The Jetsons in Boulder Part 3: Charles Haertling at Mid-Century and Beyond

We're resuming our survey of Charles Haertling's architecture in Boulder with a walk through the Flagstaff and Lower Chautauqua neighborhoods.  In 1960 Haertling designed a house for Herbert Knudsen that proved to be a real showcase for the architect's talents in meeting the client's program. While some of Haertling's later efforts became associated with organic, free-flowing curves and Space Age exploration of new materials, the Knudsen House is a different kind of organic, rooted in the horizontal, rectilinear geometry pioneered in Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style, but with a more modern, sharp-edged clarity defining mass and space, increasing freedom from right angles in plan,  and deft use of materials substituting for ornament.  Note the way the overhanging masses of the 2nd level spring from a central brick tower, and shade the entry. Looking at this house last weekend, it seemed like it must have been substantially rebuilt in recent years, it seemed so new and fresh.  

But this proves not to be the case, as the house looks now very much like it did when it was first photographed after completion six decades ago, as shown below.  It turns out that what was fresh in 1960 is still fresh, and one of those things is a clear-minded integration of building form with the natural features of the site...

From the street, you are struck by the way the house is nested in the landscape. Note the way the main entry as well as the garage door are shaded by overhanging rectilinear masses, and how those masses, finished in smooth gray exterior plaster, contrast with the brick supporting walls.  Note also the way the deep shade cast by the wide eaves brings extra definition to the simple brick mass between entry and garage, so that it seems to pop forward in a kind of counterpoint. Haertling makes this look easy, in the way Bill Evans makes a piano solo sound easy.

Richard and Helen Wilson commissioned Haertling to design their house on College Avenue in 1968, and it was built in that year.  The soft, sculptural  form of the sheltering roof and enclosing walls reflect a concern for privacy and spatial definition.  The large 2nd level deck doubles as the shelter for the carport, and the geodesic dome perched on that deck in the early photo below was becoming a fixture of modernism as well as the counterculture. Wood is employed here in order to create soft curves and rounded edges, while Haertling used concrete for compound curves in projects like the Benton House* from this era.

The house was damaged by fire in 1972, and acquired by Charles Haertling, who moved his family into the structure after repairs were completed.  It survives in its original form, with the only visible alteration being the fabric umbrella which has replaced the geodesic dome.   

Professor Stanley Gill wanted to move from the suburbs closer to his job at the University of Colorado, and defined a program which demanded efficient use of a 75 x 125 foot site in order to provide living space for a family of four, including a tennis court, indoor swimming pool, and play space for two large dogs.  Haertling's design, built in 1970, employed faceted rectangular masses and perimeter stone privacy walls to anchor the building form to the site, define exterior space, and extend interior space into the outdoors. 

The material palette includes dark-toned metal, wood, shaded glazing, and the contrasting rough texture of locally-sourced stone. 

While the external form of the Gill House has endured for five decades, the current owner told me that the indoor pool was removed by a previous owner, apparently because of interior space utilization issues rather than moisture problems, and that the configuration of the interior has undergone other alterations over the decades.

Because this tour is organized by neighborhood rather than by chronology, we're going around the corner from the Gill House to happen upon one of the first Haertling designs to be built in Boulder. Haertling, who had come to Boulder in 1953 and taught at the CU School of Architecture, designed an addition to a small house on Baseline Road for J.B. Wheat shortly after going into private practice in 1957. The Wheat House, as it is called, reflected Haertling's fascination with geometry as well as his emphasis on relating the building to its site. The addition was linked to the original house by a low, flat-roofed breezeway enclosed by floor to ceiling glass, and topped with inward-sloping triangular roof planes admitting light through clerestory windows. The multiple sources of light relate to earlier work by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The highest of the roof planes faces the sunny southwest corner, but is shaded by generous eaves as well as a lush profusion of trees and shrubs.  These enhance privacy as well as filtering the light, and anchor the house to the flat corner site...

We pass through University Hill and Boulder's downtown, and eventually wind up on another hill traversed by Panorama Drive.  Here we find the 1966 house for Roger Moment, a study in faceted, wood-surfaced solids perched on supporting masses finished in simple exterior plaster. The deep overhangs relate the design to Wright's Usonian period, while the Space Age futurism forges a link to contemporary work by Bruce Goff.  

