Walter Chatham April 1996

PETER:  I’ve always considered your career to be atypical.  You do private houses, but you’re not afraid of commercial commissions, and some of those have been just as creative and interesting as your quote/unquote more serious work.

I think of your vision of yourself as an architect as having a kind of populist edge.

WALTER:  I like that.  I think one of the things that happened to architecture in my generation is that the idea of the architect as a heroic figure, above the fray -- struggling against the philistine-ish attitudes of the hoi polloi -- has not really remained supportable.

All kinds of young architects struggle in the commercial world.  Most of them do everything possible to disguise the fact that they’re doing it, either by trying to put an intellectual gloss onto what sometimes are very mundane commissions or by pretending that those jobs don’t exist.  Or when they talk about their work, they make a discreet selection which they think is more representative of what they really like to do.

PETER:  But you’re not like that?

WALTER:  I’m not, largely because we’ve been blessed - my office and myself - with living and working in lower Manhattan, where the kind of run-of-the-mill, walk-in client is liable to be a Brian McNally or a Jerry Joseph, or somebody who is an interesting local character.  

PETER:  What did you do for Brian McNally?

WALTER:  Well, up until his discovery of Philippe Starck we did all of his restaurants except the Odeon.  We did Jerry’s, 150 Wooster, Canal Bar, and... what were some of the other ones?  There’s Indochine.

PETER:  You did Indochine?

WALTER:  Well, yeah, in my earlier incarnation. It was with 1100 Architects.  That was my old office.

PETER:  Those are some of my favorite restaurant spaces.

WALTER:  Oh, good.

PETER:  Let’s talk about Jerry’s, which is your classic middle-budget restaurant that was renovated for . . .

WALTER:  Zero dollars.

PETER:  Less than zero dollars.

WALTER:  And zero taste.

PETER:  Oh, come on, it’s an amazingly successful design.

WALTER: Thank you.  But I have to say, right off the bat, it was a collaboration.  Brian McNally had a great deal to do with that.  So did Jerry Josephs.  One of the things about working with Brian is, that he’s a kind of natural genius.  I mean, he’s like one of those primitive painters.  Like Howard Finster.  You know, somebody will look at a board and say, what’s that doing there?  And Brian will look at it and say, this is incredible, if we put this here and put this over there, we’ve got an incredible thing!  And he’s right.

PETER:  What I like best about Jerry’s is that it’s a processional space.  First, you walk past these rows of banquettes with the people looking right at you as you go by and then you go to the back where you’re in this intimate space, where the booths are.

WALTER: You know, the idea that architects reinvent the way that human society interacts and deals with space and with other humans, is such an irritating fallacy.  People like to go out to eat. In addition to the physical need to nourish themselves, the act of eating is about the most social act possible among humans.  The idea is that you enter a space and get checked out by everybody and do your own checking out.  The use of the mirrors emphasizes that.  I always like to take the absolute back booth at Jerry’s, facing forward, because you can check out without being checked.

But I think that the lesson that Brian taught me very quickly, which I’ve always carried with me, is that a restaurant is about providing the proper atmosphere for people, and I’m not saying there’s anything ever wrong with the food, but unlike some restaurants in New York, the food is not the starring achievement.  In Brian’s restaurants, it’s always been, Who’s there?  How do they look?  What’s the mood?  Is something interesting happening?  Who’s that talking to who? In New York, it’s that kind of glue that holds all these personal, professional, and cultural relationships together.

We need those restaurants to conduct our business affairs and so forth, the way that people in smaller communities use their cars.

PETER:  They talk in cars?

WALTER:  Sure they do.

PETER:  I never knew that.

WALTER:  Maybe you guys don’t talk in cars, but I’m always talking in cars.

PETER:  Cars are a funny place to talk, because everybody is facing forward.  It’s like a confessional or something.

WALTER:  I guess, but it’s like sitting at the counter in a Japanese restaurant, where you’re watching something else.  It’s more of an abstract set of relationships.

PETER:  Oh, yeah.

WALTER:  I mean, it’s important for architecture to be spatial and beautiful and have wonderful light and surfaces and do clever things.  But the real purpose of space and architecture is to contain not only human activity, but the different types of discourses and discussions that people have.  In that sense, it’s very theatrical.  It’s not necessary that architecture put itself forward as the primary thing of the place.  I’d like to think that my work is really about background, even though it could be very colorful, and it could be very jarring.  But if people walk into one of my houses or one of my spaces and they’re just looking at it -- and they’re struck dumb by something that’s been done -- in a way, I’ve failed.  Because then it’s drawing attention to itself in a way which certainly, after a period of time, will become faded.

