The Architect Personality

Keith R. Kolb, FAIA

The following essay pursues some of the themes I explore in my forthcoming memoir, LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER: A YOUNG MAN’S SEARCH FOR HIS GAY IDENTITY

A profile of Britain’s most pre-eminent architect in the January 20, 2025 issue of The New Yorker bears the headline, “Norman Foster’s Empire of Image Control.” Ian Parker’s piece takes a deep dive into Foster’s attempt to control vast numbers of architectural projects, not to mention the teams of humans that produce them, across “eighteen offices in twelve countries.” I don’t know which is more impressive—that Foster assigned himself such a gargantuan task or that he has seemingly pulled it off.

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One vignette sheds light on Foster’s relationship with his Spanish-born wife, Elena.

Parker reports that Elena initially found their partnership “hard work:”

“Her husband laughed but didn’t look entirely comfortable: ‘What do you mean?’

‘You were architecture, architecture,’ she said.”

But Elena confided that their relationship had eased over time. As Parker explains, “He’ll greet guests, have a drink. Even on occasions when he’s clearly eager to resume working, Elena said, ‘he’s able to wait.’”

This anecdote resonated with me because I grew up with an architect father, Professor Keith Kolb of the University of Washington Department of Architecture. At our home, Dad lectured ponderously and regularly on architectural topics ranging from the inspirational (Michelangelo) to the merely practical (the advantages of bush-hammering concrete, compared with sandblasting.)

Parker’s description of Foster’s relationship with Elena could just as well have been about Mom and Dad. According to Mom, early in their marriage when Dad was teaching at Montana State University, he brought home a student and launched into a long private architectural lesson in their living room.

“A cup of tea, please,” Dad enjoined Mom, who was hidden away in the kitchen.

Mom obediently brought out the tea—and I picture her dressed in a kimono, presenting the lacquered tray with an exquisite little bow—but not before setting the kitchen timer. Fifteen minutes later, it made a loud noise.

“What’s that infernal racket?” Dad asked angrily. Mom replied only with her silence, and the timer did not ring again.

Later, when the student finally left, Dad asked her why she had let the timer ring.

“I thought you’d get the hint, Keith,” she said in her customary meek but firm tone. “Dinner was ready and it was high time for you to escort your student to the door.”

“He needed my help,” Dad explained, as if that settled the issue; as if he would have continued talking to the young man all night had the boy needed more help.

Mom took all of this in and didn’t try the timer again. The next time a student came around, it was in the early morning and Mom put two slices of bread in the toaster. A few minutes later she served toast, neglecting to butter it.

“This toast is burnt!” Dad yelled.

“You can scrape off the black bits with your knife,” Mom said helpfully. If this hint didn’t work, nothing would.

While I grew up, Dad slowly learned to accommodate Mom, although she often remained consigned to the claustrophobic galley kitchen he designed for her in what was otherwise an airy, open glass house. Even so, the dynamic continued when the three of us went shopping at the flagship QFC in the University Village Shopping Center, our local grocery store. No sooner had we entered the store than Dad invariably encountered one of his former students, a group I designated with the abbreviation “F.S.”

Glimpsing the latest F.S., Mom and I quickly plunged the grocery cart down the next aisle, leaving Dad rooted on the spot, where he began advising his student on the relative merits of Le Corbusier and Philip Johnson. The poor F.S. must have thought Mom was rude to deprive him of the opportunity to meet Mrs. Kolb, but in fact she was being polite. Mom knew that Dad would not remember the young man’s name, so she was saving him the embarrassment of failing to introduce them. Dad undoubtedly remembered every minute pencil mark on the man’s latest architectural project, but the F.S.’s name? That was a complete mystery.

“God is in the Details,” Mies van der Rohe famously said, and God, was Dad ever detail-oriented! His constant aim for perfection prompted him to line up our family in front of a Camellia hedge for annual portraits. Every time I remember how he waved his light meter toward us in the jerky flight pattern of a wasp, I recall the irritation I felt as the smile froze on my immobile face. But later, after Dad settled on his preferred aperture, selected the proper F-Stop and developed the film, I had to admit that his photographs were magnificent. Nearly everybody in our family, including my three living grandparents, wore glasses, but owing to Dad’s light meter calculations, no reflections or glare ever bounced off the lenses shielding our five pairs of eyes.

As I grew up and decided to become a landscape architect, I studied at the University of Pennsylvania under several Norman Foster stand-ins, three of whom were actual former students of Dad’s. Of these three, Bob Hanna confided that one of his greatest pleasures was sipping a dry martini while working hard on his latest Prismacolor pencil drawing of brick walls and sidewalks surrounding a tree-studded bluestone terrace.

