TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: David Lake (DL)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: November 13, 2018
LOCATION: Austin, Texas
TRANSCRIBER: Robin Johnson
MEDIA: HD video
REEL: 3470

[Numbers refer to the time code of the recording.]

DT: Uh, my name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. It’s, uh, November 13, 2018. We’re in Austin, Texas. We’re at the new Central Library, uh, and we have the good fortune to be, uh, visiting with, uh, David Lake, who’s, in fact, the designer of this, uh, fine space with his team at—at, uh, Lake Flato, which is a very esteemed architectural firm that, um, is based here in Texas and it’s designed a whole range of—of award winning buildings, um, from, uh, residential to commercial to institutional, public buildings, uh, often which have a, uh, environmentally sensitive nature to them. And I wanted to take this chance to thank you for talking to us.

00:00:57
DL: Absolutely. It’s fun to be here. Always like being in our buildings.

DT: I do too. Uh, so we usually start these interviews by just trying to get a—a sense of where, um, the narrators, you, of course, might have started with your interest in architecture and the—the natural world, uh, or some combination thereof.

00:01:20
DL: Okay. So I grew up in Austin, uh, uh, over by Mount Bonnell and, uh, it was a joyous time because we were at the edge of Austin, believe it or not. Uh, and Mount Bonnell was completely not developed. We could wander all over it. We could wander all through Camp Mabry, much to the consternation of the General there. In fact, we were, uh, uh, uh, a first—I’ve always loved building things, making things with my hands. Uh, and so I would build treehouses in—in Camp Mabry and, uh, those were fun. Then one day, uh, I decided to build a dugout.
00:02:04
Instead of going up in a treehouse, we decided to dig down which is a lot more work because we were about twelve inches down and hit caliche. And, uh, nonetheless, we got like two feet down and put l—cedar sticks over it, threw sod on top of it, and we had a little dugout hangout. And, uh, the one neighborhood bully we didn’t like, we wouldn’t allow into our dugout. This was all fine and good until he decided—he got mad and he set fire to my dugout, which, uh, wouldn’t have been so bad if, uh, it wasn’t in Camp Mabry and they had to get firetrucks to put the fire out.
00:02:43
So that’s—one of my lessons was that not everything you build is forever. Uh, so time and weather and sometimes man can take down your constructs. Uh, but I’ve always liked building with my hands. And, uh, made all kinds of models and, uh, used to love to put together, you know, World War II planes and then racecars and, uh, so forth. Very good with the painting, the enamel and all. You can’t even do that anymore because you get overwhelmed by the fumes. Uh, but that’s why I have certain, uh, what do they say grey cells are missing, which has actually made me more creative [laughing] because I’ve been taking in too many paint fumes. So, that’s how I was shaped.

DT: Okay. Uh, so more about early days. Uh, can you point to any—any people, uh, family members, mentors, teachers, classmates, fellow dugout diggers?

