Sunset Townhouses (1978), and the Todd Townhouses on Nantucket Street (1982). Todd also designed two houses for Dwight K. Nishimura, the fi rst at 4517 Live Oak Street in Bellaire (1987) and the second at 3721 Meadow Lake Lane in Royden Oaks (2000, with Nikolai Nikolov). Neither of the Nishimura houses is “Miesian” in style. What both exhibit is Todd’s commitment to building architecture instead of simply designing it. Rafael Longoria, who was student of Todd’s, an employee of Ford’s, and is a colleague of Zemanek’s at the University of Houston’s Hines College of Architecture, observes that the initial design question each poses is “how shall we build this?” On Todd’s career as a teacher at Rice see William T. Cannady, The Things They’ve Done: A Book About the Careers of Selected Graduates of the Rice University School of Architecture, Architecture at Rice 43, Houston: Rice University School of Architecture, 2007.

78 Honor

Suit House, 1970

79 COUNTING

Geophysical Laboratory for the Superior Oil Company, 1967

80 Honor

81 COUNTING

82 Honor

83 COUNTING

84 At Home With Anderson Todd

AT HOME WITH ANDERSON TODD

Frank Welch

This essay fi rst appeared soon after Anderson Todd completed his Bolsover house. It was originally published in Cite #34, in 1996. The text is largely unchanged but includes some factual corrections (thanks to Stephen Fox) and some minor editing.

Anderson Todd, professor emeritus of architecture at Rice University, has begun his academic retirement with a bang by building a sparkling new house for himself and his wife, Iris, at the intersection of Bolsover and Hazard Streets in Houston, Texas. It is the third house he has designed for himself, and in both formal style and execution it perfectly refl ects the talent and philosophy of this architect and educator. That means it is a structure that adheres closely to the precepts identifi ed with Mies van der Rohe.

While a student at Princeton, Andy Todd met Mies, who would serve as his architectural and philosophical mentor. Todd recalls his fi rst personal encounter with the newly immigrated architect: “Mies came to Princeton when I was a freshman. No one would help him hang the exhibit of his precise drawings of bricks, so I did. Little did I know what the future with this man held for me.” Todd, in turn, served

85 COUNTING

Every idea can probably be put on a thumbnail.

— AT

86 At Home With Anderson Todd his teacher in 1954 by helping see to it that Mies received the commission to design Cullinan Hall and later the Brown Pavilion for Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

If Mies was Todd’s architectural lodestar, Jean Labatut was his inspiration as an educator. Born in France and educated at Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Labatut joined the Princeton faculty in 1928 and remained there until his retirement in 1967. The Princeton teacher inspired his students in the manner of the humanist-liberal tradition with analysis, knowledge, and sympathy for all periods of architecture. “He was the greatest teacher and meant everything to me; he was my patrone,” Todd recalls. On his fi rst visit to Labatut’s offi ce, in 1939, Todd saw a photograph of Mies van der Robe’s Barcelona Pavilion. The Professor explained, “It is one of the ways architecture will be built in the future.” The two great infl uences on Todd’s architectural and academic career merged in this one moment of revelation, Labatut wide-ranging and inclusionist, Mies strict, rigorous, and methodical.

There was a third important fi gure: Todd’s maternal grandfather, John Hampton Barnes, in whose Philadelphia house Todd fi rst heard architecture discussed. A successful Philadelphia lawyer, Barnes hired his best friend, Wilson Eyre— a prominent Philadelphia architect— to design the family house on Waterloo Road. Later, as chairman of his bank board’s building committee, Barnes was instrumental in approving the choice of George Howe and William Lescaze as architects for the country’s fi rst modern skyscraper, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building in Philadelphia. Todd’s paternal grandfather, Albert W. Todd, and his father’s brother were both architects in Charleston, South Carolina.

87 COUNTING

88 At Home With Anderson Todd

“I have never,” Todd declares, “said to a student: ‘Do it like Mies would do it.’ Never. Never!” Some longtime Todd observers understand that he actually feels this in his heart, but in truth Todd’s passionate beliefs lead directly to Mies. Former student John Casbarian thinks Todd really believes that he teaches without bias: “His love and respect for Mies van der Rohe is so embedded in him he doesn’t recognize it. It’s like being so close to something, one can’t see it. Early in his career Andy found the philosophy that suited him and he totally absorbed it into his being.” Todd asserts emphatically, “I try to inspire [students] with certain basic principles: how to organize space in a rational manner, how to conceive a structure with logic and directness, and how to assemble its parts with common sense and grace!” If God is in the details, for Todd it is a wise, analytical God of Sachlichkeit—directness, objectivity, and realness.

