Commonplaces: Working on an American Architecture, by Brian Healy (’81) Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, 2022, 868 pp.
Commonplace books once served as scrapbooks, in which people attached items arranged in categories as a way to remember ideas and images of value and interest. The new 868-page, 8-pound block-of-a-book Commonplaces: Working on an American Architecture, by Brian Healy (’81), has the character of a commonplace book. It features 65 of Healy’s projects assembled into 5 categories: Work, Learn, Plan, Pray, and Live. It is also packed with ideas and images of definite interest to anyone who cares about contemporary American architecture.
While Healy’s work encompasses building types typical of our time—offices and schools, civic centers and campuses, religious buildings, and residences—his architecture is anything but commonplace. The book serves as a reminder of the consistency and quality of Healy’s designs over the last four decades, making him one of the most talented—and yet unsung— architects practicing in America today. The book features insightful essays by some of the best architectural writers of our era: a pithy one-paragraph prologue by Juhani Pallasmaa; a seven-page introduction by Robert McCarter, linking Healy to American designers ranging from George Nakashima to Frank Lloyd Wright; reminiscences of Healy as a colleague and educator by Edward Mitchell and Peter MacKeith; a somewhat opaque polemic by Julian Bonder; two Boston Globe pieces on Healy buildings by Robert Campbell; an interview of Healy by Vladimir Belogolovsky; and an empathetic epilogue by Marlon Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins.
Yet Healy has written some of the book’s most telling texts. He recounts growing up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, “drawn to the beauty of … anonymous American structures” and spending a 40-year career trying “to understand what America represents and what an architecture could become within that understanding.” Near the end of the book Healy writes about the value he places on intuition, referring to Baruch Spinoza’s idea of “intuitive knowledge … based on seeing the connectedness of all things.” The reference to Spinoza explains a lot about Healy’s work and his pursuit of an American architecture. Spinoza argues that reality is essentially all the same “substance,” and while that substance has myriad attributes, taking many different forms in different locations, the underlying connectedness of reality remains. Seeing Healy’s architecture all together in this book helps us understand the singular substance of his work while it responds to different programs in different places.
There is, for example, a similar gestural quality in his architecture that cranks, lifts, angles, and skews in response to the demands of a building’s program and to the features of its context—distant views, solar access, and adjacent structures. Healy admires vernacular American buildings that are “wed to the realities of utility and experience,” and that same quality pervades his work in buildings that reflect the internal push of their plans and the external pull of their sites. Healy’s buildings also reveal a lot about the substance of America. His work expresses, for example, the ongoing tension between affluence and frugality in American architecture. More than half of the book’s pages are devoted to residences designed for affluent clients, and yet Healy’s projects, as Pallasmaa notes, “appear sober and moderate yet elegantly sensuous.”
The friction between what Pallasmaa calls “the unpretentiousness of vernacular traditions” and the wealth required to commission a custom-designed building exists for virtually every architect. The question is, How do we deal with that dilemma? Healy addresses it by valuing, as McCarter writes, “not what a building looks like, but what it is like to live in.” In other words, the substance of Healy’s work—what links his admiration of anonymous American buildings and his designs for affluent American clients—lies in its focus on the experiential impact of a building on its occupants. “Our experience,” Healy writes, “is bound by the fences and the walls; the portals and the apertures; the scale of things. These are the variables that I work with.”
This raises another particularly American tension in Healy’s work—between the autonomous individual and the authentic community. MacKeith recalls a statement that Healy once made at an Alvar Aalto symposium: “This is all about being alive and being alert to being alive … about the importance of community and the possibility of being a good community.” The idea of architecture helping us be alert to being alive captures a distinctive aspect of Healy’s work: while he cares about the experiences of individual occupants of his buildings, he often focuses attention—and a lot of his budgets—on the common spaces, which offer the greatest possibility of placing people in a community. Commonplace books contained unusual items intended to stimulate the mind and the imagination, and that is what Commonplaces does as well. It has gathered together a community of writers and a collection of buildings that are as uncommon as America itself.
—Thomas Fisher
Fisher, formerly editorial director of Progressive Architecture, is former dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota and currently professor in its School of Architecture, director of the Minnesota Design Center, and Dayton Hudson Chair in Urban Design. His latest book is entitled Space, Structures, and Design in a Post-Pandemic World (Routledge, 2022).