PETER:  Is there anybody else who does that?

WALTER: Sure, I mean, in Le Corbusier everything is ramps and stairs and the entrance hall.  There’s no detail to speak of.  It’s beautifully cast, abstract space.  And there aren’t all of the obsessive little tschatschkas that one has to have today.    If you look at either the Villa Savoye as a small project, or the Centro Soyus, which was that incredibly odd Congress hall he did in Moscow in 1931 or ‘32, you have unbelievable circulation.  I mean, way too much, from a rational standpoint of the building, is used as circulation. 

Now to Americans, this is a very radical idea.  But one only has to think about things like the Paris Opera or a palace or anything where there are all these staircases ... and again, what is this about?  What is the Paris Opera about, if not checking out the girls, the boys, the costumes, the jewels, the lights, the hubbub -- everything.  What makes architecture interesting, I think, is its relationship to the occupancy.

PETER:  Early in your career you also did a beautiful house on Nevis.  It’s a very remote, beautiful site on a small Caribbean island that has a strong English colonial past.  On the surface, this house would appear to be about a more private kind of architecture.

WALTER:  It was done for my father-in-law and my late mother-in-law . . . very interesting people.  Very artistic, kind of theatrical people.  And that place is very much conceived of as a little theater.  It’s almost like one of those Italian Renaissance projects by Scamozzi or Palladio, where you create an artificial town in miniature and then cast a set of characters and create a comedy or a drama that takes place there.  It’s about little buildings that come out of a platform which is analogous to a community. 

PETER:  The house clearly makes you feel a ghost of an historical presence.  How does it evoke that?

WALTER:  Well, partly because the house extends through a series of set pieces, some which we built and some which were pre-existent, like the cisterns and the privy extending into the landscape.  One of the things that triggered that house was a visit, when we were first looking at the island, to a ruined great house which had been destroyed in an earthquake.  No windows, no glass, or anything filling the openings; but perfectly-trimmed keystones and sills and lintels.  In fact, on our site there had been an earlier house that fell down in an earthquake.  And then, there was a later house that was built partially from those ruins.  And we built on the platform of that house which was destroyed by termites and time.  And then you have the little roofs that are more or less similar to the folk houses that people live in today.

PETER:  The highlight of the house, the culmination of the pavilions, is the dining enclosure.

WALTER:  Right, which is not really an enclosure, because it’s open completely on two sides.  It’s a place to eat outside where you can sit up on an elevated terrace. By no means do I consider myself anything near a classical architect, but that is a classical evocation of a little temple up on a platform.

PETER:  But classical elements seem to reappear in your work frequently.

WALTER:  Well, maybe I am a classicist.  I try not to literally do classical architecture, but I have to admit it’s certainly a very successful strategy with small buildings where the building itself has very little presence.  And a lot of our buildings are extremely small, meaning between 1000 feet and 2000 feet.  I notice that a lot of people now try to break even a small building down into as many components as possible, and to articulate as much of that as possible.  And without being unkind, because I know there are some who have done it very successfully, by and large, I have a great deal of trouble getting those buildings. 

PETER:  Your house at Seaside in Florida - the one that followed the traditionalist codes, but nevertheless didn’t look at all like what a house produced by those codes should look like - that house has received a lot of attention.  What was the genesis of that project?

WALTER:  Well, I got roped into buying a piece of beach-front property down there by the developer who hired me to do the Town Hall.  He offered as part of my payment a piece of land.  Having accepted this, I discovered, to my horror, that I had twelve months to do the plan and construction, or the lot reverted back to the developer. 

This was my first experience with seaside town planning.  And so I didn’t entirely understand what they were looking for.  Some of the things I did that people considered mistakes and other people thought quite inspired and interesting, were my semi-successful attempts at trying to get at what this code was really meant to do.  This was before they built Rosewalk, which is the kind of traditional Victorian area that became the image people have for Seaside.

PETER:  So, it wasn’t intentionally transgressive?

