It is a truism that architects start with their mother’s house, or with an addition to their parents’ home, if it is not a coffee shop or small bookstore remodeling. An especially entrepreneurial group of young designers go a step further: They make their own chances, buy dilapidated or under-valued properties, add their own touches, and then, in learned-from-TV style, flip them, using the proceeds for the next project. The hope is that somebody will pick up on the innovations and beautifications they have provided, publish the built design, and launch their career.
Consider this such an effort: The self-starting architect is Ben Pennell, whom I first encountered on a review when he was studying at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and who now, after detours to China and North Dakota, is teaching with me at Virginia Tech. Here he has also broken ground on a house he is building with the proceeds from a renovation in Grand Forks, N.D., itself financed by an addition in his home town of Modesto, Calif., which he built with construction help from his parents.
Pennell’s style is Retro Rococo, or perhaps Digital Deco. He has figured out how to do Venturi and Scott-Brown one better by using both the computer and his own pyrotechnic drawing skills to add floriate embellishments and distorted elongations to otherwise logical and even stripped-down structures. His architecture is evident in curls and twists, pop-outs and indentations he strews across façades and along the focal points of interior spaces. Not exactly caught up with materiality, he uses Fiberglas, stucco, or whatever material he can to transform his fervid imagination into three dimensions.
Like many architects full of vim and vigor, Pennell has also penned a screed to explain and justify his approach, which he declaimed in a well-received lecture to an audience of students, faculty, and staff here at Virginia Tech a few weeks ago, which still has students and faculty talking and debating. His first point was to justify the path he has chosen to make residential architecture, as opposed to working for a larger firm designing larger structures.
“The time for independent residential architecture is now," Pennell said during the lecture. "The time for institutional metropolitan architecture is dead."
He also called for students to follow him in building as much of such structures themselves (or with the help of family and friends) as possible:
“Revive your dead soul that is being ripped to shreds by scorpions and fire ants. And take up those hammers and nails and saw blades and shovels that you abhor. And trade in your clean clothes for dirty ones, your leather loafers for leather boots. And rebuild your flattened, burned-out houses that once gave nourishment to your living soul and cradled it in kindness and in dignity, and leave behind this world.”
Then Pennell extended his point into a larger one about how a nascent architect can find their own place in the world. Traditionally, that is through an apprenticeship to another architect, in which the designer learns everything from details to how to gain clients. To Pennell, his path is part of a larger movement in our culture that fuses DIY with social media and cheap technology to create a new kind of arts and crafts movement, visible in everything from Etsy and the numerous craft sites to the thousands of makers on SoundCloud, across all aspects of culture and beyond:
“See the lone craftsmen, the family farmers, the small-town bakers and bankers. See the local grocery stores, the corner stores, the family doctors.
See the small-time rock-and-roll bands and jazz bands;
See them earn a living without a record deal;
See them perform their art as though it were their right:
Inalienable, indestructible, infinite, and free.”
Like the self-promoting musicians and sellers of organic food from food trucks, what should drive the architect who has chosen this path is a belief in a purer, freer, and more exuberantly beautiful kind of work. Of such visions, Pennell says:
“….draw them, imagine them, discuss them while you are in school; have the open license to think independently of cost; independently of codes; independently of clients; of your contemporaries; of all prohibitive limitations which might prevent the flowering of you. Fantastic detail, vitality; bring this to the work. See it come to life on a page, and live inside of it with your hamstrings and your cotton cords and your friends and grandparents, as your fingers glisten before your very eyes like blinking neon piano keys in the dead of night.”
Together, these tasks give him a vision of what architecture could be and how you should go about making it. It lets the architect proceed, Pennell argues, without the compromises that come from having to work within larger systems, whether they be design firms, client institutions, or the financial and life and safety codes that become ever more intense the larger a building becomes:
“And with a bank loan or with bad checks or with empty promises or with severed kidney’s sold for cold hard cash in green-backed dollar bills, build yourself a house as beautiful as the Mona Lisa. Build yourself a house so beautiful that the president of General Motors comes to have dinner with you and says 'Young man, or young lady, please for the love of god design me a factory as beautiful as this.' And then tell him to go make love to himself, and resume building more houses. And see that your cities, and your hospitals, and your theaters and museums get smashed into the small of your attic spaces. And let each house shine like a bolt of lightning concentrated through the barrel of a crystal glass shotgun pointed at your heart with a bullet. Let them cry like children wail. Let them rain like seagulls flapping. Let your plastic paperclips melt into cherry sex inside of the rainbow of your helicopter. Let them be the greatest houses in town. Murder the competition. Let it be all yours, and you will not die unfulfilled, and one day when this darkened shadow of unconsciousness has passed, we will emerge from our hovels and hinterlands and reclaim the city which was taken from us.”
With the fervor of the Italian Futurists of the beginning of the 20th century, who believed that the next generation would find them “by the hulks of their burned-out airplanes” and set upon them and kill them because they stood in the way of a newness that only the young possess, Pennell feels he needs to act fast: “The architect must give to the world as many good buildings as possible before they are dead.”
Convinced of the quality of his own work, he is hard at work at this task. So far, the results are promising. There is a danger in his attitude, though. Architects (and writers about architects) convince themselves that their designs are revelations and solutions to all the world’s problems, only to find that the impact of what they do is limited as much by its place in our society and culture as it is by money and codes. Let’s hope that Pennell and the like can flip himself out of his isolated experiments and reluctance to engage social issues to test his metal and his curlicues in a larger scene.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
