From the Archive: The Lesser-Known, “Lone Wolf” Modernist Master You Should Know

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 October 2008 issue.

Richly colored canvases line the walls of architect Victor Lundy’s hangar-like studio in Houston, Texas. Some 50 feet wide and 65 feet long, there is ample room to make art and house his extensive archive. Battlefield sketchbooks from his World War Il service and magazine clippings featuring the architect’s designs line the shelves. Over his career, Lundy has built churches, embassies, houses, and even inflatable structures. Practicing since the early 1950s, he still paints daily and picks up the occasional residential commissions. At 85, he has a restless creativity. "These days I am thinking a lot and I am on the verge of a breakthrough," Lundy says. "I want to invent something, but it is hard. Every time I paint, the rectangle is a limiting thing. Being an architect, everything I paint seems less important than the space I make." This architect’s vision has always been grander than the canvas.

Take his design for the 1960 traveling exhibition pavilion for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Built out of vinyl fabric and air, it resembled a puffed-up Henry Moore sculpture. The pavilion’s 19,000 square feet held a working nuclear reactor and a theater, and, given Lundy’s modernist training, the ethereal building became a perfect synthesis of technology and form.

By his own admission, Lundy is a bit of an iconoclast, a "lone wolf." After serving as a squad leader in the army during World War Il, he entered Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, then headed by modernist master Walter Gropius. The transition wasn’t easy. He joined classes late and his previous classical Beaux Arts training at New York University held him in poor stead. In response to an assignment to design a theater in Marcel Breuer’s studio, he presented brightly colored renderings to a roomful of Bauhaus modernists. His classmates’ projects were drafted in black ink.

Eventually, Lundy learned to draw in monochrome, but he never gave up the expressiveness of paint. After graduating from the GSD in 1951, he moved to Sarasota, Florida. There, a painting of the Nôtre Dame Cathedral in Paris earned the architect his first commission: the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce building. The chairman of the building committee spotted the "Best of Show" watercolor in a juried art exhibit and asked Lundy to submit a scheme. The architect took his brushes to the site and dashed off a series of paintings that eventually became the design—his gestural stroke of celadon green became the tile roof.

Although he is considered part of the Sarasota School of modern architecture, Lundy shrugs off the description. His 1965 masonry facade for IBM’s complex in Cranford, New Jersey, simultaneously evokes a mainframe computer and a Mayan temple. Tough to pigeonhole into a singular style, Lundy’s work has a certain pervasive attitude. The forms and spaces are rich, yet complicated structures look effortless. "With every problem, I make these images out of the blue—initial responses—and then I fuss with them, refine, change, and discard. I work towards the irreducible," Lundy explains. The concept for the sculptural Unitarian Church (1959-65) in Westport, Connecticut, is simple: Supported by laminated beams, the two halves of the hyperbolic roof rise in unison to a peak but never meet, capturing the church’s central belief that the divine is an "open question."

The Westport church and the polygonal Unitarian Meeting House (1962-64) in Hartford, Connecticut, put Lundy on the national architecture scene. He moved to a Manhattan office and in 1965 traveled to Moscow alongside the canonical Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, Paul Rudolph, and Charles Eames in conjunction with the federally sponsored exhibit Architecture U.S.A. Of the five architects, though, Lundy is the least known today.

Despite his current low profile, Lundy, who is credited with creating the first architecturally designed air buildings, experimented with and redefined modernism in the ’60s and ’70s to the same degree as his distinguished peers. The pneumatics he created in collaboration with Birdair Structures of Buffalo, New York—for the AEC pavilion and the "air flower" restaurant pavilions for the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65—realize exuberant ideas and techniques that avant-garde architecture practices, such as the pop culture-inspired Archigram and Ant Farm, were only just beginning to incorporate.

Lundy’s midcareer work, such as the U.S. Tax Court Building in Washington, D.C. (1976), is his most monumental. In that project, a 200-foot-long courtroom cantilevers over the entry stair, and the granite-clad facade is classically symmetrical, with a modern austerity. Yet the difficulties he faced in getting the project built echo larger cultural and economic shifts. Both the Tax Court and the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka (1984), were commissioned in the 1960s but frustratingly delayed by funding cuts caused by the Vietnam War. Lundy weathered the setback, relocating to Texas in 1975 and working as a design principal at the Dallas-based architecture firm HKS. Though the move—and changing architectural ideologies—may have taken him off the national radar, Lundy remains irrepressible. He keeps designing through paint and drawings. "I am excited by what lies ahead," he says. "I don’t have a computer—my computer is the ebony pencil l am holding." 

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.

Related Reading:

From the Archive: An Architect Designs "Not Your Average Old-Folks Home, for Better and Worse"

How Architecture and Design Took Over Gaming