WALTER:  No.  Now, I’m not going to pretend to complete innocence.  Rosewalk was in the planning stages. Andreas Duany, one of Seaside’s planners, with whom I’ve been friends with for many years and who’s been a wonderful influence on me for many reasons, came to me one night, and after several bottles of wine, as we were sitting there pouring our souls out, he said, I’m really in trouble because we’ve designed this town and what we were looking for was a kind of cracker vernacular.  But what people are doing is they’ve latched onto this main street Disneyworld idea; and we’re powerless to stop it because we set up the condition ourselves.  Meanwhile, it’s hard to tell the realtors, who are suddenly selling lots like hotcakes to all these people who want their porch rockers and their verandas, that they’ve misinterpreted the code and we’re really looking for something a little bit more...

PETER:  Deborah’s work does come closer to that cracker vernacular.

WALTER:  Her work comes very close. She did a very good job of defining an alternative paradigm to the Victorian, based on those wonderful simple structures down there.

Andreas challenged me to come up with a house that dealt with the code and with the urban intention of Seaside, that showed that you didn’t have to build either a straight cracker building or a Victorian cottage. 

PETER:  Why would cracker be vernacular and not bourgeois Victorian?  Can one justify that, or can we simply say that from our point of view, the humbler house is purer.

WALTER:  The truth is that most of the so-called Victorian houses down there start out, when you squint at them, as what I’ll call cracker buildings.  What is so irritating and tasteless about the more offensive ones is that they arbitrarily begin to add elements which only have the intention of trying to soup up the picturesque-ness.

They’re throwing in brackets and turned columns on the porches and pseudo-dormers or patterned shingles, trying to draw attention away from the fact that these are basically nasty little sheetrock boxes with bad Acorn windows and Peachtree doors, which happen to be kind of cheesy.  You know, painted aluminum and steel things.

PETER:  Right.

WALTER: ...that have absolutely nothing to do with craftsmanship.  I mean, if you asked me, do I like Victorian architecture?  I love Victorian architecture.  I love Queen Anne architecture.  But I like the stuff that somebody actually turned with their hands.  And I like the stuff that has wonderful windows that allow light deep into the building and has high ceilings and great finishes.  But let’s be honest about this, we’re just talking about my romantic fantasy versus other people’s fantasies.  Because the cracker building is also a romantic goal in our post-industrial society.

PETER:  Of course.

WALTER: But what’s appealing about it is that it’s architecture going the other way.  In other words, the Victorian buildings at Seaside take a humble model like the cracker building, which is all the lots can deal with, and they load up the options.  It’s like a Volkswagen where they put the Rolls Royce grille on and the chrome pipes and everything.  It looks stupid.

But cracker architecture is architecture that starts with the high.  You take a paradigm like the Town Hall in Defuniak Springs, Florida, which is based on Palladio -- but it’s Palladio when the guys at the local hardware store got together and saw a picture somewhere and decided to build their Town Hall.

And then, when the guy in the back forty decided to build his house, he looks at that and simplifies it,  and he builds a house.  In other words, cracker architecture is taking exalted classical ideas and reducing them to a kind of simplicity that’s appropriate to a smaller building.

PETER: Getting back to your house . . .

WALTER:  The original idea of splitting the house came from two things.

PETER:  They’re two twin houses?

WALTER:  Well, it’s one house, twin buildings, more or less, with only a shift in the ground plane.  You step up to go into the bedroom building.  That was the only gesture to differentiate between them.  And that house began because I had a square lot with an 80-by-80 footprint that didn’t really make a lot of sense, if I was going to build a modest house, which is all I had the resources to do.

PETER:  Right.

WALTER:  So, I went to the edge of my footprint, which then created the opportunity for a space in the middle.  What I realized was, in a town where private outdoor space is almost impossible because every house is an object set in a lot with other lots adjacent, the idea that you would create two objects of your own, so that you can have a private space between them, made tremendous sense.

PETER:  The other issue we can address in this house, that is characteristic of all your work, is a kind of robust and radical, but very elegant use of everyday commercial and industrial materials. 

WALTER:  That’s a very nice way to put it.  These two buildings are made out of pressure-treated lumber, which is about as ubiquitous as you can get down there.  The structural surfaces are pressure-treated, exterior-grade fir.  And the roofs are corrugated galvanized steel.  The interior surfaces, by and large, are either tongue-and-groove board or plywood which has been painted in checkerboard or whatever patterns.

PETER:  For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve talked about your impatience with a lot of materials used in residential construction, and the desire to make what you call “dry buildings”?   What are you getting at there?

WALTER:  A dry building is a building which is assembled from pre-fabricated components.  Sheets of material.  Plywood.  Galvanized metal.  But I realize more and more that plywood and pressure-treated lumber are environmentally problematic.  I think that the future of building technology is going to be settled by what materials are available for economical use and by the consequences of using those materials from an economical and an environmental standpoint.