00:03:48
DL: So, uh, growing up, uh, we were very close friends with, uh, Michael Frary, uh, the artist here in Austin and he’s, uh, quite a gifted water colorist, painter. Uh, but he’s obviously trained in architecture and his beautiful hand, could sketch anything just beautifully. And he would take these big pads of watercolor paper down to the coast—we’d go down—the families would go down to the Port Aransas and he would immerse them in the water in the bathtub and get them to the right moisture content and then go out on the beach and sketch away.
00:04:25
And I was fascinated that you could see before you this image coming up being crafted. Uh, and that was inspiring, uh, to see him capture the beauty of the Texas coast just right there unfolding before you. And, of course, he had the liberty of making it prettier—you know, it wasn’t that rich, khaki watercolor. It was—had a little bit more faint green to it. So liberty of artistic, uh, uh, license I guess. It’s important. And then we also grew up with the Page family, uh, George Page, with Page Southerland Page, the old architectural firm here that’s now called Page.
00:05:09
Uh, and George, uh, was quite a gruff architect who, uh, when he wasn’t talking about his buildings, had a good sense of humor. Uh, but when he ever talked about his buildings, he was very serious. And, um, but we would go visit his buildings. Uh, but I think the—the most influential moment really for me was when my dad was Secretary of State for Texas and I got to leave elementary school at, you know, like 2:00, put on my blue blazer, and be a page and run letters, uh, little folded over notes from the house to the senate and from the senate back to the house.
00:05:55
And these gruff guys—they didn’t have phones, you know, this is—this is 1960, they didn’t have cell phones, they didn’t want to use their phones. They didn’t want to be overheard by their compa—compatriots so they would sketch these notes, fold it over. “David, take this—” well they didn’t know my name—“Page take this. Don’t read it and on your way back, bring me a Coke.” You know, I’d run over—but I’m in the Capitol and I’m running around through from—from house to senate, through these amazing spaces where even the doorknob has been thought about and has a star on it and is so remarkable and, uh, just every detail is tactile.
00:06:38
But then, at the same time, it’s voluminous, it’s—light is everywhere. And it is—it is a place that I think engenders, uh, a sense of importance of what goes on there. And, uh, as a topology, uh, it’s a building that clearly reinforces, not necessarily now—I can’t say it’s reinforcing good behavior in our Texas politics, but it used to be were—had good behavior reinforced in these lovely spaces. And that’s really where I—I saw the architecture then shape how our culture and how we interact with one another and the—the importance of architecture.

DT: You know, I—I’ve heard and I—I don’t know if this is true—maybe you can give me your view of it—that—that the Capitol is—and is an example of green building and that it’s built of very permanent, local materials, and that it—it’s has those deep insets so you don’t have a lot of sun coming in. Is—is—is there some truth to that?

00:07:43
DL: Well, I mean, it is built from sunset red, uh, granite from Marble Falls, uh, so it’s very close. Uh, and they did a beautiful job of finishing the granite in different ways throughout—it’s flamed—on parts of it’s honed on parts of it—it’s—but it’s true in all old buildings, before we had systems, before we had air conditioning, you had to think about cross ventilation. You had to think about how am I going to be comfortable because I don’t have air conditioning and I know the breezes are coming from the Gulf in Texas, southeast.
00:08:20
So the building is designed for flow-through ventilation. Uh, and, so in that way, it’s a passively designed building. Takes care of the breezes, has a lot of light, uh, and yes, the windows are deeply reset so the—inset—so the west sun doesn’t come slamming into the space. It’s actually running east/west. Uh, so when you run a building east/west, you get less west hot sun and less hot east sun and you’re getting more balanced south and north light. So very, uh, just a very simple, uh, approach to placing a building in a landscape makes an enormous difference.
00:09:05
Had the Capitol run north/south, uh, not only would it have been odd because I’m coming upon [inaudible 00:09:10] access to the low wings but it wouldn’t have had nearly the building performance and it wouldn’t have been as well day lit either because you’d either have harsh sunlight coming in or no light coming in. So, uh, so yeah, it’s a great building. It’s a lovely building.

DT: So—so this experience is happening when you’re, let’s see, twelve years old, still a young person, and can you maybe fill us in on some—some things that happened maybe in your later teens?

