00:00:03.100 - 00:00:17.360

Vernon DeMars in Berkeley, California, the architect of Bannockburn. One of the three architects, presumably, although I really think it's not either boasting or

00:00:17.360 - 00:00:25.520

taking too much credit to say that I was responsible for the design of it. Now is that working? Yeah, I think so.

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I'll just turn off the...Okay And I imagine that you want to go back to how did I get chosen in the first place. Yes, I do.

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And what led up to this. I've tried to organize my thoughts a bit. Didn't know whether to start at

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the end like some of the movies do and then you have flashbacks. Flashbacks. [laughter]. It'll probably jump around that way.

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But I think we can, from this first premise of how did they get chosen, I mean the architects, are you familiar with the, I wrote Sandy, this is Alexander Stevenson, a long time Bannockburn member who lives in one of the houses I designed.

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It's a lovely place too. And I had remembered, they added to it a bit, I think, and improved the situation. They had a porch or a wing I think something.

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They added a greenhouse outside. Yeah, but anyway the a cooperative of course has to be very democratic. And so they didn't just pick one architect, although I think since

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Mary Goldwater was part of the... She and Mary Herling, you've heard her out. Mary Herling I knew.

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Yes, and Mary Goldwater was... We'll go into that, how we happened to be acquainted, but I think it was a our acquaintanceship before and a scheme that we had worked on

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mutually that was the goal of the first thing. But since the cooperative said, "Well, you have to ask this architect and that architect," and they did want to solicit, well, all possible candidates for this job.

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And one of them, I think it was rather late in the choice business, someone said, well, "You mean you haven't included John Smith or whoever, or Frank Lloyd Wright?" No, but they would. They wrote both of them.

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I think I've see that letter. Did you see the letter, the reply from Frank Lloyd Wright? Someone's mentioned the letter. I haven't seen it yet.

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I have a copy of it. It's supposed to be very funny. It is, yes. We almost might stop, and you may

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want to. I'll give you a copy. Oh, that would be great. In due course.

00:03:01.060 - 00:03:11.940

The records in the Bannockburn Clubhouse are unbelievably in disarray, so I'm going through that, but it's going to take me weeks. I hope we can find this particular

00:03:13.240 - 00:03:31.560

little leaflet thing, because this is a little distributing thing, that very briefly, or maybe it came along just as an insert to show how the scheme had developed. We had a model, a large model done

00:03:31.560 - 00:03:49.780

of the site with rather simple little blocks to show what was proposed for it and but this was from the original idea of a mixed, mixture of different, all different types that model and of course we weren't able to carry that out as such.

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I've got to clear my throat a bit. Why don't we turn it off for a minute? Don't worry about it. Just talk, you know.

00:04:04.980 - 00:04:22.660

Where were we on that? So you were hired as one of a group that came in to design the Bannockburn site, is that it? Yes, and but I, as I say is, I think I was mentioning to you before that...

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They asked several people. Well, they asked more than several, I think, and there's the letter that was used for soliciting this.

00:04:32.360 - 00:04:37.980

Have you seen that, by any chance? No. Yet. I have a copy of that as well, which might be of interest.

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And it's quite legitimate and certainly not sufficient to get the answer that Frank Lloyd Wright. But I think he couldn't resist this. He didn't have a reputation as being a particularly benign

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person. No, no. Yeah, and I think he just had to show his...And I think you'll find it interesting to include it, certainly, in your thing.

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But Mary Goldwater had worked with us on this scheme for, that we did in Washington DC this, this government office that now I don't think I've talked about that. No. Yeah I'll see if I can't

00:05:15.920 - 00:05:29.620

combine it quickly. I was working in a portion of the National Housing Agency, which had been involved in doing the setting of standards for war housing around the country.

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But by this time, this is 1941 or '2, I guess, I guess, what was this? That's '41. No, it had to be '42 or '3. By that time, all the war housing

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program was really completed, but there was some sort of mopping up and continuation to be done. And I found myself when I was in this office, that what they really wanted a group to do was to do

00:06:05.920 - 00:06:19.540

some post-war thinking about houses and a whole number of things. So our particular office, I was reading reports from England and other countries that had large

00:06:19.540 - 00:06:32.860

housing programs. And I was more and more impressed with the experience that they've had in England now with large housing estates and really public housing, you might say.

