In 2006, AIA Seattle recognized Lawrence Kreisman as an AIA Seattle Honorary Member*

Over the course of three decades of a wide-ranging career, Lawrence Kreisman has consistently worked to bring public attention to the Northwest's architectural heritage and its preservation. Accomplishments include his authorship of important publications including Art Deco Seattle, Apartments by Anhalt, Bloedel Reserve: Gardens in the Forest, Historic Preservation in Seattle, The Stimson Legacy: Architecture in the Urban West, and Made to Last: Historic Preservation in Seattle and King County; his work in developing and directing the Viewpoints Tours program of the Seattle Architecture Foundation; his research and curatorial contribution to AIA Seattle's 1994 development of the Blueprints: 100 Years of Seattle Architecture exhibit at MOHAI that became the basis of the Seattle Architecture Foundation's permanent exhibit; his writings on design for The Seattle Times Pacific Northwest; his service on the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board; and his work as Program Director at Historic Seattle.

*AIA Seattle is a Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Honorary Membership recognizes those not otherwise eligible for AIA membership who have contributed notably to achievement of the mission and goals of AIA Seattle.

On Thursday, October 26, 2006, Lawrence Kreisman was the featured speaker for the LifeWorks Series . A series which features distinguished design professionals and allies offering reflections on their achievements and aspirations. Below is the text from his talk.

I appreciate being asked to speak to you today. It has given me the opportunity to reflect back on my life and my work—something that I suspect few people spend time doing. It’s forced me to dig up papers long ago filed away in boxes and drawers, and it has triggered memories of people, places, and projects that have meant a great deal to me.

I was eight years old when my parents took me to see my first opera at the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York. I remember the agonizing climb up each flight of stairs, expectation mounting as we ascended to a landing and promptly deflating as another staircase appeared. Finally at the top, we entered the Family Circle and the grand house opened up to my view—a view of gold leaf, gold lattices, gold cupids, gold curtain, gold chandeliers, red velvet, and crystal. Even after the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, my attention focused upon the names of the composers carved around the proscenium arch and the frescoed figures romping on the ceiling rather than on the stage. Undoubtedly, it was the magic of the old Met, where fantasy and art merged every evening and twice on Saturday, that awakened my interest in architecture and the design arts.

I am first generation American. My parents arrived here from Russia—my father in 1897 at the age of 12, already on his own, and my mother, a baby in 1904, landing in New York with her parents, her grandmother, and what apparently were essentials--heavy copper pots. Despite aspirations to enter a profession, my father worked most of his life in the garment industry as a cutter of women’s coats and suits. My mother, a legal secretary, worked at City Hall for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s office in the 1930s and later for several judges. While they married in 1935, they chose to wait to have children. My sister Paula was born in 1944 and I was born 1947.

Paula was a very assertive child with a high IQ, and always seemed to excel in anything she did. I remember how challenging it was to follow her through the same Bronx schools and the same teachers as an awkward child lacking confidence, slow in reading, and definitely lacking abilities in sports—the bonding ritual in the playfield.

When I reflect on my childhood experiences and how they may have influenced me to choose this path, I realize how much living in New York City shaped my interest in buildings and in design. For a child, it was magical to enter the imperial interior of the John Eberson-designed Loew’s Paradise Theater on the Grand Concourse to see a movie; to wonder for hours and often get lost in the maze of rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; to find rest and a patch of green on the broad lawn in front of McKim Mead and White’s rotunda library and the Hall of Fame at nearby New York University; to marvel at the setback skyscrapers in midtown and lower Manhattan, and to sit on the rocky outcroppings in Central Park and Fort Tryon Park sketching landscape, city, and bridge views.

At City College of New York and at the graduate school of the University of Chicago, I studied English literature. While I made the decision that this did not fit for me—and yes, I was and still am a slow reader--I credit these studies with honing my research skills, and in fostering a clear, concise, and readable writing style that has paid off immensely.

After dropping out of a PhD program in English literature at the University of Washington, I landed a job as program coordinator in the Foreign Study Office on campus. It was there, working with Jack O’Connell and students and faculty in the school’s Architecture in Rome and Landscape Architecture in Great Britain that I began to consider architecture as successfully combining my interest in arts and city life. I enrolled in the three-year graduate architecture program in 1976, struggled mightily through the challenges of graphics, structures, and design studios until I finally found a comfortable niche in urban design and historic preservation.

