Meaningful Gestures

ARCHITECT WENDELL Lovett is perhaps best known for designing Villa Simonyi, the Charles Simonyi house in Medina, although that is just one of his many notable home designs. He has been a key contributor to Northwest modernism; his legacy of ideas is also expressed through the work of scores of former students at the University of Washington's architecture department, where he taught from 1948 until his retirement in 1992.

Today, Lovett, 84, is a semi-retired architect and a UW professor emeritus. He's a member of the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows and has received dozens of citations and awards, including the AIA Seattle Medal in 1993, the chapter's highest honor. He and fellow architect (and former student) Arne Bystrom are the subjects of the book "A Thriving Modernism," published by the University of Washington Press (2004). We spoke with Lovett recently in the three-bedroom Madrona home he shares with his wife of 59 years, the novelist Eileen Lovett.

Q: What were you trying to express with this house?

A: If we look at this in terms of architectural gestures, the first thing you notice are two curving forms at the entry. I repeated the first curve and flipped it over so there are two convex passageways defining the entryway. This doesn't let you look down a straight corridor through the foyer. Space-dividing devices all have the potential to make gestures — often very simple ones, such as curves. Curves are suggestive of holding and protection, to be followed by release into an opening. I refer to passageways, such as the one off the entry, as a street, rather than a hallway, because I have in mind a European village street where there are nooks and uneven surfaces to make the journey interesting.

Q: Do you always think of houses metaphorically?

A: I like to think of any house as something in the wind and the weather. In this house I planned for angled skylights with overhangs to protect from the brightest light. This house makes gestures you would make if you were out wearing a hat or a cap. The brim, or bill, of the cap is pulled down on the south side, facing the wind and the sun at its hottest. I didn't think this way — metaphorically — in the beginning. Probably my year in Europe in 1959 to '60 (as Fulbright lecturer in Stuttgart, Germany) developed my interest in the organic school.

Q: This is a matter of holding to a human scale, then?

A: The tools we go by as we enter a building are sight and hearing. Though we don't tend to think of hearing as part of it, we do feel if we're in a hard or soft space even without using our sight. This space, generally, is soft because of the soft things in it — furniture, the paintings — and the surfaces other than parallel planes. So right away I'm trying to say: Behind these curves are private places and a little mystery. Most of the houses I've designed have cave-like areas for intimate conversation and media gear or reading. In a larger sense, the whole house is a cave-like thing. Humans have always been attracted to caves.

Q: How important are subtleties in architecture?

A: Oh, very important, although you first need to get the main things established and resolved, of course. I've always thought door pulls, stains and all the smaller concerns that tie a house together were part of what I needed to attend to. I've designed the cabinets for most of my houses, and some of the furniture.

Q: What inspired you to become an architect?

A: I doubt it was any one event. When I was very small, 2 or 3 years old or so, I remember going up to Bellingham on a boat with my mother, back in the mid-1920s. This boat had wonderful portholes. I had some canned pineapple on that trip, the kind with the holes, and remember making the connection between the portholes and pineapple hole shapes. I was captivated by the shapes.

And I think it was at Hamilton Junior High where I saw some drawings posted that looked like blueprints of aircraft or aircraft models, and looked up the class where I could learn how to do that. I loved drawing ships or cars. It was a big deal every summer when the fleet would come into Elliott Bay and you could get up on these magnificent battleships — the huge gun turrets, great hunks of sculpture.

Q: Did teachers nurture your talent?

A: I think I learned as much from my teachers' rooms, from the spaces and the atmosphere they created in them, as I did from the teachers themselves. This goes back to elementary school. The spaces were a reinforcement of what came from the teachers verbally. I was always troubled, a little bit, by the way my students at the UW were housed, because the rooms had little personality and weren't a reflection of the teacher's thinking.

Q: Was your family connected to building?

A: My father was a roofing contractor — commercial projects, mainly. Oh, that's hard work. One thing I knew, I didn't want to be one of those. Q: Do you have an aesthetic guide?

A: Ralph Erskine was the best architect in the world — an Englishman who moved to Sweden early in his career. He was a humanist who created a number of large housing projects as well as private commissions. He paid attention to things like wind and sunlight, and what people needed, and designed accordingly.

Q: How do you see architecture today?

A: Well, it's a mixed bag, obviously, and that's healthy. Architecture is a big umbrella, and a lot of wonderful work is being done locally. It strikes me that it's harder to live in profound buildings than in quirky ones — Philip Johnson's glass house, for example. At least the bathroom had solid walls, fortunately.

Dean Stahl is a Seattle freelancer. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.