00:09:45
DL: So, um, I, uh, was very early doing art classes because I was—my mom was very involved in Laguna Gloria, in the art school, and, uh, very close to our house. And since she wanted us out of the house and out of her hair and, uh, it was a family of four so my—my brothers and three of us would go down to Laguna Gloria and do art classes. And then once we were finished with art classes, we’d go try to both—we would bow fish. [laughing] We’d try to—we’d try to bow one of those carp that are kind of near the water.
00:10:24
We never could. I mean, there’s no way. We’d draw the bow back and let it fly and oh I know I got it this time but the refraction in the light and where the fish really is versus where your arrow enters—good physics lesson—where you think the fish is is not where the fish is. So, uh, but no, I—I, uh, enjoyed, uh, going to Laguna Gloria that we used to have and I think they still do. The fiesta there was where they bring all the local artists and they show their wares. And, uh, so Michael Frary and all the—the great Austin artists, uh, would show their artworks and sell them in these little kiosks on the—on the axis to Laguna Gloria.
00:11:11
And, um, it—there are some, you know, uh—Bill Hoey and, um, uh, who’s the—the wonderful surrealist, uh, anyway, great artists. They all taught at UT Art School. So, um, it was a lovely time that was interesting. It was very informal and it’s all outdoors. Uh, so it was great fun. And then later, uh, I did work construction in the summers, uh, working on, uh, really complex projects like spudding a—a flat roof which spudding means you are up on a hot asphalt roof in the summer removing a gravel that’s embedded in a built up roof, hauling it over to the side, addressing the—the asphalt that’s all torn up, peeling that up and then hauling—I get to be the one who hauls this big bucket of hot, boiling asphalt.
00:12:14
You know, it’s about 120 degrees [laughing] up on the roof. And, uh, I did learn not—that I did not want to be a roofer as well. But I did do some construction early on. And I re—I realized that construction’s really hard and challenging and—physically challenging but also just tough work. And, uh, and there’s another way of being involved in the construction process that’s not that. So, uh, and later I—I, uh, uh, I did go to—to, uh, school up in—at Woodberry Forest. There’s a—a high school up in—just outside the Blue Ridge near Charlottesville.
00:13:00
And, uh, there was a moment in my life where I was really more interested in just being immersed in nature. Uh, so we would—in fact, all my life, uh, with my dad, we would go out to west Texas or south Texas and were either hunting or we’re, uh, we canoed every river, uh, from the Colorado west to the Devil’s River, including the Pecos. And this is where—and we would use the old US/GS maps because there were no maps. And we’d put in, you know, you’d figure out where you could put in on public land or—especially on the Devil’s or the Pecos, and you’re on that river for a while before you can get out.
00:13:42
But, uh, traversing the rivers and seeing how rivers are these remarkable riparian ecosystems that—that so shape our geography, uh, was, um, a—a—not only a—a wonderful into nature, but also, uh, really incredible—because my dad was a armchair geologist. And he’s—he—he loved geology. He said geology was the—was really the history of the earth. And, uh, that—that the beginning of history is geology for him and so he would—we could be canoeing through and seeing layers of, uh, Pleistocene , whatever, and he could say what formation and whether it was oil bearing. [laughing]
00:14:36
Uh, but it—it was an engagement with the landscape and th—the rough and wild ecosystems that move laterally across Texas to the west. Uh…

DT: Do you remember any of those particular camping and canoe trips?

00:14:55
DL: Well, I mean, uh, the Devil’s was particularly memorable because that was li—that was the last one we did and, uh, we—we—we went with friends, uh, who had, uh, and none of us had done this before, however we had talked to Bill Armstrong, who was the, at the time, ha—had just finished doing the Devil’s River and he was the—I think he was Texas Land Commissioner and he was quite a—an explorer. And his story was you better—this is how you get on the river but you got to be careful for this one woman who owns this ranch because she will lob a shell over you if she sees you putting in.
00:15:37
Even though it’s public land where the bridge crosses, you better not get on her side. Get on the opposite side. But when he went down, they actually, uh, had kind of a catastrophe because a—it—it rained up above him and he didn’t know it and they were—it flash flooded and he was—his canoe—they were camped and his canoe was swept away and they—I think the person he was with broke his leg in the high water. And they had to hike, uh, he had to hike out after he got his friend in a—in the shade and he hiked out thirty miles till he could find a rancher.
00:16:18
This is the Texas Land Commissioner. He’s like 46 or 47 and he’s telling us this story and I’m looking at my dad like, are you sure we really want to do this Devil’s River? [laughing] Anyway, we did the Devil’s River and the beautiful thing about the Devil’s River is you never see any built—manmade things at all. You’re on that river. It is, uh, lovely water. Crystal clear. Limestone washes. Very deep pools. In fact, I was staring down one time and I saw a beaver sliding underneath me—his form—and I thought, “Damn, that is a big fiiiii—beaver.”
00:16:58
Couldn’t believe it. Beaver way the hell out in west Texas. Uh, and we—we’d fish and, uh, but mainly we’d, uh, pick the canoes up and, uh, went long ways over gravel ridges [laughing] because we were at somewhat low water, which is okay because you don’t want to be on that river in high water. But—and we ended up at ant—at Amistad. We had to, uh, we had someone come pick us up, uh, on a ranch that will allow access at the mi—at the far north end. Otherwise, you’d be paddling into a stiff breeze for about twelve miles, which would have been a disaster.
00:17:43
So I remember that trip really well. It was a lovely trip. And it just—uh, the—the—the geography of Texas and how radically different each watershed is and how different the ecology of each watershed is and the—and the geology of each watershed, uh, it’s fascinating.

