PREFACE FRANK HARMON

PREFACE BY FRANK HARMON

In July 1981, I drove a rented Chevrolet to Raleigh, North Carolina, on my way to interview for a teaching job at the School of Design at North Carolina State University. There, on nearby Cox Avenue, I drove past the home and studio of architect Harwell Hamilton Harris, an arrestingly quiet stucco form on a street of slightly run-down student houses. The studio had a well-proportioned simplicity that was unusual in 1981 when architecture hovered on the cusp of Post Modernism.

“If someone can do something so beautiful here in Raleigh,” I thought, “maybe there’s hope that I can, too.”

That same afternoon, I passed by D.H. Hill Library on the N.C. State campus and saw the color-and-light mural by Raleigh artist Joe Cox. That luminous cre ation also connected me to my new surroundings.

Two hours later I called my wife Judy to say that I thought that we should move to North Carolina.

The studio and work of art I saw on that hot, humid afternoon were but two of hundreds of striking examples of art and architecture borne in North Carolina from 1947 onward. How did these objects come to be in North Carolina? What people made them in a state not known for its modern art?

As it turned out, almost all the architects and artists were outsiders, from Oklahoma, California, and Poland. But for a brief moment, North Carolina seemed to be at the center of the universe.

In 1585, English explorer and artist Captain John White drew the first illustrations of buildings in the New World near the coast of what we now call North Carolina. Captain White’s watercolor drawings portrayed a native village of one-story houses with vaulted roofs, porches, and walls made of Atlantic white cedar. Today we would call these buildings sustainable. Yet to their native builders, they simply made sense. A vestige of this pragmatic approach can be traced throughout the history of architecture in this state.

North Carolina was a relatively poor state until the twentieth century. Its architectural legacy is modest compared to the great mansions and churches of South Carolina and Virginia. But because it was largely a rural state of small land owners, a rich tradition of pragmatic purpose inspired this state’s vernacular structures, including tobacco barns, corncribs, and mill buildings. Architecture in North Carolina is a state of mind more than a style—open, relaxed, and likely to accept new ways of doing things as long as they were practical. One can see that same vernacular today in highway bridges, soybean silos, and barbecue shacks across the state.

It was that state of mind that allowed North Carolinians, I believe, to accept modernism after the Second World War.

In 1954, Harwell Hamilton Harris wrote a renowned article entitled “Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture.” In it, he stated, “A region’s most important resources are its free minds, its imagination, its stake in the future, its energy and, last of all, its climate, its topography, and the particular kind of sticks and stones it has to build with.”

It’s worth remembering the stake in the future and the imagination that the director of the North Carolina State Fair, J.S. Dorton, possessed in 1947 when he commissioned Matthew Nowicki to design a livestock judging arena for his fair. Later known as the J.S. Dorton Arena, the daring structure designed by the Polish-born architect and professor at the School of Design was celebrated worldwide.

It’s worth remembering the free minds of the university faculty and small business owners who commissioned George Matsumoto, James Fitzgibbon, and Milton Small to design simple, low-cost houses that rested like curled leaves on the red clay of the state’s Triangle region and opened their indoors to the fresh air.

It’s also worth reflecting on the energy in mid-century North Carolina that created the first state-supported art museum, the Research Triangle Park, and the consolidated University of North Carolina. The same momentum gave rise to the Greensboro Four who staged the most influential sit-in of the Civil Rights Movement at the then-segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro in February of 1960.

If there were North Carolinians looking for new ways of building at mid-cen tury, the Triangle’s modernist architects were ready to give it to them.

I am still full of wonder at the modern architecture of North Carolina, how it ran like a silver stream between banks that were at times dark and unappreciative. How it was often talked down, ignored, and even blasphemed, and yet it ran clear to the ideals of its founders and was joined by a thousand tributaries flowing onward from past to present and quietly into the future.

And I’m glad that modern architecture is now in the guide books, alongside the plantation houses, churches, and horse barns of an earlier era. Modern designers are compared favorably to previous architects and artisans, including the builders of tobacco barns, throwers of pots, musicians, bricklayers, and cooks.

The need to bring traditional building into the modern era drove the ideas of Matthew Nowicki, George Matsumoto, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and other pioneers of modernism in North Carolina. Social and environmental sustainability now animates the current generation, as well as the need to manage local resources. In other words, modernism changes with the times. But its principles remain the same: invention, respect for tradition, the ability to listen, and a willingness to work outside current myths and fashion.

Two recent buildings now stand a few steps away from the Harris home and studio on Cox Avenue and continue his legacy. A bright and shining addition to Pullen Memorial Baptist Church by architect Ellen Weinstein continues the progressive tradition of its membership, who see themselves as stakeholders of religious freedom and social justice. Next to it stands the Gregg Art Museum, designed by Kenneth Luker and Derek Jones with Phil Freelon. The museum is a model of clarity and restraint in architecture—a luminous volume clad in a species of wood that would have been familiar to the native builders Captain John White met in 1585. And Harris would recognize its elegant proportions and simple form.

With the publication of this book, the modern architecture of North Carolina’s Triangle region leaves its folklore status and becomes part of the critical history of architecture. We are greatly indebted to its author, Victoria Ballard Bell, and to the architects, builders, and clients who made it possible.