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And the tendency, which was also the tendency in this country, was to build all one sort of income and social group, build all the same houses, and there might be several hundred of them. And in fact an early example of thing done under HUD, under the

00:06:55.760 - 00:07:13.440

Public Housing Administration here, was a project in Texas of 3,000 units I think. And they're all row houses, all in brick, and they're all done in bars of sort of eight families to

00:07:13.440 - 00:07:32.900

a bar, I call it that because you couldn't tell, one, except for the doors, that these were separate families. And the more and more I read about the criticism of the English experience, the more I was convinced that there ought to be a

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way in which you could have a mixture of different dwelling types, which would satisfy the needs of all the different kinds of families. And if you planned it together,

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you didn't have the problem of mixed use that is, you know, incompatible with each other. You don't have a garage and a single-family house and then a skyscraper next to it and most

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zoning tries to stop that. So typically they do it by having zoned areas, but what we were experimenting with really turned out to be something later on called a PUD, planned unit

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development. In other words, you had a large enough piece of land to actually plan the relationships of different types of buildings, you can surround them with pieces of

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larger green space to make separate one group of buildings from another when they don't match. But a row house or a townhouse, San Francisco has all kinds of examples.

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It's one of the few places where the compression is such that you find them...The row house is more or less the standard thing but very often there'll be single-family houses mixed in among them.

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And that's what gives it this excitement. Yes, it does. It really, and it, and then of course, being in Washington and knowing Georgetown and seeing how,

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how valuable those houses were. We had friends who lived in in Georgetown row houses and I thought, "You know this is really nice city living isn't it?" And if you, it's better than an apartment

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that's the next step up, I mean if you are down which ever you want to call it but I was impressed with how satisfactory these were as houses for families, if you have some nearby recreation areas and open space.

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And now people are crying for those things. Pardon? And now people are crying for amenities, you know, instead of

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just housing. Yes, of course. Yes, right. It has to go together.

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So if you, the so-called PUD is what we proposed doing. Well we were approached by the magazine, the Architectural Forum as they had asked of some dozen architects and then they sort of asked our office in the housing standards section whether we could

00:10:03.580 - 00:10:14.320

take on making a proposal for them along with the others that they were asking for. But these, the Bannockburn people, who was it that came to you? I mean, some committee?

00:10:14.680 - 00:10:31.960

Well, you see Mary, Mary Goldwater, who had been in this office and developed this plan, and she was an architect, but she was also very much leaning toward the sociological problems and demographic ones.

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And in fact, I think had some expertise in it. I wonder if you know the name Betty Coit? No. And she was a close friend of

00:10:39.520 - 00:10:59.640

hers and she was in the housing agency, the National Housing Agency, and one of the people doing exactly that sort of thing of studying the experience of people in post-war housing, they were already beginning to, these showed some of the problems, even

00:10:59.640 - 00:11:13.660

aggravated you might say, of these kind of planned communities and the kind of housing that was, even the war housing was sort of experimental in some cases. They took the opportunity to try

00:11:13.660 - 00:11:28.120

different kind of relationships to see if they'd work. And so there was much of this thinking going on at that time. And so Mary had a great deal of input into the concept of this plan that we took on.

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And so we, the idea, this is the Architectural Forum that part of the Time-Life Fortune and Forum combined and we had to have, there would be an architectural and planning team and then you had to have an actual developer who would

00:11:52.160 - 00:12:07.760

then be willing to to join the team and assess the economic feasibility of it all, and, and then an actual piece of land that was really available. So just as old we're going to be

00:12:07.760 - 00:12:21.500

done. And we found the piece of land and had this developer from Washington and one of the things he, interestingly enough, he came out and what happens in a planned unit

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development you're paying the same price for every piece of, every acre in the in the piece. I mean you can, once you bought a large several hundred acres you're free to decide which land is

00:12:36.860 - 00:12:52.280

valuable which isn't, and you you don't have to take a very expensive piece to make a park out of, you start from the beginning and you can price it however you deem it necessary. You also don't, one of the things that typically an apartment house

00:12:52.280 - 00:13:00.700

only gets built where the land is so expensive that they can't build, you know, a lower house. So that adds to the cost of each apartment.

00:13:01.200 - 00:13:11.720

So if you build it on land that costs no more than the open space that was there before, that should, you can even it out. Then another thing that he said

00:13:11.720 - 00:13:28.060

about it, and he said, he said "I'd build the housing all at cost and rent it for that, as long as I have the market Center," in other words, he, he'd build the the shopping center-- That's where the money is.

