Within Cincinnati’s lively, growing community of Modernist architecture devotees, news of a new book about the brilliant Woodward “Woodie” Garber has been met with enthusiasm. Garber, who died in 1994, has a reputation among Modernists as a controversial visionary whose advocacy of an uncluttered openness in design — in line with a more optimistic, democratic society — grows more influential every year. It’s time for a book that celebrates that, supporters have long thought. Now there is one — but it may not be the pure celebration some had expected.
“He was the most experimental Modernist in Cincinnati in terms of planning, composition of his buildings, their structural systems, their material — he was always experimenting with something new, he was always right out there on the cutting edge,” says Patrick Snadon, an associate professor of architecture at University of Cincinnati who has studied Garber’s work. “Cincinnati being a rather conservative Midwestern city, he was always running into trouble, always running into opposition.”
The author of the new book — Garber’s 64-year-old daughter, Elizabeth — comes to Cincinnati from her home in Maine this week in connection with the recent publishing of her Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter. (She is an acupuncturist and former poet laureate of Belfast, Maine.)
She will be at the Main Library (whose much-admired 1955 building her father designed) at 7 p.m. Wednesday and at the Mercantile Library at 6:30 p.m. Thursday. (While in town, she was also scheduled to speak to the Glendale Heritage Preservationists about the Garber family home, a “glass house” that was built in 1965 and influenced by the French architect Le Corbusier.)
The appearances will provide a chance to learn and hear inside details about Garber’s Modernist projects, some still standing and others demolished or significantly altered — UC’s 27-story Sander Hall, which was imploded in 1991, and the college’s Procter Hall; a Frisch’s Mainliner building on Reading Road; downtown’s Ninth Street Fire Station; and some of the breathtaking “glass house” residences he built for progressive clients. It’s also a chance to learn about his radical 1944-45 proposal to build perhaps the nation’s first glass-and-steel office building for Schenley Distillers across from the Taft Museum. It received national publicity.
The book reflects the love and empathy Elizabeth has for her father, especially as she looks back on his struggles. It also shows her admiration and pride in his legacy and in his belief in the promise of Modernism.
But those who go to the author talks without having read the book should be forewarned: It isn’t entirely positive. Her father had a very dark side — one that was all too evident to his family.
“It’s sort of a tortured, abusive genius kind of story,” she says in a phone interview. “He was brilliant and extraordinary, but he was also emotionally abusive to a lot of people around him. And he wrestled with being bipolar. So it’s a portrait of someone who was really struggling and still did remarkable work, but also caused a lot of hurt.”
The book is full of troubling remembrances about the tough time Elizabeth and her two brothers, as well as their mother Jo, had living with him. He could explode with anger, such as when Elizabeth called him “controlling” for refusing to let her get her ears pierced.
When her mother decided the marriage was so hard she wanted to leave, it unleashed a dangerous fury in him. That prompted Elizabeth to even consider killing him.
Her father could be full of surprises and maddening contradictions, she remembers. When an African-American group came to the family’s Glendale church to read a manifesto asking for national reparations for the cost of slavery and racism, some congregants were outraged. But Garber stood up in support and said, Elizabeth writes, “We have no idea the kind of violence that Negros face everyday. This is important for us to understand.”
Yet he also tried to thwart a relationship Elizabeth had with an African-American boyfriend who was her first love. “It was so shocking when he reacted because I had a black boyfriend,” she says. “He said it was all about fear for my safety. And he also wanted to be in control of his kids.”
And his open attitude toward his nudity in the home — an offshoot, perhaps, of his belief in the healthfulness of a more open way of living — troubled Elizabeth when she turned 14, she recounts in the book.
“The irony is that it fits into the story of Modernism,” she says during the interview. “He was reacting to a Victorian age where he never saw more than his mother’s ankles or wrists, so he was really into how important it was to be (aware of) your body and to be nude.
“In a way, there’s a part of Modernism that was about overexposing, and we weren’t allowed to have boundaries in the house and around ourselves physically. But teenagers need to have privacy; they need to have their own space around their body.”
The book’s title specifically recalls the destruction of his most ill-fated project, Sander Hall. But it also has a greater metaphoric meaning, since the problems with Sander Hall created such great anguish, and financial loss, for him. In a way, the project represented the slow implosion of his career.
Garber was excited about the possibilities for Sander Hall, built in 1971 as a UC co-ed dorm so large it could be a landmark. (Numerous sources say it was designed to hold 1,300 residents.) It was a tower with mirror glass panels, and Garber couldn’t wait to see what color they would reflect once installed. As Elizabeth remembers, he was pleased when he learned it would be a golden-rose tint. However, she says, that started a struggle with UC, which didn’t like that color and forced him to turn many panels inside out at his own expense. He was also forced to reduce the size of individual living suites as an economic measure.
But additionally, Sander was just plain ill-suited for its occupants.
“They put very young students in it in the early 1970s,” Snadon says. “Putting them in a tower didn’t work, and they were rebellious anyway. It was a perfect storm. It was a disorienting experience to young students who were not used to that kind of urban living.”
As much as there’s a tragic undercurrent to Implosion, Elizabeth says she is grateful to her father for introducing her to Modern art and architecture at a young age.
“There’s something about clean lines and the beauty of the form in Modernist architecture that makes it look like sculpture,” she says. “It makes you pay attention to the light, to the shape of things. It’s beautiful. I learned as a child to just feel my appreciation for it.”
Elizabeth W. Garber’s Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter is available at shewritespress.com.
This article appears in Jun 20-27, 2018.