'What a privilege it was'


A giant ocean liner ... Le Cor-
busier's Unité d'Habitation, in 
Marseille, which Paffard 
Keatinge-Clay worked on.
 Photograph: Alamy

by Jonathan Glancey

Paffard Keatinge-Clay worked with the greats - Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. Jonathan Glancey meets the 'Zelig' of modern architecture.

Paffard Keatinge-Clay was almost broke when he set out from Chicago for Frank Lloyd Wright's studio in Arizona. The year was 1949. "I ended up walking the last bit," he tells me. "Miles through the desert. Wright sent out a Jeep to save me, as he put it, from being 'bitten by rattlers'."

On arriving at Taliesin West - Wright's beautiful desert oasis, crafted by students and apprentices out of red, yellow and grey boulders set in concrete - Keatinge-Clay asked the architect where he was going to stay. Wright looked him over and said: "You want to be an architect? Go build yourself a place." Which is exactly what he did, constructing a pavilion nearby.

In the course of a career that took him from Wiltshire to Paris to all over America, Keatinge-Clay worked with the three giants of the Modern movement: Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. This Saturday, Keatinge-Clay will give a talk at the Barbican in London, where he will relive a day in the life of Le Corbusier's Paris studio; he was employed there shortly after the second world war.

He recalls that Wright did not think highly of Le Corbusier. "One day, Wright asked me to write down a list of things Le Corbusier had done that he and Louis Sullivan - who he worked for in the 1890s - hadn't done years before. It was an impossible task, of course. I'll never forget the way he referred to Le Corbusier, disparagingly, as 'Corboozer'. He didn't like the idea of these European upstarts."

America in the late 1940s seemed to offer the young architect abundance at a time of general austerity. But, while inspirational, life was not exactly a bed of roses. For one thing, the studio where Wright designed many of his most flamboyant buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was ruled by his third wife, Olgivanna. A Montenegrin dancer and a disciple of the Greek-Armenian mystic GI Gurdjieff, Olgivanna was a formidable presence who expected daily confessions from her husband's pupils.

Keatinge-Clay recalls being summoned one evening because a goody two-shoes student had told her that he had described a Wright house as looking like a melting ice-cream cone. "She accused me of attacking my host like a sword. It was all very uncomfortable." Wright sat quietly in the shadows, giving nothing away. Keatinge-Clay knew his job hung in the balance. Finally, Wright, referring to his old boss, said: "Do you think we didn't talk about Mr Sullivan behind his back?"

Keatinge-Clay was by then used to working in unusual studios housing monumental egos. While a student, he had moonlighted at London's Architectural Association (AA) with Erno Goldfinger, the Hungarian émigré who went on to design such brutalist monuments as London's Trellick Tower. In fact, it's hard not to see Keatinge-Clay as the Zelig of Modern architecture, a young man who rubbed shoulders not just with Le Corbusier, Van der Rohe and Wright, but also with Charles and Ray Eames, and the brilliant Buckminster Fuller.

We met last month in a bar in Mijas, on the Costa del Sol in Spain, where he now lives. On a clear day, you can see the Atlas mountains in Morocco. Today, however, it's pouring, which puts Keatinge-Clay in mind of 1940s Britain. "You have to remember how gloomy it seemed when I was a student. A group of us wrote a letter to Le Corbusier - architecture's shining light - and asked him to come and give a lecture."

There was no reply, so he set off for Paris with two friends. "We went to the studio in Rue de Sèvres and learned that Le Corbusier was away," he says. His hero was in New York, struggling with his UN complex building. "So we called on his wife, Yvonne. Everyone in the studio said she would be happy to see us. She was, and was happy for us to look around." Yvonne told them she thought her husband was a clever man, but she didn't understand his work - particularly his paintings, which were influenced by Picasso. "Why does he paint such ugly women?" she asked. She said he didn't like classical music; anything he disapproved of was called "Tchaikovsky".

Keatinge-Clay began working for Le Corbusier in Paris, on details of the columns holding up the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles. Built between 1947 and 1952, this remains one of the world's most powerful and considered apartment blocks. Now a national monument, it calls to mind a giant ocean liner berthed by the Mediterranean - although one made, massively, of concrete.

"What a privilege this was," says Keatinge-Clay. "I was shaking when I first met Le Corbusier. He would arrive at Rue de Sèvres at 2pm, after a morning spent exercising and painting. He was friendly at first - but then very abrupt, as he was with everyone. The studio was in a walled-off corridor of a monastery. There were few phones. It was rather quiet - monastic, I suppose. Le Corbusier was very tough. He would come to my desk and draw thick pencil lines through work I thought was done in his own manner. But we learned that he liked to break rules, his own as well as anyone else's. I got up the courage to ask him when an architect could violate the rules. He replied, 'When it strengthens the art.'"

What about Van der Rohe? "Mies was absolutely profound," Keatinge-Clay says. He came to know the architect when he joined SOM in the 1950s, the giant Chicago-New York firm influenced by the German. "This was after Taliesin, after I'd qualified as an engineer as well as architect. Mies's Chicago studio was across the street. He collaborated with SOM, so I was backwards and forwards between the two offices.

"Like Le Corbusier, Mies came to work after lunch. He was quiet. He liked to say, 'The less talking, the better; the more looking, the better.' It was best not to talk about beauty, he said, but to look for the most rational and economical solution to the design. He wasn't talking about cost, but about paring the structure of a building to a minimum.

"Verena and I got up the courage to invite him to dinner. He came and talked until seven in the morning over rum and Cuban cigars. He could be warm, even funny, but his greatest buildings - the German Pavilion at Barcelona, the Seagram Building in New York - were the product of quiet reflection. From Wright, Mies learned how to set buildings in the American landscape."

Having learned from three of the best teachers in the world, Keatinge-Clay set up his own practice in 1961. He produced radical buildings, fusing elements drawn from his mentors. There was the Art Institute of San Francisco and his student union building, for the city's state university; the latter, crowned with an amphitheatre open to the sky, mixes the design ideas of all three, yet has a character of its own. With so many places to hang out in, this is a building that was designed to be occupied. "My studio was an open house, full of music, theatre, poetry," Keatinge-Clay says of this era, which saw him become involved in radical politics and the hippy movement.

Today, he lives in an old farmhouse, with no electricity and few concessions to the modern world. He continues to work as an architect, sculptor, amateur historian and archaeologist from his cool, white modern studio in Mijas.

What did he learn from his modernist masters? That, to touch our souls, great architecture needs to be elemental and pure - like Stonehenge, which made a powerful impression on him as a boy growing up in Wiltshire. He also learned that following other people's rules is no guarantee of success.

"Le Corbusier never won a competition, because he worked against the rules - his own, let alone anyone else's," says Keatinge-Clay. "That made him an original, like Wright, but it also meant that he lost work to much lesser talents. When I think of the sheer ingenuity that went into Unite d'Habitation, I can see why not every client had the stamina for a building by Le Corbusier."

Or for one of Wright's? "Yes, yes," he says. "But Wright descended into kitsch as he got much older. Le Corbusier got better and increasingly profound. I'm glad I summoned the courage to write to him when I did - more than 60 years ago."

No comments: