WORDS Brent Rosen
Butcher shops, artisanal pickles, urban agriculture, craft beer, millinery -- at best people view these as charming anachronisms, at worst as the domain of the silly hipster. But 50 or 60 years ago, meat came from the butcher shop (“I’m like Sam the butcher bringing Alice the meat”), all pickles were “artisanal,” agriculture did not mean factory farms, most beer remained regionally, if not locally produced, and hats were still made by hand and sold to stylish people of both sexes. It’s not just work, but our culture that has been outsourced to foreign lands or computerized to the point that no human element remains.
In our rush to maximize efficiency and computerize everything, we have certainly made progress. But progress is not always progressive, and some boons are sordid. The return of the butcher shop, urban agriculture, local beer and the like feels somewhat transgressive, as if it is taboo to buck the trend of the high-efficiency/low cost model. Some of the pleasure that comes from shopping at the farmer’s market -- beyond meeting the farmers and the sense of community you get when you know where you food comes from -- is that in truth you should not be there. It would be easier, cheaper, to just buy your tomatoes at the grocery store. You feel like you’ve broken the rules when your tomatoes come from a blue-haired old lady who lives outside Clanton.
In that same spirit of rule-breaking sits the architecture firm McApline Tankersley. For the past 30 years, the firm founded by Bobby McAlpine has refused to be pushed into the high-efficiency, low cost model. The first thing I noticed after walking in the door of the McAlpine Tankersely offices was the absence of computers. Ok, that’s a lie. I knew a little about the architecture firm, had heard off-hand remarks about the firm’s use of hand drawings, heard that the cost of those drawings was quite high. Computer aided drafting is the norm in the architecture world. The computer helps you draw straight exact lines, assists in developing drawings with the proper proportions, allows for easy correction of mistakes and saves the architect countless hours crouching atop a drafting table. In truth, I looked for computers when I walked in the door, ready for rumors to be confirmed or dispelled. Anyway… there are almost no computers in McAlpine Tankersley’s Offices.
According to Chris Tippett, a McAlpine Tankersley architect, the firm’s choice to draw by hand is both “happenstance and purposeful.” It’s happenstance in the sense that the principals of the firm prefer to draw by hand, and therefore ask their employees to work in their preferred medium. But it’s also purposeful. John Sease, the other architect I spoke with for this story explained that “there is a tactile nature to the drawing part of it that makes it easier and more real than it would be just a line on a screen. It’s a romantic thing. Even a modern house has romance to it. That romance gets lost in a computer drawing.” While hand-drawing architectural plans results in a substantial increase in cost, McAlpine Tankersley believes the value of hand-drawing makes those costs worthwhile. Apparently, so do McAlpine Tankersley clients.
Now, clever reader, you may be wondering how an analog architecture firm can find suitable employees in a digital world. University architecture programs are fully computerized for the most part, with learning to draft by hand akin to learning Latin: It’s fine as an exercise in the humanities, but has limited practical application. Tippett explained that even though hand drawing is becoming a lost art, students still learn to hand draw if they take advantage of study abroad programs. “Study abroad programs don’t use computers -- they have a sketch book and they are out drawing,” Tippet said, and it is during these abroad programs that students have a “first experience being able to look at something, to figure out the proportions on a piece of paper.” Tippett thinks that once you start drawing by hand, you are inspired to draw more. One need not be a great artist to draw by hand, but someone with an eye for drawing can put art into their drafting. Or, as Sease put it, “The technique, the quirks, each individual’s drawings are like each individuals handwriting.”
McAlpine Tankersley’s quest to find qualified young architects is aided by the firm’s relationship to Auburn. All but three of the firm’s architects in the Montgomery office attended Auburn, and many of them were actually taught by Bobby McAlpine himself. While McApline no longer teaches, Auburn’s study abroad program -- where students get their first taste of hand drawing -- is directed by Scott Finn, whose partner works for McApline Tankersley. This pipeline helps McApline Tankersley identify potential interns who can draw, who have a good work ethic, and who have promise. Often, those interns end up becoming full-time employees.
