Peter Blake; architect (lovely Wash. Post obit)
Hyfler/Rosner
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 7, 2006; B07
Peter Blake, 86, a modernist architect, a prolific writer
and a former professor and dean at Catholic University, died
of complications from a respiratory infection Dec. 5 at
Connecticut Hospice in Branford, Conn.
A lifelong adherent of the modernist movement in
architecture, he believed in the beauty of clean lines and
the elegance of simple, functional forms -- in both his
architecture and his writing. With Le Corbusier, Mies van
der Rohe and other modernist icons he knew and admired, he
also believed that architecture had a social function, that
its purpose was to make life better for those who lived and
worked in the structures that architects create.
The "modern movement" -- the label he preferred to
"modernist movement" -- was much more than a style, he
insisted. "It was a commitment to help change the world,
nothing less," he wrote in his memoir, "No Place Like
Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept" (1993).
The author of 17 books and numerous columns and articles, he
was a man of many opinions, strongly held and expressed in
lively, engaging prose. "He believed it was possible to say
something serious and be accessible," said his son, Casey
Blake, a professor of American studies at Columbia
University.
His most notable books include "The Master Builders: Le
Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright" (1960), a
history of modern architecture still used in classes, and
"God's Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's
Landscape" (1964). The latter decried the influence of the
billboard industry, polluters and perpetrators of sprawl.
"This is a guy who needs to be better known," said Alastair
Gordon, a writer and architecture critic. "He was the voice
of a whole generation of designers and architects."
As a practicing architect, he designed more than 50
buildings, including a house he built for himself in 1954 in
the middle of a potato field on eastern Long Island. He
called it the Pin Wheel House, because of its shape and the
way the four walls could be slid open on steel tracks. Only
24 feet square, the two-bedroom house was raised four feet
off the ground to provide a distant view of the ocean.
During hurricane season, it could be closed up like a box.
With the Pin Wheel House and other designs, he deferred to
the natural landscape. It was a lesson he learned from
Wright, a man characterized, in Mr. Blake's words, by
"monumental arrogance," "overbearing ignorance" and "a
talent simply unequaled in this century, and in much of the
architecture of the past."
Other significant Blake structures included a mental
hospital in Binghamton, N.Y., an experimental theater at
Vanderbilt University and an old gymnasium at Catholic
University that he transformed into the Edward M. Crough
Center for Architectural Studies. He was an honorable
mention entrant in the 1982 competition for the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial.
He was born Peter Jost Blach in Berlin to a prosperous
Jewish family. In 1933, the newly elected Nazi government
kicked the family out of the country, and Mr. Blake ended up
in London. He received an undergraduate degree in
mathematics from the University of London in 1938 and
studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of
Architecture in London in 1939.
Receiving a scholarship to the school of architecture at the
University of Pennsylvania, he became a protege and lifelong
admirer of Louis Kahn, one of America's most influential
modern architects. He received his architecture degree from
Penn in 1941 and a degree in architecture, with honors, from
Pratt Institute in 1949.
In 1944, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen, changed his
name from Blach to Blake and enlisted in the Army. After
training as an intelligence officer at Camp Ritchie in
Maryland, he was shipped to Europe, where he was among the
first U.S. troops to enter Berlin, shortly after Hitler
killed himself.
Mr. Blake stayed in the Army until 1947, when he returned to
New York. He soon settled on the eastern end of Long Island
among a group of artists, architects and writers that
included Jackson Pollack, Robert Motherwell and Willem De
Kooning. Pollack became a close friend and major influence.
"It was a great time to be alive, and all of us sensed it,"
Mr. Blake recalled in his memoir. "With the war over, the
country -- indeed, the world -- seemed ready to accept new
ideas, in all the arts, that had somehow failed to develop
during the oppressive thirties."
In 1948, Mr. Blake became head of the Museum of Modern Art's
department of architecture and design. From 1950 to 1972, he
was first a writer for and then editor of the influential
journal Architectural Forum. After its demise, he created a
short-lived successor, Architecture Plus. It folded in 1975.
In the late 1950s, Mr. Blake, Buckminster Fuller and other
prominent American architects were part of a design team
that put together an exhibition of American cultural
achievements to be shown in Moscow, including a typical
suburban house. Its model kitchen was where, in 1959, Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev famously shook his fist at
then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon in the Kitchen Debate.
As Mr. Blake described the incident, "the vice president of
the United States, a visitor to a foreign land that he knew
only from hearsay, took it upon himself to deliver an
arrogant lecture to his host -- a man who was totally
mystified as to what had so suddenly made his guest so
ill-mannered."
Mr. Blake became chairman of the department of architecture
and planning at Catholic University in 1979 and also taught
there until 1991.
In "No Place Like Utopia," he described Washington as "a
city almost devoid of culture." Washington Post architecture
critic Benjamin Fogery had suggested a few years earlier
that "he seems to have hated the place," although Mr.
Blake's son, noting that his father had many friends in
Washington, described it as "more of a love-hate
relationship."
He moved to Connecticut after leaving Catholic University
and continued to write books and articles, as well as
regular columns for New York magazine and Interior Design.
The modern movement, to Mr. Blake's great regret, gave way
to postmodernism, which he considered an abomination, and
then to deconstructivism and other "isms." In his view, they
all failed to live up to the ideals that he believed were
intrinsic to the modern movement.
"Wouldn't it be refreshing to start from scratch -- to start
from the First Principles that were once so crystal-clear?"
he mused in the closing line of his memoir.
His marriages, to Martha Howard, Petty Nelson Blake and
Susan Tamulevich, ended in divorce.
Survivors include a daughter from his first marriage,
Christina Blake Oliver of Newton, Mass., and his son, from
the second marriage, of New York; a sister; five
grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.