Woodwork

A short story about architecture.

Steve Trillweather is one of the forgotten architects of the modern era. Born in 1932, he grew up on the Redwood Coast of Northern California before moving to Southern California to practice architecture. His early designs were geometric compositions of glass, steel, and concrete; exemplary variations upon the archetypal brutalism of the fifties and sixties. For a time during his years in California, he became politically active within the Communist party. Around 1954, though, he became profoundly disillusioned with socialism and disavowed his affiliation. During this period, he struggled with a deep depression, which manifested in the cold and clinical feel of the residential and commercial buildings he designed during this time.

But starting in the early sixties, he began to accept commissions in Central and South America, and as he did, his work became more idiosyncratic, as if he were freed to leave the beaten path as he took on projects which were, geographically-speaking, off the beaten path themselves. His buildings, commencing with the Alvarez Home (1963), began heavily incorporating dark woods which intertwined with his well-established clean lines of steel and glass. He began to speak more and more of wishing to “recapture the feeling of the forests of my childhood, those primeval labyrinths of infinite variety and wondrous, winding ways.” Most of his time on a project was spent walking in the mountains deep in thought, and in his journals, we see that he was increasingly drawn by a desire to “replicate, if possible, through elaborate woodcraft, the sense I had as a small child while wandering among the great redwoods and metasequoias — the sense of being safe in a great world, a world very much bigger than I; a world which had meaning and purpose, a world woven by an unseen love.”