But it was the serendipity of finding a work study job in the Office of Urban Conservation in 1977 that set me on this preservation path and it probably wouldn’t have happened without the mentoring I received from Earl Layman, the City of Seattle Historic Preservation Officer at that time. Earl was an architect, artist, and teacher. He taught by example, through his childlike delight in architecture, streetscape, city, and countryside, his high standards, his integrity, and his frank, often blatant criticism of inappropriate design and incompetent or ignorant bureaucrats. I remember lively salons at his Queen Anne Hill home with champagne, pate, and oysters Rockefeller for a diverse group of staff, friends, and peers--a wonderful introduction to the preservation field. It was through my work that I met Dennis Andersen, who would become my closest and dearest friend. At that time, he was in charge of photography and architectural drawings at Special Collections at the University of Washington Libraries. Somehow Dennis always seemed to have the answers in his head or at his fingertips—and he still does.

In this environment, fellow architecture student and friend, Rob Anglin and I learned to do research and to prepare landmark nominations Rob and I were also asked to do focused research for a series of publications that the City would publish. Rob did extensive research on bungalows, and on the firm of Willatzen and Byrne.

I interviewed Fred Anhalt and drove around the city with him identifying his projects from the late 1920s on Apartments by Anhalt , was the only one of these efforts to be published, in 1978. But that little project hooked me, and gave me the direction I had sought.

I found great satisfaction in making new discoveries and presenting them to the general public to increase awareness of the rich physical environment and heritage in the region--as a book, a tour, an exhibit, and in classroom and lecture hall.

Over the next 15 years, I wrote articles and taught undergraduate, graduate, and adult education classes on architecture and historic preservation through the University of Washington, Heritage Institute/Antioch University, and Washington State University. I presented summer historic preservation classes for teachers throughout Washington State and these were instrumental in these teachers developing curriculum units for their classrooms and stimulating concerns about local preservation of resources.

As consultant to Anne Taylor ’ s innovative Architecture and Children program, I prepared curriculum materials, lectured locally and in Tokyo, Sendai, and Nigata, Japan, and was the coordinator for a grant-funded project that installed an architecture and built heritage program into King County elementary schools. I even developed an exhibit on Chitani ’ s remarkable origami architecture at the Washington State Convention Center. During her time in Seattle, I was inspired by Anne’s energy, commitment, and passion to improve learning environments for children and to use architecture as a vehicle for broadening one’s understanding of the world.

In 1989, a small group of us met with Karen Bean in the AIA Seattle offices to formulate what would become the Viewpoints tour program of the Seattle Architecture Foundation. In 1990, with a King County grant that I had applied for, we presented our first two tours—View from Above focusing on the Metropolitan Tract, and View from Below, focusing on the newly opened Metro Transit tunnel. That year, I took on the project director role for Viewpoints, working with a passionate committee of volunteers from the design and professional community as tour researchers, writers, guides and presenters. Using my knowledge of city and region, and bringing with me a group of tours that I had conducted independently since the late 1970s, including Art Deco, Historic Theaters, Pioneer Square, and First Hill, I initiated tours, developed scripts, and trained guides. As you are probably aware, the program has provided outstanding opportunities for thousands of Western Washington residents to explore built heritage, to see first-hand examples of restoration and adaptive reuse, and to speak firsthand with architects and design professionals in order to understand the process and products of the design community. I also initiated Washington Commission for the Humanities funding in 1995 that allowed the Foundation to develop a slide presentation and curriculum materials for 4th through 6th graders and conduct free downtown walking tours for nearly 3,000 elementary school children from as far away as Olympia—the basis for the Foundation ’ s current school outreach programs.

During a brief stint as exhibit designer at the Museum of History and Industry in the early 1980s, I had developed a number of exhibits, including Another Opening, Another Show: Seattle Theatre History, based upon my research into the region ’ s theaters, and exhibits on maritime photography, fashion, and aviation.

I returned to MOHAI in 1993 as the project manager and chief researcher and curator for Blueprints: 100 Years of Seattle Architecture, celebrating the centennial of the AIA in Washington State. I was ably assisted by Mary Kae McCullough and Dennis Andersen. The exhibit interpreted Seattle and King County history through built resources with hundreds of photographs, drawings, models, and objects from public and private collections.