Finally, though, the design is all Haertling, with details like corner glazing without post or mullions, and in its original form shown in the monochrome photos, a vivid contrast between the stained wood mass of the hovering upper level and the supports below it (this contrast was compromised years later by an all-white paint job). There's a vivid contrast, too, between this design and the other ones on this tour, because Charles Haertling treated each client's program, and each building site, as a new opportunity to shape form and space.  "Starting with a clean sheet of paper" was already a cliché for architects in this era, but for Haertling it appears to have been an operating principle.  As for the space with a capital S, in the mid-Sixties the architect wasn't nearly finished with Space Age themes, and we'll explore some of them in our next tour... 

*Footnote: For earlier photo essays devoted to Charles Haertling's architecture, see "The Jetsons at Home in Boulder, Colorado (Part One)", posted on June 13, 2016, and "The Jetsons in Boulder Part 2: Charles Haertling Masterworks", from July 2, 2016.

Photo Credits

All color photos are by the author.  All black and white photos are from the Boulder Carnegie Library for Local History Collection.

Pierce-Arrow: From Gilded Cage to Silver Arrow

You could say that the saga of the Pierce-Arrow began with a gilded cage and ended with an aluminum travel trailer.  The company was founded in Buffalo, New York in 1865 and in 1872 Geroge N. Pierce bought out his partners.  By 1896 the eponymously named firm had made its first bicycle.  Pierce offered a steam-powered automobile, a failure, in 1900, and a two-cylinder gasoline-powered car in 1903. That proved more successful, and Pierce changed the company name to Pierce-Arrow in 1908.  One of the first official cars at the White House was a Pierce-Arrow, and the company produced about 500 four-cylinder motorcycles between 1909 and 1914. In that year which coincided with the onset of World War 1, Pierce introduced its signature headlights integrated into the fender tops.  Most cars had the lights posted between the fender and the radiator.  The effect of Pierce's lighting scheme was to illuminate a wider swath of the road, and also to signal the width of the approaching car.  In the case of a Pierce-Arrow, it was a large and expensive one.  The model shown below is from 1915.

The 1930 Model B Roadster below shows how the trademark headlights evolved to fit the styling themes of the late Twenties and early 30s.  Studebaker bought Pierce-Arrow in 1928, and the combine was for a time the fourth largest car in the country.  In 1929, nearly 8,500 Pierce-Arrows were sold.  This was an achievement, considering their prices started around $2,500, about six times the price of cheapest Ford Model A.  The sales boom was brief, however, and sales steadily decreased after the Wall Street Crash in October 1929... 

While sales were sinking, Pierce-Arrow maintained its high standards of engineering and craftsmanship, shown in details like the graceful archer hood ornament...

Studebaker discontinued the 6-cylinder "entry-level" Pierce-Arrows, emphasizing inline eights. Pierce kept its own engineering department, and in 1932 the company introduced a new V12 engine in two sizes, 398 and 429 cubic inches.  The 398 would be dropped in '33, and engine size increased to 462 cubic inches in 1934.  Pierce management was betting on most affluent car buyers to revive their business.  In 1932, the company sold 2,692 cars.  By 1934, Pierce was offering the convertible coupe shown below as the Model 840 inline eight, and as the V12-powered 1240.  

It's startling to realize that the car shown below was built a year earlier than the one pictured above.  The Silver Arrow show cars were conceived in the depths of the Great Depression by designer Phil Wright to attract attention to the company's other products at auto shows and in showrooms...

The tiny V-shaped rear window echoed the V-shaped plan of the windshield, and both were novelties in 1933.  So was the full width cabin with front doors flush with fender sides and headlights integrated into the fenders.  Though Pierce promoted the car with a "Suddenly it's 1940" theme, most of these features wouldn't arrive on mass-produced cars until the late Forties... 

Mass-produced was one thing the Silver Arrow was not. Pierce produced Phil Wright's ground-breaking design in a crash program for the 1933 New York Auto Show, where it was a sensation. The car was displayed at the House of Tomorrow at Chicago's Century of Progress* in 1933 and 34, but only 5 of the cars went to customers at $10,000 apiece.  Studebaker, which had built the Silver Arrow bodies, went bankrupt in 1933, and that year the two firms divorced and were reorganized. 

All five Silver Arrow show cars were powered by Pierce's V12, which featured hydraulic valve lifters.  The cars also featured power brakes.  One spare tire was lodged behind a panel in each front fender.  Three of these cars have survived...

