#475/Lost Raleigh: Mary Ruffin Hanbury + Ian Dunn + Max Bond: Brian Goldstein + Jeweler Sarah Hill + Musical Guest Karen Myatt

Welcome to U.S. Modernist Radio

0:00Hi, I'm Peter MacKeith, co-author of Out There, and you are listening to U.S. Modernist Radio. Mama don't allow no architecture around here. Mama don't allow no architecture around here. Oh, I don't care what mama don't allow, gonna draw my modern anyhow. Mama don't allow no architecture around here. Welcome to U.S. Modernist Radio, where we talk and laugh with people who enjoy, own, create, dream about, preserve, love, and hate modernist architecture, the most exciting and controversial buildings in the world.

0:38I'm Tom Guild. Right here in Raleigh, North Carolina, like every town, there are buildings mostly lost the history. But not every town has a book. Raleigh has one, though, and today in the studio, we'll talk about that book with preservation. Mary Ruffin-Hanbury and Ian Dunn. Then author Brian Goldstein tracks the work of architect Max Bond across three continents. Sarah Hill explores modernist jewelry. And later, it's our musical guest, Karen Myatt from Toronto.

1:09And now, sharing the secrets of our online library, Mr. Modernism, George Smart.

The online architecture magazine library

1:15Hey, thanks, Tom. We've been proudly scanning Architecture and Design magazine since 2013. With nearly six million pages so far. These magazines were in attics and basements and storage units in boxes, some of them wet, in climate control that gave up during the Bush one years. Nobody had opened any of them for decades. And let's be honest, they're not as rare as we think. Many libraries have copies. But now, you and everyone else in the world has access, too.

1:46As all these scans are text-searchable and free to access at usmodernist.org. At 3 in the morning, our time, we're helping a student in Australia. At 11 a.m., we're helping a homeowner in Abilene, Texas, find resources to renovate a nearly-dead 1954 modernist house. At 4 p.m., we're helping a granddaughter document the work of her architect grandfather. There's no login, no paywall, no cookies, solemnly assuring privacy while auctioning you to 11 ad networks.

2:17If you stack those pages up, you get a column 1,800 feet tall, which is taller than any building most of these magazines ever covered. If you lay them end-to-end, you'd get from New York to France, about 3,400 miles of drawings, floor plans, editorials, obituaries, and advertisements going back to the 1880s. Here's what you'll discover. Nearly complete runs of architectural record and progressive architecture, plus really old titles like American Architect and Building News, printed back when architects still wore hats.

2:51You'll get Dwell, Atomic Ranch, you know, the ones on your coffee table right now. AIA national publications, plus chapter archives from almost all 50 states. Abandon architecture podcasts, and blogs, and websites, because the internet rots faster than paper, and no one seems to want to talk about it. And the ads in those magazines are an incredible resource. If you're restoring a mid-century or any old house, somewhere in there is a full-page spread for a kitchen appliance that promises to change your marriage.

3:25It will not. The AIA gave us about 700,000 pages. The Smithsonian, universities, museums, and architects ship dozens, if not hundreds, of boxes right to my house. Children of mid-century architects packed up their father's collections and mailed them to North Carolina. Just on faith, we'd do right by them. I really can't thank everybody enough, but I'll keep trying. U.S. Modernist Radio is underwritten by the Brent R. Harris Charitable Trust, restorer of Richard Neutra's Kauffman Desert House in Palm Springs, and six other houses in California.

4:01By the E. Faye Jones Conservancy, preserving the legacy of modernist architecture in northwest Arkansas. EFAYJonesConservancy.org. And by Diane Bald and the Budman Family, restoring significant architecture in Toronto, Los Angeles, Malibu, and Palm Springs.

Lost Raleigh with Mary Ruffin Hanbury and Ian Dunn

4:17Raleigh, North Carolina has been in the top ten cities for quality of life for decades. Cranes and construction crews are as familiar a site as the Old Oaks lining its streets, hence our town's nickname, the City of Oaks. Everyone's moving here, and like many cities, teardowns are the cost of progress. Most of the new projects are great, and most of the destroyed buildings, well, their time had come.

4:47But not all of them. Today, we'll remember modernist buildings and houses long gone with Mary Ruffin Hanbury, a historic preservation consultant, and Ian Dunn, an archivist and local historian at the State Archives of North Carolina. Ian and Mary Ruffin are the authors of Lost Raleigh, exploring the Oak City's architectural history. Welcome to the show, Mary Ruffin and Ian. Thank you. Ian, your big project with the North Carolina Archives is the processing of the News and Observer photograph collection.

5:20It's one of the largest holdings they have. Why is that collection so important, and how large is it? That collection is absolutely massive. I think it has, by my estimation, over 5 million individual images, and it goes beyond negatives. It goes into prints. There's images on CDs, and it really is a daily diary of Raleigh from 1938 going all the way to, I think, in 2007.

5:50So it's an incredible span of time. It covers every day. And when did the state receive all this? They received it over a number of years in installments, as the NNO would not have a use for it anymore and donate it. But we had a standing deal with them that they would donate as they didn't need the negatives any longer. And how much room does this all take up? Quite a lot of space. The negatives obviously don't take up as much space as maybe the prints, but quite a lot.

6:21It is one of our biggest collections. I mean, like, how many square feet do you think it is? I'm trying to get a sense of the size of all that. Square feet? I'd say it filled the average house. Really? Wow. That's crazy. That is a huge collection. Now, is there any plan to digitize any of that? We digitize it on a need basis. Okay. If somebody orders a print or a scan of a negative, then we keep that digital scan. But you don't proactively digitize.

6:51No. We're not going to digitize a debutante portrait from 1932 or, you know, it's not. Damn.

7:00Well, until her— That's just what I was going to ask for. Until her obituary runs. Right. Now, Mary Ruffin, how did you and Ian decide to write this book on Lost Raleigh? Well, I had known Ian's predecessor, Carl Larson. And when Carl passed away at an early age, Ian stepped into some of his responsibilities at State Archives. And when I do research, a lot of times I want to see if the building has always looked the way it does now. And I would check over to the archives and say, do you have any pictures of such and such a building?

