Date/place of birth:
24 July
1885
San José, California
Date/place of
death:
6 June
1969
Williamsburg, Virginia
Relationship to the college:
Profession:
Architect
Editor
Educator INTERNAL LINKS
Kocher Designs for Campus
Studies Building
Jalowetz House
Service Building
Music Cubicles
Farm Buildings
Curriculum
Small House Exhibition
Small Houses
Furniture
Black
Mountain College Newsletter, No. 10, December 1940 Images of architectural
projects by Kocher and furniture designs will be added at a later date. |
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 Lawrence Kocher’s
contribution to architecture in the United States was both as a pioneering
advocate for modern architecture and as an advocate for the preservation of
architectural landmarks.
Kocher studied history at Stanford University (B.A., 1909). He also
studied at Pennsylvania State College (M.A., 1916), at MIT, and
at New York University. From 1912-26 he taught at Penn State and established
the School of Architecture there. In 1926 he was appointed Director of the McIntire School of Art and Architecture at the University of
Virginia.
When Kocher was appointed Managing Editor of The Architectural
Record in 1927, the magazine issued a “Delphic utterance” that it was
embarking on a new chapter in its history which would probably include
“something about ferro-concrete, about architectural polychromy, about a
more effective direction and use of the allied arts and crafts. Possibly
the impulse originated by Sullivan, developed by Frank Lloyd Wright and
amplified abroad will bring repercussions from Europe. No doubt
standardized shapes and machine-made surfaces will find their logical
place in design. That there will be movement, enterprise, new feeling is
clear....” (Architectural Record, January 1928, p. 2) Under
Kocher’s direction the magazine was transformed from a beaux-arts
periodical into one espousing a broad concept of modern architecture
encompassing education, social responsibility and concerns, modern
design, and contemporary materials and methods of construction.
Although his early writings were about traditional architecture -- The Art of Lancaster County (1919), Fireplaces in England
(1926), and Early Architecture of Pennsylvania -- fifteen articles
in Eighteenth Century architecture published in The Architectural Record (1920-22) – he was
equally committed to the use of modern materials and construction methods
and to contemporary design in new buildings. This was reflected in his
private practice. Of special interest to Kocher was the design of small,
affordable houses. Three houses – one of aluminum and glass, one of
canvas, and a third constructed of plywood (except for the sheathing for
the roof) – attracted national attention. Ideas which he proposed in the
1920s such as well-designed, prefabricated interior components for storage
and utilities have become commonplace. A design for Sunlight Towers, an
apartment tower, placed the towers at forty-five degree angles to the
street. The saw-tooth shaped facade provided for light and for
cross-ventilation.
Kocher had been interested in Black Mountain College from its beginnings.
He included Black Mountain in a series of articles on the
education of the architect in the September 1936 issue of Architectural
Record, and soon after the college purchased the Lake
Eden buildings, he proposed that the campus should be modern. He suggested
a collaboration between the Black Mountain’s Bauhaus contingent – Josef
Albers, Anni Albers, and Xanti Schawinsky – and Walter Gropius and Marcel
Breuer, who had only recently arrived at in the United States to teach at
Harvard University.
In the summer of 1940 when Black Mountain realized it could not
construct the buildings designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer for
the Lake Eden campus, the college turned to Kocher to design simpler buildings that could be constructed largely by
faculty and students working with a contractor. At the time Kocher was
visiting professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In the fall of
1940, he was appointed Professor of Architecture at Black Mountain, and he
moved to the college with his wife Margaret Taylor Kocher and their two
small children Sandra and Lawrence. For the first two years his salary was
paid by the Carnegie Foundation in New York, and for the third year, by a
gift of $1,000 from Philip L. Goodwin, architect for the Museum of Modern
Art in New York.
Over a two year period, several buildings designed by Kocher were
constructed at the college. The main building which Kocher designed had
four wings providing for administration, a library and exhibition hall,
student studies, faculty apartments, and rooms for social gathering. One
wing, the Studies Building, was constructed in 1940-41. The studies
themselves were finished by students in the fall of 1941. Although the
faculty considered construction of the additional three wings after the
war, Kocher was not able to return to the college to supervise the
construction, and the project was dropped.
In addition to the Studies Building, Kocher designed a barn, music practice
cubicles, and two small houses, one for the music teacher and his wife and
one for the kitchen staff and other black workers. The
substandard houses in which many mountain people lived without running
water or electricity rekindled Kocher’s interest in small house design. In
a review of William Lescaze’s On
Being an Architect (Putnam, 1942),
he decried the lack of “the proportional space or emphatic appeal which
the social aim of architecture deserves. It is a curious inconsistency in
modern life that the architect contributes so little to the devising of
statues or other instruments of action which would further the elimination
of squalid slums in cities and within the shadow of factories.” (New
Republic, August 1942, pp. 237-238.) In the same review he stated that
the architect would design small houses that would be varied in design –
not monotonous boxes – and visually appealing, economical, and
mass-produced. While at Black Mountain a long essay on the modern small
house, "Homes to enrich our national standard of living" was published as
a pamphlet by Revere Copper and Brass, Inc. (ca. 1942).
By 1942 most of the men students and American-born male faculty had left
to join the war effort. The college was greatly diminished in size, and
wartime restrictions on building supplies prohibited continued work on
Kocher’s designs for the campus. In the spring of 1943, he was granted a
leave-of-absence to complete an article co-authored with Howard Dearstyne,
who had taught briefly at the college, on a comprehensive architectural
center which would bring together architects and industry to “investigate
the psychological, social, economic, and technical aspects of building”
through an organization “uniting research with planning and design; design
with experimental construction; and experiment with the ‘trial-by-use’ of
model building.” (New Pencil Points, July 1943;
abridged in
New Architecture and
City Planning: A Symposium, edited by Paul
Zucker (1944)). Kocher returned to the college briefly in the summer of
1943 and officially resigned in 1946.
Since 1928 Kocher had been a member of the Advisory Committee for
Architecture for the Restoration of Williamsburg. In 1944 he was appointed
editor of the Architectural Records of Colonial Williamsburg and was
instrumental in the monumental task of reconstructing the colonial
village. He retired from the position in 1954. From 1944-59 he was
Lecturer in the Fine Arts at the College of William and Mary. He also was
supervising architect for the restoration of Washington Irving’s home in
Tarrytown, New York.
Kocher invited Howard Dearstyne to serve as
Assistant Editor of Architectural Records of
Colonial Williamsburg. Working both
together and separately, Kocher and Dearstyne prepared monographs on
approximately fifty buildings. They coauthored two books: Colonial Williamsburg: its Buildings and
Gardens (1949) and Shadows in Silver: A Record of Virginia,
1850-1900 (1954).
Photograph: North Carolina
State Archives, Black Mountain College Papers
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