Rescued by banks in its home city of Buffalo, Pierce-Arrow Motor Cars attempted to salvage its future by adapting the styling themes of the SIlver Arrow show cars to a streamlined, but less radical flagship, also (confusingly) called the Silver Arrow.  This was offered with inline 8 and V12 engine options in 1934 and 1935.  The example featured in the ad below is a 1934 model, denoted by the four vent doors on the hood's flanks.  The seaplane in the ad helps underline the streamlined, Art Deco theme of this car, which for some reason was offered only as a 2-door coupe.

The example below is a 1935 Model 1240 Silver Arrow owned until recently by the Academy of Art Automobile Museum* in San Francisco.  For 1935, the Silver Arrow's last year, the hood vents were grouped together and outlined by chrome trim.

The rear of these "production" Silver Arrow coupes was marked by a similar sloping fastback roofline to the Century of Progress cars, with a simplified, but still divided and tiny, rear window. Perhaps Pierce reintroduced running boards and separate fenders on the production Silver Arrow out of deference to the perceived conservatism of its clientele; it doesn't look like they would have been an effective cost-saving measure.

Faced with the continued prospect of dwindling car sales which amounted to only 842 cars in 1936, Pierce-Arrow introduced a novel, well-designed travel trailer called the Travelodge  in that year.  Built of aluminum panels on a steel frame, the Travelodge was offered in 3 sizes up to 19.5 feet (the Model A) and featured insulated walls, heated interiors with built-in cooking areas and baths, and hydraulic brakes actuated by a connection to the car ahead. In the case below, that car is a 1937 Pierce-Arrow V12 limousine. The Travelodge appeared in the same year as the better-known Airstream*, and 450 were sold over two years. 

Sadly, neither the travel trailers nor the experiments with streamlining were able to save Pierce-Arrow from the second wave of the Great Depression that hit in 1938.  The company declared bankruptcy that year, and the receivers took over in May.  According to the Pierce-Arrow Society, the last car was built from spare parts in late 1938 by chief engineer Karl Wise. Total production in that final year amounted to no more than a dozen eight-cylinder cars and a dozen twelves, one of which, a V12 phaeton, is shown below.

*Footnote:  For a look at the Pierce Silver Arrow in the context of the 1933 Century of Progress Fair, see our post from 5-31-20, "Vanished Roadside Attraction: Chicago's Century of Progress". And for the history of Phil Wright's other famous contribution to car design, visit "Willys Aero Saga: An Afterlife in Rio", posted on this site on 8-29-19.  Other cars from San Francisco's Academy of Art University are featured in "Roadside Attraction: 1st Impressions, Academy of Art Auto Museum" from 4-29-18.  Other streamlined travel trailer designs from the 1930s are featured in "When Mobile Homes Really Were Mobile", posted on July 30, 2017.

Photo Credits:
Top & 2nd: wikimedia

3rd & 4th from top:  Ruby Smith 
5th thru 7th:  the author

8th:  Frist Art Museum

9th:  Pierce Arrow Museum
10th:  George Havelka

11th:  Pierce Arrow Motor Car Company
12th & 13th:  Mecum Auctions
14th:  theoldmotor.com
Bottom:  pinterest.com

Michelotti and Vignale in the 50s & 60s: Pioneers of the Italian Line

In Europe after World War II, the car industry was faced with the task of rebuilding.  In the USA, it began the job of redirecting production to civilian vehicles.  Some car makers took the approach of sprucing up their prewar offerings, while others offered new designs.  In the case of new manufacturers, designers and engineers were given a relatively free hand, and clean sheets of paper...engineers and designers were free of the software-hardware interface back then. Soon enough, designers like Mario Boano, Giovanni Savonuzzi* and Giovanni Michelotti sketched and modeled new shapes to enclose all the new chassis. Before the rubble of war had been cleared away, Pinin Farina showed the startling Cisitalia* coupes in 1946, and the next year Stabilimenti Farina produced three Alfa Romeo 6c 2500 cabriolets to the design of Giovanni Michelotti. Perhaps those Alfas caught the attention of Alfredo Vignale and Enzo Ferrari, because by 1950 Vignale was building a series of lighweight, alloy-bodied Ferrai coupe and spider bodies to Michelotti's designs...

In these first Vignale Ferraris, careful contouring of surfaces and deft use of proportions took the place of surface decoration.  Along with Felice Anderloni at Superleggera Touring, Vignale pioneered the use of the oval eggcrate grille on Ferrari's V12-powered road racers. This one is a 340MM, with the 4.1 liter Lampredi-designed engine that powered it to a victory in the 1951 Mille Miglia.   Note how the oval shapes are repeated in elevation, in section, and in the shapes of windows...

