His transcendent vision
The LAMBENT LIGHT OF early evening fell through the restaurant window, illuminating Coy Howard’s face and clarifying the solid red of his shirt. Even the white of the small round table was set ablaze by a strangely magical incandescence. Light was the reason we were there, not this light in particular, but light in general, or, more specifically, Southern California light. I wanted to talk about it, and Howard, a Venice architect, was the person I most wanted to talk about it with. I knew him not by his work but by his words.
I had come upon a quote by him from a 1998 New Yorker magazine piece called “L.A. Glows,” in which he spoke in dazzling, trenchant terms about a subject that captured my fancy. As much as what Howard said, I liked the way he said it, the aural evocations -- “diaphanous soup,” “a glowing thickness to the world” -- stirring in me a sudden, instinctive knowing, a shock of recognition. L.A light had been a wonderment to me since I’d moved here nearly two years ago, but I could never quite articulate just what it was that captivated and mystified me about its quality.
Howard had articulated it, and in so inventive and lyric a fashion that I yearned to hear him speak of it firsthand. I called him on impulse one Sunday afternoon. Would he mind getting together some time for a little chat? Sure, he’d be happy to, he told me in his unvarnished Texas accent. We joined forces in Santa Monica, where, for hours, we talked. Toward the end of the conversation, I decided I’d better own up.
“I’m afraid I don’t know your work.”
“That’s OK,” he answered. “I don’t read your section.”
A few days later, by request, Howard sent me a Rizzoli book, “Three California Houses: The Homes of Max Palevsky,” and a catalog from a gallery show. By then I knew that he was not only an architect and a professor at Southern California Institute of Architecture, but also a furniture designer.
Opening the catalog, I saw pictures of startlingly beautiful, somehow otherworldly objects I couldn’t at first identify, but which I took to be sculptures until I read the descriptions: Table, Macassar ebony, cast bronze and glass; Table Lamp, fabricated brass wire; Ceiling Fixture, handblown glass and cast brass fittings. More tables, more lamps, cherry sofas, wenge sofas, maple sofas, bubinga sofas. There was an organic, anthropomorphic aspect to these pieces. Any minute now, they were going to walk right off the page, directly toward me. They variously called to mind, sea creatures, graceful insects, space beings -- all vibrating with a fulgent inner life.
There was clearly a lot more to Howard than had met the ear. I read his bio. Furniture in permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; graphics and posters in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Consultant on the L.A.’s Getty Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and on the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Featured in 10 books. Broad range of awards. Chair of the Environmental Arts Program at Otis College of Art and Design in L.A.
Then I opened the book, flipping past Palevsky’s Palm Springs house by mid-century modernist architect Craig Ellwood, and his Malibu house, with interior renovations by Italian architect Ettore Sottsass, and on to the Mediterranean-style mansion with interiors by, as described on the jacket flap, “the avant-garde architect Coy Howard.” Here were photographs of rooms that had an eerie effect on the psyche. I didn’t even attempt to analyze or understand them cognitively: They simply provoked a response that, in turn, provoked a need to turn to them again. And yet again. Something touched me. But what? I met with him once more.
The facts were these: Back in the mid-’80s, the major art collector, philanthropist and computer pioneer Max Palevsky, one of the largest shareholders of Intel Corp., approached Howard with a proposition: redesign the interior of his 1928 Italianate villa in Beverly Hills to correct the choppiness of the floor plan, the awkward angles,and make it a place worthy of housing his museum-quality Arts and Crafts furniture. Howard turned him down. Why, Palevsky demanded to know. “Because, Max, you’re crazy and I’m crazier,” he told him. “We’ll kill each other.” Palevsky persisted, proposing a deal that no one, certainly not a maverick artist-architect, could refuse: free rein. “Just amaze me,” was all Palevsky asked.
A mere nine months later, amaze him he did. Howard created a work of architectural art like no other. He has effectively dissolved the boundaries between furniture and architecture, between design, art and craft, and, most intriguingly, between the rational and the radical.
“I was drawn to Coy because he’s very cerebral,” Palevsky explained. “He’s got a great eye; he’s a stickler, a real perfectionist with detail, and he’s brilliant at what he does. The house speaks for itself in the positive. It’s the work of a serious, mature architect -- and there ain’t many of those around.”
Naturally, I needed to see it firsthand, just as I’d needed to hear Howard firsthand. The viewing was arranged. I reacted in exclamation points. Everywhere I looked, the work held a contained energy, a hint of a hidden urgency, something to come. Each piece of furniture had a powerful physical presence and each piece begged to be touched. So, too, did the wood features, and the marble details, and even the bathroom tiles.
This was an intensely introspective house. The reaction I had was simultaneously intellectual and emotional (“I always look for the thing that unites the head and heart,” said Howard), and it was both quieting and disquieting. It was like looking someone directly in the eyes for more than a few seconds, wanting the intimacy of the other and yet fearing it, so turning away.