00:13:29.280 - 00:13:40.550

And the money's there and particularly if he's built the houses, he's already got the market for the for this shopping center yeah and and or whoever he leases it to or whatever else.

00:13:40.550 - 00:13:56.520

So, and this is the good argument for not building the housing and then let someone else come in and take a piece of land right nearby and... So this was custom made for somebody who could really make

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profits. Well anyway, this thing was done, it was published in the Architectural Forum, and the date was January 1941, and since Fortune Magazine is part of the

00:14:10.760 - 00:14:28.660

same combine, the , hey published the plan among some other discussions of city planning in one of the issues, and that issue is October of '43. So that was a couple of couple of

00:14:28.660 - 00:14:46.060

years later. Now I don't know, what, I think when the Bannockburn concept came up and I see Mary Goldwater apparently as part of the organizing committee, I'm sure

00:14:46.060 - 00:14:52.940

that... Her name's thrown around a lot. I never knew exactly what position she was. Well she, and I have this letter, let's see if I can get it out

00:14:52.940 - 00:15:03.260

here. The letter from... Yeah. Both the application letter and

00:15:03.260 - 00:15:12.540

Frank Lloyd Wright's here. And the application is signed by, let's see, Mary Fox Herling President, Mary Goldwater Chairman of the Planning Committee.

00:15:12.980 - 00:15:28.120

So Mary knowing, and she must have gotten this issue of the forum and the... What is the date of this? '46. '46, so here we are '43, that's three years later.

00:15:30.300 - 00:15:43.940

She must have have shown them the plans, the planning group and they said that's just what we want. So yeah, So this was sort of the letter that went out to everyone that they were trying to get ideas

00:15:43.980 - 00:15:51.540

from. Yeah, and, and I don't know how many there were, and you probably have this in your file, I mean, how many architects were solicited.

00:15:51.540 - 00:16:08.260

Well, I hope I can find this. But I think in a way, as I say, I think we had a kind of an in on it because Mary having been part of the planning group was almost the, I guess she sort of talked them

00:16:08.260 - 00:16:32.060

into saying get a piece of land of this size where we can do this sort of thing, and this notion of the mixture providing for all the range of family sizes appealed to the, to the group. The letter from Frank Lloyd Wright I guess.

00:16:33.580 - 00:16:45.140

The standard letter was written to him. And it doesn't sound like a very insulting letter. It sounds reasonable to ask these questions. And I love his opening paragraph.

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He's never seen anything done cooperatively. Yes, and he can see the awareness of thi,s he has nothing against cooperatives but...So anyhow, but

00:17:05.500 - 00:17:14.860

then we-- You didn't know that of course when you signed up, did you? I mean, you didn't know of his response. Well, we were already, I was

00:17:14.860 - 00:17:25.260

already thinking, I think we were already working on it, more or less. I know we were there, when this--and had attended some of the cooperative meetings when it was

00:17:25.260 - 00:17:37.240

still being sort of put together. And I had a kind of a halfway contract with him already. And then someone, I think I was at

00:17:37.240 - 00:17:47.340

the meeting when they, someone said, "You haven't asked for John Smith or Frank Lloyd Wright. What about?" well, we hadn't thought of it, but we will, so they did.

00:17:50.660 - 00:17:55.580

Boy it's really snide. Isn't it snide? Oh, yes. Yes.

00:17:57.740 - 00:18:14.280

And you know, showing this to some of my friends, what we're doing here is discussing the letter, the reply from Frank Lloyd Wright. He misspells a couple of words here and runs another one together.

00:18:14.380 - 00:18:23.940

Yeah, his grammar is terrible. I think he typed this himself. Because I think if his secretary typed it, he would storm in and correct this.

00:18:24.520 - 00:18:38.940

I think so too, because... And he also says...there was a word that he had, that... He didn't even spell Vermont

00:18:38.940 - 00:18:41.960

correctly. No, that was the one I was looking for. Yeah.

00:18:43.040 - 00:18:48.140

And another one runs together, the word. So I think that... And he has shipping, and then he wrote shopping.

00:18:48.760 - 00:18:57.600

And he wasn't going to bother rewriting it just for your group. I hope they, I'd like to have a copy of this.

00:18:58.040 - 00:19:05.660

I'm sure they have one. That's the only one I have left here. I'll make you a copy of a couple of things here. But that is very funny, that is very funny.

00:19:05.660 - 00:19:15.340

And I might make you a copy of this. Or I might... I could give you this one. I have the original. We didn't need him anyway, right?