PETER:  Is the problem availability or toxicity?

WALTER:  The problem with wood is that even though it’s purported to be a replenishable resource, we are using it up much faster than we’re replenishing it.  Building materials are very much like the stuff you get at the grocery store.  A lot of wood products now are filled with emulsions and binders and various toxic chemicals, and the whole problem of fire and the release of toxic gases has become an issue.  The idea of these materials breaking down after a period of time -- for instance, the glues and solvents and plywood begin to break down -- also has very profound and far-reaching implications.

PETER:  And that’s pushed you in the direction of thinking more about metal?

WALTER:  That’s certainly been an influence.  You know, galvanized metal is not just an affectation for me, although the more I build, the more I realize that people are going to start accusing me of being obsessed with this material or that material, and that’s okay.  Galvanized metal is simply . . .

PETER: Galvanized.

WALTER:  Steel is obviously a recyclable material.  If you put an electrostatically-attached coating of zinc, you get a product that will last twenty or thirty years.  It doesn’t have to be painted.  It attaches easily.  It’s strong.  It keeps the weather out.  

PETER:  Recently you made a galvanized house in Mississippi.  And how you’re working on the renovation of Gordon Bunschaft’s East Hampton house for Martha Stewart.  As I understand it, you’re going to put in a galvanized kitchen?

WALTER:  Stainless steel, actually, but yes, they’re connected by steel.  The house in Mississippi, maybe it’s the culmination, because it’s all galvanized inside and out, and it’s hard to imagine going beyond that.

Interestingly enough, it was at the client’s request.  He’s a fascinating man, Roger Malkin. Roger had been to Australia, which is very much a product of British early nineteenth-century colonial expansion.  There, they have a tremendous tradition of pre-fabricated houses.  That’s where galvanized metal was introduced by the British, because they could put up warehouses and temporary facilities very quickly.  By the 1820s, the British had several manufacturers of galvanized corrugated metal in London. I’ll show you my book on pre-fabricated buildings in the nineteenth century if you don’t believe me.

PETER:  Really?

WALTER:  This was a development in architecture and building which virtually shaped the nineteenth century.  And like so many facts in history, it’s been conveniently forgotten because we don’t like the idea that we had an unromantic industrial housing past.  We like the idea that our colonial forefathers lived in little rude wooden structures up in Plymouth Plantation or Williamsburg.  But the British exported so much of their building all over the world, and this incredible building technology was one of the fuels of the industrial revolution.  It was modular and it could be easily shipped.  And they had churches and houses and schools and administrative centers. 

So, my client went to Australia and realized that a lot of the buildings in the Outback were galvanized metal, inside and out.

PETER:  Can you give us a feeling of what the house is like?

WALTER:  In many ways, it represents the fusion of the two main tendencies in my work.  One of which is a desire on the part of my soul to achieve a high modernist aesthetic that either literally or metaphorically evokes this high degree of industrial finish.  The other is the tendency towards the vernacular that we’ve already talked about.

PETER:  It must be pretty weird on the inside with all that galvanized?

WALTER:  Well, you have to come and see it.  The light bounces off the inside.  And it actually deadens the house acoustically because it breaks up sound waves.  And we have a very rich, beautiful hard pine floor which then infuses the house with warmth.  So, rather than this cold metal shell, you get the light hitting the wood floor and reflecting up the walls, constantly changing.  So it’s really quite nice.

PETER:  Although many of us who live in downtown New York are rather blasé on the subject, you’ve been informed by its nineteenth-century industrial character.  Not only the large loft spaces, but cast iron facades and so on.

WALTER:  Sure, what do you have?  You have people in the New World, with new materials and new industrial potential, building cities like New York and Philadelphia.  And this building type that they developed, the loft building, which was considered obsolete by World War I, is still from every standpoint - environmental, social, cultural, economic - a paradigm of flexibility.  In many ways, the twentieth century has been a failure from an architectural standpoint.

PETER:  There’s our headline.

WALTER:  Well, it’s true.  Architecture has been reduced to being about a particular short-sight, short-term efficiency.  With the advent of air conditioning and fluorescent lighting, it’s not only possible, but desirable to have a maximum eight-foot ceiling.