In the same year, Vignale bodied the Maserati A6G shown below to a Michelotti design.  A handful of the just-introduced Lancia Aurelia would be bodied in similar style.  Like the Lancias, this Maserati was intended for practical daily use rather than racing; the bumpers, trim and roll-down windows are clues.  Unlike Lancia and Ferrari, Maserati offered left-hand drive on its cars in the early Fifties.

These cars caught Briggs Cunningham's attention as he planned to offer a limited run of road cars to qualify his American-built, Chrysler powered sports racers as production cars at Le Mans. The first Michelotti-designed bodies for these Cunningham C3* road cars appeared in 1952.  Contours and lines were similar to Vignale's work on Ferrari chassis, but at a larger scale.  Note the lack of decoration, and the tight overhangs front and rear... 

These were busy years for Michelotti and Vignale.  In 1952, they produced four Ferrari 340 Mexicos on a new tubular chassis to compete in the Carrera Panamericana, the race run on public roads across Mexico. 

Three of the cars were coupes with roof lines similar to the Cunningham; in the photo above these coupes, as nearly identical as Vignale could make them, arrive on the dock in New York.  The fourth car was the spider pictured below.  Note that roughly half the car's length is occupied by the engine room housing the 4.1 liter Lampredi V12, and the provision of boundary layer air control devices on the doors ahead of vents which may have been intended to cool the drum brakes.  Another new feature Michelotti introduced on a few Ferraris that year was the Mexico's narrowed, projecting front fender form, with the headlights located inboard of the fenders.  It's uncertain whether this was part of Michelotti's intuitive approach to aerodynamics, or intended as an aid for the driver in aiming the car.

In 1955, Vignale bodied the first Blu Ray show car for Enrico Nardi on a modified Lancia Aurelia chassis.  Blu Ray 1, shown at right below, featured a plexiglass roof and a center-mounted light in the oval air intake.  Michelotti kept the oval air intake and a transparent roof panel in the Nardi Lancia Blu Ray 2 on the left from 1958,  but toned down the original car's wild details to make Blu Ray 2 more adaptable for series production.  It remained the sole example, however...

Also in 1958, Michelotti sketched a proposal for a new GT coupe based upon the Triumph TR3 chassis.  He had already gotten approval for a restyling the Standard Vanguard for the same company, and a new production car called the Triumph Herald was proceeding according to Michelotti designs...

Triumph was impressed enough to commission a prototype, which appeared on the Vignale stand at the Turin show that year.  Eventually it was christened the Italia, and went into limited production.

In the 1959 production version of the Italia, Triumph's conservative management opted for conventional fender forms with an oblong grille in the usual position above the bumper, similar to what appeared in the late Fifties on Michelotti-penned, Vignale-bodied Lancia Appias.  In so doing, they missed an opportunity to offer a fresh, innovative design (at least visually if not mechanically) on the growing American market, a good 4 years before the Lotus Elan and Studebaker Avanti offered aerodynamic faces with integrated lighting and air intakes below the bumpers.  

The glassy, upright greenhouse of the 1958 prototype survived in the production car. The design predicted the TR4, another Michelotti design that would appear in 1962, the same year that the TR3-based Italia passed out of production.  In this case, production amounted to 330 examples.

In 1959, the year Italia production began, Michelotti left Vignale to form his own coachbuilding firm, after consulting with Standard-Triumph on other, larger scale production projects like the Herald economy car.   That same year, Vignale produced this prototype of a spider on the Maserati 3500 GT, the Touring-bodied coupe version of which had appeared in 1957. The 3500GT was produced in over 2226  examples, 245 of which were the Vignale spyder, and it saved the company.  The Michelotti spyder design went into production in 1960, on a 100-inch wheelbase, 2 inches shorter than the Touring coupe.  It shared the coupe's aluminum-block, twin cam inline six with twin spark plugs per cylinder.  

Details on this prototype differing from the production car include the grille, bumpers, vents below headlights, fender side vents, and tail lights.  

The body form, however, is the same.  Production spyders, unlike the alloy Touring coupes, had steel bodies with alloy hood and deck lids.

Evidence of Michelotti's increasing participation in design for Triumph was his body design for the TRS road racers which appeared at Le Mans in 1959. These cars were promoted as being based upon the TR3, but in fact had a new chassis design and a new, aluminum twin cam engine design.  The photo shows the second-series version of the car racing at Le Mans in 1960. These cars had fiberglass bodies, a first for Triumph and Michelotti, and predicted his design for the TR4, which would appear in 1962... 

