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From the Star:
The architectural ballad of Barton Myers
Mentor. Master. Visionary. He rode into town in a blaze of creative glory and left with bitter regret. All he really wants now is his due
May 04, 2008 04:30 AM
Martin Knelman
Entertainment Columnist
LOS ANGELES – Moving here from Toronto 20 years ago may be one of the smartest, luckiest decisions architect Barton Myers ever made. But even now, sitting at an Italian restaurant near his thriving Westwood office, Myers reveals more than a trace of pain and regret when he talks about his adventures as a young prodigy from Virginia who made lovely waves for two decades in a baffling Canadian city where he never quite belonged.
These days, Myers has plenty of reason to be proud and happy. The phenomenal steel-and-glass house he built for himself and his wife, Vicki (chief financial officer of his company) atop a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, is one of the most innovative and admired residences in contemporary architecture, an object of awe among his peers, famous for its bring-the-outdoors-indoors concept, its huge roll-up fire-station doors and its vast open spaces.
On a 16-hectare wooded slope, Myers set three linked pavillions – the main house, his studio and a guest house. Each one features roll-up sectional glass doors and expansive terraces beneath steel canopies.
As a result of the acclaim Myers has had for his retreat from the noise and stress of L.A. (less than two hours away), adaptations for special clients who want the feel of the wilderness house in different environments have become a significant sideline for his firm.
At 73, Myers is still at the top of his game. He keeps collecting prizes and honours (including the 2002 gold medal from the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects). His firm often wins major competitions over big-name rivals. Meanwhile, Myers has become the presiding prince of futuristic performing arts centres, earning raves for daring designs in Newark, N.J., Cerrittos, Calif. and Portland, Ore. And within his profession, Myers has the ultimate reward; he's widely viewed as a brilliant champion of the avant garde and as "the architects' architect," as one young professor recently put it.
So what more could Barton Myers wish for? Well, he wants to be honoured, remembered and respected for the work he did in Canada, and to have his work preserved. He wants to be given his due. And after more than two decades, he's still showing the scars he bears from the major public commissions he felt he should have had, but didn't get, in his Toronto days, and the times when, after seeming to win a major competition, he still didn't get to do the job.
Though he said farewell to T.O. many years ago, it was a long goodbye, and for a while his influence lingered over the city even in his absence, partly because a group of his proteges banded together in the firm Kuwabara, Payne, McKenna, Blumberg (kpmb) – and emerged as the town's dominant architectural whiz kids. Certain of his buildings, including the wildly unconventional steel house he built for himself in the Yorkville area, are still here and still being talked about. And his 1976 design for the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton continues to be regarded as a triumph.
"It is impossible to reflect on Toronto architecture without thinking of Barton," says Bruce Kuwabara, who has emerged as a dominant figure in the city. "No one was happy to see him leave, but he saw greater opportunities in the U.S."
According to Kuwabara, three figures had a huge influence on this city's architectural sensibility – Myers, Jack Diamond and George Baird (professor and theorist). And of the three, he puts Myers at the top. "He was an inspiring leader, and he set the standards for those of us who kept working here."
Flashback: In 1986 at the inaugural Toronto Arts Awards, Myers was one of the winners, earning the prize in the design category. Another transplanted American, Jane Jacobs, was also on the list of winners, along with novelists Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood.
In a way Myers considers himself a Toronto architect, though his Southern accent made him feel like a bit of an outsider, and eventually he got frustrated because he found the market too small and the opportunities too few. Yet Toronto was his proving ground, first as a partner in Diamond and Myers (1968 to 1975) and then as the principal in Barton Myers Associates (1975 to 1987).
Other buildings he cherished – including the Seagram Museum in Waterloo – are also gone but it's only now with the disappearance of his best known public building, the Art Gallery of Ontario as he reconceived it at the close of the 1980s, the final curtain seems to be falling on Barton Myers's Toronto. Instead of revelling in the great success he has enjoyed in the land of constant sunshine and palm trees, Myers – who has the rugged, lanky good looks and twangy vocal charm of an aging movie star cowboy – makes it clear he's taking Toronto's rebuff rather hard.
Many in Toronto's culture community are looking forward with huge excitement to the completion of Frank Gehry's expanded AGO, but Myers is definitely not one of them, although he admits the previous incarnation over which he presided was never perfect.
