Looking for Billy Baldwin

I always wanted to have an apartment like Billy Baldwin’s. Finally I got to live in a high-rise and have a little desk in my living room. Still don’t have the slipper chairs. I search the Internet for articles about him and for tips on where to purchase his best designs. (Shortcut: Ventry Limited, Bielecky Brothers.) His best work was his most contemporary. What I would have done for Si Newhouse’s white art-filled living room! As soon as Rizzoli published Billy Baldwin: The Great American Decorator, I ordered it. Many of the images are also in Baldwin’s earlier books, which took me to back to my late teens and early twenties, when I poured over those volumes fantasizing about living a bigger life in Manhattan.

Billy Baldwin's apartment with the famous slipper chair

Billy Baldwin's apartment

Kenneth Hair Salon
New York

In my first blog, I mentioned an early childhood memory of seeing Mrs. Gilbert Miller’s Mallorca house in the pages of House & Garden. The indoor/outdoor terrace confused my young mind, but I never forgot it. Several years later, as a teenager, I opened the heavy brass and glass door on Grant Avenue and walked down a few steps into Tiffany’s perfumed tranquility, designed by Billy Baldwin (with Tiffany’s design director, Van Day Truex.) I wanted to live there. Who would have thought that Tiffany’s San Francisco outpost occupied a windowless ground floor of a parking garage (that was once a great department store)? It was hushed and elegant, but not intimidating. The slip-covered sofas were small, complemented by black lacquer Parsons tables and Bielecky Brothers cane side chairs and just a little shiny brass. Even if all I could afford was a modest vase or drinking glass, I felt truly swell for those few minutes. I understood what Holly Golightly was up to.

Mr. and Mrs. Harding Lawrence Residence

Dallas, Texas

Cole Porter's apartment.  Rendering by Mark Hampton

Mr. and Mrs. William Paley's Apartment
St. Regis Hotel, New York

By high school, I knew all about Billy Baldwin and his slipper chair. His simple one-room apartment seemed like the epitome of an elegant New York life out of reach. One of the first design books I bought was Billy Baldwin Decorates, essentially reprints of articles he wrote for House & Garden. He wrote another book, Billy Baldwin Remembers. And then his heir, Michael Gardine, prepared an autobiography that was a bit more gossipy.…

Arango Apartment
Madrid Spain

Now there is Billy Baldwin: America’s Greatest Decorator, by Adam Lewis, who has written biographies of designers Van Day Truex and Albert Hadley. The good news is twofold. There are a few images that have not been seen in any of the previously published books. And the lectures Baldwin gave at the Cooper Hewitt in 1974 are published for the first time. The bad news is also twofold. Lewis’s text contains little new information, and the writing is as stilted as in his other two books. Perhaps worse, at least for a design book, is the uneven quality of the images. Some of the photographs are reproduced beautifully, as you expect from a Rizzoli book, while other images, many of them by the famous photographer Horst, appear to be scans from magazines. Jane Thompson’s recent book about Design Research (published by Chronicle) faced a similar challenge of uneven visuals, but the clever design by Pentagram fixed that. Not so here. The design does not mitigate the uneven reproduction quality. Some of the fuzzy pictures are full pages! When confronted with relatively few visuals, the designers of Lewis’s earlier volume on Van Day Truex resorted to a smaller format. That might have been a good choice here, although the subtitle wouldn’t have made sense. And small books don’t sell as well. I am not sure that Baldwin would want something that was not as tailored as his upholstered furniture.