As a result of my fund-raising and discussions with Unico Properties in 1995, the exhibit was partially reinstalled at a new Seattle Architectural Foundation gallery in Rainier Square where it continues to educate the public about history and the value of buildings to our lives.

I have also prepared other exhibits, including Good Schools: A Celebration of Seattle Public School History for the Seattle School District and Des Moines Memorial Drive: Preservation of a Landmark prepared for King County Cultural Resources Division.

I served as architectural historian on the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board from August 1995 until July 2003. And in 1997, I was honored with the Washington State Historic Preservation Officer's Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Historic Preservation .

Since 1997, I’ve been Program Director of Historic Seattle, where I produce a large number of educational programs and events focusing on architecture, design arts, and built heritage.

Historic Seattle is a membership organization that for 32 years has preserved and restored buildings, provided the community with educational programming focused on respect for built heritage, and encouraged people to get involved in preservation through its advocacy efforts.

We have been at the table in shaping city policy and encouraging neighborhood groups to protect buildings that are important to their historic character.

None of my publications ended up on best seller lists, and none is likely to fund my retirement. But that’s not why they were written. I did them to fill a gap in resources and evaluation of local and regional architectural, social, and cultural heritage. They include Apartments by Anhalt (1978 and 1982), Art Deco Seattle (1979), prepared for Allied Arts of Seattle, as part of a city-wide program of tours and exhibitions; West Queen Anne School: Renaissance of a Landmark (1984), to celebrate the adaptive reuse of a cherished neighborhood school that might otherwise have been demolished; and Historic Preservation in Seattle (1985), which I saw as a necessary document to welcome people to the city when it hosted the National Trust for Preservation.

Mary Randlett, a remarkable photographer who had worked with me on earlier books, introduced me to Virginia and Bagley Wright to lay the groundwork for our book The Bloedel Reserve: Gardens in the Forest (1988). During a chance meeting with Patsy Bullitt Collins on one of my periodic First Hill tours—she had just purchased the house of her grandfather—she asked me if I had ever seen the letters the architect Kirtland Cutter had written to C.D. Stimson. What began as a book on one house expanded to review major buildings in three West Coast cities in The Stimson Legacy: Architecture in the Urban West (1992). This was one of my most exciting projects, making discoveries that included handwritten letters from Louis Sullivan, original inventories, drawings, and renderings, and wonderful family memorabilia. It also stands out for me because of the friendship that developed with Patsy Collins, whose values, directness, and community commitments were exceptional. My most recent book, Made to Last (1999), was a major expansion of the 1985 preservation book to include King County.

But I suspect that if I am known locally, it’s more for my by-line. Since 1988, I’ve written nearly 300 home design features on a wide variety of topics for the Seattle Times Pacific Northwest Magazine, which reaches an audience of over 500,000 readers in Western Washington.

My work is intertwined with my life, and I don’t see any clear dividers. My wonderful partner Wayne and I celebrated our 25 th anniversary in August at our Lummi island retreat, in the presence of our daughter Robin and family, friends, and co-workers of many years. Wayne has willingly tolerated and supported me in the work I do and its offshoots into our personal lives through our travels and our collections.

We have both developed a keen interest in the design arts of the earlier “modern” age—1890-1930-- that had great vision and clarity and produced some remarkable architecture, interior design, and decorative arts. The design movements of this period were revolutionary in their time. They questioned public taste, established principles for design excellence, and encouraged artists and craftspeople through publications, art and architecture journals, competitions, and exhibitions.

Every time I come home, I revisit the periods in which these important steps in the design world were first taken. It is a place where the design trends of many countries and periods live together in some harmony. These include the work of turn-of-the-century designers from England, Scotland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and the United States.

I have always been curious about older cultures. But more than that, I have maintained a romantic, sometimes nostalgic view of the world—a conviction that things were more beautiful, more expressive, and better-crafted back then. It has become one of the great pleasures of my life to surround myself with furniture and decorative arts that evoke the ambiance of an earlier place and time but are, even in this new millennium, extraordinarily modern.

What’s next for me? A good friend and colleague, Glenn Mason, and I have just completed The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest, which will be published by Timber Press next fall. We have spent nearly three years examining regional architecture, furniture and furnishings, fine and applied art, printing and graphics, and photography to discover what was being done by companies here, what was new to the movement, and what was adapted as a result of the climate, environs, indigenous cultures, and Pacific Rim communication and trade. Our intent is to place the Pacific Northwest in the broader context of the Arts and Crafts Movement as a whole. The book also investigates various Arts & Crafts societies and art colonies such as Beaux Arts Village east of Lake Washington and schools such as the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts. The Arts & Crafts inspired early 20th century art instruction and manual arts courses in the public school systems and the students' prolific production of handmade Mission style furniture, hammered metal work, lighting fixtures, and other period accessories.

