Take 10 With Architect Mark Cavagnero
While Covid focuses our attention on private spaces, public places are equally crucial to our well-being. Mark Cavagnero and his eponymous award-winning firm concentrate on this external world, working on projects for the arts and culture, science and technology, education, civic, and master planning. Mark Cavagnero Associates' diverse portfolio etches the Bay Area landscape from the restoration and expansion of the French 18th century styled California Palace of the Legion of Honor to master planning for The Oakland Museum of California's Brutalist landmark.
CC: A large part of your portfolio consists of public buildings dedicated to arts and culture; what propelled you on this path?
MC: It was somewhat circumstantial. I began with a keen interest in affordable housing and urban infill. My first project under my name, however, was the Legion of Honor Museum. After it opened, the clients who called me were mainly arts groups with renovation projects. Eventually, I was hired to design a new arts project: a music school in Silicon Valley. That project received numerous awards and a great deal of publicity, so consideration to design new buildings soon followed.
Within five years, we had developed and built several award-winning new buildings of non-arts projects ( a conference center in Southern California, Sava Pool in San Francisco, a new courthouse in Mammoth Lakes, the new Public Safety Building in San Francisco, etc.). At that point, we had evolved into a very diversified office with arts as just one of our areas. We now have an extensive group of projects in the workplace, housing, labs, university buildings, schools, and master planning.
CC: You are initially from the East Coast but have now lived and worked on the West Coast for many years. How do the two coasts influence your aesthetics?
MC: I grew up admiring the great early modernists and studying their work intensely. I worked in New York for five years for a very disciplined architect who was part of that Modernist ethos. When I came to California, I realized that the climate, culture, and expectations were all more relaxed, so I began to find my way within the Bay Area environment. Still, I find myself wanting a high degree of resolution and always struggling to make a complex project appear simple, pure, and rational through reduction and clarity of design.
CC: What was it like working for and with 2007 AIA GOLD MEDAL winner Edward Larrabee Barnes?
MC: I admired Ed greatly. He was my mentor and friend. I traveled with him often to projects in the MidWest and South. He famously was part of the group studying under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard after World War II (I.M. Pei and Phillip Johnson were his classmates). Ed taught with Lou Kahn and so became close to him as well as Breuer. My time with Ed was very much a continuation of my learning, allowing me to see how Kahn versus Breuer might have approached a project and how Ed found his voice within that incredible personal pedigree.
He and I connected well, so I found myself, even in my 20’s, running several projects at once and working closely with him on the designs. I periodically visited him and his wife Mary on weekends, and Ed explained the various phases of their beautiful house in Mt. Kisco, New York. I studied drawings of his early work late at night in the office to better understand his gestalt. I visited numerous Breuer houses in my hometown of Litchfield, Connecticut, that Ed admired so we could discuss them together.
Mark Cavagnero and Ed Barnes at the Legion of Honor Museum project
CC: In collaboration with Barnes, you worked on the restoration and expansion of the Legion of Honor Museum. What were the challenges and rewards of touching one of San Francisco's most iconic structures?
MC: I had never worked on a museum, a publicly owned building, a historic structure, or a seismic upgrade before that project. It was all new to me. But Ed taught me a great deal about seeing the important ethos of a building and understanding its spirit, and how to work within it while bringing it into the 21st Century at the same time. Ed was very close to the then museum director, Harry Parker, who had been Ed’s prior client at the Met and the Dallas Museum of Art. When Ed decided to retire, he convinced Harry that I could handle it alone. Bravely, Harry agreed, and I had my first project, with three employees and no specifically relevant prior experience. Fear, hard work, and dedication were my seven days a week companions.
Mark Cavagnero Associate sketch Tannery Arts Center
CC: For the Tannery Arts Center, Digital Media and Creative Arts Center in Santa Cruz, Mark Cavagnero Associates repurposed two nineteenth-century industrial buildings. What were the challenges and rewards of that experience?
MC: Most people thought the buildings needed to be torn down. They were in awful shape. But I saw the charm in them, the layers of history etched into the various wood structures that had accrued over time. I set about to remove methodically, or excise, the bad ones and carefully restore and re-purpose the better ones. In the end, the challenge was to give it a sense of cohesion, which it had never had due to its 130-year history of episodic growth. The budget was really low, but the art was in the removal and understanding of the whole, not in any particular detail, material, or component. My reward was in seeing something altogether new and beautiful evolve quite literally out of a remnant pile of buildings long since left for dead.
CC: With a staff of seventy, what are your secrets of maintaining that many personalities in one company?
MC: Each voice is heard and respected. Each person is both a designer and a detailer, a worker and a communicator, a thinker, and a doer. We have very little hierarchy and a deep sense that every decision in the long process is essential. Therefore, our entire office is full of very talented people who focus on making all aspects of a project ideal, from the design of form to the roof's waterproofing details. It is a calling for all of us, and so egos don't get in the way, only the best solution to each situation governs. I like our office- the people, the atmosphere, the commitment.
Who Was Le Corbusier? by Maurice Bessett
CC: Who is your favorite architect, past or present?
MC: That has to be Le Corbusier. I fell in love with his work during my freshman year in high school. It was a book entitled “Who Was LeCorbusier?” that made me feel I wanted to be an architect. I still have that same book with me today. When my high school library remodeled, the head librarian sent all the architecture books to me, as I was the only student who ever signed them out! LeCorbusier made such beautiful and seminal buildings. I have studied his work in person and literature my entire career. I studied architects like Giuseppe Terragni and Kahn, who closely followed Le Corbusier, to fully understand more of what was in his work. Along the way, I fell in love with theirs too. I have always loved architecture and still do. I consider myself very lucky to still love my job and still have the intellectual interest that captured me when I was 13.
CC: How would you define your work in three words?
MC: I hope another architect might find my work to be beautiful, disciplined, subtle.
CC: A book that everyone should read?
MC: “Louis I. Kahn” by Robert McCarter for architects
“Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon for everyone else
CC: What's inspiring you in life right now?
MC: As of this moment, I am inspired by Joseph Biden, at 77 years of age, putting out the most ambitious climate change policies our country has seen from the White House. It is so fundamentally necessary. He went through an outrageously challenging campaign to win the Presidency. He could have focused only on Covid 19 and the economy, and most would have understood, but he has chosen to spotlight the critical crises of climate change immediately. If he can do that, take on a massive challenge while two other ones are staring him in the face, then I should be able to continue to learn, continue to focus, and make even better buildings.