The Art Gallery of Ontario has had numerous reincarnations during its nearly 100 years at Dundas and McCaul. The AGO as reinvented by Myers lasted only 15 years before closing last fall to make way for Gehry's vastly different gallery (expected to reopen this fall).
"I don't think I could ever go back to Toronto after the destruction of the art gallery," he says on a note of bitter irony.
To understand why, one need only glance at the cover of Barton Myers: Selected and Current Works – a lavish volume in the prestigious Master Architect Series from the Images Publishing Group. (By being included in the series, Myers is placed in the company of such global superstars as Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli.) The cover is a full-color image of the Tanenbaum Sculpture Atrium, with its famous peaked glass roof and wall of glass.
In Gehry's remake of the AGO, the space remains but not the peaked roof, its defining feature.
It was Gehry's plan to alter the sculpture atrium that caused Joey and Toby Tanenbaum, major benefactors, to withdraw their support in an angry protest four years ago, objecting to "needless destruction."
A few months later, the Tanenbaums made peace with the AGO and were welcomed back into the fold. But Myers is still angry and sad. And it's personal. He openly expresses his hostility to Gehry, who made the move from Toronto (his birthplace) to L.A. 40 years earlier than Myers, and is now considered by many to be the greatest genius among living architects.
"I had some serious setbacks in Toronto," says Myers, who still feels aggrieved that major commissions kept being snatched away from him – the National Gallery in Ottawa, the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto, and the unbuilt 1980s opera house planned for Bay and Wellesley. Yet he rather enjoys his persecuted-rebel status, almost boastfully regaling friends with such tales as how he was ousted from a University of Toronto teaching post for political reasons. (Not to worry; he's now a revered professor at UCLA.) But the coup de grace,he emphasizes, is the demolition of his AGO.
"Frank can be really mean about it," he adds. "We were at a dinner together and he said to me, 'I'm going to destroy your building.'"
When questioned about the incident, Gehry made it clear he was trying to be jocular and ironic about an awkward situation. "We were at a party, and we'd all been drinking," said Gehry. "I really like Barton personally, and I admire his work. But if the AGO is an issue, his problem is not with me but with the clients and what they hired me to do."
According to Myers, there was a way the AGO could have preserved the best elements of his work. Myers says he sent sketches explaining how it could be done. His suggestions were ignored.
Even back in the early 1990s, it was frustrating for Myers that his original plan was never completed, lacking most conspicuously the glass canopy he meant to run all along the Dundas façade. But the money ran out, and eventually the AGO stopped responding to his demands to finish the job. Myers grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, steeped in history and tradition. On the Myers side, he belonged to one of the South's most distinguished families, which occupied the same house for six generations. (That house is now a museum.) But he likes to point out that his family tree also includes a notable Jewish ancestor from Montreal.
As a young man in the 1950s, Myers attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, then spent five years as a pilot of fighter jets in the U.S. Air Force. After studying at Cambridge University, he returned to the U.S. to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
Then he moved to Toronto and went into partnership with Jack Diamond, a South African and fellow student in Pennsylvania. For a while they soared as partners; but they were driven men with strong egos, destined to have a noisy, acrimonious falling out. Followers were expected to choose sides.
"They both had strong personalities, and they shared certain ideas about urban design," says Kuwabara, "but Barton was more interested in high-tech work. They were both extremely outspoken, and had strong reactions to things, so perhaps the split was inevitable."
Equally inevitable was his realization that Toronto was never going to be big enough or adventurous enough to let him fulfill his ambition. Despite his quarrel with Gehry, he would no doubt agree with his Toronto-born rival who told a lecture audience in Chicago he never could have achieved his creative breakthroughs if he had remained in the city where he was born, with its stifling conservative mindset.
But Barton Myers and Southern California were made for each other – the self-styled outlaw architect perpetually seeking a new challenge, and that ultimate western frontier where the shock of the new is always welcome.
Every time Barton Myers watches from his hilltop futuristic palace as the sun sets over the Pacific, Toronto must seem more and more like a distant mirage, where the big breakthrough always seemed to be just slightly out of reach, like the green light at the end of the dock Scott Fitzgerald describes in The Great Gatsby. For this particular master builder, Toronto was Heartbreak House – a place where promises were often broken and prayers were rarely answered.
