Construction

In any event, for the second project I redesigned the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. I have no idea how I came up with the concept, but I created a two tier system - on the upper level you could see the musical performance live, while below you could pay a lower fee and see it on TV. This is way ahead of its time, video is just being invented – and I had no idea how video would later impact my design education. 

Problem was style of presentation. I was heavily influenced by comics, especially those of R. Crumb. I would dearly love to still have this presentation, set in comic book fashion with heavy black ink; but Professor Treib was unreceptive to this style. Thank goodness he pulled me aside and told me he thought I didn’t belong in the college. From what he could see, he was probably right; but I took it as a challenge, one I refused to lose.

And finally, the third person deserving credit here is Professor Lars Lerup. It was under Lars I gain an appreciation for Modern Architecture. It wasn’t so much that I like the buildings as it was that I looked up to him and he like the buildings. I remember summer days listing to Al Green and discussing form and function. But try as I might I could never embrace Modernism, something about it was missing, incomplete.

As I matured in my education I thought that something was ornament and color. The modern movement’s stripping away of human figure and form, I thought, made it soulless – deserving of its brutalism; that was until discovering Colline Notre Dame du Haut, or better known as Ronchamp by Le Corbusier.