Frame house from the 1800s: Samuel Richmond House, 36 Bowen Street, Providence, Rhode Island
“I would say the other trend, oddly enough, has to do with manufacturing and premanufacturing, which was also an issue in the 1950s, when quite a number of prefabricated prototypes were developed.”
Douglas Garofalo (1958–2011) was a Chicago-based architectural maverick known for his pioneering use of computer modeling to encompass his engineering practice. His projects vary greatly in scale and location. They include forms of collaboration that cross both geographical boundaries and professional disciplines. Whether commercial or residential, they push the limits of conventional design practices by taking full advantage of innovations in design technology.
In one of his residential schemes, the Green Bay House, sinewy yellow fiberglass wraps the stacked wings of an addition in an S. In a different remodel, the Spring Prairie House, a rambling red farmhouse gets clad with sensual aluminum roofing in complex, computer-plotted curves.
His public buildings, such as the Korean Presbyterian Church in Queens, are equally daring. With the completion of the Hyde Park Art Center in 2007, for which Garofalo won the Chicago AIA Distinguished Building Award and the Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design, he became accepted by the mainstream as an important designer of public space.
Garofalo was born in Schenectady, New York, and earned his Masters of Architecture from Yale in 1987. He was a professor at the University of Illinois School of Architecture in Chicago, and was the school’s acting director from 2001 to 2003.
The work of Garofalo Architects has been recognized as part of “The New Vanguard” in Architectural Record and the “Emerging Voices” program at the Architectural League of New York. His firm’s portfolio was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006.
Douglas Garofalo notes the period right after World War II as being one of greater experimentation in American home design due to the sheer numbers of houses that were constructed for returning servicemen. It was also a period of prosperity, which fueled risk and innovation. But mass production tends to fall into repetition, which is more efficient and cost-effective. Today, new technology in materials and digitized manufacturing is affording a new wave of variation in forms and design solutions. “It’s a really interesting moment in that regard, and not just in the residential work, it’s in all the work,” he says.
I think since World War II, our architects of residential architecture have begun to think more progressively about our popular architecture as belonging to everyone, rather than as being for the caprice or pride of a kingly patron.
Douglas Garofalo: I would say post World War II there has been quite a shift from, say, the 1950s to right now. Immediately after the war was a rich period of experimentation in housing in response to the problem of building many houses quickly enough for the shifting population—that is, all these guys coming back home from the war and having families. It led to things like prefabrication. The suburbs boomed and to a certain degree you could say are still booming.
The other thing that plays in is prosperity. As individuals or in groups, people can express all kinds of what you call caprice, or personality. With prosperity comes a bit more freedom to experiment. By the way, I would say there are patrons of architecture, and they tend to be the very wealthy and they build the kinds of houses that make all the architecture journals, but they are not always the most interesting.
I would say that housing is still an issue, but maybe the issues are quite a bit different now. After this period of intense building, since the forties, people are starting to question sprawl. And also, you have the question of style. Why does everything have to look the same? I think the public is more and more aware of that homogeneity, much more so than in the 1950s. But in a weird way, I think there was a lot more variety and experimentation in certain areas of postwar housing than there is now. I think the kinds of developments that go up now are even more expedient and homogeneous. Typically, I mean. I’m talking about the bad stuff.
There’s bad stuff and good stuff. Maybe I have a romanticized notion of forward-thinking contemporary architects as being somewhat in opposition to dominant culture. Can you speak to that?
Garofalo: I think traditionally, in the romantic version, the avant-garde would be against the “common market,” or would be flying in the face of it. But I think today, avant-garde architects look for ways to operate within the market. I would be more in favor of working against typical developers than I would be against the markets themselves. At this point, developers define markets more than architects, by a long shot, so I would distinguish between the public and developers in that regard.
Do you feel like you have a certain aesthetic mission that you want to bring to your work?
Garofalo: Our approach to residential architecture has a lot to do with thinking of typology, systems, organizations, and forms that go against homogeneity. I suppose that relates to something you were asking me before, about what’s enduring across all these styles of residential architecture, particularly in America. I would say it’s this notion of individuality, or what I might call heterogeneity. Even as those suburbs get built ad infinitum, one thing that has remained is individualism—an interest in differences. It’s what American culture is based on, right? It’s the melting pot, but in our version of the melting pot, you keep the differences, you don’t make everything gray. You exhibit those differences.
The romantic idea of the avant-garde is to fly against and react, but these days, I’d say the avant-garde is more interested in a both/and scenario where you’re producing entirely new things, but they seem to be intimately connected with their contexts. It’s a fine line to walk. For example, we’ve done a lot of work in the suburbs. At first glance, that work probably looks foreign, but if you look at it for any length of time, it makes sense in its context.
