Love Takes a Long, Long time

Not a whisper of wind today; the trees are all addressing the sun.

Trees take the stress until they can’t. Last evening they were going crazy in the wind. They bent for forgiveness—as if trees needed forgiveness? The wind was whipping around like Auntie M yelling when that little dog went missing.  This evening the highest branches are near motionless pushing out new leaves, the sun is shining and the birds are celebrating.

Earlier in the day, I watched a robin enjoying the lawn sprinkler. It flew in low across the yard to a branch just overhead after the sprinkler was started. Sitting on its tree branch above the sprinkler, it caught droplets from the oscillating showers and shook its feathers in delight.

“I’ve been thinking, love takes a long, long time.” [1]

Yesterday the entire neighborhood was shuttered and quiet—except for the neighbors’ 200 db generator blasting out across the lake, and this image of only the world’s privileged surviving on generators after the Apocalypse. After the roaring winds died away, with the power out and the sky gone dark, all that could be heard was that generator and the house lit up top to bottom. We were waiting for the repair crews to return us to normality. The crews are being paid overtime, coming on a Saturday night to re-light the darkness.

[1] Borrowed from a song by Susan Tedeschi.

Drafting 101  Lesson No. 1

Old drafting saying: “Don’t smoke weed before setting out to back-check dimension strings on a working drawing.” Seems logical enough, right? Though some of us learn faster than others. To explain:

Bill Sterling had been one year ahead of me at Yale. We knew each other mostly in passing at school, so his volunteering to introduce me was way generous. On the offhand chance he could get me a job, I interviewed at Miami’s an old line architectural/engineering firm, Ferendino Grafton Spillis Candela. To my surprise, I was hired.

Bill explained he needed an assistant on the project he was working on at the time, a restoration study of the Miami Biltmore Hotel. Sited at the edge of an 18-hole golf course on prime real estate in Coral Gables. It had been originally built in the 1920s during Florida’s gold rush days, along with a string of other gold coast hotels, the most famous being the Palm Beach Breakers. The Miami Biltmore was modeled loosely on the Cathedral of Seville, at least the tower had been, and had gone through World War II as a Veterans Administration (VA) hospital. Now twenty some years after the war, the Feds looked to unload it, donating it to the City of Coral Gables, one of the early Miami suburbs.

Miami Biltmore Hotel—photo by Ebyabe, 2011

George Merrick, the developer, and Phineas Paist, an architect buddy, had been hanging out on Key Biscayne one day smoking dope when they hatched the brilliant scheme to create an imitation Venice, complete with canals (in this case to drain the Everglades).

Oh, I kid the Floridians, but they do love their pseudo Old World architecture—and their weed.

Coral Gables owes its hacienda look to the founders’ desire for a sales hook, using quarried coral rock for the more extravagant places, a few gateways—and stucco for the upper middle class houses that filled in between. Along with barrel tile roofs. Only New Jersey tourists could be suckered into believing this was Seville, let along Valhalla, given the palmetto bugs and skeeters.

Ferendino Grafton Spillis Candela had bought another rundown hotel in Coral Gables, the oddly named Douglas Entrance. It was never clear what it had been an entrance to—other than the rear parking lot. Like a back lot at Universal Pictures. Designed by Phineas Paist in 1924 as another rambling, hacienda affair, the exterior was preserved, along with several major interiors, into which the firm’s architects and engineers were plunked down in the former hotel rooms. They’d torn out the separating walls between individual hotel rooms and wittily cut interior picture windows running down the corridors looking into these spaces to help tie the thing together, but you knew you were in a former hotel when using the small, one-person toilet rooms.

Douglas Entrance—photo by Ebyabe, 2011

Phineas Paist also is credited with the Venetian Pool, created from the former coral quarry. Nice place to keep cool on a hot Florida day. Rumor was my workmate’s wife used to hang at the pool making eyes at the life guard, but that’s only a rumor. With a name like Phineas, you’d better be good at something.

Venetian Pool, Coral Gables—photo by Daniel Di Palma, 2016

Ferendino et. al. was my first professional job after grad school. I was happy to land a job anywhere, seeing as the 70s Recession was going full bore in South Florida. It was a mixed bag that lasted two years, enough to get my architectural license and move on. My friends were a mix of first generation Cuban-Americans and a handful of non-Cubans. Cuban expats waiting to return when Castro died made up a number of the firm’s older employees—as they did Miami in general. There were a handful of women drafters, though no women architects—one woman structural engineer who had a dislike for former morgue spaces, but otherwise was a cheerful soul.

Andrew Ferendino was the firm’s founding partner and of Italian extraction, Peter Spillis the Greek we called ‘the ghost’ because he was never seen, and Edward Grafton was from an old line Florida family. Grafton was a brother-in-law to Lawton Chiles, then the powerful US Senator. Grafton was the rain maker. And Hilario Candela was the principal designer, a fact he insisted people keep in mind.