A range of conflicting sensations ran through me: forlorn to profound belonging, desire to lack of desire, smooth to jagged, ordered to chaotic, rational to sensuous. Herewith, in living color, a Jungian enactment of the dramatic tension of the opposites. Psychic archetypes writ bold and material. Yin/yang, anima/animus, feminine/masculine, dark/light, mind/body, call it what you will: They are the primal opposing forces we seek to integrate all our lives. I felt like staying and I felt like leaving.
I sensed that Howard might be able to tell me why, but wouldn’t. Already he had said to me, at our second dinner: “I don’t enjoy talking about my work. So let’s talk about something else, or I’ll get bored.” Meaning he didn’t like offering analysis. That’s for the viewer, and besides, as he remarked on another theme, “The ground of our existence is mystery -- it isn’t knowledge.” So in other words, if you don’t get it, as Bob Dylan once sagely proclaimed in so many words, it wasn’t meant for you. But I did get it on an intuitive, visceral level, if, admittedly, I couldn’t quite define it -- just as I couldn’t define the L.A. light. It was pre-language. No matter. I got something else, and that was the psychological shimmer.
Here was an amazing vision, manifested by a just-as-amazing craftsmanship. Howard engaged two now-longtime cohorts, Terry Sutherland, a master wood craftsman who works at L.A.’s oldest lumber yard, Bohnhoff Lumber Co., and Wayne Smith, a self-employed master tile-and-stone craftsman, to make real his fantastic imaginings. So artistic and exacting are Sutherland and Smith in their work, they make the most absurdly complex job look as if it were pulled off with a fluid ease. That’s the telltale sign of a master, and it smacks of Old World.
Smith speaks with great pride and passion about every aspect of tiling (“See how refined the grout joint looks?”) and Sutherland with a quiet authority about wood crafting. (“Anybody can make something once, but to make the exact same thing again to complete a pair, now that’s difficult.”)
Just as difficult, said Howard, is finding craftsmen of this caliber; they’re the proverbial vanishing breed. What the trio has executed in Palevsky’s house is wondrous. They have created an ode to authenticity -- authentic work always explores anew the possibilities -- and, as such, have shown us the true power of love and commitment to art and craft. It recalls, in fact, the Arts and Crafts movement, which itself recalled medieval guilds and monasteries.
“Max’s house was like a laboratory,” said Howard. “I grew a lot and acquired a lot of skills, like woodworking, so I became more fluent. It broadened my range of work. Max was incredibly generous, very trusting and even fatherly -- you’re gonna get in there and get it right. And if you don’t, welll, you’ll start over.”
Despite its moments of high drama, there is so little ego in evidence in the Palevsky house, you might be wrongly inclined to think you’ve missed the point, or the team has missed the boat. “Essential work transcends the ego,” Howard said. “It’s work you can’t put your finger on.” But stick around for a little while, and the utter luminosity of the house will blind you. It makes no difference that you might not -- probably wouldn’t want to -- live here, and even if you did, you couldn’t. This, after all, is the very personal statement of two men with keen intellects and refined sensibilities who married their sophisticated aesthetics and made it a singular work of art. “I’m very aware that most things I do are maybe too subtle and outside the sensibility of most people,” said Howard. “But that’s the price you pay when you do this kind of work.”
On the surface, the house can appear linear, classical, perhaps even cold, referencing its own formal history. But on a deeper level, it calls up powerful emotions that can, at first, be unsettling. It is fraught with symbolic meanings. “You’ll spend a long time trying to figure out the symbolism,” said Palevsky. “You might get a clue and then you might be fooled.”
Let the multiple interpretations begin. The living room overwhelms with its robust, rather Gothic ceiling that evokes not only baronial halls but memories and associations far more provocative: the attic space of your childhood, nature’s fingers gripping the house, the ribs of an animal, a lobster’s pincers, wings, schooners. In the dining room, by contrast, the thinner, flatter wood of the ceiling doesn’t touch the walls, and therefore seems to defy gravity, conveying a quieter sense of lightness or floatingness.
In the entry dividing the living and dining rooms, splits and pairs of inlaid marble suggest, when looking up, the form of a basilica, and then, almost as immediately, a geometrical abstraction of a human figure straddling two platforms -- the head on the ceiling, the arms stretching from one wall to the other, the heart a window that is both closed and open. It brought to mind a Howard metaphor.
“My work resonates between abstraction and figuration, in the extreme middle. It’s like being a trapeze artist. There are two easy things to do on a trapeze wire. One is to stay near the platform, and the other is to race across and allow the momentum to create the balance. The hardest thing is to go to the middle, stop and perform some amazing act. But that’s the only interesting place to be.”
The inlays of the marble themselves constitute a kind of metaphysical geometry, connecting, splitting off, reaching toward each other, intersecting, penetrating, splitting off again;dependent, independent, interdependent. They remain singular -- experience me -- but also fuse, and in that fusion become the transcendent other. We are one. And everywhere a translucent light, of which Coy Howard is not only a student but an eloquent messenger, emanates from the most intimate regions of the work.
This is a house that seems somehow to have emerged full grown and yet, paradoxically, is emerging still -- a house of radiant luminosity that, in the end, resists the limitations of definition.
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Barbara King is editor of the Home section. She can be reached at barbara.king@latimes.com
