I discovered Harwell Hamilton Harris’s work when I was a student: a black and white photograph of his Fellowship Park House stood out from thousands of other published houses because of the clarity of the design and the way the house seemed to belong to its Californian hillside.

Harris built the house for himself and his wife Jean in 1935. It was small, less than 500 square feet, consisting of one large room open on three sides to a lush ravine covered in ferns and live oak trees. Attached to the room was a tiny kitchen. The floors were covered in rush mats, unpainted redwood beams spanned the ceiling, and a beautiful oriental ginger jar was poised on the edge of the living room, hovering just above the trees.

The photograph of the room with the ginger jar was published worldwide. It presented a new image of Californian modernism, one that was forward-looking yet comfortable – a quality not associated in 1935 with the avant-garde.

I met Harris for the first time in 1982 at the School of Design at NC State University, where he was professor emeritus after leaving his native California. For 50 years his fame had been widespread, acclaimed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto as an American genius. Yet in person he was quiet and modest. He told me that he had built his hillside house for less than a thousand dollars, using parts salvaged from an earlier project in Hollywood. It had jump-started his career.

A few years ago, I visited Fellowship Park to discover the house for myself, which was then unoccupied. What I found was totally unexpected. I had known Jean and Harwell Harris in the last decade of their lives as gentle folk: kind, polite, and Edwardian in their courtly manners. Never did I think they started their marriage as Bohemians. But at Fellowship Park I discovered that to reach their house, they walked through the backyards of four neighboring houses; that their house had no plumbing for years; and that they showered outdoors with a garden hose, one partner keeping watch while the other bathed! But how perfect, I thought, that this symbol of domestic serenity was built out of relative poverty. Harris’s contribution to the art of American residential design began with a one-room shack. I was reminded of another cabin built with salvaged materials at Walden Pond, by Henry David Thoreau.

The house at Fellowship Park is slowly falling to ruin. The ferns are gone now; the hillside is thick with wild nasturtiums. I believe Harwell would accept this as natural. He believed that architecture, like delight, is ephemeral, and that ideas often outlast buildings.

Sponsored by the College of Design and the Triangle section of the American Institute of Architects/North Carolina, the annual lecture is endowed by the estate of the renowned architect Harwell Hamilton Harris, FAIA (1903-1990) who served on the faculty of NC State’s College of Design from 1962 to 1975.

Frank Harmon is a fellow of the American Institute of Architecture and a Professor in Practice at the College of Design. He is the founder and principal of Frank Harmon Architect PA, a multi-award-winning, LEED AP, green architecture firm established in 1985. He was also a close friend of Harris for many years, and he credits Harris with steering his design sensibilities towards modern, innovative and regionally appropriate design.

In 2005, when Harmon’s firm was named Top Firm of the Year by Residential Architect magazine, he told writer Vernon Mays, “[Harwell Harris] taught me that every client and every situation is different and new. And it is the architect’s job to understand the needs of every situation and every client. He loved to say that the house is a portrait of the client.”

Harris also taught Harmon to infuse warmth and familiarity into modern architecture by embracing what Harris called the “sticks and stones” of the place:  the landscape, materials, climate and culture specific to the region in which a building will be built.

“What people thought was cold and threatening modernism, he made warm and approachable,” Harmon says.

Harmon’s lecture will focus on “why Harwell Hamilton Harris is important today,” he said. “His work embraces the whole of the environment – from the living room to the city – and all the particulars that go into making a building. He was also the first architect to write about the importance of regionalism in modern architecture.”

Harmon will discuss specific Harris projects – including his personal home and office on Cox Avenue in downtown Raleigh and St. Giles Presbyterian Church in North Raleigh – that strongly influenced Harmon’s own work.

Originally from California, Harwell Hamilton Harris was a sculptor who changed careers after he visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in Los Angeles. He worked with Richard Neutra from 1928 until 1932 then merged the ideals of modern and California regionalist architecture into his residential work of the ‘30s and ‘40s. He served as Dean for the University of Texas School of Architecture from 1952-1955 and practiced in Dallas until 1962 when he moved to Raleigh to teach at NC State. He retired from teaching in 1973 but continued to practice until shortly before his death. He was a professor emeritus at the university when he died at the age of 87.

The Harwell Hamilton Harris Lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Coliseum parking deck. Limited parking may also be found in the Riddick or Peele parking lots after 5 pm. Parking along campus streets is not permitted unless otherwise noted.

For more information on the lecture call 919.515.8350.

For more information on Frank Harmon, go to www.frankharmon.com.

The Havens House designed by Harwell Hamilton Harris, FAIA. Photo by Man Ray.

]]> http://blog.frankharmon.com/press-releases/frank-harmon-to-deliver-special-lecture-at-nc-state-university/feed/ 1 http://blog.frankharmon.com/press-releases/frank-harmon-examines-the-work-of-harwell-hamilton-harris-in-31st-docomomo-journal/ http://blog.frankharmon.com/press-releases/frank-harmon-examines-the-work-of-harwell-hamilton-harris-in-31st-docomomo-journal/#comments Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:09:26 +0000 kweiss http://blog.frankharmon.com/?p=16 January 3, 2005 (RALEIGH, NC) – In what architectural professor and scholar Kenneth Frampton considered an epoch-making address to the American Institute of Architects in 1954, the late Harwell Hamilton Harris, FAIA, proclaimed that the “most important resources of a region are its free minds, its imagination, its stake in the future, its energy, and last of all, its climate, its topography and the particular kinds of sticks and stones it has to build with.” He further declared that “for architecture to be really great, it must express variety, freedom, love of the physical world that is the product of the best regionalism – the regionalism of liberation.”

For the September 2004 edition of doco,mo.mo., the biannual journal of Paris-based Docomomo International (DI), a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation and conservation of modern buildings, sites and neighborhoods, Raleigh-based architect Frank Harmon, FAIA, was asked to examine Harris’ contribution to modern architecture and how it might be preserved. The result is Harmon’s five-page article in DI’s 31^st journal, entitled “Regionalism & Preservation In The Work of Harwell Hamilton Harris.”

Docomomo International is to modern architecture what the National Register of Historic Places is to pre-20^th century architecture. Although accustomed to scanning the globe for content, this particular issue of DI’s journal focuses on postwar modernism in America.

In the article, Harmon points out that California-born Harwell Harris, who moved to Raleigh, NC, in the 1960s, was one of the first 20^th-century architects to analyze the meaning of place in modern architecture and the role of the region as a creative stimulus to progressive design. Harmon notes that Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) once referred to Harris as the second best architect in America, after Frank Lloyd Wright, and that Frank Lloyd Wright held a similar high regard for Harris.

One of the primary purposes for Harmon’s Docomomo contribution was to address how Harris’ buildings and landscapes must be carefully maintained and preserved. He praises certain architects for their sensitive restoration of some of Harris’ buildings, and notes that the immaterial and transparent nature of the architect’s projects require particular sensitivity to preserve.

Frank Harmon is principal of the award-winning firm Frank Harmon Architect PA and was a close, personal friend of Harwell Harris from 1981 until Harris’ death in 1990. During that time, Harmon traveled with Harris to visit his buildings in California, Texas, and North Carolina. Harmon also considered Harris a mentor and, like other contemporary architects including Will Bruder and Frank Gehry, he credits Harris as a strong and early influence on his own career.

For more information on DI’s mission and its international journal, visit the website – docomomo@citechaillot.org.

For more information on Frank Harmon, go to www.frankharmon.com.