From the Archive: The Singular Vision of Outlaw Architect Mark Mills

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s July/August 2004 issue.

Eighty-three-year-old architect Mark Mills is as free-spirited and prickly today as he was when he and kindred spirit Paolo Soleri were banished from Taliesin West in 1947. "Frank Lloyd Wright got the idea we were stealing his clients and he said, "Scram!" recalls Mills, who now lives in Carmel, California, where he still practices architecture. "Paolo and I were thrown out at the same time," Mills continues, describing how the two young architects found their way to a desert hideout on the north slope of Camelback Mountain near Scottsdale, Arizona.

Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they lived in the open among the sagebrush and cactus for the next year. "We were living up with the squirrels," says Mills. "We scrounged dates from the date trees and then the skunks came along. The skunks sprayed on the dates and we ate skunk dates."

Their encampment consisted of little more than a tent, but eventually they built a more permanent shelter. "It was a little demonstration cone with a hexagonal base made from concrete block and a roof made from triangular pieces of plywood," explains Mills, who has had a passion for hands-on building since childhood.

Mills and Soleri’s exile on Camelback Mountain had all the elements of biblical legend: fleeing society, breaking ranks with the deity-like Wright, living with the animals in a desert wilderness, taking time for reflection, and returning to the world with a visionary message. Soleri would sit quietly on a rock and draw imaginary structures by stenciling ephemeral veils of watercolor onto paper. "It was the landscape that penetrated my semi-impermeable wrapper," observed Soleri. Then, in 1948, the outlaw architects came down from their mountain and rustled up a client.

Nora Wood hired Mills and Soleri to design a small desert getaway in Cave Creek, Arizona. For a little extra, they agreed to build the structure themselves. "We told her that if she bought us $300 worth of tools, we would go out and build her house and she agreed," recalls Mills.

The concept for the house was based on a drawing by Soleri called "Turnsole," which depicted a domed structure embedded in the desert floor. Its glass roof could rotate to follow the sun’s path across the sky. "The idea was already in Paolo’s head," says Mills. "And when Paolo got an idea, it didn’t leave his head until he had built it." Mills is characteristically humble about his contribution to the project. "I mainly did the grunt work," he says. "I couldn’t change any of Paolo’s ideas so I just grunted."

The pair excavated the entire foundation by hand, using only shovels, pickaxes, and an old wheelbarrow. Mills and Soleri got occasional help from the client’s attractive daughter, Colly (whom Soleri moved in with soon after).

While it’s easy to see Wright’s imprint, the Dome House suggests a more personal and sensual interpretation of Wright’s "organic design": a one-to-one communion with nature; a place for reflection and personal transformation. At once a cave, spiderweb, and sky dome, the house combines eclectic influences from the Southwest, like Native American kivas, with an offbeat kind of sci-fi imagery. (The region was experiencing a high level of UFO sightings at the time.)

Such anomalous sensibilities—outer space and back-to-the-land—would be reconciled in the alternative architecture of the 1960s, helped along in part by the cosmic parity provided by LSD. The Dome House was published in Architectural Forum in 1961 and, along with R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes and Friedrich Kiesler’s Endless House, became a touchstone for young designers wishing to break from the soul-withering grid of corporate modernism. Mills and Soleri were, in a sense, proto-hippie architects, two of the pioneering fathers of the hands-on, design/build movement that swept North America in the following decade.

After finishing work on the Dome House, Soleri went back to his native Italy—he would return to Arizona in 1956 and start the alternative communities of Cosanti and Arcosanti—while Mills moved west to California and settled in Carmel. The Big Sur area was already established as a bohemian outpost. Henry Miller was there and so was Ansel Adams, along with a colorful mix of artists, poets, vegetarians, and back-to-nature eccentrics. Miller used to come to dinner regularly at the house of Mills’s mother-in-law, Louisa Jenkins, a mosaic artist who, Mills remembers, "used to stand on her head naked." It was in this setting of fog and beatnik glory that Mills established his own independent practice and designed a series of more than 30 one-of-a-kind houses for an equally free-spirited group of clients.

One of Mills’s first projects was for Nathaniel Owings, a partner in the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who needed a place to escape his high-pressure career. He bought a property in Big Sur where the rocky outcroppings of the Santa Lucia mountain range cascade into the Pacific Ocean. "We wanted to build a house that would become part of this rugged shoreline," Mills recalls. "Our aim was to disturb as little as possible." They chose to position the house on a seemingly unbuildable precipice that dropped 600 feet into the ocean. "We fitted the house into the windswept line of bay trees, which were clustered on the extreme end of the point," said Owings in 1961. Two-thirds of the structure was cantilevered out over the cliffside. The Owings family chose an appropriately poetic name, Wild Bird, for their aerie.

It was such an intimidating, windswept site that Mills made the entry sequence low and cavelike so as to embrace the visitor upon arrival. A narrow footpath leads down terraced stone steps and between rough, rustic rubble walls. This tight, subterranean effect is a preparation for the explosion of panoramic views that follow.

While the sloping roof of Wild Bird was meant to evoke an elemental sense of shelter, the Farrar House (1966) was more suggestive of living. biomorphic forms. The site for Far-A-Way (a play on the client’s name) was as sea-washed as the Owings’ site, but even closer to the ocean’s fury, nestled in among the jagged rocks of the Carmel shoreline. Mills designed it to be as tough as a barnacle, with 9.5-inch-thick steel-reinforced concrete walls that sloped outward at a slight angle and gave the structure a bunker-like profile. Odd, trapezoidal windows and doors added further to the pillbox effect. "If there is another war," said Betty Farrar in 1967, "I suppose we can just knock out the windows and stick some big guns in." Every opening offered close-up views of ocean and rocky shore.

"[Far-A-Way] is theater more than home," wrote Robert Wernick in Life magazine in 1967, "a proscenium arch opening onto the perpetual drama of the Pacific." Sadly, the Farrar House was demolished in the 1990s, but the ingenious Hass House (1969), also in Carmel, has been relatively well preserved. This 1,950-square-foot house responds to its site in the most organic way imaginable, literally dropping over the edge of the cliff to capture intimate views of the crashing waves and rocks below. Its groin-vaulted structure can be interpreted as the body of a giant snail clinging to the edge of the cliff, but Mills prefers to call it the "Limp Penis House." (He designed it for a widow soon after her husband died, but let’s leave the psychosexual inference to the readers’ imagination.)

Mills went on to create more adventures in domestic living, but he made a point of never repeating himself: "Everyone I ever worked for was completely different," he says. "They didn’t want the same thing." There was the Fan Shell beach house, built in 1972 on a sand dune along 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach, with four radiating concrete vaults set between an almond-shaped swimming pool and the ocean. Then there was the turtle-like house he designed in 1977 for Dr. Bela Janko in Monterey, with a domed roof and porthole windows made from concrete drainpipes.

Today, the inventive Mills remains something of an anomaly, just as he was nearly 60 years ago when he left Taliesin for the wilderness. He remains the consummate outsider, self-effacing and humble about his contributions to architectural history. While his individual projects were published on occasion, he seems to have gone out of his way to shun all forms of self promotion and thumbed his nose at conventional architectural practice.

Mills’s architecture defies easy categorization. It doesn’t fit into the midcentury-modernist mold and he certainly had no visionary aspirations like his old friend Soleri. An American original, Mills pioneered his own school of anthropomorphic regionalism.

Related Reading:

From the Archive: The Swimming Pool That Changed the World

Tracing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Influence