Site Map | Archives

Home › Entertainment › Local Entertainment

Albuquerque personalities: Architect Bart Prince doesn't build houses; he creates livable works of art

By Phil Parker
Friday, October 19, 2007

related linksMore Local Entertainment
related linksMOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

related linksTRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.
STORY TOOLS

SHARE THIS STORY [?]

Architecture's been called the mother of all the arts for a reason: It embraces everything else. It embraces painting and sculpture and music. It's the most difficult thing to bring into being.

— Barton Bradford Prince_____

A teacher liked Bart Prince's drawings when he was 7 or 8 years old, enough to put them on display at the New Mexico State Fair. They were textured, with precise curves and straight lines. They gave the sense of something skeletal. Something organic.

He won blue ribbons for them.

"My teacher told me, 'Wow, this art is really interesting,' " he recalls, many years and hundreds of designs later. "After I'd gotten this blue ribbon, I said, 'That's a building.' "

The teacher was confused. Prince grins at the memory: "She thought, 'Wait a minute . . .' "

Maybe you've driven by Prince's home on Monte Vista Boulevard Northeast. You've probably thought the same thing.

Wait a minute . . .

The house rises over trees, and looks like it should be attacking Marines in the apocalyptic future of a James Cameron flick. The two-story stone tower to the north of "The Spaceship" holds a spiral staircase - on the outside, where there's also a long, narrow waterfall that cascades to life with the flick of a switch. In his bedroom and living areas, walls curve into the floor instead of meeting at a right angle.

Copper dinosaurs stand guard by the sidewalk, part of his collection of artwork that includes paintings, sculpture, blueprints and funeral-home chairs designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

It's a marvelous collection, prodded and refined by a man's boundless imagination. That's what people see in Bart Prince's house - and why many hunger for a Bart Prince-designed home.

He doesn't construct things so much as he creates them. There's a difference.

Growing up, I had a parallel interest in music. It didn't seem to me that they were different. It was another expression of the same kind of thinking. Both are based on an idea that exists through an individual putting thoughts on paper. In one case, you've made a score, which is presented to an orchestra. An orchestra is a contractor. In another case, you're doing drawings of buildings and showing them to someone to build.

Barbi Benton's home is so large - 27,000 square feet - that it transcends the notion of "house." Dial the ex-Playboy Playmate's number and a machine kicks on: "Hello, you've reached The Copper Palace. If you know your party's extension you may enter it at any time." This is Benton and husband George Gradow's home, and they each have an extension. It's called "The Copper Palace" because its entire exterior is constructed out of copper.

And because it's a palace.

"Everywhere you turn, it's certainly a piece of art," Benton says of her sprawling Prince-designed superhome in Aspen, Colo. "We definitely feel like we're living in a museum."

Prince's live-in sculptures are strewn about Albuquerque, New Mexico, the United States and the entire world. He's designed museums, mansions and affordable-living townhouses. In the 1980s, he was commissioned to build a house on Albuquerque's West Side. He decided to limit himself to the same budget and contractors as the surrounding houses, somehow creating a one-of-a-kind, two-story dubbed by some neighbors as "The Fortress." The cost was a not-so-whopping $120,000.

I never see something that makes me think, "I could make a building out of that." Not a spider web or a fish or anything like that. But it's all there as something you digest and see and appreciate. We're as much a part of nature as any of the creatures around us. I've always felt you ought to be able to build a building that grows like any other organism. The look of it, the shape, the space and what's holding it up are all constructed as though it's a specific organism that's grown to become that way.

The design process, Prince says, is something like pregnancy.

His clients give him a list of requirements, in whatever form suits them - he's gotten half a page of wants from some; 10 single-spaced, typed sheets from others.

"They're talking about how they live and the general requirements for what they need," Prince says. "They're not ever telling me about shapes or materials."

Prince, 60, studies the site: code requirements, streets, adjacent buildings, even climate.

"Then I like to let it simmer," he says. "I don't start sketching the way some people do. I prefer to let it stay in my head as long as possible. As soon as you sketch something, you're committed."