At some point in my education, I concluded that this behavior was an observable phenomenon and it needed a name. I decided to call it ‘The Architect Personality.’

Here’s a definition: an individual, highly trained in architecture or one of the related environmental design fields, who approaches his subject with the zeal of a monomaniac.

What’s a monomaniac, you ask? It’s a person who obsesses over a single subject or idea, to the exclusion of all others.

I once worked for a talented landscape architect who suffered from an unusually eccentric version of monomania. Otherwise laudably reasonable when outlining his design concepts, he insisted that geometric vectors—vectors as subtle as those that direct the path of the sun between the tallest dolmens at Stonehenge on the summer solstice—connect the pyramids at Giza with not only the US Capitol dome in Washington, D.C., but also with Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and, well, fill in your important cultural monument here___________.

But monomania is not the only aspect of the Architect Personality. It is nearly always accompanied by Superior Taste. The architect with an architect personality possesses the certain knowledge that only one color is appropriate for the walls, floor, and ceiling of a given room or building. What’s more, he also knows exactly which objects should appear in or be banned from that space. Nobody else knows these things, which is why we all need to shut up and submit to the transcendental vision of the architect in question. Move over papal infallibility; make way for architectural infallibility!

Dad illustrated this concept with an anecdote. It involved his mentor, Lionel “Spike” Pries, the Beaux Arts School-trained subject of Jeffrey Ochsner’s book, Lionel Pries: Architect, Artist, Educator. The last house Spike designed was the 1965 Gurvich House on the tip of Webster Point in Seattle’s Laurelhurst neighborhood.

According to Dad, when the house was finished, Spike told Mrs. Gurvich that he’d like to come photograph the interiors, but when he arrived with his entourage and a collection of those tall high-intensity floor lamps, he saw with his architectural infallibility that Mrs. Gurvich had arranged her living room furniture all wrong.

“May I offer you a martini?” asked Mrs. Gurvich, ever the consummate hostess.

“That would be kind of you,” replied Spike. Then, while she retreated to the kitchen to fetch the cocktail shaker, he directed his minions to begin re-arranging the furniture.

The burst of activity must have flustered Mrs. Gurvich, who was perhaps looking on from the kitchen. She returned to the living room and handed Spike his martini. He took a sip and puckered his lips. “What is this?” he asked in an arrogant tone. “You forgot to pour in the gin!”

Our esteemed Pacific Northwest author, Erica Bauermeister, published a delightful memoir called House Lessons: Renovating a Life. In it, she describes buying a decrepit, century-old house in Port Townsend, Washington, removing the archaeological strata of junk filling its every room, and proceeding with the restoration.

To do so, she had to find a compatible architect, and she astutely observes that architects can be divided into two types: visionaries and collaborators. The visionaries are “demigods,” the famous starchitects who command their clients to pay for and appreciate the inspirational designs they have in mind, regardless of any impracticalities the resulting buildings might contain. For example, Mies van der Rohe insisted that his reputed lover, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, must spend her days in a glass house he designed with no opaque perimeter walls whatsoever, despite the reservations she must have expressed concerning her need for privacy.

Dad knew the Farnsworth House well and taught it to his students. He once told my brother and me about the time when he and Mom stopped off in Chicago on their way back to Seattle from Harvard University where Dad had studied under Walter Gropius. Since the Farnsworth House was not far away, he drove Mom over to take a look. Dad parked, got out of the car, and stealthily approached the house, camera and light meter in hand.

Mom wisely insisted on remaining in the car, strenuously objecting to his brazenness. “Keith, don’t do that!” she said.

According to Dad, when he got up close and stuck his camera lens against one of the glass walls, whom should he encounter behind the window but a mortified Dr. Farnsworth, who quickly dashed away to hide behind an interior partition.

Oddly enough, Dad officially belonged to the “collaborators” branch of architects, not the visionaries. Collaboration was the gospel preached by ‘Grope,’ as Dad called Gropius, and he briefly worked for Grope’s firm, “The Architects Collaborative.” But, as I explained to Erica Bauermeister in a letter complimenting her book, the distinction has always been blurred for me, because Dad had one foot in each camp. He declared that the architect’s word is law when it comes to client relations, and he spoke about the architect’s need to fire clients who refused to submit to his design vision. After all, that’s what Frank Lloyd Wright would have done, and in fact, Mies ended up suing Dr. Farnsworth for non-payment of fees.

In Dad’s case, though, his bark was worse than his bite. He needed to get paid by his residential clients, so he often made collaborative compromises with them. The mark of the true Architect Personality is the visionary demi-god who can get away with dismissing his clients, only to embrace many more clamoring for his highly tasteful services. Dad must have hoped for that, but he never achieved it.