Lawrence Modern home

Nicol House, Kansas City, Mo.

The precious few times I’ve had the privilege to visit Bruce Goff-designed houses I’ve always left feeling enthralled by the experience, and reminded that the world is far more mysterious and wonderful than I had previously thought.

So it is with great delight to relay the news that our friends at KCModern are putting on an ambitious, multi-event Goff extravaganza June 8-10. (See details below.) This is a rare opportunity that shouldn’t be passed up. While not as well known as Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff’s organic architecture is no less celebrated among architecture enthusiasts, who sometimes travel great distances and scheme to great lengths just to get a glimpse inside his eccentric buildings. We in Lawrence are extremely fortunate that these houses are so close to home and accessible.

Goff designed three houses in Kansas City—each will be on display during the KCModern tour—and to visit any one of them is embark on a rich and revealing architectural journey.

Tom, Dennis and I had the privilege to do just that a couple of years ago when Rod Parks, owner of the Retro Inferno furniture store in downtown Kansas City, kindly invited us into the Nicol House, which he purchased in 2010. We haven’t seen the other two Goff houses scheduled on the tour, but the Nicol House alone offers enough satisfaction. It is food for the eyes of anyone who appreciates great architectural design, art, and furniture.

Nicol House interior at night (Photo: Bill Steele)

Like nearly all of Goff’s residential works, the Nicol House is a reflection of the client as much as it is about the architect. Mr. Nicol was a banker who liked to entertain guests, and the house’s extravagant teepee shape and totem-like entry doors (one door leads to the backyard pool) suggest a family of high socioeconomic status occupying it. Joe Price, who commissioned Goff to design houses and buildings for him, once told me that Bruce tried to place himself in the shoes of his client and design his house as if he were the client. So go figure.

The house features an octagonal floor plan that in the drawings looks like a honeycomb. Once inside, you rise a few feet upward and enter a cavernous space where you are immediately drawn to a sunken pit at the center. It is one of the most magical entries in modern architecture. There you can enjoy total freedom to view the house and all of its fantastic qualities without ever having to move.

Looking north through the Nicol House’s colorful rooms (Photo: Scott Spychalski)

Yet, there is something wild about the house that makes me want to explore it with childish abandon. Perhaps it’s the bold colors of the rooms? The triangular windows? The massive rear doors with octagonal windows that pivot 180 degrees? The areas of attraction and interest are inexhaustible. I can only imagine how much fun the Nicol children had growing up in this house.

Nicol House interior in early morning light (Photo: Bill Steele)

One of the reasons the Nicol House resonates so strongly is because it taps into our primal knowledge of nature: earth, water, fire, stone and sky are in one form or another represented here. The indigenous character of the house would seem to reinforce this. But no matter how you interpret it, there is no denying its boldness and originality, its fervent imagination, especially in the context of the play-it-safe times we live in. Nearly 50 years after it was built, it remains a fresh and vital example of Bruce Goff’s visionary architecture.

Bill

GOFF WEEKEND
KANSAS CITY
JUNE 8|9|10  2012
www.kcmodern.com/

THE MAGIC OF GOFF LIGHT
Friday, June 8th, 7:30 to 10:00
An intimate reception featuring the signature Goff weekend cocktail and hors d’oevres. Watch the ever-changing light in the premiere Goff home of Rod Parks’ The Nicol House – 5305 Cherry – Kansas City – Missouri
$50.00 per person

CREATIVITY IN KANSAS CITY
Saturday, June 9th, 10:00 – Noon
A Conversation of Bruce Goff
A discussion and exhibition of Goff’s work in Kansas City, featuring original owners, colleagues and drawings
Katz Hall at UMKC
5005 Rockhill Road – Kansas City – Missouri

PAUL SEARING TRIBUTE TOUR
Saturday, June 9th, 1:00 – 4:00
Tour the 3 Goff houses
The Nicol House at 5305 Cherry – Kansas City, MO
The Hyde House at 5020 W. 67th Street – Prairie Village, KS
The Searing House – 7821 Fontana – Prairie Village, KS
$20.00 per person for the 3 houses
BUY ONLINE NOW OR AT SYMPOSIUM
NO TICKET SALES AT THE HOUSES

BEHIND THE SCENES TOUR
Sunday, June 10, 1:30
INVENTING THE MODERN WORLD
DECORATIVE ARTS AT THE WORLD’S FAIR 1851-1939
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
4525 Oak Street – Kansas City, MO
Enjoy Brunch at Rozzelle Court (reservations recommended)
Meet at the information desk at the Nelson at 1:30

Sargent "Space Home" for sale in Topeka

Los Angeles and San Francisco have their Eichler homes, Kansas City has its Drummonds, and thanks to a little known builder named John “Church” Sargent, Lawrence, too, has its modern subdivisions. Take a drive down Ousdahl Rd. between 19th and 21st and south of 9th St. on Madeline and Murrow Ct. and you can’t miss them.

Dubbed “Space Homes” when they were built in the mid-1950s, these simple, modest houses channeled California Modern style architecture at affordable prices — most sold for around $15,000 or less — to the Lawrence masses. They have held their value: I recently closed a sale on a 1955 Sargent on Murrow Ct. for $125,000, a net plus when adjusted for inflation.

Space Homes landed so long ago that hardly anyone remembers where they came from. Church Sargent died in 1974, and his Topeka-based business, Jayhawk Construction Co., no longer exists. But Lawrence Modern has been able to piece together enough fragments to form a picture of the man, his company, and his houses.