Todd’s new house at 1932 Bolsover is located on property that Todd had used as a site for house design projects in his Rice studios for more than 20 years. “The lot is not quite long enough north-south for the sort of modular organization I was asking the students for, but nobody caught the discrepancy in all those years except one fellow.” In spite of the site’s dimensional intransigence, his new house strictly adheres to Todd’s familiar principles of modularity and respect for the clarity of planning, the roles of materials and their exact assemblies. In concept it is a junior version of the house Todd designed for his family at 9 Shadowlawn Circle in 1959. It is, however, as Houston architect William Stern says, “more youthful, less Miesian, more like the 1950s California Case Study houses.” Todd himself describes his new house as “quirky, quaint, and cozy.”

89 COUNTING

90 At Home With Anderson Todd

The older Shadowlawn house is larger than the Bolsover house. It is richer in tone and execution, and more somber in mien. It is likewise a courtyard house but with high-walled courts on its east and west sides bracketing a rectangular block plan. After a visit many years ago, Philip Johnson described Todd’s award winning house as “more Mies than Mies’’ There is a grand sweep to the central spaces, which lock around the walnut-sheathed core. The larger house fi nds a muted echo in the more intimate Bolsover structure. The Bolsover furnishings are mellower: Windsor and Tugendhat chairs coexist.

Key to both houses is the element Todd considers of paramount importance in planning the modem house: the centralized kitchen. “There are no servants anymore, very few even in River Oaks,” he asserts. “I grew up in a big three-story house in Philadelphia with two acres of lawn in front, served by a staff of nine taking care of everything from gardening to chauffeuring. Now, with servants at a minimum, it makes extraordinary sense to locate the kitchen right in the center of a house.” While the Shadowlawn kitchen is hemmed in between the living and sleeping areas, its only natural light coming from a smallish skylight, the Bolsover kitchen benefi ts from a glazed north wall facing the house’s inner court.

A high-walled court on the south side of the Bolsover house runs along Hazard to form an entry alley, centered on steel gates facing Bolsover. In some ways, this court is reminiscent of one at the earlier house but here it slips past the corner of the house to create a more intimate approach to the entry, Part of what gives the new house its youthful feeling is the buoyancy of the light-refl ecting white steel structure, white drywall interior, grey linked

91 COUNTING

92 At Home With Anderson Todd white terrazzo fl oor, and light grey-brown brick. At the Shadowlawn house the details are similar, though sharper and more articulate: the black steel fascia has a crisp channel reveal dear to Todd that is missing from Bolsover. “It cost too much to repeat that,” Todd notes regretfully as he gently segues into a mantra concerning masonry modularity. Otherwise the diverse parts of the assembled new structure are as carefully and thoughtfully ordained as in the earlier, more expensive house. He is well known for his passion on the subject of the performance of materials. He draws full-scale details, with every brick in wall elevations and dimensioned plans as precise and succinct as his intentions. He sketches and slaps his extended hands together at right angles, illustrating how wood members should relate and fi t. Suddenly he asks: “What size does Sheetrock come in?! Aha! ‘Eight foot and ten foot’— every architect gives the same answer. None of them know there is nine-foot Sheetrock!” The Bolsover ceiling height is 9 feet 2-1/4 inches high with a ¾ inch reveal at the ceiling and a 1-1/2 inch recessed base at the fl oor.

Many architects from his two generations of Rice design studios still see Todd regularly. Members of his fi rst graduating class of 1955 meet once a month in Houston for lunch. Mel Hildebrandt, one of the ‘55 regulars, comments on Todd as a teacher: “Three things about him stood out. First was his enthusiasm for architecture. He made you believe it was important. Second was his interest in each person individually; there was the sense that one had personal value. And third, he made me believe that I could achieve. I owe him a lot.”

Another member of Todd’s fi rst class is Benson Ford, who through Todd’s encouragement and tactical help went on

93 COUNTING

I had to move a wall, then another wall, then I had to make this wall higher. It’s a never- ending game.

— AT

94 At Home With Anderson Todd to the wider world of Princeton on a scholarship. “Yes, Andy made the Princeton experience possible because he believed in me, a kid from Pasadena, Texas. First Andy at Rice and then Jean Labatut at Princeton were the great infl uences on my life. I vividly remember Todd sitting with a group of students holding this block of wood, mahogany, I believe, turning it over in his hand and asking ‘What is this piece of wood all about?’ We were stumped, of course. It was an oarlock from a Venetian gondola. He was pushing us to analyze, visualize, and seek answers based on the evidence. This bone-lean oarlock was very beautiful and puzzling but, secretly, perfectly functional. That was his and Labatut’s way: charging us to fi nd our own answers about truth, clarity, and simplicity.” (Ford later was the contractor for the Shadowlawn house.)