7:33And at one point, Ian and I were emailing and we were talking about a building that was gone. And I said, someone should do a Lost Raleigh book. And he says, you know, that's funny. Carl was working on one when he died and had kind of the beginnings of a manuscript. And I said, oh. And so it's sort of—he kind of called my bluff because then it was sort of like, well, maybe we should finish it. And that's how we ended up doing it. We went to his brothers, his surviving family, and got their blessing and their permission.

8:04And then we got to work. Now, tell us who Carl Larson was. Carl Larson was a Raleigh native, Raleigh historian. His father was also a historian, specifically a Civil War historian, also worked at the State Archives. So he's been steeped in history since a young age. But he started working at the State Archives, helping the AV unit identify unidentified pictures in the Albert Barden collection. And he started as a volunteer, but eventually got a part-time position with the archives.

8:38And about 2015, he began this manuscript that we've expanded. And then you and John Morris and Carl started a blog? John Morris started Goodnight Raleigh. And Carl came on board once he had seen the site and thought he could add to it. And John happily let him write for the site. Really, John Morris is how I met all of these people associated with the archives. Because I was biking down Hillsborough Street one day, and John Morris comes up behind me on his bike and hands me a Goodnight Raleigh card.

9:17Because he saw a camera on my back. And he said, if you take pictures of Raleigh, we'd love to post them on the site. And he biked off. And I contacted him. Man of mystery. And I said, I'd be glad to, you know, offer some pictures. And that's how I found out about Carl. I didn't meet him. So I knew about Carl. And then in 2009, when they were redoing the roundabout on Poland and Hillsborough, I saw Carl across the way photographing the construction process.

9:47And I thought, I'm going to go introduce myself because that's Carl Larson. And that's how we met. Wow. Wow. It's a small world. Goodnight Raleigh, I know it as a Facebook page. Goodnight Raleigh was a blog. It was one of the early, you know, canaries in the coal mine for alerting people about buildings that were in trouble, in danger of being destroyed. The bookstore. Yeah. The NC State bookstore, the Milton Small design that had the wonderful little concrete walkways, right, throughout that system.

10:18That are, I think they're all gone now from the campus. There were a few other places, I thought. I think they're all gone now. They're all gone now. Yeah, they were really gorgeous. We've lost a number of important modernist structures in Raleigh.

Remembering lost modernist buildings in Raleigh

10:31I want to ask you guys about a couple of them. The first one is the building for the Carolina Country Club, which was designed by Matthew Nowitzki and Milton Small. Tell me about that one. Well, you know, it's interesting. That was the third of four buildings on that site. Its immediate predecessor had a really horrible fire, and several people who worked at the country club who lived on site died in the fire. It was really pretty grisly. And it was, at the time, so far outside of the city limits, they didn't have water supply.

11:03It was really bad. But when they built the new one in 1948, it was Milton Small. He was working at the time with William Henley Dietrich, whose house is directly across the street. And Nowicki did the interiors. And also a guy named E.G. Thurlow did the landscaping. It was a real departure because the other ones were sort of very traditional in— Southern plantation style. Very much so. And this one had a lot of brick and quarry stone and glass, so it was much more fire-resistant, which is actually something they were concerned about, given the previous one.

11:38But very much materials. You walked into a lounge that had a big fireplace. It almost is sort of Frank Lloyd Wrightian, that you're going into the center of the home. But then it had these wonderful glass, expanses of glass, that gave a great view to the outside. So even though you were inside the space, they wanted to celebrate the views out to the country club. And it was also made to be expanded easily. So it was one section, but if you wanted to add, if you had growth in membership or growth in programming, it was meant to be able to be easily added on to.

12:14So it was written up at the time in publications and just a great building. Widely heralded, as I understand. Indeed. But I heard, Ian, maybe you can clarify this, that over time, most of the members hated it. I don't know that I can speak to that, but it does make sense. And really did not like the modern design at all. They liked the function of it. They just wanted it to look more like the past than it did previously. Right. That would make sense to me.

12:44Yeah, we may not know that for sure, but considering what they replaced it with, that would seem to indicate that that's the case. Yeah, yeah. They put a much more traditional thing on the property. And then nearby that, in 2013, we lost the Paschal House by James Fitzgibbon, which I think was really the last sort of major loss in Raleigh of a remarkable house. Thankfully, the last major loss. Yeah. I think it was an absolute shame to lose that house, a tragedy, really.

13:15I think Myrick Howard even called it vandalism at one point. I think that might be a little bit of a stretch, but it was certainly a tragedy. Beautiful house, designed in 1950. One owner. One owner. And the children couldn't seem to find a way to sell it, unfortunately. And I think the thing that really put the nail in the coffin for that property was the fact that the lot was three acres. And the development pressure on a three-acre parcel is just immense.

13:47And I don't know that there's many houses in Raleigh that could withstand that, say, maybe the state capital. But, yeah, it's a real shame. Where was it? On Alamance Drive in Raleigh. Okay. Carolina Country Club. Oh, all right. Inside the Beltline. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Also, it was situated almost in the center of the lot, so you couldn't realistically only subdivide the back portion. I guess you could, but there wasn't enough money in it for the children. Yeah, we brought several development plans, and we had three or four people that wanted to buy the house.

14:19And they could have built it and built maybe two or three other houses on it successfully. But they wanted to max out the whole property, and it just went. And this was a house. You know, it needed some repairs, but it wasn't in horrible shape. It was beautiful. It had a sunken living room. It had these beautiful sort of plywood ceilings that were still intact. It had the hi-fi and the bookshelf that dropped down so you could put your records on it and play. Really something. Didn't it have the original kitchen appliances?

14:50Yes. Oh, yes. Incredible. Really incredible. Another building I wanted to ask about, which I don't think is in your book but was torn down recently, was Milton Small's old Raleigh City Hall. What's happened to that? I don't think that – that building doesn't really get a lot of love, does it? No, it doesn't. Yeah, I was sad to see that go. It sort of disappeared quietly, didn't it? Yeah. There wasn't a lot of uproar about it. I remember a lot more uproar about the Garland Jones building than I do that one.