Mrs. Clive Runnells Residence
Hobe Sound, Florida

Lewis interviewed several people, but many of the key folks are dead, including Michael Gardine and Way Bandy, who provided Baldwin with his final home on Nantucket. Baldwin retired in 1973 and died in 1983, apparently broke. The narrative isn’t compelling and doesn’t capture Baldwin in his time. Lewis writes about Baltimore’s upper middle class, which Baldwin grew up in, and then about the superwealthy that Baldwin catered to in New York and elsewhere. But Lewis provides little insight or analysis. And he adds little color or texture to the tale. (Odd, given Baldwin’s love for both.) Although Lewis says Baldwin lived as an out gay man, he rarely mentions Baldwin’s homosexuality, treating it as if it shouldn’t be discussed. While that might have been a hallmark of the time, I am not sure it was Baldwin’s way. Curiously, the author doesn’t connect Baldwin’s father’s disapproval to his initial false starts and his later ambition and incredible success. Unfortunately, Lewis doesn’t really place Baldwin in any larger context than the upper reaches of the Upper East Side.

For a glimpse into Baldwin’s actual life, I would suggest an interview Baldwin gave to Francesco Scavullo in the 1970s for the book Scavullo Men. (There are also a lot of great interviews with leading cultural figures of the time, like Leo Castelli, Henry Geldzahler, Leo Lerman, and Sam Wagstaff.) This interview is not listed in Lewis’s bibliography, and I think that is a serious omission. When asked if he was spoiled, Baldwin refers to his mentor Ruby Ross Wood: “I really pity most rich people, and I don’t want to see very many of them. I think they’re boring. My old boss, Ruby Wood, said to me ‘Now, Billy Baldwin, you’re coming here from that nice town and you’re going to have a hard time because New York is very tough. But don’t forget one thing: you’re going to see an awful lot of rich people. You get as much of their money as you can. That’s all they’re worth—money—and we’re lucky because we’re going to get some of it.’” Baldwin is quite open about being “1000 percent homosexual” and about how he looks on serving the superrich and what it meant to be gay. When asked, “As a man, what were your feelings about becoming a decorator?” he replies, “Since the day I was born I’ve never had the slightest idea of being gay. It just seemed perfectly normal.”

With both of Baldwin’s volumes out of print, Lewis’s book provides a survey, if not a critical look, at the great decorator, who by the way loved being called a decorator. In the Scavullo interview, Baldwin responds to the question about the difference between a designer and decorator by saying, “Michael Greer, if you please, was the first person to call himself a designer so people wouldn’t think that he was gay. Designer is supposed to make a man of you. It’s perfect crap.” Despite its shortcomings, the volume is important for the library of future decorators—and designers too.

All images (unless otherwise noted) courtesy Rizzoli USA.

Related Links
www.ventryltd.com
bieleckybrothers.com
www.rizzoliusa.com
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2vuOxz6YU

Elaine Kollins Sewell Jones 1917-2010

Elaine Kollins Sewell Jones, Hon. AIA
1917-2010

The author with Elaine Jones, Summer 1990.

Elaine Kollins Sewell Jones, Hon. AIA, passed away last month in Los Angeles after being in failing health for several years. I have a hard time expressing what she meant to me as a friend and mentor. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to put a few memories into some order.

I met Elaine Sewell Jones at a workshop for architectural librarians at the San Francisco AIA Convention in 1985. At first, she seemed shy and feminine in an old-fashioned way, but she proceeded to ask me directly for advice on organizing the archives of her late husband, A. Quincy Jones, FAIA.

Jones was known for his Eichler homes, but he also created important custom residences, churches, factories, and campus buildings. He wasn’t a specialist—he believed in the idea of the architect as a generalist. There was little I had to offer Elaine at the moment I met her. But she saw something I didn’t. She was remarkable for living in the present, celebrating the past, yet nurturing the future.

She gave me her card; it was unlike any I had ever received. Smaller, more delicate, similar in size to a Japanese business card. I paper-clipped it to my copy of A. Quincy Jones: The Oneness of Architecture, published by PROCESS. Her card told me that she was a communications consultant. I wasn’t even sure what that meant. Yet I remember thinking, “One day I will want to call her.” Within a few years, I was no longer an architectural librarian but an architectural publicist, and the firm I worked for was opening an office in Los Angeles. Quite boldly, I contacted her and asked if we could meet again. I was surprised that she remembered me. Later on, I would learn that she rarely forgot meeting anybody. What I had mistaken for shyness was actually her way of creating space for herself. She was always sincere but kept a buffer zone around her until she knew you and let you in. If people proved themselves, she called them “the good goods.”

