Book tours midcentury modern OKC
Lynne Rostochil has put together a great stockingstuffer of a pictorial history book on Oklahoma City midcentury modernism.
Part of Arcadia Publishing’s “Images of America” series, “Oklahoma City’s Mid-Century Modern Architecture” hits the highlights, as well as some nooks and crannies in the architectural period of the 1940s to mid-1970s.
My remarks here are limited to her research on single-family homes. See The Oklahoman’s Business section for a review of the commercial architecture covered in the book. Here are some highlights of her highlights.
FIRST, PAGE 11: The Kamphoefner House in Norman, built in 1942, designed by Henry Kamphoefner, then acting chairman of architecture at the University of Oklahoma, later to promote modernist architecture across the South as dean of design at North Carolina State University.
The L-shaped homes is open, airy, with redwood siding and flagstone combined with big windows. Rostochil notes that Frank Lloyd Wright, who visited in 1946, was impressed.
Presumably to save a few lines of space in the book, she doesn’t mention that the home was featured in Pencil Points magazine in 1944, as she does at OKC mod.com.
That’s not meant as a dig, but to point out something: The bottomless internet is exciting. The value of her book is that it’s a book, and for all its breadth, it’s compact. Pleasant. Cozy even. Books are so midcentury!
LAST, PAGE 127: a subterranean “earth” home by eco-architect Joe Hylton, of Norman, who designed 150 semi-underground and solar homes.
“During the 1970s, subterranean architecture became popular in commercial, school, and residential design,” Rostochil notes. “These ‘earth’ buildings were famed for being extremely energy efficient and, especially in Tornado alley, for providing excellent protection against the all-too-common storms in the Sooner State.”
In between, Rostochil, a founding member of the Okie Mod Squad, writer and photographer, really has captured the era in
pictures, words and architecture design heroes and personalities such as Bruce Goff, Raymond Carter, J. Palmer Boggs, Herb Greene and George Seminoff.
Some of these homes you might know:
• Goff’s 1948 Ledbetter House with its cantilevered discs, and his 1955 Organic Modernist Bavinger House (RIP) with its 55-foot spiraling helix.
• Robert F. Reed’s 1964 Organic Modernist Krogstad House in Quail
Creek. • Herb Greene’s 1964 split-level Cunningham House in Quail Creek, with its surprising, sweeping, two story wall of windows and screens hidden in back; Greene visited the home earlier this year for the first
time in 50 years. • George Seminoff’s 1959 International-style, 20-by-40-foot, oneroom, brick-and-glass box weekend
bachelor pad (with a decade of additions and expansions as he married and had a family. It fascinates me because of the story and because a ficus tree grows in the living room, caught up in one of the expansions.
“Modernism, which eschewed most ornamentation in favor of clean lines, was an especially good fit when placed against Oklahoma City’s flat, sun-soaked plains and vast, often mercurial skies,” writes Rostochil, whose grandfather R. Duane Conner designed the iconic “egg church” of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) at NW 36 and Walker Avenue.
Rostochil’s work takes its place alongside two other books in my own library: “The Physical Legacy: Buildings of Oklahoma County, 1889-1931,” by Bob L. Blackburn, Arn Henderson and Melvena Thurman (Heisch), Southwestern Heritage Press, 1980; and “Historic Photos of Oklahoma City,” by Larry Johnson (Turning Publishing Co., 2007).
“Oklahoma City’s Mid-Century Modern Architecture” is an especially good fit among pictorial histories of Oklahoma City since it’s framed by an architectural era, not just by time.
Its publication is well timed for the gift-giving season for anyone interested in midcentury modern architecture, or this aspect of the history of Oklahoma City’s built environment.
The book, at $21.99 in paperback, is available at Full Circle Bookstore, Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Rostochil will be signing copies Saturday at the Okie Mod Squad’s Holiday Mod Swap, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 415 E Hill St.