Back to school: former merchant housing maven Rodney Friedman gets new respect designing campus housing

Residential Architect, Jan-Feb, 2003 by S. Claire Conroy

last July at the Pacific Coast Builders' Conference (PCBC) Gold Nugget awards, a very happy 69-year-old architect kept trotting up to the stage to pick up one Lucite-encased hunk of "gold" after another. Fisher-Friedman Associates won five awards that night--four Gold and one Merit. It was especially gratifying for the veteran firm because it did so in front of its peers--an audience full of competing firms and past, current, and future developer and builder clients--and it did so in its hometown of San Francisco. Rodney Friedman, FAIA, was the happy architect, and his firm of 38 years was a big winner that night.

Twenty or 30 years ago it would have come as no surprise to see Friedman, Bob Geering, and their now-retired partner, Bob Fisher, hogging the limelight. They were part of housing's all-star team back then, turning Irvine Ranch land and San Francisco Bay Area quicksand into good-life subdivisions. But it's been a long time since Friedman's folk were on the builders' A-List of architects. The firm no longer bursts at the seams with 100 architects in downtown San Francisco. Now it's down to a lean and mean 35 across the bay in Emeryville's warehouse district. "But, hey" says Friedman, "It's a Park Avenue address."

lemons into lemonade

True, Friedman does have a Park Avenue address in Emeryville, an emerging high-tech town just north of Oakland, and his quarters in the warehouse district are quite swanky. Best of all, he's having a great time doing much more than the merchant housing that built his career. "I haven't done a single-family-detached subdivision in 10 years," he says. Not that he wouldn't like to, it's just the production builders seldom call anymore. But lemons into lemonade, Friedman has found a new customer base: university and college housing. And for the militant Modernist who cringes at the idea of doing Mediterranean-style patio homes, it's a great new outlet for interesting design. He nabbed three of those five Gold Nuggets for his campus housing work.

Although student and faculty housing design is frequently handcuffed to its context, Friedman sometimes grabs the commission for connective-tissue buildings as well--dining halls, common buildings. He has a freer hard with these, which fuels his creativity. What's more, his buildings often weave in among the superstar architects' work that our centers of higher education are so fond of collecting, and this feeds his ego. On the campus of Stanford University, for instance, his Manzanita II dorm completes a quad anchored by a Ricardo Legorreta-designed dorm.

In some ways, Friedman relishes his current status as a desirable, hirable, workhorse architect. Star architects can, apparently, glow too brightly for the firmament. "If you get a high-profile job everyone loves, then the school thinks, okay, we've got a Legorreta," he explains. "Meanwhile, we do 10 jobs." It's a delicate balance. You've got to be on the radar without overwhelming it.

So how did Friedman get from merchant housing to campus housing? By moving sideways and full circle. Trained as a Mid-Century Modernist at the University of California, Berkeley, he learned from a who's who of residential architecture. William W. Wurster had just returned to the Bay Area as dean of the architecture school and had just swapped Bauhaus for the dusty Beaux Arts curriculum. Fresh from his position as dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., Wurster had a portfolio of celebrity connections. So, one by one, he marched his amazing peers through his students' lecture halls.

Friedman soaked up cutting-edge wisdom from Buckminster Fuller, Eric Mendelsohn, Richard Neutra, Paul Rudolph, and Joseph Esherick. He was a teaching assistant to Charles Eames. Not only were these great innovative architects, they were great house architects. In their view, there was nothing humble about the housing profession. In fact, it was possibly the best laboratory for experimenting with the new building techniques and materials emerging after World War II. They all made history designing their own and others' houses. "Housing was not something relegated to the also-rans of architecture," says Friedman. "Every studio we had dealt with some kind of housing."

grid goodbye

After a tour of duty in the Air Force during the Korean War and an apprenticeship designing mega commercial buildings in the San Francisco office of Welton Becket and Associates (now Ellerbe Becket), one of the largest firms in the country at the time, Friedman and Becket colleagues Bob Fisher and Bob Geering started their own firm. Among their early clients were builders trying to compete with Joseph Eichler, popularizer of the Modern tract house. What Friedman learned from Sea Ranch, another cutting-edge project across the Golden Gate bridge and about 2 1/2, hours up the Pacific Coast Highway, gave him the bag of tricks he needed.

"When Joe Esherick, Charles Moore, and Bill Turnbull did Sea Ranch in the late '60s, it changed everything," Friedman contends. Oddly enough, it wasn't their single-family houses that inspired him; it was the condos. Here, he says, the architects broke the 12x12x12 post-and-beam grid that had everyone boxed in: "Suddenly, you could have an 8 foot room or 10 foot one, one with no walls; ceilings could be any height. You could bump out and cantilever; you could poke holes for windows anywhere. You could react to the site.