A. Quincy Jones: The Oneness of Architecture, edited by Elaine K. Sewell

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1989, I suggested that she allow me to interview her for L.A. Architect, the newspaper of the AIA Los Angeles chapter that Barbara Goldstein and later Noel Millea edited. For some reason, Elaine agreed. Although she was quoted in several books, articles, and documentaries, I don’t think she ever agreed to another full-length interview. (The interview is reproduced here.) In the 1990s, I suggested a few times that she agree to an oral history with UCLA, to which she was donating Quincy’s archives, but she would gently steer the conversation in a different direction. She created a process through which architecture and design could be understood and appreciated. She never wanted to be perceived as self-serving. Unlike most people, she didn’t need recognition. Our mutual friend Katherine Rinne told me that many of the unsigned articles in Arts+Architecture magazine were actually penned by Elaine.

During our many conversations, I asked her questions about some of her clients, including her work with the Herman Miller Corporation and with Charles Eames, Alexander Girard, and George Nelson. She was good at deflecting. As we got to know each other better, she would tell me a few things about Charles or Ray Eames, but never anything that would contradict her professional relationship with them. She told me once about taking a trip to Carmel with Ray. During the day, they went their separate ways and connected again in the late afternoon. They had both purchased a piece of ribbon—the same exact ribbon. She saw what her clients saw. We talked about creative people being self-centered, but she meant it as a compliment. They knew where they were going. She could be elliptical at times, but she also believed in facts. She didn’t like it when people got their facts wrong or mistook a speculation or opinion for the truth. This would happen a lot as people began to try and parse the Eames relationship. Her response about those people was clear: “They weren’t there.”

Elaine’s close friends Charles and Ray Eames outside their house in Pacific Palisades.

@Eames Office

In 1990, UCLA Extension asked her to talk about her husband’s work as part of a lecture and tour. She felt that would be too self-serving, and she suggested two young people interested in Quincy’s work instead: Maggie Valentine, an architectural history student at UCLA who later wrote a book on the architect, S. Charles Lee, and me. I had no real idea what I was doing, but I was driven by an interest in modernism and the challenge of preparing a lecture. For months, I spent every Friday afternoon at The Barn, the home in Century City that she shared with Quincy, going through materials trying to understand his oeuvre. Elaine never asked to see an outline or intervened except once when I had chosen a slide because the chemical change over time gave it an extra nostalgic punch. She promptly suggested a replacement. If the work was interesting why be false?

Jones & Emmons office at 12248 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles.

The steps leading to the former office of Elaine Sewell Jones.

The front door to the Jones & Emmons office.

One of the courtyards at the office of Jones & Emmons, now the office of Fred Fisher.

After I moved back to the Bay Area, I would try to visit her at The Barn in Los Angeles between meal times so she wouldn’t go to the trouble of preparing a meal. But still there was tea and it was always exquisitely presented in the large square table overlooking the courtyard. Even drinks would be accompanied by a beautifully arrayed choice of morsels. Beauty could not be compromised or contained.

The main room at The Barn, designed by A. Quincy Jones, FAIA. Photos courtesy of Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio.

The studio at The Barn where Quincy taught 5th year students. Later it was one of the spaces where Elaine processed the archives. Photo courtesy of Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio.

She never wavered in her belief about modernism’s potential. She always said it wasn’t a style but a process. Likewise, in discussing Quincy’s work, she tried to stay away from interpretation about any specific building. She left that for others. She was interested in facts and in sharing information about the process. She would say that Quincy’s design was rooted in the experience of the building as people moved through it. I came to appreciate the humility it took to focus on spatial experience over object.

I think she hoped that the archives (now at Department of Special Collections at UCLA) would help future students and scholars understand the design process. She understood the value of an almost complete archive of a practice. She didn’t know how future researchers would use it and didn’t worry about it. The evidence would be there.