The human brain is better than an iMac, and Prince's brain is a lot better. The project stays in his head, ever-present, growing and changing. Rooms expand, shrink or move. Maybe that hallway should look up through the second floor, all the way to the ceiling. Would it help the natural light if windows came in lower?

He knows when it's time to sit down and start creating a design to show others. Something clicks.

"When it's getting close to that time," he says, "some of the guys I've worked with could tell."

Prince, whose fee generally runs between 8 percent and 15 percent of the total building cost, will sit at his table or computer. A few hours later, the project is committed.

I remember going to kindergarten and first grade in Santa Fe. We lived in a dark, creepy adobe house, and I went to a dark, creepy adobe school. As a kid, it didn't seem like that's the way things should be.

Cecilia Portal is the executive director of the Albuquerque chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She has studied Prince's projects, sat with him, and has a strong grasp of their importance.

"People are very intrigued with Bart's work," she says, "because it's unusual and controversial."

She continues: "His work elicits a positive or negative response. Never middle of the road. Look at architecture in New Mexico and then look at what he's doing; some people think it doesn't belong here."

Portal admires Prince's work most, she says, because success hasn't slowed his drive to be creative.

"Most people take architecture for granted," says Portal. "That's why Bart is so important. He breaks away from 'brown boxes.' "

Among churches and two-story brown boxes in Rio Rancho is a residence that's often referred to as "The Snake House." The driveway starts at Huron Drive, a dirt path. Every other part of the house sits on beams extending off the ground.

Framed by the Sandias, the building is a marvel, particularly when viewed from the road on dusty New Mexico mornings. It's a massive, modern work nestled into the Earth all around.

Portal has seen the house up close, as have architectural students and curious passers-by.

"I would have loved to see that house in White Sands," says Portal, "or a moonlike landscape. It's distracting to have all the brown boxes around it."

What fascinated me about Frank Lloyd Wright's work - he was being really creative. It seemed his buildings were being created, as opposed to being built.

Christopher Mead, a professor and the dean of the University of New Mexico's College of Fine Arts, was studying in Paris in 1991. He met up with Prince, vacationing there at the time. They spent 10 days together, walking and taking in the city's centuries-old architecture. Mead teaches a history of architecture class at UNM. He's a historian and has written two books about Prince.

A few years after that excursion, Mead commissioned Prince to design his new home. He submitted a 10-page, typed, single-spaced "program" of what he wanted. It described in detail his practical needs and what he needed "emotionally" - like views or the public areas being upstairs.

The result: Mead's living room is wide open, with an uncommonly high ceiling and spacious floor area for seating. (Mead and his wife are hosting a party this month and expect more than 300 people. They'll all be comfortable.)

A few strides from the living area is the dining room. Walk from one to the other and a strange sensation hits, as if you've crossed an invisible threshold. They're attached, with no walls in between, yet the dining room is intimate. It's the perfect space for a standard-size dining table.

"This is one single space that's 100 feet long," Mead says, standing at the point where the rooms meet and the enclosure seems to change so drastically. "The space is scaled to its function."

The living room needed to be big, the dining room small. The ceiling dips downward from one to the other, like a teardrop on its side. Everything curves inward at one end, belling open at the other.

"For him," says Mead, "the beauty of the space matters. But it's perfectly adjusted to our requirements."

Mead's study is a finer example. He can enter it from the master bedroom on the bottom floor, or a set of stairs from the deck above.

The study had to be fireproof: Mead has a vast collection of books that fill shelves from floor to ceiling all around the room. Because Mead didn't want a view, Prince put in a line of thick, semi-opaque glass extending vertically from the tip of the room.

It's difficult to imagine a more perfect work area for any academic. Light bathes the room, and desk space is ample. Combined with the stone interior, Mead says his study has "a sacred quality."

"That's the beauty of Bart Prince," he says. "He gives you what you want, but he's an artist. You end up with something more than you expected."