Bobby McAlpine has a favorite saying, something he impressed upon his students and stresses with his colleagues: “Why it is is what it is.” This simple aphorism drives the firm’s entire approach. During early interviews with clients, it is the architects job to figure out the “why.” A client says, “I want a large dining room so that I can regularly host dinner parties for at least 12 people.” The why -- entertaining -- leads to the what -- a dining room sufficient to graciously host parties. Start with the dining room table. If you want to seat 12 people, how large must the room be accommodate a table of that size? What size windows are proportionate? How high must the ceilings be to create the feeling of grandeur the client desires? Is the dining room sufficiently important to this client that it can serve as the heart of the house? Should the entire home revolve around this room, or would the client prefer a living room in that role? If the dining room’s dimensions are X, what dimensions will the remaining rooms need to be in order for the entire house to have the proper proportions? These are the “why” questions that make the house “what” it will be for the client.
One thing all McApline Tankersley projects share, regardless of individual clients’ desire, is a grounding in classical architecture. McApline Tankersley pulls from Europeans influences, whether English, French, or Mediterranean, but then puts a modern gloss on those classic forms. History creates a base and informs the finished product, no different than how a guitar player must learn the chords before its possible to jam. Using classic structures and forms as a base makes it easier for the firm’s architects to solve problems. There are dozens of books of classical architecture in the firm’s library and sprinkled throughout the office, and the architects can look back to the past to see how a current problem can be solved.
Sease explained that each unique project shares some common problems. “Every house must have a kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, and each house has its own heart and soul. That said, you still need to figure out where the sink will go, where the shower will go, and how all the rooms will interact.” Another frequent problem results when a client’s wish list includes “laundry rooms, mud rooms, dog rooms, home gyms, etc.” and “the tail begins to wag the dog” according to Tippett. Adding all of these rooms requires the proportions of classic architecture to be stretched, and then the architect must to figure out how those rooms will interact with the necessaries. Often, people will live in a home for a year and realize they use the home completely differently than they thought they would upon moving in. The architect’s job is to learn about the client, determine the client’s style of life, and then help the client edit their needs in order to avoid that sinking, one-year-in feeling.
In a similar fashion, architects can use design to determine how their projects will interact with the community at large. Tippett talked about a development in Atlanta where each house is built along a huge common green. Each house shares its “yard” with its neighbors, and this builds a sense of community impossible to create when fences and privacy are the primary concern. This sense of community inspired Tippet when served as lead architect on the A&P Loft project. Tippett designed the A&P to have a pedestrian environment with shopping, communal spaces, and numerous areas that everyone -- tenants, home-owners, random passersby -- can use. At the A&P there are balconies that look out onto a common courtyard so you see your neighbors. In the old days, before air conditioning, neighbors would sit on their porches and their stoops to avoid the heat trapped in their dwellings. Neighbors could visit, gossip, chat, laugh, and get to know one another. Tippett tries to design projects like the A&P to bring that community interaction back.
“We are still learning from things we knew a long time ago, but that we forgot,” Tippett said. Winding streets that go nowhere, people isolated from each other on huge lots, communities where no one speaks to one another -- these are modern inventions. Before the suburb, before the highway system, back when the home was your castle, not a castle, you had interactive neighborhoods. While residential architecture can only do so much to encourage this interactivity, Sease told me that in meetings with clients they often ask their clients to think communally, and not to build residences that could double as fortresses.
After speaking with Tippett and Sease, I got the sense that the firm does things the old way if that method remains the best way. When cabinets are installed in the homes they design, the architects ask the carpenters to paint the cabinets on site. If the cabinetry is painted in a box in the carpenter’s shop, it looks like a car -- high gloss finish, totally fake. The carpenters will often argue, “’but if we hand paint the cabinets, they will not have a consistent finish,’ but that’s exactly what we want” Tippett explained. A rough, textured, uneven finish lets the homeowner know that the cabinets weren’t simply machined along with thousands of other, identical, pieces of wood and metal.
And that goes back to the hand drawings. McAlpine Tankersley stands against the notion of, as Sease put it, “the machine does that… why are we worried about it?” Computers and industrial processes can make everything in life fast and easy, but at a certain point, it all becomes cut and paste. Computers and mass manufacturing make it easier to be lazy, to ignore differences in conditions and to apply the same solution to every problem. Hand drawing forces McAlpine Tankersley architects to view each project as unique, to solve each design problem based on the individual project’s unique conditions, to put sensitivity and soul into every set of plans. Although it’s not the cheapest or easiest way to design houses, hand drawing performs a beautiful bit of alchemy: it takes engineering and turns it into art.
PHOTOS Courtesy Mick Hales, Kris Kendrick, Tria Giovan, Jean Allsopp, Erica Dines, mcalpinetankersleyblog.com