In the late 1990s, I received a call from a young man named Michael Blackford, who said that Elaine suggested he contact me. He was trying to save one of Quincy’s few projects in Northern California (besides the Eichler tracts), the Daphne Mortuary. Bridge Housing had bought the parcel from the Daphne family and wanted to replace it with affordable housing, a noble enough goal. Elaine understood from the outset that the dialog about saving the building was worth having, whether or not the building was actually preserved. If she got directly involved, it would be, again, too self-serving. Perhaps a more creative architect than the one Bridge hired could have figured out how to use the building and its ideas in the new scheme. The publicity resulting from the fight to save the Daphne was not about NIMBYism as Bridge first suggested, but about reassessing the architectural legacy of modernism. For better or worse, the process worked, even if the individual building wasn’t saved. Afterwords, Elaine always referred to it as the Daphne caper. Although her work had everything to do with the physical world she also understood that it was transient. Love was permanent.

Daphne Mortuary by A. Quincy Jones, FAIA. Photo by Donna Kempner.

Gardens of Daphne Mortuary. Photo by Donna Kempner.

Elaine never criticized religious traditions. I didn’t know her to practice any specific faith, although she certainly had a strong reverence for Japan. Yet she was the most compassionate person I knew. She treated every person with the same respect and generosity no matter what their line of work was. If someone proved untruthful or unkind, she subtly distanced herself. She was always moving toward kindness.

From the sketchbook of A. Quincy Jones

Christmas was special because it was time to acknowledge individuals. When Quincy was alive, the couple sent out hundreds of cards featuring a sketch of his. When I knew her, there were beautiful carefully selected presents, often from MoMA. Sometimes when I came calling, she would present me with a gift. Once it was a pre-Columbian carving that Quincy had given her, and another time it was a memo sample of Alexander Girard fabric. Always wrapped beautifully, without tape.


PreColombian artifact on Alexander Girard fabric

Maintaining hundreds of friendships, processing the archive, meeting scholars and students, and trying to take care of The Barn took up incredible amounts of time. She only slept a few hours a night. Sometime in the early evening, her watch would make a sweet ringing sound, which was a reminder for her to eat something. She would just go on working. The challenge of being Elaine’s friend was meeting The Standard. I always worried whether anything I did would approach her level of excellence and thoroughness. One day, we were discussing marketing and communications. I was using the terms interchangeably, and she focused in on the two words. Her point of view, which I came to adopt, was that communications was the umbrella. Marketing was somewhere beneath it. She didn’t correct me; she engaged. She never wavered in her focus on the individual or their work. No detail was too small to look at again.

This way of being must have been with Elaine from an early age. She graduated from Oregon State University in 1941. She moved to Kansas for a time and from there co-edited a newspaper during World War II called the Oregon State Yank that consisted of letters from fellow students who had become soldiers. The many letters ended up with her, and she would eventually catalog them all with great care and give them to the university in 1991. What could have been lost to history became one of the most significant archives in the country documenting the day-to-day wartime experiences of soldiers during the war. If she took on a job, she did it right.

Although we went to dinner a number of times, we rarely attended a cultural event together. But we both went to the opening of Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses in 1989. I was at the beginning of my career, and she was the doyenne of the modernist moment in Los Angeles. I feel that show (and catalog) was a catalyst for the resurgence of an interest in midcentury modernism that probably led to a reappraisal of Quincy’s work. For part of the evening, we toured the museum together with Lucia Eames. Standing in the reproduction of her father’s living room I said nothing, just absorbed in the brilliance surrounding me. Elaine and Lucia chuckled together over Saul Steinberg’s drawing on an Eames fiberglass chair. I couldn’t believe my good fortune to just be there.