15:20It was a small building made out of brick and metal. It was City Hall for a long time, and then it became the police headquarters, and then they moved out. And I think it was just miscellaneous city departments for a while until they decided to build their new high-rise tower on the property. Was it downtown? Downtown, right, yes. Right by Nash Square. And if you look at the size of what they've put up, again, it's a question of not only, I think, consolidating city departments in one place, but again, as we said about the Paschal House, the value of land is so great in Raleigh that it's really hard not to build or it's really hard to keep things that don't max out the zoning envelope.

16:02And Small designed it to be built higher, but that didn't happen. No, no, a lot of times these buildings are made for expansion, as you've mentioned a couple times, but people don't take them up on that option. The last building I want to talk about is one of our most famous, I think the second most famous house in North Carolina, and that's the Catalano House, built in 1954. I think second in fame only to Biltmore in Asheville. When the house premiered, it was in every architectural journal in the world.

16:33Architects and design fans came here from all over for the next almost 50 years to see it. So what happened with that house? That's another sad story. The roof, which was this paraboloid roof, detractors called it the potato chip house, but it had this magnificent roof, and part of the structure required there to be underground cabling to have tension to hold that roof in place. And in the 80s, one of the cables was damaged, and then in the 90s, another cable was damaged.

17:10At that point, the building was vacant, and then Hurricane Fran came. With that initial damage and the storm damage and not having someone in it to be aware of things that needed to be taken care of, it got to the point where the city condemned it. And it was demolished in 2001, and again, the lot was large, and it was subdivided into two lots for two buildings. But having a building like that vacant is always a problem because if no one's there, you don't notice a leak until it's catastrophic.

17:44Yes. But it lives on in the North Carolina Modernist homepage. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. My favorite house. I couldn't believe when I first discovered that in 2007 that they had destroyed this thing. It was tucked away in this residential subdivision off Ridge Road, so you really, even when it was there, you had to go looking for it. It wasn't something that stood on a major artery. It was very discreet in that regard. Well, it's sometimes what you want in a home. Yeah. Yeah. And later on, they renamed the dirt road Catalano Drive.

18:15So you can find it on a map and drive down there and see the houses that were built in its place in a little cul-de-sac. Okay, so they named it after they knocked it down? Yes. That's sort of ham-handed. Isn't every subdivision named after what was there before? Green Meadows and Fox Chase. I mean, they're all named for things that aren't there anymore. The book has sections on residential, commercial, educational, institutional, public, religious, recreational, and social landscapes, and one category I found really interesting, transportation.

18:50You guys covered a couple of bridges. Yes. Ian wrote those. Mm-hmm. Tell me about the bridges. Well, there was a Martin Street Viaduct. It was built right after the Boylan Avenue Truss Bridge, which is the other entry that I wrote. The Boylan Avenue Truss Bridge was a metal truss bridge that spanned the railroad cut there, and the Martin Street Viaduct was a concrete roadway, elevated roadway, that extended Martin Street to Boylan Avenue. So, built roughly in the 40s?

19:221913, I believe. Yeah, way earlier. Oh, okay. Yeah, very early. Wow. Mm-hmm. And were these replaced because they wore out, or was it a development reason? They were both replaced because the state thought that they were dangerous. Okay. So, they were worn out. They were worn out. So, there's debate on whether they could have been repaired, but an engineering assessment of the viaduct said that it was unsafe. But it did take them months and months and months to destroy it, so I don't know if those claims are all that true.

19:57Have there been any instances of any of the buildings or structures that you came across being moved and preserved somewhere else, like the recent Matsumoto House was in Raleigh? I don't think we have any structures in the book that are still standing. Yeah. I mean, North Carolina, I think, is unique among states. I moved here from South Carolina, having lived in Virginia, and I had never seen a place where so many buildings were moved. I mean, you look at Blount Street and all of those buildings that were moved around to, you know, accommodate the state.

20:32But I can't think of any modernist buildings that I can think of in Raleigh that have been moved in order to be preserved. There was one. Well, there are two Matsumotos that have moved. Right. One was on Arrow Drive that moved to Durham. Uh-huh. And then the one in the last couple of years that was on Transylvania. That's right. The Weber House. The Weber House. That moved to near Athens Drive High School. Right. Yep. But those are the only two that I could think of, and I was just wondering if you'd run across anything else, whether it's old or new. Well, the Cameron Mansion, where Cameron Court Apartments is now, it was actually deconstructed and rebuilt.

21:09Oh, as opposed to jacking the whole thing up and putting it on a truck? Right. Where did it go to? It went to, I can't remember the name of the street, but it was reconstructed in 1939. When I say reconstructed, I mean they used a lot of the bones and the parts of that house to construct the new house. It's off of Wade Avenue, back in the neighborhood back there, Five Points area. Okay. We know another building that, you know, was disassembled, Raleigh had a lustron house. Oh, yes. Which are, you know, prefabricated, made of metal, and the Raleigh Historic Development Commission worked very hard to save that and deconstruct it.

21:48And I think it's still available for sale. I don't know if they have a parcel for it, but— Oh, it's been rebuilt. It's been rebuilt. Okay. Because I know for a while they had it in storage. But these buildings were meant to be rebuilt and take it apart. So that's a great example and a great example of— Well, they were sold in kit form, weren't they? Absolutely. Yeah. Made in an aircraft factory. Well, and they're metal, so you can't—if you want to hang a picture, you have to use a magnet. No, no, no. If you want to hang a picture, you can use a magnet. Yeah. It's a feature, not a bug.

22:19Okay. Got it. What was your favorite discovery in writing the book? You know what I really—I don't know if this is a discovery, but I know that for a while—I don't know, I can't speak for Ian, but I was kind of superstitious. I was afraid if we talked about the book, we would jinx it, and somehow it wouldn't happen. But when I got to the point where I was less superstitious, I would go places, and I would ask people—not telling them that we were working on a book, but people who'd live here for a long time, you know, what is a building that's not here anymore that you really miss? And the response that I got from so many different types of people, everybody had a suggestion.