“What we tried to teach were principles of good architecture in its various guises,” Todd explains. “Then, in Labatut’s words, we told them to ‘close the book and create a forgetfulness’ and move on. I wanted them to fi nd out what was good and learn to like it. There are things that make good architecture that you don’t see. There must be a moral framework. Yes, sure, virtue is its own reward— it’s the only reward you really get.”

95 COUNTING

96 Anderson Todd at Rice

ANDERSON TODD AT RICE

Nonya Grenader

When Anderson Todd joined the architecture faculty in 1949, Rice was a very different place. It was a Department (rather than School) of Architecture with studios, classrooms and offi ces contained entirely on the second fl oor of Anderson Hall. William Ward Watkin, the program’s founding voice, was leading a distinguished program that had yet to go beyond the Beaux Arts traditions upon which the school was founded.

Todd arrived with fresh ideas combined with an expansive understanding of all periods of architecture. He had been deeply infl uenced by Jean Labatut, his professor and mentor at Princeton’s Graduate School of Design. That experience, along with an interest in the work of Mies van der Rohe and the International Style, would profoundly inform Todd’s own teaching and professional career.

97 COUNTING

98 Anderson Todd at Rice

99 COUNTING

You have to make choices in life, and you’ve got to look for a certain amount of satisfaction. But more than satisfaction, you’ve got to be able to stand up for it. Stand up for it and put it up on the wall. Nail it to the wall.

— AT

100 Anderson Todd at Rice

Raymond Brochstein, a student in Todd’s freshman studio in 1951 observed, “Todd brought modernism to Rice; he was exploring new ideas in theory and in teaching.”

Brochstein would have Todd as a professor over multiple semesters and the impact of his teaching still lingers. “He was demanding but fair. We learned that everything mattered, every design choice made a difference. We were challenged to conceive of a project in its entirety with all elements considered together.” In later years, Brochstein and Todd were working on the design of a table and those early lessons still applied. They considered multiple options for the connection of vertical stainless steel legs to horizontal support (settling on a reveal) and they questioned the thickness of the tabletop, debating the difference a 1/16” would make. Again, everything mattered.

At Rice, Todd served as Chairman (1966-1969), Director (1969-72) and Acting Dean (1980). The pioneering Rice Preceptor Program, which places students in prominent architectural offi ces, fl ourished during that period. In the fi rst Preceptorship class of 1969, Danny Samuels was placed in the Paris atelier of Jullian de la Fuente who was a protégé of Le Corbusier and had been commissioned to continue work on the Venice Hospital after Le Corbusier’s death. Samuels arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris and recalls, “I was a young kid from Arkansas, had not been anywhere outside of the United States, and Andy Todd drives up in a red convertible two-seater—he has brought Jullian to pick me up at the station. We stuffed my very large trunk into a slot behind the seat and I sat on top. The three of us toured the city all day and it was such a memorable start to the year. That’s how Andy was; he just appeared when you needed him.”

101 COUNTING

102 Anderson Todd at Rice

103 COUNTING

I got pretty close to my students. Not that I was easy on them, but, well, that’s another matter.

— AT

104 Anderson Todd at Rice

In 1978 Todd was named Wortham Professor of Architecture at Rice and continued to teach with the same high expectations of those earlier semesters. Hundreds of students learned how to organize space and structure with clarity in assignments such as the classic courtyard house, a typology that Todd had assigned over the years and had mastered in his own work. Mark Oberholzer, a student of Todd’s in a 1991 studio, remembers: “Before beginning his famous courtyard house design problem—with its emphasis on light, space and detail,—Andy assigned a quick house design with absolutely no constraints, so that we could get out all of our bad ideas and start the courtyard house fresh.”

Though Todd retired in 1992, he continues to be an essential presence at Rice. He attends lectures. He participates in conversations. He teaches. He learns. In 2001, he spent a long afternoon reviewing freshman design projects. The students had designed toys or, in formal terms, a set of parts that could be confi gured and reconfi gured in a variety of ways. The program stipulated a system that would engage players from age eight to eighty (conveniently, Todd’s age at the time). As always, Todd looked closely, examining the parts and turning each piece slowly in his hand. He gleaned every bit of information from the individual pieces and assembled different versions of the whole. Why use this particular wood? Why cut along that grain? Why such a complex connection? No connection at all, just gravity? What an exuberant shade of blue (that reminded Andy of a tie he once bought in Paris)!

