Implosion

by Elizabeth W. Garber

  The stone fireplace wall was painted a gritty white. Suspended from the ceiling, a cable hung down for Dad to attach a three-foot-long black metal-framed sculpture, with wires attached to the top and bottom that held squares painted bright colors. It was a model for a screen that had been built, life-sized, for the St. Louis airport. Woodie had seen the model gathering dust in Harry’s studio on a visit, and convinced him to sell it to him.

  My father asked me, “Do you remember why Harry chose this set of colors for one side and these for the other side?” He swung the sculpture, showing me the side with red, orange and yellow squares. On the opposite side, the squares were painted blue, purple, black.

  “Of course, Dad.” I rolled my eyes. “You taught me this when I was almost a baby! They are ‘hot’ colors on one side and ‘cool’ on the other.”

  “Just wanted to keep you on your toes, Sugar.”

  I grinned. “Don’t worry about me, Daddy!”

  As night settled, my brothers and my father played with the lights, tapping and turning the dimmer switches, trying to remember what light lit up what part of the room. Finally they left them all on full and bright, and the room spun around us, a dizzying flash and flare of reds, copper pans, walnut cabinets that gleamed like coffee beans, paintings, and driving jazz rumbling through it all.

  I was setting the table. My mother was making a supper to celebrate, steaks with crushed garlic were ready to grill on the new broiler that had just been installed, scones in the new oven, corn heating in a copper pan on the stove. My father called out to her, “Dinner can wait. We have to go outside and walk across the field to see the house from outside.”

  The entry closet stood like a big box when you entered the great room from the front door, making the visitor pause, our father explained, before they entered. We pulled on our coats and hats, and stepped into the muddy boots we had left in a row on the porch. The house was still surrounded by vast bulldozed fields waiting for our landscaping. It was raw, late winter as we walked across the sticky clay mud of the fields, across the drainage ditch and up the road so we could see down the hill towards the house.

  This was the first night the house became what it was designed to be. We stood together, my little brothers holding my mother’s hands, and I leaned against my dad, his arm flung around my back, as we looked at what we had created. The darkness hid the mud field. The house shimmered like a white mirage in the valley, the crushed glass wall panels sparkling, while the Great Room blazed as if on fire, red, orange, and wood reflected and glowed inside the long glass walls. We were dazzled by my father’s vision. We had all worked together to make it happen. He clapped us all on the back, heady with delight. “We did it.” We nodded, smiling, repeating his words, almost stunned by this magnificence, never dreaming what would happen to us living in this blazing cauldron.

  We walked down the road together in the dark, turned onto the gravel drive that cut through the woods and followed the creek. There, on the crest of the hill high above us, the house sailed like a moonlit ocean liner. We walked up the driveway, proceeded under the inset ground-level entryway, and mounted the wide stone stairway leading us back to the Great Room, the heart of the fire.

  Woodie (professional portrait), circa 1960s

  THE MIRROR GLASS TOWER

  1967

  Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

  —LOUIS KAHN

  THE FRONT DOOR FLEW OPEN. “BOY OH BOY, does that smell good!” In his fifties, Dad was a bull of a man, bald and big-chested, with a booming voice that filled the Great Room. “I’ve got exciting news once we get dinner on.”

  In the narrow galley kitchen, our pretty mother, in her late thirties, lifted a steaming beef tongue out of the pressure cooker, filling the house with the smell of bay and pepper. Her black hair was cut short, setting off her dangling Mexican silver earrings. My dad had convinced her to wear skirts above her knees. He said, “With legs like yours, it’s a crying shame not to show them!” She’d felt shy about it, but he insisted. He bought fashionable clothes for her when he went to New York City for meetings.

  The floor-to-ceiling sliding-glass walls of the Great Room became mirrors at night, reflecting me and my two younger brothers as we laid out the silver on the glowing teak table. Now aged seven and ten, the boys looked like skinny twins, with buzz cuts, wearing button-down shirts with jeans.