Whenever I finish one book, I say, “Never again.” Most people who know me well ignore that cry, knowing that it usually doesn’t ring true. Books are challenging for many reasons, not the least of which is the finality of them. It’s not a website, with the possibility of tweaking, correcting, and adding whenever something new comes to light. If you wonder why it takes so long for some authors to finish a project, it is probably because “final” is not an easy thing to accept. As I go through the painful final stages of copy edits this month, I have had several moments of panic. Ultimately, as you know from your own design projects, you have to say, “That’s it,” and let it move forward.

My writing, teaching, and program production have left me with some fairly strong opinions about the world we live in now—and not all of it is positive. We talk a great deal about education and about literacy. But we are fast becoming a nation of well-educated people who are, by and large, visually illiterate. Young adults are not being trained to look, observe, and evaluate what they see. They are becoming accustomed to instant images jumping on and off movie screens, computer screens, and television screens. They barely have time to take in the color and shape of a thing before it vanishes and is replaced by something different. In this split second world, subtleties and refinements vanish. The roughness or smoothness of stone, the color gradations and textures of a woven fabric, the graceful curve of a wooden chair leg, the glow of a gold leafed frame on a burgundy wall—these are things that need time, they need observation. They may even need the touch of a finger or the sniff of the nose to gain your full appreciation. So little in cyberspace tests a person’s senses or challenges his or her perceptions of the physical world.

As an architectural historian, as an historic preservation advocate, and as an educator, I worry about this. I am concerned that in the rush for the latest improvements in communication and sharing of information, now objectified as “data,” we are losing the capacity to use our gifts of observation, the “visual thinking” that it at the roots of aesthetics. I worry that as we strive for “world classdom,” we are settling for the lowest common denominator of taste and the loss of the quirky, idiosyncratic characteristics that make our neighborhoods the downtowns of our cities different from one another.

In eight years on the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board, I was fortunate to work with designers who saw the value of historic buildings, were open to suggestions, and whose final renovation and new projects showed understanding and sensibility. But I frequently listened to the arguments of architects, real estate developers, attorneys, and building management that justified the replacement of wood windows with vinyl, wood shingle with composition, gutting complete historic interiors to meet educational requirements, seismic, and building codes. I reviewed arrogant and inappropriate additions and alterations to historic properties by designers who had not been paying attention in architectural history classes or taken the time to learn the characteristics of historic styles, and did not seem to know how to design in context--or purposely ignored all the clues.

At Historic Seattle, I am frequently asked to provide homeowners with recommendations for interior designers and architects to help them out when upgrading an old house. Frankly, I can count on my fingers the number of firms who have the knowledge base and, more importantly, the passion, to work with historic buildings. I wish there were more. I wish that the design professions devoted less time to looking to follow the latest trends and to make their own new ones and more time looking back at our superb design history as a valuable guide for moving ahead.

I’ve always been quite humble in acknowledging my impact in the community. But I do see that apart from the information I share with others, it has been my continuing energy, enthusiasm, imagination, and comfortable teaching and writing style that have inspired people, regardless of age, experience, or academic standing, to see, critically evaluate, and appreciate the riches of the environment in which we live and work. I hope that adults will pass on that knowledge to young people to generate a better-informed and more active citizenry that will guarantee the value placed upon built heritage in the future.

At the AIA Honor Awards in June, I offered up some advice to the profession that I ’ d like to repeat for those of you who were not present that evening because it really is critical. Our future seems destined to include many new high-rise buildings and the loss of the Seattle familiar to us. I ask you to always take the time to think about ways in which older buildings might be incorporated into your project rather than razed. Take the time to evaluate their importance and the distinct character they have brought to the street and to the neighborhood. Sustainability teaches us the value of conservation of materials and energy. The architectural profession is about creativity and this is one of the most creative things that you as Seattle design professionals can do. You have it in your power to educate fellow architects, property owners, and developers and to change minds. I hope that you will make that part of your mission as it has been—and continues to be—part of mine.

Thank you.

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