Paffard Keatinge-Clay

Practicing architecture in San Francisco from 1960 until 1975, Paffard Keatinge-Clay left behind a legacy of architectural work in the Bay Area, some of which is realized, others of which only paper documentation exists. These buildings and projects are indices of a career marked in equal measure by synthesis and ambition and which is characterized by a series of apprenticeships with major architectural figures that were active between late 1940 and early 1960: Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He also shared an association with a host of other notable designers including: Myron Goldsmith, Mies ver der Rohe, Sigfried Gidieon, Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Erno Goldfinger, and Rafael Soriano. He has lived for many years near Mijas, in Spain, and now maintains an architect's office in the town. [http://www.empresas-negocios-de.com/inmobiliaria-construccion-y-vivienda-en-malaga/gw_pm14.htm 6th June 2008]

Early life

Born near Stonehenge in England, Keatinge-Clay grew up in the Wiltshire village of Teffont. He received his education from the Architectural Association in London, dual majoring in Architecture and Structural Engineering. He graduated in 1949. He began his professional career while in school at the London office of architect Erno Goldfinger.

Architectural career

Keatinge-Clay worked for approximately one year in the studio of famed French architect Le Corbusier at 7 Rue de Sevres in Paris, France in 1948. While there, his work focused primarily on the Unite d’Habitacion in Marseilles and on the plan for the town of Saint Die. Leaving Europe after having graduated, Keatinge-Clay traveled across America and apprenticed for a year at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin studios in both Madison and Arizona. His time in the American west under the influence of Wright culminated in a year long effort to make a Homestead claim on a piece of government property in the Arizona desert. Here, he built a pavilion in the desert - an elemental study of components that would later become the template for his own home on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais in Corte Madera in Marin County.

Having left Arizona in the early 1950’s, Keatinge-Clay moved to Chicago where he worked at the Chicago Offices of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on both the Inland Steel and Harris Bank and Trust Buildings with Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch. It was in Chicago that he was in contact socially and professionally with Mies van der Rohe through his father-in-law, Siegfried Gideon, and the architect/engineer Myron Goldsmith. He later transferred to the San Francisco office of SOM where he executed the Great Western Savings and Loan Building in Gardena, California. It was from here, in 1961, that he left the firm and began his own office.

Keatinge-Clay’s own office in San Francisco was located at 680 Beach Street in what is now Fisherman’s Wharf. Concurrently with starting up his own practice, he was teaching and lecturing in schools around the Bay Area including the University of California at Berkeley, and San Luis Obispo.

During the 14 year period from 1961 to 1975 Keatinge-Clay produced several buildings several of which remain today. The first was the previously mentioned 1965 home for himself. This was followed by a medical office building in the San Fernando Valley in 1966 and the 1968 addition to the San Francisco Art Institute, an Art Academy situated in the heart of the city’s elite Russian Hill neighborhood. Finally, in what would turn out to be both the most ambitious and professionally tumultuous project of his career, he was selected to design the Student Union building at San Francisco State University. Difficulties, both technical and legal, resulted in his eventual departure from the U.S. to Canada, followed by an exodus through North Africa sometime in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

During the latter portion of his time in San Francisco, Keatinge-Clay was recognized abroad when he placed as an honored finalist in two competitions in the UK, both in 1972. In what could be seen as a return to his homeland, the first of these proposals was his design in London for an administrative office addition to Parliament at Westminster. The second was for a new art museum in Glasgow, Scotland for which he received an honorable mention.

Built Works

GWS

Like its predecessor, the Art Institute, the building for San Francisco State shares a preoccupation with the horizontal in the creation of an artificial datum. The result of a competition and the byproduct of Moshe Safdie, who had previously been awarded the commission, Keatinge-Clay claimed the design to be the result of countless hours of collective workshops and collaborative student input. The student workshops resulted in two trapezoidal concrete pyramids: one that aligned sectionally with an axis to Polaris, the North Star, to create a space for “quiet, introspective activities”, the other was composed of an occupiable roof terrace/theater, for “boisterious, public activities”. More than half the program is buried below ground on a prominent site at the heart of the campus facing the main quadrangle. The whole is accessed through a pair of convert|30|ft|m|sing=on high enameled steel offset pivot doors that open into a great public room on the interior of the building from which all functions were to be accessed. Structural expression was designed in the form of a triangulated series of poured-in-place concrete columns, ordered on a decidedly Wrightian “triagrid” plan module that hearkens back to the Usonian house studies of the late 1940’s.

TP

A medical office building, it is a three story high cast-in-place concrete structure with diagonal fins similar to those on the Art Institute at the upper two floors. The first floor had vertical mullions whose side-to-side spacing varied like Le Corbusier’s La Tourette.

This project was done in association with the office of Dion Neutra in Los Angeles.

Other projects

Campus collocation planning studies in association with James Leefe, architect of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Center “Chapel of the Cross” at 2900 Marin in North Berkeley. Immaculate College and Pomona Colleges were for a time studying the idea of combining. The office was commissioned to design new dormitory buildings for this project in association with the office of Charles and Ray Eames.

References