  Dad shouted to us playfully, “Come give me my kiss.” Even though I was thirteen, I didn’t mind running up to give him a kiss on the cheek when he got home from work. He wore big black glasses, a plaid bow tie, a white shirt, and a boxy Brooks Brothers suit. My brothers ran up and pecked his cheek before running back to set the table.

  “Lilibet, turn around and let me see your outfit!” I beamed with pleasure to show off my mod orange-and-yellow-striped top, yellow miniskirt, and orange vinyl belt he had given me for Christmas. I was skinny and shy at school, but looking at myself reflected in the glass walls under a grid of ceiling spotlights, I felt like Twiggy, the British model, with my short haircut.

  He added, “I brought home the new Vogue for us to look at after dinner.”

  “Wow, cool!”

  “You look great in those colors. That’s my girl.” He patted my butt. “Now get back to work and help your mother.”

  The night my father would first tell us about the tower, Mom skinned the tough outer layer of the tongue before settling the huge savory chunk of meat on a wooden platter. She carried the platter to the table and we followed with serving dishes of green beans and corn, frozen last summer from our garden. I sliced her homemade whole wheat bread on the cutting board.

  No one else I knew ate tongue. It seemed everything we ate was unusual, different from the kids at school. Brains sautéed in white wine, kidney pie, marinated herring, ratatouille from our vegetables in the garden, and on Christmas morning, sweetbreads, cooked in cream with capers.

  My brother, Wood, with sensitive eyes, carried white china plates to the dining room table. My dad barked orders with enthusiasm. “Hubbard, don’t forget the butter or the horseradish!” My little brother brought a small bowl of our dad’s favorite horseradish. Our dad switched into his German accent. “Have I ever told you about the summer I worked for my uncle on his horseradish farm?”

  “Of course!” My brothers and I rolled our eyes. “The horseradish stung your eyes so bad it looked like you were crying.” We were sure we knew all his stories. We sat down at the table and started loading our plates.

  Dad interrupted us. “How many times do I have to tell you? Do not start eating until your mother lifts her fork!”

  Our mother waved her fork in the air, good-heartedly, as if she was making fun of the rule. “I’ve lifted it. You can start eating now.” Then, to distract him from his namesake, she asked, “Now Woodie, tell us your exciting news.”

  “It’s final. I got the commission for a new high-rise dorm at the University of Cincinnati. It will be called Sander Hall.” He served himself a large slice of tongue, slathering it with horseradish before taking a big bite. He chewed with great appreciation before he continued. “I’ll be designing a great way to live for college students. A place they can really feel at home.” He warmed up, slipping into the teacher voice he used when lecturing student interns. “When I studied architecture at Cornell in the 1930s, we stayed up late in bull sessions talking about modern designs coming from the Bauhaus architects in Germany.” He winked at us. “Sometimes you learn more outside of the classroom than in lectures! You need to have places to talk.” He looked at us, expecting us to nod like his students, showing that we understood before he continued.

  “It’s all about social interaction.” His voice filled the long room as he explained. A California study had showed that students benefited from housing that supported social interactions. He didn’t want to build another m
onstrosity with long dark halls, with everyone going back and forth to use a single large bathroom. “That’s what the University wants because it’s cheaper to build. But no way am I going to submit students to that impersonal layout!”

  He made a quick sketch of his plan on a paper napkin. Clustered like little villages, were five double rooms, a shared bathroom, and their own pajama lounge. “They’ll have a big lounge downstairs where they can hang out too. I’m going to fill it with modern furniture.”

  Designing this dormitory tower was completing a full circle for my dad’s career. My father said he became an architect because he grew up under a drafting table. In 1913, the year he was born, his father’s Union Central Tower in downtown Cincinnati, at thirty-eight stories, was the tallest building in the world outside of New York City. Covered in marble and white terra-cotta, the tower was crowned with a cupola of a small Greek temple of the type you might imagine finding in a forest glade, but which was equipped with an aviation beacon for the modern era. At night the illuminated skyscraper was a symbol of the up-to-date city on the banks of the Ohio River.