In 1961 Michelotti designed the body for the Conrero* Triumph Le Mans coupe, which was intended to be the first of a series of cars for a new effort at Le Mans.  It remained a one-off when Standard Triumph management cancelled the project, concentrating instead on the launch of the new production cars, including the TR4 and Spitfire for 1962.

That same year, Michelotti's design for the new Maserati Sebring went into production, and bodies for this car were produced at Vignale.  It eventually took the place of the 3500GT spyder in the Vignale production schedule, as it was built on the short spyder wheelbase despite offering 2 + 2 seating.  This Series 1 car, twelve-plug twin-cam six that was one of the car's main attractions, and offered on the Sebring in 3.5, 3.7 and eventually 4 liter versions over a 4-year production run.

There was also a standard 5-speed ZF gearbox, a well-instrumented dash and a finely detailed interior...

The flat, recessed tail panel was in line with Sixties trends, and reinforced the rectilinear forms, along with the creases on the flanks.  348 Series 1 cars like this one were built; in 1965 the Series 2 appeared (oval chrome surrounds for the quad headlights are a sign); but only 98 copies left the factory.

By this time most of Michelotti's work was in designing prototypes for production cars. BMW and Alpine Renault used his services, but his most frequent association, in the public mind and in terms of the number of cars that went into production, was with Triumph.  After the TR4 and Spitifire, there were new designs for sedans, and proposals for new sports cars like the Zoom and Zest.  The 1965 Fury prototype below was similar to the Spitfire center body section but had a sleeker nose and tail.  A tamer version went into production as a 6 cylinder fastback coupe version of the Spitfire, in 1967.  Perhaps in deference to Plymouth, it was called GT-6 instead of Fury...

In 1970 Triumph introduced a GT car called the Stag, based around a new 3.0 liter V8, sohc engine and using some chassis components from the Triumph 2000 sedan, which was also a Michelotti design.  Despite initial reliability problems with the engine, and also a conflict caused by a merger with Rover, which had its own V8, over 25,000 Stags were built over an 8 year period.  Styling themes, especially the grille, headlights and tail light panels, were similar to Michelotti's restyle of his 2000 sedan.  The T-shaped rollover bar was incorporated into the design out of concern that convertibles would soon be banned in the US, one of Triumphs main markets. 

The integrated rollover bar on the 1975 Ferrari 365 GTS/4 NART spyder was likely there for practical, rather than legal reasons.  Luigi Chinetti, Ferrari's New York distributor and head of the North American Racing Team, commissioned 5 of these wedge-themed Daytona spyders between 1974 and 1976.  At least one of the cars was raced, one was configured as a conventional convertible, and one was given as a present to Chinetti's wife.  They are among the last cars designed by Michelotti, and among very few to adopt the creased, wedge-profiled body forms popularized by Giorgetto Giugiaro.  Giovanni Michelotti died in 1980, at age 59, after over 4 decades working as an industrial designer.  Most of his designs were for motor vehicles; there were over 1,000 of them.

*Footnote: Cisitalias are profiled in "The Etceterini Files Part Eleven", posted on 4-22-17, and the Cunningham road and race car history is reviewed in "The Cars of Briggs Cunningham" from 4-15-17. The Nardi Lancia Blu Ray 1 was featured in "One of One: A Brief History of Singular Cars", our post for 9-7-15, and Blu Rays 1 and 2 are pictured in "The Etceterini Files Part 14: Enrico Nardi and His Cars" from 2-26-18.  Cars built by Virgilio Conrero are profiled in "The Etceterini Files Part 12", posted on 11-28-17.  Michelotti designs for Vignale on Ferrari chassis are featured along with the Vignale-built Kelly Corvette in "The Italian Jobs Part 2" from 2-27-16.
Errata:  The description of the Conrero Triumph got mixed up, and the photo of the Nardi Lancias got left out of the first version of this post, and we gave you the wrong numbers on Ferrari 340 Mexico production.  Counting the spider it was 4 cars, not 3.  All these mistakes are possible proof that the writer cannot always be trusted with editing tasks, especially when late for dinner.  Apologies. 

Photo Credits:
All photos by the author except the following:
5th from top:  Luigi Chinetti Motors and RM Sotheby's

6th (Ferrari Mexico spider):  George Havelka
8th & 9th:  Carrozzeria Vignale
15th (1960 Triumph TRS):  pendine.com
16th (Conrero Triumph coupe):  Carrozzeria Michelotti 
20th (Triumph Fury) thru bottom (Ferrari NART):  wikimedia