SEATTLE — As a steadfast champion of straightforward simplicity — in architecture, and in life — Audrey Van Horne undoubtedly would appreciate it if we would just hurry up and get to the point already. Facts are facts. Complexity only clouds them.
One point taken, and another unpretentiously submitted: Audrey Van Horne is a superstar.
Over her beyond-impressive, beyond-50-year career, Van Horne metaphorically macheted substantial, lasting paths: as an architectural pioneer and mentor, as a business owner, as a civic leader, as a mother of five — all at the same time.
These days, at 94, Van Horne still nestles a sharpened pencil behind one ear, just in case, and still embodies the robust “Why wouldn’t I do all that?” outlook she might actually have been born with. Now retired from architecture (but little else), she no longer sketches designs for clients, but she consistently, widely inspires as a “How does anyone do all that?” powerhouse of activism, community-building and collaboration.
“I had the opportunity to meet and work with Audrey while she was advocating and fundraising for affordable housing,” says Seattle architect Curtis McGuire, a longtime Van Horne admirer bordering on “groupie.” “Affordable housing, social-justice issues, Modernism: Audrey was, and continues to be, on the front end of issues that she believes in — issues that are as relevant today as they were when she started her career in architecture.”
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The happy fact that Van Horne the superstar sparkles in our Northwestern orbit is owed to one poorly considered decision by an adolescent cello player named Dan McKay. He and Audrey dated in high school in New Jersey. One oh-so-fateful evening, after they rode the train into New York City for Dan’s music lesson, he carelessly left his girlfriend in the company of his guy friend, John (last name: Van Horne).
“And he was in my life ever since,” says Dan’s ex-girlfriend.
John and Audrey worked together at a couple architectural firms in New York City, married in 1947 and moved to Seattle in 1948. Once here, John worked with notable modern architects Paul Thiry and Fred Bassetti, then established his own firm in 1951. Five years later, Audrey earned her architecture license and joined John at work, establishing Van Horne & Van Horne Architects.
“When I came here, there were maybe eight women architects, total,” she says. “I’m architect No. 938.”
By the 1980s, architect No. 938 owned a majority of the family business.
Together, always together, the couple built a marvelously wide-ranging portfolio: an award-winning passive solar home; the Hiroshima Exhibit for the Seattle World’s Fair; the expansion of the hippo-viewing area at Woodland Park Zoo; a beach playhouse on the north end of Whidbey Island, where “each piece was on skids, so you could rearrange them,” she says; and the computer-science lab in the University of Washington’s Sieg Hall.
Over multiple decades, the Van Hornes designed some of the region’s most striking and enduring examples of midcentury-modern architecture — “which, in the midcentury, was just modern,” Van Horne says. Many are cataloged in a photo book she created after John’s death in 2003 (she printed “enough to go around for the kids”). Van Horne & Van Horne Architects closed in 2008.
“The ones we left a mark with are probably Pottery Northwest and the Volunteer Park Conservatory,” she says. “In 50 years, there were hundreds and hundreds of projects. We managed to keep busy. We went through a lot of kinds of projects: some work for the schools, a lot of work for the Parks Department. Our work was thought through by both of us. The early houses on Hilltop [a planned community near Bellevue] were largely John’s, but we discussed this work as it progressed, and some of the later houses were largely mine, but the design was developed together, critiqued together. Out of it came good houses.”
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Born Audrey Jupp (“J-u-double-P, instead of J-u-pee-pee,” she says, laughing) in April 1924, Van Horne grew up in New Jersey with her father, a naval architect; her mother, an artist; and three siblings. She discovered her passion for architecture as a senior in high school, when an art teacher assigned hands-on projects rather than regular old reading.
“When we studied famous painters, we each had to paint a picture. I did a Van Gogh,” Van Horne says. “We did the same thing with sculpture; we each did a cardboard milk container filled with plaster of Paris and carved it up. For the history of architecture in the United States, we had to design a building. It was fun. I didn’t know much. Mine was in the country in the woods, from concrete blocks: a summer home.”
