ONCE I WANTED TO BE AN ARCHITECT

Charles always kept on his proper sport coat..

photographs by Paul G. Ryan

Once I wanted to be an architect. Of course, at many times over the years, I wanted to be many things. I played some serious ice hockey, I studied engineering wanting to become an aeronautical engineer, but flying airplanes was more fun than designing them. I got my pilots license and flew my own airplane deep into many wildernesses. I became a photographer. I became a cinematographer. I made movies.  But I never became an architect.

The BURNS HOUSE

Over the years I became friends with many architects, Larry Halprin. Rod Freebairn-Smith, Thom Mayne.  And I met Charles Moore once at the Halprin Experimental Workshop on the driftwood beaches of Sea Ranch…

…where many participants took off their clothes, but Charles always kept on his proper sport coat on while rolling logs across the sand.  He always had an inquisitive and mischievous look in his eye.

Larry Halprin - Anna Halprin - Charles Moore… Sea Ranch 1966

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Last week, years after, I was at a party at one of the homes he designed, the Burns house in Santa Monica, built on a steep hillside.

THE BURNS HOUSE - Santa Monica

Now I saw the creative manifestation of that formally dressed beach walker.

Momentarily escaping the social obligations, I wandered through the spaces, up and down staircases, exploring the inner spaces of stacked oversize domino cubes. Each flight revealed a different view of the landscape, the Ocean and its visual cousin the deep blue of the swimming pool, stands of palm trees, distant houses across Santa Monica Canyon. 

One of the demands of the client was that there be a place for a full size pipe organ. Moore gave it a home.

The Organ at the BURNS HOUSE

It’s a tremendously interesting place to explore. Beyond practicality, the function of architecture in keeping your daily life movement interesting should not be underrated.

Burns House - by the pool

A strange and wonderful place.  I don’t think I would ever get bored here, and whatever odd items I would bring to it would find a comfortable pace to reside.

In retrospect I don’t think I would have had the persistence to struggle through the political and business complexities of architecture to give birth to ideas such as this.  For me, it was relatively easy to make images.

“If buildings are to speak, they must have freedom of speech. It seems to me that one of the most serious dangers to architecture is that people may just lose interest in it… If architecture is to survive in the human consciousness, then the things buildings can say, be they wistful or wise or powerful or gently or heretical or silly, have to respond to the wide range of human feelings.”
Charles Moore