     And if tall people wouldn’t hit their hands and damage the acoustical tiles when they did their morning exercises, building codes would probably allow seven-foot ceilings.  The twentieth century has been about reducing human occupancy from the primary concern to maybe number five or six on a list of overarching concerns of why we build the way we do.  It’s so tragic.  People will say to an architect who does a ten-foot ceiling, “We can’t afford this.  That two feet is just volume we’re paying for, and we don’t want to pay to air-condition that; and if we put in  cheap, ugly fluorescent lighting, it’s not going to hit the desktop at the right height.”  So what happens is you get a series of spaces that have been purposely designed to absolutely cut back on materials and space, to the point where they’re barely habitable.  And then, if the use for which they’re intended changes, there’s no possible other use.

PETER:  Last year you got a commission from Martha Stewart to restore and remodel the Gordon Bunschaft house in East Hampton.  So, we have Gordon Bunschaft, Martha Stewart, and Walter Chatham.  That’s quite a stew.

WALTER:  Well, the house itself is very much, from a planning standpoint, an expression of what I consider to be an ideal in architecture.  

PETER:  Really?  From pictures, it’s hard to like.

WALTER:  Well, I didn’t say I liked the house.  And I didn’t say the house was ideal.  I said, from a planning standpoint.  And what I mean by that is that he’s reduced this object to a kind of elemental wall.  When you approach the house you’re not aware even of its volumetric qualities.  You see this opaque wall made of travertine, which is almost frightening in its austerity.  There are two doors, which are identical, the main entry and the kitchen door.

PETER:  What material?

WALTER:  The doors are wood.  They’re set back.  So it’s really medieval.  The thing is almost like a monastery and it’s that simplicity that appealed to Martha Stewart.  She talks about it as her kind of monastic retreat.  Stone floors, stone walls, light coming from above.  There’s this kind of concrete T-beam system with glass in between.  That’s where the light comes into the house.

PETER:  This is sounding better and better.

WALTER:  It’s fantastic.  But now, everybody looks at it and goes, yuck!  When Bunschaft lived there, it was filled with great art and great furniture on the inside.  And outside there was a Henry Moore and a Giacometti and a Miró.  So, the house itself formed a kind of neutral backdrop to the activities of the occupants, their furnishings, and their taste in art.  Which is almost an ideal for me.

PETER:  But that’s rather different from your more theatrical approach, when you guide the people using the space.

WALTER:  Well, Gordon Bunschaft is more mature than I am, and I’m attempting to mature a little bit.  Now, the negative part of it is that the house, without those things I just mentioned, is somewhat void of character.  And, some people would even say, is a kind of blank, dull, ordinary thing.

     Now, the challenge is that there are aspects of the plan, like the kitchen he designed and some little worn spaces that were connected to it, that are absolutely horrible and have to go.  And our intention with the house, meaning Martha’s intention and mine is to further simplify, further reduce it.  Make the kitchen an elemental composition that isn’t even separate from the dining room. It will simply be a kind of edge.  The project is really about trying to further purify and clean up the existing house, and then it will become a decorating question, if I can use that term.

PETER:  Is it landmarked?

WALTER:  No.

PETER:  So you’re trying to keep the essential elements, but also build from there?

WALTER:  Yes, although very much to her credit, Martha looks at the house as an important house.  And when she bought it from the Museum of Modern Art, interestingly enough, there were no stipulations.

PETER:  Really?

WALTER:  And someone else might have bought it for the property and knocked it down.  And she made the decision, the right decision, to go with the house, to try - the word that architects like to use - to intervene as minimally as possible, in order to further distill the essence.  And then, hopefully, fill it up with great furniture and art, which is something I’m very interested in doing also.

But the ultimate idea is, once again, to reduce the house from a planning standpoint, almost beyond simplicity, to stupidity.  Deborah Berke once paid me a very great compliment, although she didn’t realize it at the time.  She saw one of our buildings at Seaside and said, “this is the dumbest plan I’ve ever seen in my life.”  And, for a small building, it just doesn’t get any better for me.  So, we want to make sure that the Bunschaft house is as dumb as it can be, and by that I mean both artless, if you understand my sense of that, and also mute. 

PETER: Gee.

WALTER: We started the interview talking about one powerful client, McNally and we’re ending it with another powerful client,  Martha.  You know, I have a tremendous amount of work to do on this house, but I don’t have to set the parameters.  In other words, I love strong clients because they tell me what they want...

PETER:  So do I.

WALTER:  ... and they leave me alone to do my job, which is, simply, to get at the essence of what they’re looking for.