22:56And I just realized that there's a lot of people who really care. I mean, when you work in preservation and archives, the people you work with care, but people who are lawyers or doctors or accountants, there are people who really understand what Raleigh has lost and really care about it and really are passionate about it in a way that I didn't necessarily expect. Ian? I really enjoyed learning about the Bath building. I'd always loved it for what it was, but I didn't know anything about it.

23:29And I really liked learning more about it because it's such a mysterious building. It was a laboratory building for the state, right? Yeah, right beside the Heck Andrews house, right behind the Heck Andrews house, which I always thought was a very interesting contrast. But yeah, I really liked learning about that, and I wish that building was still there. Well, you know, that's something that marks longtime residents as separate from all the recent people that have moved here. They have things, buildings in mind, that aren't around anymore.

24:00And folks who moved in five years ago, they don't know, but if you lived here 40 years, you've seen a lot of things get knocked down. Well, and I kind of hope the book levels the playing field between those two populations. Yeah. That the people who've just moved here can see that, you know, Raleigh, for a city that was a pretty small town for most of its life, punched above its weight architecturally. And I think a lot of people who are moving here from other parts of the country don't realize that because they weren't here to see it.

24:32My connection to the Bath building is that my grandmother lived in an apartment building on the site that was torn down to build the Bath building. Really? So I remember the building before that, and it was this beautiful brick four-unit building with these four old ladies that lived in the apartments. And you could go and walk in, and it had a front entrance, which was very formal, and it had this sort of rickety back stairs that you could go up to these little green porches on the back of the place. And then the state bought it and built the Bath building, and now that's gone.

25:05What's going up on that site? Do you guys know? Nothing currently. Nothing currently. It's just going to be a grassy field for a while. I love those layers of history, like you were saying. We mourn a building that's lost, but we forget what came before it. And sometimes what came before it is even more significant than what we lost. We most recently lost. Like the Garland Jones building, what was there before was the Academy of Music, and that was a wonderful A.G. Bauer building. And examples are like that all across Raleigh.

25:36We forget what came before it. And this is repeated in many cities across the country. Absolutely. The book is Lost Raleigh, Exploring the Oak City's Architectural History. Mary Ruffin, Ian, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you. Thanks for having us. We were talking with Mary Ruffin Hanbury and Ian Dunn about their new book, Lost Raleigh.

Brian Goldstein on architect Max Bond

25:57J. Max Bond Jr. was a Harvard-trained, civil rights-era black architect whose work across New York, Atlanta, and the rest of the South, and even Ghana, shaped activism and architecture. Brian Goldstein, an architectural historian at Swarthmore College, made his name with an earlier book on Harlem gentrification and redevelopment. He's now tracing Bond's buildings across three continents. George began his conversation with Brian Goldstein by asking about one of his favorite activities.

26:29Brian, before we talk about architecture and Max Bond, understand that you like to visit grave sites for some of the people that you admire and that you recently visited Bessie Smith. So tell our listeners about who Bessie Smith was. Well, Bessie Smith was maybe the greatest blues woman of the history of music, certainly in the 20th century. She was not from Philadelphia, but she was buried in Philadelphia. And somewhat famously, her gravestone was purchased by Janis Joplin and a friend of Bessie Smith's in the 1970s.

27:06Janis Joplin saw her as kind of her greatest influence and was disturbed by the fact that Bessie Smith did not have a gravestone that recognized the contribution she had made to American music history. So I wanted to see the gravestone for a few reasons. One is my interest in African-American history and African-American cemeteries as spaces that sort of document the ways that certain built environments are valued and others are often neglected. I love music, especially blues and jazz, and then also Janis Joplin.

27:39I think it was an adequate commemoration of her. People had left various items that helped to remember her, including bottles of whiskey. Now, when did Bessie Smith pass away? She died in 1937 in a car accident in Mississippi and went many years without a proper recognition of her. That's a long time without a headstone. It is. Yeah. Yeah. And she died young, as, you know, often happens in these somewhat tragic cases. But one of the reasons I love recorded music is that you can experience the embodiment of a person long after they're dead,

28:13which I think is just something that maybe we don't recognize enough in this world where, you know, recorded music is ubiquitous. But the idea that you can push a button and hear this person who died 90 years ago is really mind-blowing. Yeah, pretty compelling. It is. We're going to talk about your new book. It's called Max Bond, The Life and Work of the People's Architect. And to start with his early history, because very unusually for that time, he was part of an academic family. So the listeners may have heard of Bonds of various other names, if not Max Bond, Julian Bond, the iconic civil rights leader, Horace Mann Bond, who was a very important university president.

28:54Or maybe they've heard of Ruth Clement Bond, who was Bond's mother and a very important quilt innovator. The Bonds were a family of educators and activists. They were a family that had been recently descended from enslaved people in the American South and remained largely in the American South as the leaders of many of the predominant historically black colleges and universities. Bond's father was a dean at Dillard University. He was a director of education at Tuskegee Institute and Atlanta University.

29:28Bonds' mother's brother, Rufus Clement, was the very famous and longstanding president of Atlanta University. And Horace Mann Bond was president of several schools, including Lincoln University outside of Philadelphia. So that sort of role really defined his life, which was through an understanding that education was a fundamental means by which African-Americans could achieve not necessarily financial success, but sort of intellectual and professional success in their lives. So that was a lesson that Max Bond was taught really from the very beginning of his life and that defined his life in certain particular ways.

30:05One was just by assuring that while many African-Americans were moving north, the Bonds largely stayed in the South. A second way was, I think, giving him a lot of confidence that allowed him to deal with situations of racism and discrimination that really didn't cease throughout his life, and many of which came from the architecture profession and really gave him sort of a rock hard determination, as someone once said about him, to push through that. And thirdly, it facilitated his own career as an educator, an understanding that he was a member of a black elite, but was responsible to all of the many different types of social classes that an architect would serve.

30:48And that was something that really came out of his childhood, his understanding of himself as the child of educators.