To be among the chosen few, you needed to be Cuban—because Hilario Candela ran the designer shop. I was not Cuban. Having fair skin helped; I wasn’t mulatto, which appeared to be an issue worse than not being born in Cuba. Growing up I hadn’t belonged in South Carolina either, but by comparison, living in Miami was the complete experience of being a stranger in my own country.

Spanish, Spanglish and occasional English were the firm’s spoken languages. And half the office smoked.

A gay architect a few years older became a lunchmate; he was from Boston and another Ivy League grad. He’d found his boyfriend in Miami and stayed. I think Armstrong was his surname—I can’t remember his first name. What we held in common was the love of design, and possibly, not being Cuban, a distaste for being second class citizens. Mostly though, he seemed comfortable in his own skin, no pretension but with a keen sense of humor. I’ve lost track of too many people; I should have made a better effort at staying in touch with him.

An older Cuban architect, whose nickname I’ll say was “Soco” liked to brag about a) how large his plantation had been in Cuba, and b) how he avoided paying US taxes. He seemed always to be smoking cigarettes and socializing while everybody else worked. My friend David Kingwill, who loved practical jokes, left Soco a message on his phone extension while he was on his lunch break claiming he was from Social Security, saying Soco had been selected for an audit and to “please call.” Soco, being an emotional sort who’d been called out, went around all afternoon telling one and all how upset he was. I don’t think David liked braggarts.

KIngwill was yet another expat from outside Florida.

Al Otero was a fast friend who’d been given, as an off the cuff birthday present, the sketch design of a glass home surrounding a courtyard where, on a podium, he was told to mount his beloved forest green ‘bathtub’ Porsche. I think it was Sterling’s sketch. Al’s two passions were the car and his love of early modern white design, a la Richard Meier. Oh, and his wife, Olga, a beautiful Cuban with a quick witted temperament.

The four of us were nearly killed one night on the way to dinner, being broadsided by a waitress with a suspended license late for work driving through a stop sign. Thank god it wasn’t the Porsche.

Olga’s VW bug was demolished, and she wore a head brace for months. Al sprinted out, memorized the tags, and the waitress was arrested for leaving the scene, though she didn’t go to jail. It was more important that she get to work.

My impression of law in Florida hasn’t much changed; you need to accept these things are no big deal. Have a toke.

Ferendino Grafton Spillis Candela  Part 1 is a YouTube link incorporating a series of slides taken in the 70s. It’s credited to Roberto Catasus, who I remember being hailed as, ‘hey Catasus’—probably because there were only so many Robertos anyone could remember. You may notice the plethora of Magic Markers on desks—they were an occupational hazard to breathing.

I’m in a couple slides, if you’re truly bored.

1:26—Al Otero was never this earnest, which is why we got along.

2:22—Bill Sterling and Al Otero—Bill’s signature bow ties drove me nuts. He said if he was going to wear a tie, it needed to stand out.

4:08—Me in a closet, so it seems; cool shirt, though.

4:34—David Kingwill is second to the left.

5:41—Me and Al with a third dude.

6:17—Paul Pergakis in the background & Armstrong far right

10:23—Ed Grafton, Andy Ferendino, and Peter Spillis

Coral Gables retained the firm to study what to do with their acquired white elephant. To be fair, if you’ve ever been there, it’s a ginormous beast surrounded by one-and-two-story houses. Bill Sterling assigned me survey and drafting duties, which meant reading the mildewed blueprints (which indeed were blue) of the original working drawings, transcribing them onto then-modern day mylar.

Drafting on mylar was more challenging than linen or vellum, mainly because the pencil leads were slightly greased, making it hard to vary the line widths with any subtlety, which I prided myself on drawing.

Mylar sheets were for the technical drawings, supposedly better for archival purposes. Though years later when I was researching archived pencil-on-linen drawings from the 1930s for the Federal Triangle buildings in Washington, DC, the linens had held up well. My opinion, mylar sucked.

Also later in the 80s, some bright star came up with a method called ‘pin bar’ drafting wherein you drew on a successive series of mylar sheets, stacked one on top of the next, so to separate building components. Base building exterior walls and building cores on the main layer, followed by interior walls on a second layer, toilet fixtures and such on another… The only benefit was if you reproduced the base mylars, and passed them onto the engineers, they had identical backgrounds—until someone needed to make a revision and everyone started all over again.

When you needed to run a check print, you stacked them altogether on a flat plate printer, exposing the blueprint paper to light. One at a time. The traditional blueprint machine was ten times faster than a flat plate printer, except you couldn’t use it on a pin bar series. The net result was, a) fuzzy linework if you stacked too many layers, b) no one wanted to run check prints because it was slower than hell, and c) making revisions required going layer by layer with an electric eraser and shield. Whoever invented that one should have been shot.  

I held onto my pin bar for a lesson in unintended consequences. It was a flexible steel band about the thickness of a spatula with attached pins to keep the layered mylar sheets aligned. Later in the 80s, when anyone complained about how slow AutoCAD Ver. 2.5 through 14 was, I’d wave the pin bar and laugh maniacally. Though AutoCAD was no speed demon either and regularly tended to blue screen.

‘Control-S’ has stayed with me for all my Microsoft products.

Bill and I studied the hell out of that hotel, trying various options for turning it into an office building along the lines of the one our architectural office occupied. But the City of Coral Gables had no interest in spending the coin it would have taken to convert the place. The most we ever did was construct a tennis pavilion for eight or so courts, framed by a Spanish style arcade facing the street to hide the chain-link fence. My contribution was locating a tile manufacturer who made the knockoff Alhambra-patterned tiles we used to decorate the built-in benches.

The Miami Biltmore still stands, though the studies we did were never followed through—years later, a private developer took it off the city’s hands and restored it as, surprise! a resort hotel. Funny how these things go in circles. We are, after all, back in the 20s again.

Miami Biltmore Hotel restored courtyard—photo by Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, © 2010

Zooming in, at the base of the fountain, the coral rock with all it’s wormy, black patterning is distinctive.

Courtyard closeup—from photo by Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, © 2010

Miami Biltmore Hotel restored swimming pool—photo by Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, © 2010

When we were surveying the complex in 1973, the pool had been filled with dirt and seeded with grass. I couldn’t understand why, in a rehabilitation hospital, some bright star had decided a swimming pool wasn’t necessary.

Decades after, D and I had tea under the arcade one morning.

During its VA days, the hotel’s major spaces had been left largely intact, though it took the developer time and coin to restore them. There’s a charming room in the tower labeled “Library” on the original blueprints—named for where, during Prohibition, the gents and gals would sip their “tea.” Rumor had it Al Capone had been there once.

Alhambra tile wall—photo from Biltmore Hotel website

Tools of the Trade

So to return to that opening caution about dimension strings requiring a clear head, I began my architectural career in the dark ages of pencil leads, straight edges, triangles, scales, large drafting desks and cigarette smoke. I’m now finishing it in the age of 3D renderings and animations, and physical models extruded by 3D printers. But the tools from then to now are only what get you from initial dreaming through communications with union workers. Without an imagination and some way to talk about it, the tools are lifeless.

Paul could draw like a demon. I know because I drew just as painstakingly. Perfection was possible when you worked at it. He showed me a trick of applying graphite dust to the back side of mylars to poché walls and make happy clouds in black and white to improve boring line renderings.

When drafting wall sections to convey their makeup, convention continues to use symbols representing the materials, diagonal hatching for brick, cross hatching for concrete masonry, dots and small triangle representing concrete.

Batt insulation was / still is represented by wavy lines, suggesting the softer material. Paul took it one step further, using a circle template to draw swirling ‘s’ curves. Damn, but I had to concede. We were buds in being too low on the totem pole and too poor to do much about it. Except he had a badass Chevy that he loved as much as Al loved his bathtub Porsche.

It wasn’t clear then, but both Paul and Al were devotees of style over necessity. No more than you’d desire to drive a four-cylinder sports car half the size of the rest of the traffic, would you put down cold cash for a hot rod getting you frequently pulled over. Al would point to US cars with wheel fenders that didn’t follow the wheel shape and yell ‘bad design’! and Paul loved the deep burblings of a hot rod. Paul’s car drank gas like water, but for a subspecies of women I expect he did well. Both were romantics in their way.

Style is everything. It’s not a philosophy generally ascribed to, but employed with irony, I’m fine with it.

Paul was another disgruntled peon, likened to the author. He told me he’d inherited a San Francisco food truck license—like a NY City cabbie might pass his cab license on down—and Paul was holding on to it just in case. Shit, yeah! But he wasn’t rushing to California to serve folk on vacation. I expect that story was the same lunchtime break we sat in his testosterone-fueled beast and shared a joint before lunch.

Studying dimensions, 20’–8”, 12’-4 7/8”, 7 5/8”, 18’-4 7/8”, and so on—across an entire building of two-three hundred feet and adding up some fifty or sixty such dimensions looking for mistakes is like water torture when you’re stoned. The numbers won’t add up, like doing accounting long hand. And I swore never to do that again. Paul, I’ve lost track of, but the lesson remains. I bet he still draws beautifully.

So what indeed did the fool take from his several years in Florida? He learned to bike from Coral Gables down through Coconut Grove and on to Matheson Hammock with his son on the back. He learned to run in Grapevine Park. His son’s mother learned she hated hurricanes and his son loved sitting in the sand at Matheson Hammock Park slapping the inch high waves from Biscayne Bay.

He returned from Paradise a man with an appreciation for tropical places, a Latin culture he’d only read about, how to prepare Cuban pork roast with plantains, and a three-year-old born in Coconut Grove next to Vizcaya, a boy who never complained that entire Ryder truck drive to Northern Virginia.