Van Horne then announced her chosen career to her father.
“Here’s how you know you have a good dad,” she says. “I knew an engineer whose daughter wanted to be a doctor, and he told her, ‘Oh, but you’ll have to be a nurse.’ When I told my dad I wanted to be an architect, he said, ‘You’re so lucky! I build boats, and they have to float. You have the whole Earth to build on.’”
Van Horne attended the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture and Design in the early 1940s — there were just two or three female students in a class of 50, she says, and they’d all start drawing shades and shadows at 8 in the morning, as “the daylight was just beginning to behave itself.”
But Ann Arbor was an all-night train ride home to the East Coast, so after two years, she enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she earned her master’s degree in architecture in 1947. (She also had looked into Yale and MIT, where the interviewer, she says, “was acting like the king of England. He was in a great big, red leather chair — way up there, and I’m way down here. He said it was very hard there for women; they had special places for women to rest and lie down.”)
In Seattle, there was not much downtime at all for a young architect nurturing a career, a bustling business and a growing family. Van Horne also lectured in the University of Washington’s Department of Architecture (and was featured in its 2011 documentary with Studio 216, “Modern Views: A Conversation on Northwest Modern Architecture”), and taught an Introduction to Construction course at Edmonds Community College, where homework was not required, but attendance absolutely was. But, then again: Why wouldn’t she do all that?
“There was no problem, from a family point of view,” she says. “I was only doing what I wanted to do. We had the business; it was what we wanted to do more than anything. I wasn’t in the office regularly until our youngest was in school, and I did all the driving around that mothers do.”
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Van Horne no longer drives, but she still lives on one level of the Portage Bay-area home she and John designed and built in 1953. With light-luring clerestories; John’s custom-drawn cabinetry; and giant floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking glimmering water, gliding boats and the top reaches of towering, highly prolific fruit trees, it is a brilliant model of the couple’s modern, functional approach.
“It’s a sense of simplicity and resolving issues and making it work, an effort to break down the complexity of former forms of architecture into something very simple; ornamentation is not the idea,” Van Horne says. “It’s very open. It’s taken me years to realize: I have a friend who comes sometimes and says, ‘But you don’t close the shades.’ Somehow that shows what we were designing: simple and full of light. Like the little Volkswagen: Its design had the same sort of freshness as our house — some details, but not gingerbread.”
Before building their family home, the Van Hornes purchased two adjacent lots, “all covered with blackberries 10 feet tall,” she says, and then developed the property with their friend and future next-door neighbor, architect Edward Cushman.
He was Jewish, and Van Horne says there was some concern Cushman could run into problems trying to buy the lot in early-1950s Seattle.
“We just divided the land,” she says. “Ed was a friend. It just happened as part of the story.”
Inside Van Horne’s home, meaningful mementos create an artful gallery of a vibrant life: a bust of Van Horne’s daughter Francine, sculpted by Van Horne’s daughter Jill; a bold, colorful piece of wall art that John Van Horne made of movable, magnetized foam flags; straightforwardly simple standing lamps from their time in New York City; the requisite basket stuffed with rolled-up architectural drawings (“Every architect has one,” she says); scrumptious homemade biscotti (if you’re lucky); and a dedicated, well-used workspace.
Even in her decidedly modern designs, Van Horne always has relied on a couple of traditional techniques.
Number one involves a good No. 2 pencil.
“I’m a drawer. God help me — I’m much better at ‘viewing things’ than ‘reading things,’ ” she says. “Architecture has changed a bunch from using CAD [computer-assisted design]. You can’t think with a computer nearly as well as when you grow up thinking with that pencil.”
Number two takes two: face-to-face communication.
One client, she recalls, “got so they wanted to tell us by email what they wanted; it just plain doesn’t work. You can’t do it without that thing you get from people — that look on their face. The more you can draw and let them see what you’re thinking, that’s what you hope: You can draw sketches so people see the story you’re trying to tell.”
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