Max Bond and the American Institute of Architects

30:53How tough was it for him to get to be a member of the AIA? Because a long time, they really didn't admit black members. Yeah, so Bond was trained at Harvard in the 1950s. He received his M.R. from the Graduate School of Design in 1958. He was the fifth black graduate of the GSD. He was the first to have gone through both undergrad and grad school there. He entered a professional world in which black architects were certainly exceptional, but in which there were others.

31:24So by the time he started working in the U.S. in the 1960s and developing the early career years that allowed him to become a licensed architect, he wasn't really working in a world in which there were no black architects in the AIA, but in which there were few. So he had a relatively smooth path to licensure in that sense because of people like Paul Williams before him, who was either the first or second black architect to be a member of the AIA. But I would still say even if the AIA was an environment in which he was, let's say, welcome,

31:59he certainly was dealing with an organization and organizations affiliated with it in which he was often the only black person in the room. 1968 was a hinge year for the AIA. It was the year that the civil rights leader, Whitney Young, spoke at the convention and gave this very famous address where he stood before a group of probably 99 to 100 percent white members and said, you know, you are not a profession that's distinguished yourself because of your lack of attention to the civil rights struggle,

32:29the ways that you've contributed to the societal inequalities that the civil rights struggle is confronting, the degree to which architects had not looked inward, the degree to which they had planned the very kinds of disruptive redevelopment projects that were uprooting black neighborhoods. In the aftermath of that address, you see a sort of surge of new black-run architecture firms and bonds. Bond Rider Associates, which was formed in 1968 as Bond Johnson Rider, was one of the major ones to come out of that.

32:59So he was a person who, let's say, wove throughout the evolution of the AIA in the 1960s until by late in the decade. It had become an organization that, at least in some cities, was seeing more black numbers. The AIA is a great organization, but during the 70s and 80s, they had been frequently criticized for just giving lip service to this idea of promoting black architecture. Did they really do anything during those decades? I mean, they did things, but of course, it's all a matter of measurement.

33:31I believe in 1968, there was a scholarship fund created in partnership with the Ford Foundation, I believe I have that right, that helps black students who entered architecture school. It wasn't a single-digit number, but it was certainly a low, low, double-digit number. That was when the organization in the early 70s had its first black official, Robert Nash, an architect from Washington, D.C., I believe was a vice president. Eventually, Robert Coles was also in a similar role. That's not nothing, but it wasn't a wholesale transformation of the organization,

34:04which, of course, didn't have a black president until the 2000s, Marshall Purnell, I believe. So you're dealing with a situation where I think in a parable that was true much of Bond's career, measures that were attending to the fact that this was a very dominantly white profession and often dominantly male profession did some things to change those patterns, but not certainly enough to dramatically disrupt them. It's often said that the black architects had to work twice as hard to get the same kind of recognition as their white counterparts.

34:37So what were some of the projects that Bond worked on that were exceptional? Yeah, I mean, I would say it worked twice as hard to survive in many ways. With Bond maybe as one of a handful of black architects that we could say reached the true pinnacle of the profession, still the comparison is not the same. I talked to James Polshik before he passed away. He had a long-running friendship and professional colleagueship with Bond, and he did a really interesting thought experiment where a number of people had said, you know, I've always wondered, is Jim Polshik and Bond sort of followed a similar path,

35:12and then at some point it began to diverge. And, you know, I asked Polshik, do you think that some of those differences are because you're a white architect and he's a black architect? And he was unequivocal. He said, you know, of course, there's no doubt. So one thing I'll say about Bond's projects is, like many black architects, they tended to be publicly funded. They were often for clients who were themselves African-American, not always. And they tended to be financially precarious in ways that were not necessarily typical of other New York architects who were kind of at that level, you know, were deans and division chairs

35:45and those things. That said, you know, Bond really made quite an important impression on the built environment, despite some of those constraints.

Notable projects by Max Bond

35:53Some of my favorite projects were the library that he designed in Bolgatanga in northern Ghana, a library that was part of the modernist vision of the president of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. It's a really beautiful, concrete, brutalist building that also has very distinct influences from the indigenous domestic architecture of northern Ghana. These mud homes that were composed of circular forms, kind of dividing out the program into individual modules, something the library carries through.

36:26In the 1970s into the early 1980s, he designed what's now known as the King Center or the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which is a memorial to King, which is also the place where he rests with Coretta Scott King in a tomb in the center of a pool surrounded by walkways that are made. Is this the main center in Atlanta? Exactly. Yeah. So a center for programs around nonviolence and peacemaking and civil rights activism, as well as a place of contemplation.

36:56He designed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which is the foremost institution for the study of African-American history and culture in Harlem on 135th Street and Lennox with his firm Bond Rider Associates. And at the same time, they also designed the Studio Museum in Harlem, which has since been demolished. But on 125th Street, the kind of first permanent home of the Studio Museum was a renovation of an existing building. And then later, as he merged with the larger firm Davis Brody and Associates and eventually became Davis Brody Bond,

37:31Bond designed a number of projects that started to have more private clients, bigger scale, and more visibility. And some of the most interesting ones, I think, are the extension of the Harvard Club on 44th Street in New York City, the biomedical research buildings that were part of an adaptive reuse of the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights in New York City. And then at the end of his life, the two projects that are by far the most visible he ever worked on. One is the September 11th Memorial and Museum in downtown New York City,

38:01and then the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on the National Mall. And that he did with Phil Freelon. Yep, Phil Freelon, David Adjaye, Smith Group, and of course, a lot of other consultants, it being a museum. But that was a project that Bond began to really advocate for, not just to get the commission, but to get the museum realized beginning in the early 1990s, you know, long before, well, right as the legislation was passed initially, but long before it was signed, you know, ultimately into the final legislation that authorized it in the early 2000s.

38:35So that was a project that he had many, many years of involvement with before his 2009 death. And since we talked about Bessie Smith, where is Max Bond buried? Max Bond is buried at the Uptown Cemetery of Trinity Church. There's a mausoleum that's near the Hudson River in Washington Heights, actually right around the corner from Bond's final home in the Grinnell, a famous co-op building in Washington Heights. And he's buried in a modest wall in an ornament space in the mausoleum of the cemetery.