John "Church" Sargent at his company office, sometime in the 1950s

Church Sargent was born in 1897, in Kansas City, Kan., and partnered with his father in the cut stone business in Topeka before World War II. He developed a reputation as a savvy businessman, able to adapt quickly to market signals. When When the Great Depression put a virtual freeze on the demand for cut stone, he formed Jayhawk Construction in 1941, positioning himself for the construction boom that followed the war.

Jayhawk Construction’s initial offerings were diminutive ranch houses, about 700-800 sq. ft., that featured two bedrooms and one bath. They sold quickly, but by the mid-1950s demand fell and Church was forced to offer another product to remain competitive. (During the building boom, he faced fierce competition from the Moore Bros. tract houses on the other side of town.) Like Joe Eichler and other successful builders at the time, he decided to hire an architect — a modern architect — to boost curb appeal.

He lent the services of James R. Cushing, an architect who designed military housing and other buildings for the U.S. Air Force and was lead partner in the Topeka-based firm Cushing, Servis, Van Doren & Hazard.

Interior view of Sargent house on Murrow Ct. in Lawrence

While Cushing’s designs don’t stand out like the marvelous Eichlers, which benefited from a stable of well-known modern architects, they share many of the same grammatical elements: post-and-beam construction, open floor plans, vaulted ceilings illuminated by clerestory light, an honest expression of materials. Their differentiation comes from the architect’s stylistic variations on the theme.

A mid-1950s Topeka newspaper article states: “It is remarkable that, while the interiors of the houses are the same plan, the exteriors would not be recognized as being the same house. There is a wide difference in roofs, the entrances, finishes, and the colors which make them all seem individually designed homes.”

Kitchen and dining area

Each Space home had three bedrooms located on one side of the house across from two bathrooms with a kitchen, dining area and living room. Kitchens were equipped with modern appliances and metal cabinets (with boomerang pulls) manufactured by the Youngstown Cabinet Company, now highly sought after. Exterior siding was board and batten made of thick pecky cypress, pine or redwood. Roofs were flat and/or low-sloping A-frames with tar and gravel. A private patio was included on the side or back of the house. These houses are very efficiently designed, practical, and down-to-earth. Though small compared to today’s houses, their openness makes them feel larger, and they are also easy to maintain, making them eminently liveable.

It is unfortunate that many Space homes have been altered over the years with gable roofs, siding that has been covered up or removed, and other additions that are not sensitive to the original design. But a number of well-preserved examples remain scattered around the city. Take a walk or drive some day and prepare to enter a time-warp, when Space Homes invaded Lawrence.

906 Murrow Ct. Flickr photos, click here.
Exterior shots of various Space Homes in Lawrence, click here.

Tom

Alfred Caldwell taking in the scenery at the Domer residence in Baldwin, Kans., in 1993.

During the early post World War II period, Lawrence might have seemed far from the centers of innovative modern architecture — Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia. In fact, Lawrence was very connected intellectually to these cities and the towering geniuses of modernism—Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, among others—because KU’s program in architecture had turned modern in the 1920s through the influence of Professors George Beal, Joe Kellog, and later through the leadership of Professors John C. Morley and Curtis Besinger. Wright was particularly influential on the school, having befriended George Beal who went to Taliesin West in the mid-1930s during the summer to collaborate with Wright. Wright then frequently stopped in Lawrence on his annual caravans from Taliesin in Wisconsin to his new winter quarters called Taliesin West near Phoenix. Besinger worked for Wright for 17 years, leaving the fellowship as a senior apprentice, and he not only taught Wrightian principles of modern design but also focused on Japanese architecture which had influenced Wright’s thinking so much. His book, Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like, is a revealing Cambridge University Press publication that everyone interested in Wright should read. Morley, a frequent traveler to the European centers of modernism, made many connections for the school particularly in Denmark and Scotland where he taught on Fulbright fellowships and received additional training in modern urban design. From about 1925 to 1975, there was no one on the KU faculty who was not a “modern” architect.

As a result, dozens of young architects with a modern aesthetic, technologies, and building processes were graduated from KU during that key 50-year period. They flooded growing architectural firms in Topeka, Lawrence, Wichita, Kansas City, and St. Louis and built a gigantic array of new structures that followed the tenents of architecture laid down by their professors who promulgated modern thinking in studios and classrooms. It was impossible for these graduates to imagine building anything but modern buildings until the smoky pretensions of post-modernism began to creep into the plains during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The work of a generation of KU graduates faces the jeopardies of time and ignorance today, and our website brings that work before the public for evaluation and appreciation. These architects are “shadow figures” of modernism, architects who will never be well known but who made significant contributions to our Midwestern architectural landscape.

Main Pavilion, Eagle Point Park, Dubuque, Iowa 1934. Architect: Alfred Caldwell

The subject of shadow figures of modern architecture is important because there were geniuses among them, some of whom came to KU to teach and lecture. One frequent visitor in the late 1980s and in the 1990s was Alfred Caldwell who was a colleague of Wright, Mies, Craig Ellwood, Hilbesheimer, and other leaders. Caldwell was a visiting professor at KU in 1980, and stayed at our home in south Douglas County on a number of occasions. I worked with him from 1980 until the late 1990s. He retired as the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Professor of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago only two years before he died at the age of 95. He was a modern master, the last one, yet he, like our Lawrence architects, is not very well known because the stars overshadowed everyone. Slowly we are learning about them. Architecture could not have done without them!

"Farm house" designed by Alfred Caldwell, Bristol, Wisconsin 1948

For a short account of Caldwell’s work, and to see some of the fabulous landscapes and houses he designed, look at the article, “The Last Master” published in Inland Architecture magazine. It’s a synopsis of the book Alfred Caldwell: The Life and Work of a Prairie School Landscape Architect, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1997.

Dennis