By Ellen Berkovitch | Photos by Robert Reck
Try to label architect Bart Prince, and you may find yourself pondering whether the concept is protractors or Pixar. A vigorous animator of space, the New Mexico native (his great-grandfather LeBaron Bradford Prince was governor) has made a career of designing houses that mere mortals cannot visualize until they are manifest on the ground—strange, snaking geometries on a lunar landscape; odd consorts of materials; ribbed interiors with bone structures as complex as exoskeletons, and frequently, names.
Names? Yes, names—the snake house, the snail house, the Smurf house, an “A-frame on acid” (from a critic at Architectural Record, reporting on a Prince house in Mendocino, California)—are just some of the personifications assigned to Prince houses, dubbed by onlookers who, Prince acknowledges, always tend to anthropomorphize his architecture.
Gallery spaces in Prince houses (top) serve as connecting elements that provide owners a place for displaying collections or housing books. Structural curved pipes in the sunken living room (bottom) run the length of the house.
The architect saw his first houses built on Albuquerque city lots (by builder Fred Hill) while he was still in high school. Knowing from childhood that architecture was his vocation, he graduated from Arizona State University, where he met his mentor, Bruce Goff, and spent time visiting Paolo Soleri’s Cosanti. He returned to Albuquerque and set up architecture shop in 1973.
Yet any hint of regionalism ends there, and the world for Bart Prince opens into a practice that offers buildings so constantly surprising as to be solely ascribable to the architect’s compulsion to make a new architecture for our times. “I’m not interested in developing one style or one visual idea,” Prince says. “Materials are available to everybody. Geometry exists in the general domain. My interest in architecture is how it becomes a work of art.”
Prince’s name now—a signature on houses whose forms are unmistakable yet never replicated (“I tell people that even from an early age I was always trying to get rid of gravity and the horizon line,” he says)—is cited regularly in international architecture circles as being heir to Goff, and, in turn, to Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom Goff first corresponded in 1916. Goff was 12 then, and he received in return a signed Wasmuth portfolio of drawings from the elder architecture maverick whose Wisconsin home and studio, Taliesin, had been burned down by arson two years earlier.
Photos, clockwise from above: A view of the snake house looking west (top left), the south elevation of the master bedroom (top right), and the northeast side of the master bedroom (bottom). The site plan at right shows the house sprawling vertically down the lot.
The modernist years for 20th-century architects were a time in which patrons made actual architectural aspirant’s ambitions. The dynamic over whose patron was whose sometimes led to arguments. One such snafu that got Wright fired up—according to stories that Prince heard from Goff, which he relates with gusto, clearly relishing the memory of his friend (who died in 1982) in the retelling—was over the patron Joe Price.
The Price family in Oklahoma had built the Wright-designed Price Tower (Wright’s first skyscraper, 1956, in Bartlesville, OK), but Joe Price in turn commissioned Goff to design his first house. That irked Wright, but it was through this sort of knighthood of the moderns that Prince got his jump start too; beginning in the late 1970s, he and Goff collaborated on Goff’s last—and Prince’s first—major building, the Pavilion for Japanese Art (to house the Shin’enKan collection of Joe and Etsuko Price at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), completed in 1988. The Joe and Etsuko Price house in Corona del Mar ensued as a private project for Prince—and made Joe Price’s name synonymous with patronage of the avant-garde.
Looking east, the snake house captures a sequence of views, different in every room, of the Sandia mountains and Albuquerque city lights.
The tag “neo-organic” that has followed Prince through his career tracks a dotted line back to Wright and the Prairie style, implying a signature integration of materials and site. Yet imitation is anathema to Prince, who trumpets the “make it new” injunction across his entire body of work.
“I was interested in Wright from a very early age,” he allows. “Later on I became worried that [Wright’s] work is so strong, the danger is becoming trapped by it and imitating it. You become really enthralled by such a strong work and you can’t see past it, is the danger.”
Prince’s own house-studio in Albuquerque is a traffic stopper. A crenellated tower of concrete block marks one edge of the site. Wrapped with a spiral staircase, it resembles fantasy architecture from a Giambattista Piranesi engraving. His newest building addition is a 100-foot cantilever jutting into the cottonwood trees above the street like an elevated bowling alley. A perambulator of that corridor—filled with Prince’s painting collection—may note that the walls and floors, of identical rough-sawn plywood, illustrate Prince’s notion that a wall need not end at the floor, nor vice versa.