39:09Not too far from Ralph Ellison, actually, who's around the same area of the same cemetery. Now, was Ralph Ellison the science fiction writer? No, so wrote Invisible Man. And I guess you could maybe call it science fiction or black Afrofuturism. Yeah, exactly. So he was a very well-known Harlem intellectual. And so I think, you know, being in the company of people like that is very fitting for Bond as somebody who was from a younger generation, but certainly followed in the cultural footsteps of those kinds of intellectual figures in Harlem. The book is Max Bond, The Life and Work of the People's Architect.

39:41Thanks for talking with me, Brian. Thank you for your wonderful questions, George. That was George's conversation with Brian Goldstein.

Sarah Hill on modernist jewelry

39:49Sarah Hill has spent the last two decades helping revive downtown Durham. In 2001, she opened Hamilton Hill Jewelry there, betting on the city's then-struggling economy. The shop is in Brightleaf Square, Durham's restored historic tobacco warehouse district. Hamilton graduated from the Gemological Institute of America and remains one of downtown Durham's most devoted boosters. But she has something almost no other jewelry store has, and even fewer specialize in.

40:20Modernist jewelry. Here's George with Sarah Hill. Sarah, before we talk about jewelry, I understand that you come from an academic family and you grew up in Chapel Hill. That is correct. You've got it right. My dad was a religious studies professor. It used to be called religion. I was born there in 1960, and my mother was a Spanish teacher at North Carolina Central. It was a college then, NCC. She adored that. So I grew up in that milieu, and then we moved to Gainesville, Florida for more of the same.

40:54And then I returned to North Carolina for college and then subsequently to live here in Durham in 1990. Did you always want to be in the jewelry and gym business, or did you have a career before that? No, I did not always want to. I was not even a rock hound as a kid, you know, down at the creek trying to find stuff. I was probably more inside playing with clothes and thinking about fashion. It was always on my mind. I think to a great extent because my grandparents had a small women's dress shop in a little town in Kentucky called Mount Sterling.

41:30And when we would go there in summers, I adored playing in there. So it may be that that retail gene came from there. What career was no career? I did work in some very interesting places in what I call pink-collar jobs. Clerical work at the Smithsonian Institution. That was my first job out of college where I was an English major. And I was just really going nowhere fast for at least a decade, but working in interesting places, meeting interesting people.

42:04So I have to say there were some positives. And then this jewelry idea fell from the sky. I had the sense to look up and catch it rather than running away. My wonderful friend to this day and former and only business partner, Michael Hamilton, had met a man who had been an orthodontist and had become a gemologist. When he quit orthodontia, he studied gemology, the study of gemstones and diamonds.

42:34And Michael said, I think that sounds like it would be perfect for you. And I probably rolled my eyes, but fortunately it did stick with me and I did end up pursuing it. And then I was off to the races. It really was a great fit. It has been a great fit. Your store opened in 2001, is that right? That's correct. And I recall that the first time I went in there, I was just struck by the way these things looked and felt. I had never seen what I came to think of as modernist jewelry in its simplicity and unadornment and just full-out beauty.

43:11How did you come across this genre of jewelry? Well, I love those definitions and descriptions that you gave. You were not alone. Many people had not been introduced, have not still been introduced to modernist jewelry. Contemporary jewelry, yes, most likely, but not straight-up modernist. And we do make that distinction at Hamilton Hill. But when I decided that I wanted to be a merchant in my adopted hometown of Durham, and I wanted to do it as part of downtown renovation, I did need a product.

43:46And what would it be? And I didn't know. I knew it had to be something extra special to give the little fledgling business a chance of thriving, surviving its first few years especially. So I went on a fact-finding mission to Basel, Switzerland, to, at the time, a very important and large gem. Because that's where the facts are. You've got to go to Basel. You've got to go to Basel.

Discovering Neesing and tension rings

44:13Get the facts, ma'am. And so we went to Basel, the same location as the art show. And we saw Niesing Jewelry, N-I-E-S-S-I-N-G, from Wreden, Germany. We saw a big poster of a Niesing ring. And I saw it and gazed at it and walked toward it, you know, kind of like, take me to your leader. It was a moment. And I said, whatever that is, I want that. But I did not have a vision for that at the time.

44:46I kind of knew what I didn't want to offer. And we did not then go full-on modernist with everything. We also had contemporary. And even in the early days, some estate pieces that we felt. Like some Victorian stuff, right? Well, later than that, pieces that we felt had some design merit. And it's not to say that there isn't design merit in Victorian, but we went more with pieces from the 40s and 50s. David Webb, for example, and some more sculptural pieces that were a bit more tangential to the big vision of Hamilton Hill,

45:24which is modernism was and is modernism to this day. I think that the Neesing is to jewelry as the Mini Cooper is to automobiles. It's very sleek and well-engineered and beautiful. I like that. The tension ring is a slight misnomer if you want to try to wrap your brain around how it works. Yes, it's beautiful. And I would prefer just to stay there. That would suit my temperament, just to stay with beautiful and desirable.

45:57But it's actually a misnomer. It's not tension. It's really compression. Apparently, tension in metal pulls away and obviously compression goes toward. Then there's also a spring. Metal can be springing. And boy, oh boy, I hope not too many metal experts, metallurgists and physicists are listening to me. Oh, we have a big physicist and metallurgist audience. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay. Well, bring them on.

46:28Let them come see the jewelry and we can discuss. So, yes, the tension ring is Neesing's kind of their utmost, their most important. Well, they might disagree. That tension ring was designed, the first one was created in 1979, the year I graduated from high school. And it had been not designed and executed, but it had been fiddled with. What's the word? It had been... Tinkered? Tinkered. It was a vision earlier, even in the 1960s.

47:00And all of this grew out of... She was born a Neesing, but then she married... Her name is Ursula Exner. And she ran Neesing. She began hanging out in that milieu of the Bauhaus school and movement and with avant-garde artists. And they began pushing the envelope on what jewelry could be. But in 1850, I think it was, when Neesing was founded, they were just making basic wedding bands. Okay. So, you never know where you might end up.

