THE BEST YEARS SENIORS : Small-Town Girl : At 70-Something, Ojai Architect Has Too Much Experience and Is Having Too Much Fun to Retire
Some seniors are doing what they’ve always been doing, only now they do it better.
One such is 70-something architect Zelma Wilson, who has to her credit some of Ojai’s most distinctive buildings: City Hall, St. Andrews Church, the Arcade Plaza Mall, Meditation Mount, the Racquet Club and the Krishnamurti school, Oak Grove.
Wilson, who has been living and working in Ojai since 1964, will be one of the speakers at UCLA’s architectural forum May 5. For her, the subjects of the conference panels are particularly pertinent: “The Myth of the Male Genius,” “The Discrepancy Between Excellence and Fame” and “Fame and Who Gets It.”
A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (there are only 2,000 in the United States) and a multiple winner of Ventura County AIA awards, Wilson is known for her originality. Some time ago she combined two venerable Spanish houses to form the Ojai City Hall, and recently she turned an old-fashioned service station on Ojai’s main street into a charming complex bursting with beauty and health: a flower shop and an organic fruit and vegetable store.
“When I graduated from the USC School of Architecture,” Wilson said, “I was the only girl in my class. In those days, women architects were rare. And when there was a woman architect, it was kept a deep dark secret. Julia Morgan did Hearst Castle. She did her drawings in the basement. And she designed 800 other buildings including several on the Stanford campus, but she died unknown, alone and penniless.”
“I wanted to be an architect from the time I was 11 years old,” she said. “After my father died, my mother built a house for my sister and me. I was there through it all, from the day the contractor came over with a book of many different style houses we were to choose from.”
“They cost anywhere between $3,000 and $5,000. That’s all we could afford. There were months of measuring, laying foundations, putting in pipes, planing wood, plastering, painting. I played hooky to watch. It was by far the most fascinating thing that had happened to me. I knew then what I wanted to do. For a female to say she wanted to be an architect was like saying, ‘I want to walk on the moon,’ especially at Santa Rosa High School. Yes, I’m a Ventura County girl.”
The small-town girl lived in Europe for many years during the communist scare period of the 1950s because her husband, Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Wilson, was blacklisted in Hollywood. Zelma Wilson was unable to practice her profession abroad, although she did postgraduate work in architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.
On her return from France, she worked harder and faster to make up for the lost years. Besides the public buildings, she built many homes in and around Ojai, designed the library and Senior Citizen Center for the city of Simi and taught at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo School of Architecture.
She sees challenges in the three-year moratorium on building in Ojai due to the water shortage. Many people, she says, will buy houses that aren’t quite right for them and will remodel.
“Architects usually hate that kind of work, but I love it. It’s like a puzzle and what you do can help so much. The way a house is laid out determines what your life is like. That’s one of the lessons that comes with time.”
Asked if she intends to retire, she replies to the question with a question: “Did you know that one of the most striking and innovative buildings in America, New York’s Guggenheim Museum, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright when he was 76? And Philip Johnson who just did a sensational office mall for London is 83. He claims he’s a better architect now than he ever was before.”
“That’s exactly what I feel,” she said. “There’s no substitute for experience. My instincts are surer, and I’m having more fun, thanks to the accumulation of knowledge that comes with age. Philip Johnson came right out with it! ‘It takes a long time to find ways to keep roofs from leaking.’ What he meant,” she says, “is that once you have all this experience, it’s a shame to waste it. And not just professional experience--the experience of life. Today I can build a better house because I’m a mother and a grandmother.”
“People used to dream about retirement. They thought it would be a time when they’d have the leisure to do the wonderful things they always wanted to do.” Wilson pushes her silver hair out of her gray-blue eyes.
“When I was in France and couldn’t work because I was a foreigner, I had a long enforced period of doing ‘the wonderful things.’ I lunched, I shopped, I tried out sports and hobbies, I read, I learned French, I sipped cocktails. But I felt empty and ungratified. That’s why I laugh at the word retire .”
She looks around at her office walls covered with blueprints, clutches her drawing board. “They’ll have to carry me out of here.”