Certain suburbs lend themselves to iconoclasm, right? And others less so. Some of the work you’ve done falls into playful rehabbing.
Garofalo: We’ve literally not had a house that we’ve done from the ground up. I don’t believe there’s ever a clean slate. Even if you don’t have a preexisting building, you have a site to react with, to play with. And I think our version of play is to really study the context, research it, and find the kind of idiosyncrasies within it. We tend to exploit those so that they’re connected like nothing you’ve ever seen.
And why is that important?
Garofalo: I think it goes back to not wanting to stick with the status quo and wanting to respond in a very particular way to a context and a client. All clients are idiosyncratic. There’s a myth that the suburbs are full of homogenized, like-minded people, and the city is somehow more diverse. When you look into it, those clichés don’t hold. So our work tries to respond to the personalities we’re dealing with as much as the contexts. I should say the clients are part of the context of the project, so that’s why we respond to their whims, desires, and needs—both functional and otherwise. And then we have our own interests, materials, and form.
Are those the kinds of challenges that provoke you to be inventive about materials and forms?
Garofalo: I think those things are part of a larger picture. We’re also influenced by the use of computers, not because we’re tech heads, but because of our interest in complexity. As I said before, we have this interest in difference or heterogeneity. As architects, we automatically have to think of what organizational systems, geometries, formal systems, and hierarchies can accommodate the most difference or the most complexity. So it isn’t just about form and materials, the project mix includes the client, budget, site, and schedule, and our own desires and thoughts on culture and social structure. It’s all part of what I call an ecosystem. All those things conflict with one another at one time or another in a project; it’s not like they fit together neatly. I think our interest is to add complexity to the project and figure out a way to have the project evolve and take form over time.
The ecosystem is a good metaphor. If you take an ecosystem—a natural region—and you zoom out, you can imagine it as this cohesive, symbiotic, working organism. If you zoom in, you’ll find lots of conflict—flora and fauna in direct conflict with one another. It’s really survival of the fittest. So both things are true: it’s cohesive and symbiotic and also full of incredible variation. That’s our wonderful predicament here in the studio—to figure those things out and to make things within that overall sensibility.
That’s fascinating. What you’re saying is that every architectural challenge, every project, is this holistic cauldron of conflicts that you are in a sense working through to find completion and balance.
Garofalo: I think that’s true, and it’s only holistic at certain times. It depends on the frame of reference. At a certain point, we’re not part of the project anymore. Somebody’s living in it and then it keeps going. We think about that, too, although it’s out of our control. It certainly keeps it interesting.
I’d like to get back to the first question that I asked you even before we turned on the tape recorder. Instead of thinking in terms of the sweep of residential design history as one of different styles, one might think of it alternatively as responses to emotional challenges. If you were to generalize, do you think that you could make a legitimate comparison between what is being addressed in housing today versus what might have been before World War II, when homes were made, by and large, for more practical needs?
Garofalo: I think I can do that in terms of my own and similar practices. I don’t know if I could zoom out more than that because it’s pluralistic. I would note a couple of trends right now. One is due, like in the 1970s, to an energy crisis. To me, the crisis never should have gone away. Architecture has a renewed sense of responsiveness to the environment—for both ethical and monetary reasons. I think our response as architects fits right into this ecosystemic model of hierarchy and all the systems and parameters you need to think of with a project. So I think one trend is to make buildings more responsive. But I don’t think it’s just about function; it’s also about aesthetics. We’re all engaging in this wealth of wonderful research in terms of materials, textures, color, and lights that’s very sophisticated, and that’s a lot of fun.
I would say the other trend, oddly enough, has to do with manufacturing and premanufacturing, which was also an issue in the 1950s, when quite a number of prefabricated prototypes were developed. But now it’s changed because with computers—digital machinery—everything does not have to be stamped out one and the same. You can have variation in those systems. So an interest of ours is to think about how things are being made and about variation within the repetitive systems of building. Building is a very repetitive industry, and that’s how contractors and developers make money—doing the same thing over and over again. But now, with newer digitized machines and methods, it’s possible to get a lot more variation, a lot more complexity in projects for not more money. It’s a really interesting moment in that regard, and not just in the residential work; it’s in all the work.
Both of those trends—responsiveness to the environment and prefabrication—are connected to the past, but I see more sophisticated possibilities than were available previously. Mass production is no longer about repeating the same thing over and over again like a cookie cutter. You can use repetition to deal with some serious issues—for example, public housing—but have variation and individuality within those models.