47:31I see people come into your store and they really do light up. I mean, I think they're kind of expecting to, like walking into a Zales. But instead, they're just like, whoa, what is this? Yes, I will try not to worry about being immodest. It is true. They do. Oh, oh, is it... Did you make it? Is it... It's very artistic. Oh, I've never seen anything like it. And then we hand them maybe a stainless steel, like the one I'm wearing, 18 millimeter stainless steel ring with a diamond appearing to float.

48:06And, you know, it's not right for everybody, but at least they get turned on to it. It opens their minds. And then many people do begin to covet it and wish to go that direction. Also, people are a little bit surprised to find something in Durham, North Carolina, of our, even if it's not our caliber, but of our variety, of our focus. They're a little bit surprised. But, of course, those of us who live here know that this is a very sophisticated town.

48:37Well, not glamorous, unfortunately, but people have developed keen eyes by going to museums and studying art in college or traveling. So the Durham population was quite receptive immediately. That, of course, was gratifying. This is your 25th year. Are you planning anything special? Oh, boy. Yes, but exactly what is to be determined? We have been offered a niecing specialty item that they would make for us.

49:09And we'll have an event or two. Georg Sprang, another German designer that we work with, will be coming in November for a week-long, basically a trunk show, a personal appearance. His mother visited us in 2001, and he was just a kid. Now he's the owner of the company. So some designer visits, and who knows, maybe a big old block party, but to be determined. Now, tell people where your store is so they can come visit you.

49:42It's in Brightleaf Square, the renovated tobacco warehouse that's at the corner of Gregson and Main in downtown Durham. We're in the courtyard part. We have a lot of clients from around the country, some of whom we've met. Maybe they lived here or visited here and no longer do. But some that we've never met and have just become close with. You could say close. They're fans. Big fans. They are fans, and it is outstanding. Fewer and fewer galleries of our ilk exist in the U.S. these days.

50:13They are closing when the generation that started a gallery of this type selling primarily European designers. The kids, if there are children, they don't necessarily want to inherit the business. Anyway, we get more and more calls from around the country, people looking for Niseng or Shafrat or Andre Ribeiro, the guy that puts the diamonds into the black rubber, et cetera, et cetera. So just because you're not at the corner of Gregson and Main in downtown Durham doesn't mean that you can't have a piece of Hamilton Hill through our website or by calling one of us.

50:49Operators are standing by, so to speak. If you like modernist architecture, you will really love Hamilton Hill. Thanks for talking with me, Sarah. Thank you so much, George. Pleasure. That was George's conversation with jeweler Sarah Hill.

Musical guest Karen Myatt

51:03Karen Mayak can trace her whole career back to her grandmother, who introduced her to the American Songbook when she was a kid and opened the door to a life spent blending jazz, blues, soul, gospel, and rock into one voice. She's a Montreal-based singer and has headlined the Halifax Jazz Festival, performed with Symphony Nova Scotia, and released a new album, The Lease, about spiritual pilgrimage. Karen, I noticed your new album is called The Lease, but your first album, another French word, Enchanté.

51:39Is this a theme for you? Yes, my very first album and then my follow-up album was called Femoir, which is a word I'm pretty sure I made the word up, but it is a French vibe. Yeah, it sounds like a movie from the 40s shot in France. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was playing around with words for that album, for Femoir. It was really stories about the feminine spirit. A lot of the songs had that theme. So I put the word feminine and memoir together and came up with Femoir, and now it's become something I've been doing now.

52:14Enchanté, Femoir, and now Valise. Obviously, I'm inspired by French and French culture. And you know what they call words like that? They call them portmanteaus. Portmanteau. Oh, exactly. Yeah. And how fitting for Valise as well. Oui. Absolutely. Thank you, Tom. I did not know. Yeah. Good thing you're here. You were a fan of that. Now, before we hear some of your music, I understand that you are quite the chef. I've heard about po'boy sandwiches, British scones, and something called an Ulster fry.

52:48What is that? Oh, my goodness. Wow. That's amazing. I don't know that I'm quite the chef, but I do like food. Yeah. I'm quite the eater, I think. Yeah. I can thank my husband for that. He encouraged me to share recipes from our travels. So Valise, the album, is actually a travel theme inspired by some travels that we've done over the last decade, really. And a big part of travel is food. And we always like to try the local cuisines. Sometimes that's not as pleasant an experience as you would hope.

53:22But most of the time, it's incredible. And so I started sharing stories from travel, but that also included food and my favorite recipes. So the po'boy sandwiches from New Orleans, of course. And the Ulster fry, I've spent a lot of time in Ireland, and they take their breakfasts very seriously. So that's a big part of their culture. And there's two distinct breakfasts in Ireland. As we know, we have Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and their kind of dark history of civil unrest there between their religious sides.

53:59So they do have two distinct, to this day, Irish breakfasts. So they have an Irish breakfast, and then they have an Ulster fry. And I think it's kind of like the difference between Catholicism and Anglicism. You know, there's like one different ingredient on the plate. So I just find that... What is it? Yeah. What is an Ulster fry? Maybe there's a black pudding. You're digging deep into my... Like a blood pudding? A black pudding, yeah. And maybe the Irish breakfast doesn't have that.

54:31There's a few differences, but I wouldn't say I'm an expert. I'm just sharing my experiences on my travels, so... Enough to make a song out of. Yeah. The Ulster fry song. Yeah, maybe that's next. Well, tell me about this first song. It's called Angelique. Yeah, Angelique, it's based on the concept of Michelangelo when he said, I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free. So again, that's from my travels to Italy and to Florence, of course.

55:04And so the deeper message of Angelique is one of the lyrics, the lyric of the chorus is, I see the you inside of me. So that when we're sculpting or creating art, that it's really something to be shared, and that we are all the same, essentially, through art. And that's a bigger theme of the album as well, when we live in the era that we live in now. And throughout history, you know, art is hope, art is healing.

55:35And I think the story of Michelangelo is just one of those stories. So it's been crafted over the years, and my husband wrote it many years ago. And we sort of started working on it together and with our band and with a different arrangement, and it kind of blossomed into this sort of anthem that it is now. And yeah, it's all about the power of art. Here's Karen with Angelique.