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/421187
AoD
The architectural ballad of Barton Myers
Mentor. Master. Visionary. He rode into town in a blaze of creative glory and left with bitter regret. All he really wants now is his due
May 04, 2008 04:30 AM
Martin Knelman
Entertainment Columnist
LOS ANGELES – Moving here from Toronto 20 years ago may be one of the smartest, luckiest decisions architect Barton Myers ever made. But even now, sitting at an Italian restaurant near his thriving Westwood office, Myers reveals more than a trace of pain and regret when he talks about his adventures as a young prodigy from Virginia who made lovely waves for two decades in a baffling Canadian city where he never quite belonged.
These days, Myers has plenty of reason to be proud and happy. The phenomenal steel-and-glass house he built for himself and his wife, Vicki (chief financial officer of his company) atop a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, is one of the most innovative and admired residences in contemporary architecture, an object of awe among his peers, famous for its bring-the-outdoors-indoors concept, its huge roll-up fire-station doors and its vast open spaces.
On a 16-hectare wooded slope, Myers set three linked pavillions – the main house, his studio and a guest house. Each one features roll-up sectional glass doors and expansive terraces beneath steel canopies.
As a result of the acclaim Myers has had for his retreat from the noise and stress of L.A. (less than two hours away), adaptations for special clients who want the feel of the wilderness house in different environments have become a significant sideline for his firm.
At 73, Myers is still at the top of his game. He keeps collecting prizes and honours (including the 2002 gold medal from the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects). His firm often wins major competitions over big-name rivals. Meanwhile, Myers has become the presiding prince of futuristic performing arts centres, earning raves for daring designs in Newark, N.J., Cerrittos, Calif. and Portland, Ore. And within his profession, Myers has the ultimate reward; he's widely viewed as a brilliant champion of the avant garde and as "the architects' architect," as one young professor recently put it.
So what more could Barton Myers wish for? Well, he wants to be honoured, remembered and respected for the work he did in Canada, and to have his work preserved. He wants to be given his due. And after more than two decades, he's still showing the scars he bears from the major public commissions he felt he should have had, but didn't get, in his Toronto days, and the times when, after seeming to win a major competition, he still didn't get to do the job.
Though he said farewell to T.O. many years ago, it was a long goodbye, and for a while his influence lingered over the city even in his absence, partly because a group of his proteges banded together in the firm Kuwabara, Payne, McKenna, Blumberg (kpmb) – and emerged as the town's dominant architectural whiz kids. Certain of his buildings, including the wildly unconventional steel house he built for himself in the Yorkville area, are still here and still being talked about. And his 1976 design for the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton continues to be regarded as a triumph.
"It is impossible to reflect on Toronto architecture without thinking of Barton," says Bruce Kuwabara, who has emerged as a dominant figure in the city. "No one was happy to see him leave, but he saw greater opportunities in the U.S."
According to Kuwabara, three figures had a huge influence on this city's architectural sensibility – Myers, Jack Diamond and George Baird (professor and theorist). And of the three, he puts Myers at the top. "He was an inspiring leader, and he set the standards for those of us who kept working here."
Flashback: In 1986 at the inaugural Toronto Arts Awards, Myers was one of the winners, earning the prize in the design category. Another transplanted American, Jane Jacobs, was also on the list of winners, along with novelists Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood.
In a way Myers considers himself a Toronto architect, though his Southern accent made him feel like a bit of an outsider, and eventually he got frustrated because he found the market too small and the opportunities too few. Yet Toronto was his proving ground, first as a partner in Diamond and Myers (1968 to 1975) and then as the principal in Barton Myers Associates (1975 to 1987).
Other buildings he cherished – including the Seagram Museum in Waterloo – are also gone but it's only now with the disappearance of his best known public building, the Art Gallery of Ontario as he reconceived it at the close of the 1980s, the final curtain seems to be falling on Barton Myers's Toronto. Instead of revelling in the great success he has enjoyed in the land of constant sunshine and palm trees, Myers – who has the rugged, lanky good looks and twangy vocal charm of an aging movie star cowboy – makes it clear he's taking Toronto's rebuff rather hard.
Many in Toronto's culture community are looking forward with huge excitement to the completion of Frank Gehry's expanded AGO, but Myers is definitely not one of them, although he admits the previous incarnation over which he presided was never perfect.