00:19:15.340 - 00:19:32.500

We got you, so. Yeah. Well, so we started working on it and this piece of property, the, was a golf course and it had been developed, I wouldn't say it was

00:19:32.500 - 00:19:46.400

an earlier version of a planned unit development. I'm sure that the developer of the golf course then had the lot surrounding it, sold as things looking on permanent open space. All those old Wilson Lane houses.

00:19:46.400 - 00:20:02.580

Yes, the Wilson Lane things. And so obviously when it came up to take the golf course, their permanent open space and have it subdivided for a mixed use, they were not very enthusiastic about it.

00:20:02.860 - 00:20:18.660

And, and the area was zoned for single family residences. So, we went through, we developed the plans, we started the plan and, and actually worked it out to try to have a selling point to show how it would be done.

00:20:18.660 - 00:20:36.500

In fact, along Wilson Lane, there would be detached houses on lots similar in size to, and these would be the more expensive ones probably as a starter, and we wanted to show what we do and so on, and then hopefully we could

00:20:36.500 - 00:20:54.120

move into other types, as the rest of the properties developed, and they had the little valley from the houses right on Wilson Lane to separate them from the rest of this. But, and then we had a hearing in the Montgomery County Planning

00:20:56.040 - 00:21:08.000

Commission that was held in a local school and we had invited them. This is a planner that I had known in California, and he was now the planner for Westchester County in

00:21:08.000 - 00:21:24.620

New York. And a very up-graded community. And, but he had been, I knew him in San Francisco, and he was one of the early planners when planning really was not one of

00:21:24.620 - 00:21:36.360

these required things of every city with a whole staff, and he had, I think he had several towns, Monterey, he had a small office with one secretary. He'd go to a meeting there with

00:21:36.360 - 00:21:46.180

the city council and make proposals and so on. That's the, that's the level in which planning was going on in those days. Of course now that every little

00:21:46.180 - 00:22:06.980

city has required to have a planning staff. Well anyway, so we had the opportunity to present this scheme to the, to the citizens of the surrounded the area of Bannockburn, almost-- and we invited Hugh Pomeroy, was his

00:22:06.980 - 00:22:21.420

planner's name, came down with white piping on his vest even, you know, and almost--I don't think he ever had a cutaway, but he was looking very Wall Street and so forth. And he gave a very impassioned description of "this was the wave

00:22:21.420 - 00:22:32.860

of the future," and all the reasons, all the arguments for how it took care of the different size of families and different income groups and so forth. And in fact, his talk was so good

00:22:32.860 - 00:22:50.500

that the that the audience all applauded at the end. Then they voted almost unanimously to reject the zoning change. In other words, I don't-- And this was, the board was probably made up of these very conservative sort of rural, I mean Montgomery

00:22:50.500 - 00:22:55.580

County, that's the political unit, right? Oh, yes, right exactly. There was no Bethesda, there's no... No, no, no, no. Yeah.

00:22:55.580 - 00:23:08.940

And so they thought that, "That's a nice idea, why don't you try it someplace, else, And we'll wait to see how it comes out" or something. And I think they almost said something like that.

00:23:08.940 - 00:23:15.140

But they knew that there was no pressure on them to, they didn't have to give in. Exactly. And so they didn't.

00:23:15.760 - 00:23:33.540

So then that, well, what was decided that we'd go ahead with the, with the pilot project along Wilson Lane and that maybe, then we see what happens next. Also this means that this is about into the second year for my

00:23:33.820 - 00:23:49.340

involvement with nothing happening yet, you see. And although we did, we were working on the houses, but it had, it was a pretty low key, and it began to be the problem of how long could we string this out.

00:23:50.660 - 00:24:03.300

And with-- I had just gotten out of the Navy. I was still in Puerto Rico in the Navy when the correspondence about my getting this commission and so

00:24:03.300 - 00:24:28.320

forth, Mary Goldwater writing to me that they'd met and that they were interested in the, our Fort Drive idea, that, that was the name of the first-- This image house, where is the fixer, the mold, the volume actually created? Well, the fact that it vanishes

00:24:28.660 - 00:24:40.400

when the brain is injured proves that it must have a foundation in the nervous system. In the case of the dimension, first of all, it must be somewhere in the higher reaches of the

00:24:40.400 - 00:24:52.880

nervous system. For instance, patients who are unfortunate enough to suffer a stroke in addition to an amputation, often find that the phantom vanishes at the same