  CINCINNATI WAS BUILT in the heart of the Ohio Valley, a crossroads where the East separated itself from the West and the North defined itself as different from the South, a place that had wrestled with the dynamic tensions of these factors since its beginning. The city’s shape is defined by the ancient river that had carried native people for centuries. Settlers were intent on building a fine city on a fertile plain, cupped by an amphitheater of steep hills. Steamboats plowed the thick river, mills sawed the dense forests, industrialists built factories, and skilled craftsmen arrived to construct a booming city in the early nineteenth century.

  The Queen City, as it was called from its earliest days, would be compared to Rome’s seven hills, and architects were the means to these grand visions. Cincinnati’s architects designed Greek- and Roman-inspired edifices to rival the greatest European cities. An influx of German educated refugees settled in the Over the Rhine area of the city, building brick and stone churches, homes, and businesses in Greek Revival and Romanesque, Gothic and Italianate styles. Fueled by ingenuity and industry, the city expanded rapidly, moving out of the crowded downtown into the hills. The Miami canal and trains transported materials and passengers to planned suburbs, including the village of Glendale, where my family settled. In Cincinnati’s expanding years, architects were revered and their work set out to define culture and improve society. My grandfather and father had both answered the intoxicating call of architecture.

  My grandfather’s firm, Garber and Woodward, was the most influential and prolific architectural firm of the first third of the twentieth century in Cincinnati. As my parents drove us through the city, they would point out elegant buildings of stone and brick, towers, schools, and homes. “Your grandfather designed that building.”

  MY FATHER, WOODIE Garber, learned the building field from the bottom up, as a hod carrier and day laborer on his father’s construction sites until his father’s career and fortune ended abruptly with the Depression. Relatives helped Woodie with tuition as he worked several jobs to pay his way through architecture school. When he emerged from Cornell in the mid-thirties, fired up with the prospects of designing modern buildings, he was lucky to find any work. He was fitted for a linen smock and joined the legions of draftsmen in John Russell Pope’s office in New York, where they designed the classically-inspired National Gallery in Washington, DC. He spent days drawing specs of Doric columns and vaulted ceilings, while by night he studied Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus architects who were escaping from Germany to the US.

  For over fifteen years, from the Depression in the early 1930s to the end of World War II, hardly any new buildings were commissioned in the US. Sigfried Giedion’s Harvard lectures from 1938-39, published as Space, Time and Architecture, became the bible for a young generation of architects who waited for America to begin building the modern age. As the war ended, there was a demand for many new buildings, and modern architecture led the way into the post-war age. Materials developed during the war for airplanes, metal, glass, and plastics offered lower-cost options for the new buildings, instead of the more expensive traditional stone and brick Beaux Art buildings that copied designs of the past.

  During the war, my father had been a civilian engineer and architect, designing engines and low-cost, quickly constructed, flat-roofed, air-cooled barracks for troops. When, at the age of thirty-two, my father finally opened his own practice, in 1945 in Cincinnati, his wartime experiences in utilitarian buildings would influence his work. He submitted his first major design for a competition, a glass tower for downtown Cincinnati, which might have made him famous nationally. It would have been the first curtain-walled glass skyscraper in the U.S., the first sealed, temperature-controlled office building, as well as the first office tower with movable partitions. The drawings of this elegant weightless tower, the Schenley building, graced the cover of the inaugural issue of Progressive Architecture with a twelve-page spread for this revolutionary design. My father’s design addressed many of the issues of glass buildings for decades to come. He planned for double-pane glass to reduce summer heat and to conserve heat in winter. There would have been radiant floors to heat or cool the building. This tower design preceded all the famous American International Style glass and steel skyscrapers.