The Art Gallery of Ontario has had numerous reincarnations during its nearly 100 years at Dundas and McCaul. The AGO as reinvented by Myers lasted only 15 years before closing last fall to make way for Gehry's vastly different gallery (expected to reopen this fall).
"I don't think I could ever go back to Toronto after the destruction of the art gallery," he says on a note of bitter irony.
To understand why, one need only glance at the cover of Barton Myers: Selected and Current Works – a lavish volume in the prestigious Master Architect Series from the Images Publishing Group. (By being included in the series, Myers is placed in the company of such global superstars as Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli.) The cover is a full-color image of the Tanenbaum Sculpture Atrium, with its famous peaked glass roof and wall of glass.
In Gehry's remake of the AGO, the space remains but not the peaked roof, its defining feature.
It was Gehry's plan to alter the sculpture atrium that caused Joey and Toby Tanenbaum, major benefactors, to withdraw their support in an angry protest four years ago, objecting to "needless destruction."
A few months later, the Tanenbaums made peace with the AGO and were welcomed back into the fold. But Myers is still angry and sad. And it's personal. He openly expresses his hostility to Gehry, who made the move from Toronto (his birthplace) to L.A. 40 years earlier than Myers, and is now considered by many to be the greatest genius among living architects.
"I had some serious setbacks in Toronto," says Myers, who still feels aggrieved that major commissions kept being snatched away from him – the National Gallery in Ottawa, the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto, and the unbuilt 1980s opera house planned for Bay and Wellesley. Yet he rather enjoys his persecuted-rebel status, almost boastfully regaling friends with such tales as how he was ousted from a University of Toronto teaching post for political reasons. (Not to worry; he's now a revered professor at UCLA.) But the coup de grace,he emphasizes, is the demolition of his AGO.
"Frank can be really mean about it," he adds. "We were at a dinner together and he said to me, 'I'm going to destroy your building.'"
When questioned about the incident, Gehry made it clear he was trying to be jocular and ironic about an awkward situation. "We were at a party, and we'd all been drinking," said Gehry. "I really like Barton personally, and I admire his work. But if the AGO is an issue, his problem is not with me but with the clients and what they hired me to do."
According to Myers, there was a way the AGO could have preserved the best elements of his work. Myers says he sent sketches explaining how it could be done. His suggestions were ignored.
Even back in the early 1990s, it was frustrating for Myers that his original plan was never completed, lacking most conspicuously the glass canopy he meant to run all along the Dundas façade. But the money ran out, and eventually the AGO stopped responding to his demands to finish the job. Myers grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, steeped in history and tradition. On the Myers side, he belonged to one of the South's most distinguished families, which occupied the same house for six generations. (That house is now a museum.) But he likes to point out that his family tree also includes a notable Jewish ancestor from Montreal.
As a young man in the 1950s, Myers attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, then spent five years as a pilot of fighter jets in the U.S. Air Force. After studying at Cambridge University, he returned to the U.S. to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
Then he moved to Toronto and went into partnership with Jack Diamond, a South African and fellow student in Pennsylvania. For a while they soared as partners; but they were driven men with strong egos, destined to have a noisy, acrimonious falling out. Followers were expected to choose sides.
"They both had strong personalities, and they shared certain ideas about urban design," says Kuwabara, "but Barton was more interested in high-tech work. They were both extremely outspoken, and had strong reactions to things, so perhaps the split was inevitable."
Equally inevitable was his realization that Toronto was never going to be big enough or adventurous enough to let him fulfill his ambition. Despite his quarrel with Gehry, he would no doubt agree with his Toronto-born rival who told a lecture audience in Chicago he never could have achieved his creative breakthroughs if he had remained in the city where he was born, with its stifling conservative mindset.
But Barton Myers and Southern California were made for each other – the self-styled outlaw architect perpetually seeking a new challenge, and that ultimate western frontier where the shock of the new is always welcome.
Every time Barton Myers watches from his hilltop futuristic palace as the sun sets over the Pacific, Toronto must seem more and more like a distant mirage, where the big breakthrough always seemed to be just slightly out of reach, like the green light at the end of the dock Scott Fitzgerald describes in The Great Gatsby. For this particular master builder, Toronto was Heartbreak House – a place where promises were often broken and prayers were rarely answered.
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/421187
AoD