00:24:52.880 - 00:25:09.440

moment as the stroke. Well, the fact is that in a sense we, all of us, we all of us have phantom limbs, but in our case, the phantom, the translucent volume that Jelly molds, coincides

00:25:10.120 - 00:25:27.900

with an actual limb which fills it up. It's almost as if we slip ourselves into a translucent glove of the possibility itself. In the late 1950s, neurosurgeons

00:25:28.280 - 00:25:44.120

like Wilder Penfield in Canada discovered a way of locating and drawing the outlines of this image in the living brain. Using local anesthetics, they found that it was possible to open the skull of conscious patients, which gave them an unprecedented

00:25:44.340 - 00:25:55.320

opportunity for hearing the body image, as it were, speak for itself. Now, these investigations were not done out of gratuitous curiosity, since they were carried out during

00:25:55.320 - 00:26:08.720

essential surgery. By stimulating the exposed surface of the brain point by point, Penfield and his colleagues found that although there was no local sensation in the brain itself, the

00:26:08.720 - 00:26:20.140

conscious patient invariably reported peculiar feelings in remote parts of the body. And very slowly, they were able to map a consistent image of the body.

00:26:21.360 - 00:26:32.580

Now the point is that this map is not drawn to scale. Its proportions are not the same as those of the physique which it represents. Certain parts seem to get more

00:26:32.580 - 00:26:45.220

than their fair share of representation. The face and especially the mouth are represented over a much wider area of brain than the leg is. The representation of the hand and

00:26:45.220 - 00:26:59.380

the thumb is vastly out of proportion to their anatomical size. In fact, if you think of this rather crude image as a map of the body, you'd have to regard it as

00:26:59.380 - 00:27:16.760

an electoral map of the country, where the size of each region is related not so much to geographical spread, but to the number of parliamentary constituencies which it has. Now, on an ordinary scale map of Great Britain, of course, Scotland

00:27:16.820 - 00:27:32.360

would appear larger than the south of England. But if we draw a map in which each parliamentary constituency has a square inch all to itself, then the size of Scotland shrinks and the south of England, which sends a large number of members to

00:27:32.360 - 00:27:50.660

Parliament, appears quite vast by comparison. Well, this is more or less what happens in the brain map. Because of their enormous functional importance, the mouth and the hands have many more points representing them than the

00:27:50.660 - 00:28:04.060

leg or the trunk have. And that's what accounts for the strange anamorphic experience of the image which we feel. It's also what accounts for that large hole which you feel in your

00:28:04.060 - 00:28:14.360

tooth with the tip of your tongue. It's not that the hole is particularly large, but because the parliamentary lobby of the tongue which feels the hole is enormous.

00:28:15.660 - 00:28:26.160

And since the hand also has a disproportionately large representation in the brain, fevers can affect the way it feels. You feel it as your hands are ten

00:28:26.160 - 00:28:35.940

times larger than they are. They're not really bigger in the sense that they just grow to a large size, but they just get fat. They, like your hands, blowing up like a balloon.

00:28:36.760 - 00:28:45.480

How far up the arm does the feeling go? Just about, just as far as here. And you put your hands together, and it's still, you still feel it.

00:28:45.480 - 00:28:59.060

And you play tricks with your hands, move your fingers about and you still feel your hands greatly fat like a balloon, as if they've blown up like a balloon. My hands are normal weight, they're just very, very fat and

00:28:59.060 - 00:29:05.060

big. They look small, but the feeling goes to your brain. You look at them and you can see

00:29:05.060 - 00:29:15.340

them as small, but your brain says they're large. Right then. How are these parliamentary representatives in the brain actually linked up to the

00:29:15.340 - 00:29:32.840

constituencies which they represent? Well, the electoral map is not simply a picture of the body, it's really a, well, it's a neurological projection of it. And the reason why we feel pain in the appropriate part of our

00:29:32.840 - 00:29:49.380

self-image is because there's a nervous landline between the sense organs in the skin and the muscles and the parliamentary representative which answers for it. Once they enter the central nervous system, these fibers run

00:29:49.380 - 00:30:01.620

parallel to ones which are coming from other areas of the body. But as they travel upwards towards the head, the fibers are grouped according to their source. The fibers which are coming from

00:30:01.620 - 00:30:15.720

the leg are found in the middle part of the spinal cord, whereas those from the arm and head are found on the outer side of the cord. Now at the top of what's called

00:30:15.720 - 00:30:18.280

the brain stem, all these...