From left: The Jemez Springs house is a system of poles designed to deal with the site on a Jemez River floodplain that flows as high as 10 feet—Prince raised the house to create outdoor living spaces underneath; north elevation; a roof terrace opens at the top of a spiral staircase that connects the floors.
For the recent house in Mendocino that led an Architectural Record critic to free-associate the design to hallucinogens, Prince created a spacious, undulating plan that from the outside resembles a geometry of compound curves covered in shingles. Inside, an angular and elaborate beam structure—64 feet from one end to the other—scared the contractor so badly he had to be persuaded to take the job.
Prince’s so-called snake house, built on a flood plain in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, coils atop the ground, in an elevated plan, for an owner who enjoys traversing the jointed body of her dwelling—in plan, visualize a shotgun concept blasted madly with kinetic energy that makes the snake writhe. Prince met the client when she attended a lecture he delivered at the University of New Mexico. When she came to the office, he relates, she asked for a house and requested, “Is it possible to stretch it?” He laughs.
The west deck of the living room overlooks the stream. At each end of the house larger terraces open to 360-degree north and south vistas.
A pole house in Jemez Springs—shiny as an art deco breakfront with corrugated steel panels—replaced the owners’ on-site doublewide; Prince punned on the style in cladding a triple stack in space-age material. A cabin under construction in Datil resembles the monocle of a desert-bound Captain Hook. Its part-time resident-owner—who otherwise lives in a distant state—can close it up inside a folding metal sheathe Prince designed.
And in Glorieta, a psychologist who had formerly inhabited an old adobe in downtown Santa Fe wanted a house that would work with the adamant red earth of the site, be solar, and break the harsh western winds; Prince gave her all that in forms that tether to the ground and end in acute angles.
The architect relies in his practice on the word “synthesis”—the concept that plays out in considering site, climate, and clients’ needs. He says he thinks for a long time first, draws second, and constructs models, finally, in order to help clients visualize their projects. “Architecture,” says Prince, “is above all a creative art.”
Left: A view from the kitchen into the living space of the Jemez Springs house. Right: Triangular wall panels provide lateral support to the house. “I always express what’s going on in the structure,” Prince says.
“‘House’ means to people something very specific. If you show a pitched roof with a door and a couple of windows, everybody is going to say ‘house.’ But when you show them something like most of these, that’s not the first thing that comes to mind—they’ll say ‘spaceship’ or ‘caterpillar.’
The house’s wings (foreground) extend like arms that enclose the south- facing space to block wind in winter and shield solar gain in summer.
Left: A floating roof over the Glorieta house living room provides a pavilion that lifts the rest of the structure and lets you see to the distant hills. The lightness of the enclosure conveys the impression of the house’s opening to nature. Right: A recessed living area is signature Prince. Under the point of the triangular roof that covers the glass corner of the house, a terrace opens to the south
Prince’s drawings are integral to his design process. Above, left: Hanna residence perspective drawing, southeast view (1974). Above, right: In a cross section, a vertical line shows a waterfall cascading through the center of the house.
A plan (top) and elevation (bottom) for the Porter-McGehee residence in Cerrillos (1984) shows active solar design making use of adjacent rock walls as storage.
“I have people who say to me, ‘You must stay awake nights trying to think of weird things to do.’
“No, on the contrary. I think when you work this way—trying to work from the inside of the problem, and letting the building grow from that and not trying to force it into a shape—you’re going to end up with a much more creative solution than if you were just trying to think of a form or a shape.”
What ensues, Prince allows, can be radically original: “The idea that you could actually have something for yourself doesn’t really occur to most people. People buy the cars they’re offered and the houses that are built—because they figure that’s what those things have to look like.
“Somebody once asked Picasso to explain a painting, and he said, ‘If I could explain it, you wouldn’t need the painting.’ You know, it’s easier for me to do architecture than explain it.”
Left: Never before published is Prince’s 1971 ink-on-Mylar drawing of an Indian Arts Center in Taos, an unbuilt project. “I was trying to create a modern expression of the creativity of native peoples without imitating their geometries,” he says. Right: A Datil cabin (2000) is a cylindrical structure secured in a steel armature that permits it to be sealed “like a person-devouring robot.”
From the Spring 2007 issue