  Drawing of proposed Schenley Building, 1945

  But the glass tower was opposed by Senator Robert Taft, Sr., of the Republican political family of Cincinnati. My father was informed that no modern building would be built in ‘their’ city, and the glass tower was never built. But this didn’t stop my father from continuing to lead the battle for Modernism in Cincinnati. His strident, unwavering belief in the Modern way would mean that Woodie Garber’s career would be marked by a fight for nearly every building he designed.

  IT’S DIFFICULT NOW to imagine the magnitude of the general public’s shock and fury on first contact with Modern Art and Architecture in the early twentieth century. There were riots in response to early art shows, and some early modern buildings, made of concrete, metal and glass, were picketed or vandalized. Many planning boards moved to forbid modern buildings from ever being built in their towns. Yet, the radical designs and concepts of early Modernism were welcomed by many connoisseurs of art and design. Perhaps for many, appreciation of Modernism was a trained (or educated, or even privileged) admiration, yet there still lingers a conservative backlash against and hatred of Modernism. Even today, early modernist buildings are being torn down at an appalling rate.

  My dad’s work finally took off in the early 1950s, with his design for the Cincinnati Public Library, the first modern library in the U.S. following WWII. Distinctive for its open stacks, glass walls, and enclosed garden behind a brick serpentine wall, it was featured in TIME and LIFE magazines. His buildings were striking and unusual. Over the next two decades, his firm designed modern flat-roofed schools, with open-plan classrooms filled with light. His design for a Frisch’s hamburger restaurant had rippling roofs, inspired by the poured-concrete hyperbolic/ parabolic roofs by the Spanish architect Félix Candela that my father visited in Mexico. His cantilevered entryway to a glass, metal, and stone addition to the Gothic-designed Episcopal church shocked the village of Glendale. Proctor Hall, at the College of Nursing and Health at the University of Cincinnati, had moving panels that blocked the sun through the hot Ohio summers. And there were so many homes. Woodie designed stunning personal modern homes for discerning Cincinnati clients and their families.

  Maybe every architect dreams of building a tower. Woodie’s first tower had not been built, but now this college dormitory gave him another chance. He explained to us at dinner that night how he would clad the dorm with a newly developed mirror glass. By 1967, glass towers had been around for quite a while, but mirror glass solved a lot of energy problems, conserving heat and helping with cooling. In Boston, I.M. Pei’s firm was designing the John Hancock Tower, which would begin constr
uction the next year. My father’s dorm would be the first mirror-glass tower in Cincinnati. Towers saved land and gave everyone a terrific view, and reflective glass meant you could control light and temperature.

  He was determined to make the dorm living spaces elegant and functional like a modern home. He would choose every piece of furniture for the lounges: Knoll International metal-framed chairs slung with leather, and Bertoia chairs. The ground-floor lobbies would be light and airy, as dramatic as the finest modern home. He said, “These students won’t have to live with broken-down couches, heavy desks, and uncomfortable chairs. They’ll have built-in desks along the room-length windows just like us.”

  I thought about this. “That means my room is just like a college dorm room. Cool!”

  “That’s right, Sugar.”

  “How tall will it be?” Hubbard asked.

  “It’s twenty-seven stories. In ‘65, when I designed the Master plan for the University, I’d planned for three low-rise dorms, but to save money they want to put 1300 students in this one building.”

  My mother looked concerned. “That’s a lot of students in one building.”

  “I’ve got it worked out.” He explained that the secret to this building was that it would really be two dorms stacked on top of each other. The boys would be on the upper stories and girls on the lower levels. They’d have high speed elevators going to each section so they wouldn’t have long waits. He was confident. “It will work out great.”

  He added that it would have crushed milk-glass panels all the way up the side of the building, just like ours. “Can you imagine how it will sparkle in the sun and moonlight, high above the city? Rainstorms will keep washing the panels clean of the city’s dirt.”