Karen Myatt performs Angelique

55:59Michelangelo in a studio Through a dozen years

56:31Fell a thousand tears To set the angel free From the marble block Weary hands unlocked

57:03Something still to see Chip away the stone Carve away the rock And set the angel free I see the you inside of me I see the you inside of me

57:38That work Not like him I see the you inside of me But yet You're free I see the you inside of me You're free You're free To set the angel free You're free

57:54And I see the you inside of me I see the you inside of me That's the you inside of me And of course What happened to be Here's my friend This about NOT obsessing That's the feeling By you But sometimes Of course When I see the actual guitar solo

58:36guitar solo

59:06At the deeper core There is something more

59:38A soul Divinity Place the hands to prayer Put the wings to wear Set your angel Free I see the you inside of me I see the you inside of me

1:00:14I feel the you inside of me I am the you inside of me I see the you inside of me I see the you inside of me

1:00:44I am the you inside of me It's a powerful song. Yeah, that's really great. Thank you. Thanks very much. Now, you've been playing music for a long time, since what, four or five years old? Yeah, yeah. I've been singing from a very young age. My mother has the home videos to prove it. But I grew up in a very musical home with my grandmother.

1:01:19She passed away in 2021, and she was five days short of her 103rd birthday. Wow. Yeah, she was an incredible woman. And on her 13th birthday, she asked her father for a pony, and he gave her a piano. Close enough, I suppose, about the same size. She didn't know what to do with that. She taught herself. She was self-taught. You feed a piano less. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I grew up in a house with her playing every jingle off the television and

1:01:53the golden era and Lawrence Welk and all of that. So, yes, I was singing along with her at the piano for as long as I can remember. It's really incredible that what we've learned about the jazz scene in Canada. Most Americans are unaware of the Juno Awards for music, right? Yeah, our grannies. And, you know, the incredible jazz scene in Montreal. Yeah, we're about to embark on another Montreal Jazz Festival, which I think is one of, if

1:02:27not the largest, one of the largest jazz festivals in the world. You just had Stacey Kent. I think she'll be here. But, I mean, of course, it draws people from all over the world, but some of the acts are just, I mean, absolutely top-notch, incredible. And it's one after the other. I mean, just choosing what shows you're going to go to, you're better off getting a pass because it really is the best of the best. So, the Montreal Jazz Scene. And then we have small clubs all over the city and we have world-class players.

1:02:57And so, it's a really rich place to be making music and making connections and building a band. And we've got great schools here. I've got a couple of young McGill grads in my band that you hear on the recordings. The drummer and the piano player are both in their 20s and fresh out of school. And they're still preserving jazz. You know, I wouldn't say that what we're doing is jazz. It might be fusion jazz. And there are a few tunes on the record that are closer to traditional jazz.

1:03:28But, you know, we're interested in making a new sound. And everything really is influenced by jazz and blues. So, there will always be that foundation. It's a beautiful place to be musically. And Montreal has a new industry, really. And that's the comedy industry, the Just for Laughs festival up there has done for comedy what the city's done for jazz for years. Yeah, yeah. We're pretty much the arts and culture hub of Canada in a lot of ways. And there's such a European influence as well.

1:03:59So, we've got a lot of authentic cultures represented in our arts community and in our restaurants, going back to food. But it's like the New York of Canada, you know, like everything kind of cultivates here. And then there's a lot of new projects coming up. There's a lot of theater. We have a huge art center at Place des Arts, which brings in all kinds of dance and the orchestra. And, of course, every city has that artistic presence. But I do feel like it's quite the hub and that a lot of people actually come here to

1:04:33record their albums as well. We've got great recording studios. So, I'm very proud to be a Montrealer, having just moved back from Halifax about four years ago. So, it's an exciting time. Tell me about this next song from your new album of the least called Pockets of Gold. So, Pockets of Gold is the first single off the album. And it's my sort of protest song, I suppose. It, again, my husband had written this many years ago, and we decided to pull it out and

1:05:04reimagine it and rework some of the lyrics and the arrangement. And, again, it became something that neither of us expected it to be in its final product. The song, you might assume, is about things like colonialism or the displacement of peoples. But it is about that and much more. Unfortunately, it's still a very relevant topic. We've dealt with some political distress in Canada as well as all over the world.

1:05:34So, it is sort of, yeah, it's my protest song, I guess. It's the first time I've ever released a song like this. So, the message, in the end, that this song, I hope, gives is you have a right to be here. You have a right to be you. And no one can take that away from you. So, it really is a human rights song. Here's Karen with Pockets of Gold.

Karen Myatt performs Pockets of Gold

1:05:58Here's Karen with Pockets of Gold.

1:06:28They came across our waters. They came upon our shores. They came unto our native lands To fill their pockets with gold. They came with promise of heaven

1:07:03They came with tales of old They came to serve salvation And fill their pockets with gold Oh, where the rivers run The mountains mighty high Oh, where flowers bloom This land forever This land forever mine

1:07:35This is the place These are the times There's a smile on my face At the scene of the crime

1:08:05The mountains mighty high Thank you.

1:08:51Thank you.

1:09:21Where the rivers run, mountains mighty high Oh, where flowers bloom, this land forever, this land forever mine This is the place These are the times

1:09:51There's a smile on my face Oh, wipe that smile from your face We'll be bad, we'll be naked We'll be scared, we'll be sacred We'll be bad, we'll be naked

1:10:25We'll be scared, we'll be sacred We'll be bad, we'll be naked We'll be scared, we'll be sacred We'll be bad, we'll be naked We'll be scared, we'll be sacred We'll be bad, we'll be naked We'll be scared, we'll be sacred

1:10:56That's really cool Well done, thank you Some powerful words Thanks You can learn more about Karen On Instagram At Karen Myatt Music And the Myatt is spelled M-Y-A-T-T Thanks for joining us, Karen We've been working on this for a while I'm so glad we could get it together Thank you so much for having me It's a real honor And I'm excited to keep learning about architecture This is such an amazing podcast So thank you Thanks for listening U.S. Modernist Radio is underwritten

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