The Eames living room reconstructed in the Case Study House exhibit at MOCA
Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art

It took me several years to understand that Elaine had probably hoped that my interest in Quincy's work would blossom into a book. But we were different in a fundamental way. In addition to having great discipline, she was fearless and had an inner strength that would allow her to face any adversity. She would stay calm, solicit opinions, and make a decision. I followed my passion, but not quite beyond my fears. If she was disappointed that I didn’t pursue that project, she didn’t show it. Whenever I sent her writings or clippings, she was always encouraging.

In June 1999, I brought several friends from Northern California on a tour of Los Angeles, which culminated in a visit to The Barn. As always, she was prepared. She showed all of us around, gave everybody a PROCESS book, and joined us for dinner. She wanted to be around young people and hear what they were thinking and designing. She shared her home with thousands of people and it is hard to think of it without her being there physically. Thankfully, Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio, a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg foundation, has purchased it. Fred Fisher, the thoughtful architect who purchased Quincy's office building, is renovating the building.

Elaine Jones with the author and friends at The Barn, June 1999. Photo by Kenwood McQuade.

The Barn, Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Kenneth Caldwell.

Until she couldn’t type anymore, she was the most faithful correspondent I’ve ever known. I have dozens and dozens of her letters. A number of years ago, I knew that her arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome had worsened, and she seemed to be aging quickly. We came down, stayed nearby at the Century Plaza, and spent most of an afternoon reminiscing. When it was time to say goodbye, she walked us to the car to get our parking permit, and I turned to watch her walk down the hill back to the porch. Her beautiful skirt fluttered in the wind. I saw a young woman nearly skip back to work.

From the sketchbook of A. Quincy Jones

Barry Elbasani

Barry Elbasani, FAIA
1941–2010


Michael Severin, Donn Logan, and Barry Elbasani after winning the competition that created their firm.

It has been a little over a month since Barry Elbasani of ELS Architecture and Urban Design passed away. I still think I will walk to the top of the stairs at 2040 Addison Street and he will say “What’s going on, sport?” or “The security here is terrible.” When I worked for him from 1990 to 1997, I spoke to him most days. After I went out on my own, we spoke far less frequently, but whenever we sat down, it was as if no time had passed. The intimacy was unbroken. He was intuitive in almost everything he did, from a diagram to a presentation. If he wasn’t sure, he delegated. Sometimes he got it wrong, but often he got it right. He was willing to be bold. It takes a certain fearlessness to start your own firm when you are still in your twenties and not yet a registered architect. I love the photos of this intense-looking young fellow with a mop of curly hair.




Barry was a grouchy optimist and realistic urbanist. He grew up in Brooklyn and on the streets of New York. He was still innocent in some ways, but you could never fool him. Through sheer talent (and a little advocacy), he got into Harvard. He never forgot that he wasn’t born to go to Harvard. His one year in Cambridge changed him forever. After leaving Boston, he moved to Los Angeles to work for Victor Gruen for a year, where he learned something about showmanship. He loved driving around Los Angeles in a convertible MG with a good salary and no commitments. But he moved to Berkeley, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He told me once, “Berkeley was like Cambridge, but with better weather.” He loved looking at buildings and had a special reverence for Kahn. But he was just as interested in the spaces that buildings frame. Although he came of age in the 1960s, he was not a firebrand radical. He knew too well the result of communist tyranny in Albania. He understood that cities need economic activity to thrive. He knew that an active public sector can help revitalize a downtown.


Barry and Jerry with their mother.




One of his skills was to bring the developer and the planner together to see what was in their mutual interest. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the growth of the Southwest exurbs brought the firm work that wasn’t explicitly urban in nature. Barry’s goal was to make it as urban as possible, and he predicted that the suburb or exurb would densify and that his buildings would become the new town centers. The suburbs would catch up to his bold diagram. He took the long view.

After the communist regime in Albania fell, Barry went over to visit his long-lost relatives. When he came back, he gave us a slide show that was as powerful as any I had ever seen. He laughed about the modest accommodations. By now he was middle aged and used to comfort when traveling. Looking back, he knew it was some kind of dumb luck that had him standing in his own firm in his own building, the owner of a beautiful house overlooking the Golden Gate a few minutes away. The slides were powerful because it was personal. This was the most important lesson I learned from Barry. Everything is personal. Business is personal. If it’s not, then it’s not fun. When a client got fired from his firm, Barry always called. The moment the person was no longer influential, Barry swept into action.


