Architect Is on the Level When He Knocks Conventional Design

It was late December, and architect Bart Prince was paying one of his regular visits to the site of a residence he was designing in Los Altos--a house that looks strikingly like a Viking ship.

He was approached by a man from the local building department, who handed him a package. “We decided to pitch in to buy you a Christmas present,” the man said. “I don’t suppose you know how to operate this.”

Inside was a level, a simple instrument that determines whether a surface is exactly horizontal.

Prince told the story during an Art Forum lecture at Rancho Santiago College on Monday afternoon, and his audience of students and visitors laughed heartily. They had been viewing slide after slide of buildings that seemed to have no straight lines--buildings that swooped, radiated, curved and flowed in bizarre and fantastic configurations. They looked like space ships, caterpillars, bat wings. . . .

“Eventually people give ‘em a name,” Prince said in his friendly, plain-spoken way. But, he added, specific reference “is not something I’m trying to do.”

Prince, 41, whose firm is based in Albuquerque, N.M., is best known in these parts for completing former associate Bruce Goff’s design for the $13-million Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Opened last September, the structure--which houses the art collection of oilman Joe D. Price--has been praised as a bravura stroke of imagination and disparaged as a ‘50s coffee shop gone amok. With its prow-shaped roof suspended by cables, twin cylindrical towers and translucent paper-like walls, the pistachio-green pavilion has an undeniably exotic air.

How does the building relate to the rest of the museum complex, someone wanted to know. “Well, they don’t seem to relate,” Prince said easily. “My feeling was to try to get as far away from it as I could.”

Architecture seems to have come naturally to him, he said. At age 6 or 7, he drew buildings that won him a blue ribbon at the New Mexico State Fair. At 15 he did some tract-home design work for a general contractor and learned, he said, “about the way you’re supposed to build.”

Although Prince has designed houses on small lots and with limited budgets, many of his clients seem either to be princely Arabs or moneyed Southwesterners with independent, don’t-fence-me-in attitudes. They appear for the most part to be people largely innocent of either conventional or purist notions of taste. Owners of generous tracts of land want to maximize their sweeping desert views.

It doesn’t seem coincidental that Price, most frequently criticized about the architectural context of his work, frequently works in these wide-open spaces. (“Context,” Prince sniffed, “is usually used as an excuse to do more of what’s already there.”)

One of his clients was a New Mexico lawyer who told Prince he didn’t want to be reminded of his office when he went home. His house became “a separate sculptural element” with an oddball scimitar-shaped roof and cantilevered elements rising above the drab pseudo-adobe buildings already on the site.

“I think it’s important that a building not just be a profile against the sky but be integrated with the sky,” Prince said. Inside the house, floors curve up to become the walls, and walls curve into the ceilings. Prince said the inspiration for that idea came from the client’s remark that he liked to take portrait photos with a seamless background. (The probable nature of those photo sessions became clear when Prince flashed up a slide of a mural the client commissioned for one room, which featured a kitschy nude model.)

Another client was a housewife who spent much of her time in the kitchen. She told Prince, “I don’t want anyone to budge without me knowing it!” So he designed the kitchen in the middle of the house. But the woman also claimed she wanted a “colonial” home.

“I don’t want to spend my time doing an imitation of a particular style,” Prince told the audience. First, however, he asked the woman what she meant by colonial. “I want something big, with high entrance doors and lots of wood,” she said.

Prince smiled at the audience. “Well, I can do a ‘colonial’ house,” he drawled.

He is not fazed when people looking at houses he has done for other clients say, “I wouldn’t want to live in that!” In fact, he said, he is likely to agree that he wouldn’t want to live there either. He believes that “an architect shouldn’t have a style per se; each work should be an individual creation for the client.”

Does that mean Prince would cater to any client whim? “The only time I’d be prejudiced is if someone came and said, ‘I’d like a typical tract-type house.”