The people I've worked for sense there's more harmony and more beauty in life. There doesn't just have to be the typical thing we're handed. There's something beyond that. Some aren't interested in art or crazy things. They just think there's got to be something to better suit the way they live.

David Gutierrez and Jim Vanhoose occasionally get knocks on their front door from people wondering whether their house is on the market. Vanhoose said he once woke to see 15 UNM architecture students outside taking photographs.

They live in the Prince-designed H-shaped house in the Laurelwood community on the West Side.

"Just get on Lakewood and look for the wildest house there," Vanhoose says. No resident of a Prince-designed home ever has a hard time giving directions.

This is the house Prince constructed in the '80s, under the same budget and with the same contractors as its neighbors.

Gutierrez counted the number of windows once: 138. This is his favorite part of his home.

"With the sunshine we get, why not?" he says.

They consider their home a work of art, framed by the standard Santa Fe-style adobes all around. It's not nearly as stylized as some of Prince's other works, because the plot of land and design situation didn't call for that. But there is a magnolia tree at its center, outside, with the home built all around it.

"People get lost in here," says Gutierrez, "even though it's not that big. They don't know where to go."

There was one model I did for a guy who went everywhere in a helicopter. He had to identify his house from the air, and he had to land. He wanted to be able to push a button and have the helicopter be pulled into the house.

But there were other aspects. He wanted something that looked beautiful and distinctive and interesting from the air. He wanted to take his morning swim inside and pick fruit off plants as he goes by. Now that's exactly what he does - we made a garden that his lap pool runs through.

I designed a stained-glass shower with a spiral stair that goes past it. He liked the idea that he could be taking a shower as guests were arriving. He could see them, but they couldn't see him.

And he also said that, from the shower, 'I want to go directly into the pool.' The pool is three stories below, so I put in a fire pole he can slide down into the water.

In that house, there's a whole section of the kitchen that moves according to which floor he's on. I told him, 'You know what would be cheaper? Three refrigerators.'

Prince says he has known his calling since perplexing his teacher with blue-ribbon drawings.

He was born in Albuquerque and spent bits of his childhood in Santa Fe and Española, where his father owned a newspaper, the Valley News. He graduated from Highland High in 1965, attended architecture school at Arizona State, and was back in the 505 area code by 1972. His great-grandfather, LeBaron Bradford Prince, was territorial governor of New Mexico in the late 19th century.

Prince designed his first house while still in high school. A building was going up in his neighborhood, and when he wasn't in his garage making house models that looked to unknowing eyes like science fiction, he would watch construction.

"There was something innately in me," he says. "I don't know why. We didn't know any architects (growing up), and there are none in my family. But I never had to think about what I wanted to do, or what I'm interested in studying. There just wasn't any question about it."

He lives with two happy dachshunds who wait to bark at guests. He's an avid reader whose tastes vary. Two weeks ago he finished O.J. Simpson's "If I Did It" in one night. He also plays the piano and is passionate about music.

"What I like is modern music," he says, "though when it's made by an orchestra it's called classical. I like the creative compositions. I can listen to pop kinds of things, but it's not music in the sense that those creations are."

Prince is far from rock-star artist. His typical clothing ensemble is a black shirt and khakis.

"I don't have weird tastes," he says in his studio, surrounded by models and sketches. "I think I save it all for this."

In junior high there was a teacher who every year cut off slips of paper with different historical figures' names on them. You'd have to pull one out and do a report on that person. I pulled out Frank Lloyd Wright. It wasn't as though that's what suddenly woke me up or changed my direction.

But I pulled his name and hadn't heard of him. I looked in an encyclopedia and some other things and found out he was an architect.

Christopher Mead says he's been asked how someone who is a student of architecture history can live in something so distinctly modern. The inquisitors are missing the point, and his answer speaks to a notion Prince personifies.

"History is not the past," Mead says. "It's made by what we're doing right now."

The artist inside Prince - the presence that's been with him since childhood - makes his not-so-humble abodes such fun to look at. They make more sense than you might ever have expected; a synergy of style and substance.

Smart as the man behind them.