Barry with his family in Albania.

Along with his family, he made the decision to sponsor several Albanian cousins in the United States. I suspect he didn’t think too long about it, he just went with his gut. Two of them spoke at his memorial. That is when I wept. He could boast about anything to do with his work, but I never heard him brag about changing the lives of these distant relatives and giving them an opportunity that they never imagined. He might have been in their place.

When his son Mark died tragically a few years ago, he was hurt more deeply than any of us knew or could see. I think some part of his optimism was dulled. When he got sick in April, he was himself until sometime in June. But as soon as the essential Barry was stilled by the cancer, I don’t think he wanted to hang around. He wanted to get to that place where he could start making calls again.

Terminal Days

Terminal Days
July 30, 2010

In a few days, San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal will be closed forever. The art moderne structure by Timothy Pflueger has outlived its usefulness. In the last year, I have been taking the bus home some days, and I’ve been appalled at the condition of the building. Dark, smelly, and boarded-up, it felt doomed. Although it was never awe inspiring, it was once a strong, light-filled, utilitarian structure. For suburban kids like me, it was the portal to all the excitement that urban life had in store. The entryway was the building’s most significant architectural gesture. You walked down a ramp and emerged into a huge light-filled space that said, “Adventure is just outside.”




It really looked like this before they filled it in with the Greyhound platform.




The city's pleasures were just outside.


At rush hour the ramps were filled with organization men returning home.

My father rode the H bus from our home in the East Bay to the Transbay Terminal for close to three decades. He was not a North of Market dandy, but a South of Market organization man, toiling for the phone company. When we were very small, he worked in the art deco jewel (also by Pflueger) at 140 New Montgomery Street. When the new building at 666 Folsom was finished, I enjoyed following him on his back-alley pathways to work. 666 Folsom was the ugliest place I had ever been in, and I remember thinking, “I can never work in an office.” But I liked the cafeteria. Except for a few years in college, I rarely worked in a traditional corporate office. My dad would take his lunch hour to walk all over South of Market and had nodding acquaintances with hundreds of people, including the sculptor Benny Bufano. But the doorway to his work world South of Market was the Transbay Terminal.


This is how I remember it as a kid.


The trains stopped running in the late 50s.


It was handsome once upon a time.

It always felt like a train station, even though the Key trains stopped running around the time I was born. Squint your eyes and the diffuse light from above and the vertical metal supports almost transported you to Europe. Later, after Loma Prieta, horizontal seismic beams compromised the spatial experience. When the building was renovated a number of years ago, they inserted a balcony space for Greyhound that filled in the entryway. In the fall of 1976, I took the H bus myself, walked out to the trolley car stop, and took the M Oceanview all the way out to San Francisco State University. It was my own life now. Without that tall entry space, there was no transition, no portal, no architecture left.


photo courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library


The seismic reinforcements took away the sense of space.


It was basically a shed with parking beneath and a huge front porch.


The Key system trains ran on the lower level of the Bay Bridge.


The interurbans actually worked!

This morning in the newspaper, they announced that you could see the cocktail lounge, coffee shop, and shoeshine stand that had been covered up for years. The authorities swept the bums out, tried to clean out the urine odors, and gave us sentimental folks a last look. Nobody was asleep on the miles of wood benches. The coffee shop and bar were empty and smelled like stale cigarettes.


Cuddles, the cocktail lounge.


The coffee shop


Love those stools and the plastic flowers that look very dead.


I don't remember ever eating there.


Where the homeless slept



This was hidden behind a wall.


The metal version of the office on the east side of the lower entry.


The original version of the office on the west side of the lower entry.


The exterior of Cuddles.


Entry to the coffee shop.


Love those graphics.


Who designed this? It's perfect.