On juries and elsewhere, Todd always makes tangible observations regarding stability, spatial accommodation and appearance and then moves to more elusive qualities

105 COUNTING

Anderson Todd in Studio, Rice School of Architecture, 1968

106 Anderson Todd at Rice

107 COUNTING

108 Anderson Todd at Rice that encompass mass, maneuverability, and ability to delight. Without seeing it coming, anyone he talks to comes away with an understanding of Vitruvius’ three requirements of fi rmitas (durability), utilitas (usefulness) and venustas (beauty) in ways that are expansive and informative.

Style, in architecture and in clothing, has gone through cycles but Todd has been consistent and classic in both. He is a master of editing and elegant detail but is not afraid of a splash of color. At the entry of the courtyard house that Andy and Iris Todd designed for themselves, there is a skillfully assembled palette of materials: crisp white walls, terrazzo fl oor, cantilevered wood slab shelf, and one of Andy’s luminous watercolor washes. Past students visit the house and enjoy the built version of Todd’s many lessons. When asked about that table he designed with Brochstein years ago, Andy quickly sketches the connection of the vertical leg to the horizontal support, visually describing the reveal between the two elements. He explains, “It is the space between the two that makes the difference, the invisible that makes it all visible.”

When the computer became a common tool in architecture offi ces, Todd was eager to learn it: “I believe in it—in a computer drawing, you are working full size and that was something that Labatut believed in.” Nonetheless, though he embraced the computer, Todd has never stopped drawing by hand. Everyone knows that the prime spot in a Rice School of Architecture lecture is within view of Andy’s sketchbook. As he draws his observations, from insightful plan sketches to a spot-on portrait of the speaker, he constantly explores his subject. In fact, there are stacks of sketchbooks that reveal a lifetime of astute observations in

109 COUNTING

110 Anderson Todd at Rice words and images: the students taught, the books read, and the places traveled. At the age of ninety, Anderson Todd is the consummate teacher while still possessing the curiosity of a student.

111 COUNTING

112 Anderson Todd at Rice

113 COUNTING

IMAGE CREDITS Eve Arnold, Photographer: page 62 (thanks to Geraldina Ara- manda, Mary Kadish, and the Menil Museum). Rick Gardner, Photographer: pages 2/3, 14, 40/41, 42/43, 64, 72, 74, 79, 80/81. Nonya Grenader, Photographer: pages 102/103. Paul Hester, Photographer: pages 3/4, 12, 18/19, 54/55, 70/71, 84, 88, 106/107, 110, Back Cover. Fred Sandback, Artist: page 22: Untitled (Sculptural Study, Two- part Vertical Construction), ca. 1986/2008. Black acrylic yarn. Spatial relationships established by the artist, overall dimensions vary with each installation. Photo by Cathy Carver © 2011 Fred Sandback Archive; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York. Anderson Todd, Architect/Professor: pages 28/29, 32, 46, 58/59, 60, 72, 82/83, 90, 108. Wendy Todd, Photographer: page 32. Frank White, Photographer: pages 5, 112/113. Ron Witte, Photographer: pages 10/11, 16/17, 38, 116/117.

114 Credits

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due to the many contributors to this project. In par- ticular, I am grateful to Nonya Grenader, Stephen Fox, and Frank Welch for generously agreeing to contribute essays. The images were kindly provided by the Menil Museum, the Fred Sandback Estate (David Zwirner, New York), Eve Arnold, Stephen Fox, Rick Gardner, Nonya Grenader, Paul Hester, Anderson Todd, Wendy Todd, David Todd, and Frank White. I was continually struck by the generosity of all of the image providers who never failed to give me exactly what was needed to give the project its visual voice. Anderson Todd’s family—Emily, David, Wendy, Hannah, Margaret and Iris—provided many insights into Anderson’s life, and many much needed corrections along the way. Anderson’s grand- daughter Hannah, specifi cally, provided me with a fascinating essay that she had written about her grandfather, a terrifi c glimpse into his formation, his work, and his perpetual passion for life. Lucie Todd graciously allowed Anderson and me to have many conversations in the Shadowlawn House. These conversations were an important catalyst for much of what appears in my own essay and proved to me that, as Emily Todd remarked, ‘space changes people.’ Lucie Todd herself gave me countless insights into both the house that she lives in and its architect…always in the most illuminating and incisive of ways. Lucie leaves no doubt about the fact that nothing will ever come of architecture without a patron to set it in motion. Most of all, to Anderson: thanks for Almost Nothing. Ron Witte, October, 2011

115 COUNTING

116 Credits

117