DT: Probably [overlapping conversation].

00:18:04
DL: I can’t imagine building a wall across our frontier. What no one ever talks about with this wall is they don’t talk about the species who can’t gain access to water of the Rio Grande and all the wild species and all the domestic species who will be walled out and, uh, it’s really as—astonishing that you would ever think, speaking of architecture, that a physical wall is ever a solution to, uh, a border. Uh, but that’s another story. I’m mover—I’m moving into politics and not architecture.

DT: Okay.

00:18:44
Uh, but I just don’t think we—we think enough as—as homo sapiens about other species. I think we’re far too species centric and we do need to think about all species and all life, uh, if we have any hope of sustaining our earth, uh, in its current—even its current state. So that was heavy. All right. Now ask me a easier question. [laughing]

DT: Well let’s—so you had these—these wonderful explorations with your father of these, at many times, very remote, isolated places in nature, you know, and great exposure to the geology, the st—you know, the—the history of the earth as your dad said and—and also the—the I guess ecology of these riparian zones. Um, maybe, uh, you could take us through the next chapter. You’re I guess in your late teens by now?

00:19:43
DL: Yeah, my late teens.
.
DT: And tell me about when you go to college perhaps. What’s…?

00:19:48
DL: Well I went to—I went to Woodberry Forest in Charlottesville. I—I, uh, enjoyed that immensely. We—we canoed. We, uh, I ran cross country in the—that beautiful landscape we took trips into the Hill Country. We ran, I mean, Hill Country into the Blue Ridge—and I was a runner. So we would run, you know, eight, ten miles a day in those beautiful hills. Uh, but at the end of Woodberry, I was—I went to University of Virginia and I went into Architecture School. And, uh, I had just really studied hard for three years at Woodberry.
00:20:27
And I was really kind of ready to party. And architecture was—the first year of architecture, they wanted you to work like sixteen hours a day and do all these little silly models and these kind of word games on design matters. And I was like, I don’t really want to do this. So, uh, I dropped out and I got into, uh, Mesoamerican studies and studied, uh, Mesoamerica which I love—all the—all the sites in archeology and—of me—of Mesoamerica. And, um, and then I had this one great moment where, uh, a counselor, you know, you just don’t hear about college counselors anymore—but I had my—my second year meeting with my counselor—my advisor.
00:21:17
And she says, uh, “What are you going to do with this degree when you—this Mesoamerican studies, you know, degree?” And, I’m, uh, like, “Oh yeah, I hadn’t really thought I was going to do anything with that degree.” [laughing] She says, “Well you don’t—you can—let me tell you what you can do with a Mesoamerican studies degree. You can go into civil service and—and you don’t strike me as someone who would very—be very good at that. I don’t think you take orders very well and you don’t seem to listen very well.”
00:21:54
She’d already—“And then or you could teach and I don’t think you have the patience to teach.” The—how she figured this out in twelve minutes, I’ll never know, but I’m like, “Hmmm, duh. Maybe I should change course.” So I endy—I ended up, uh, moving back to Austin, uh, and, uh, largely really because my younger brother had died at—had an unfortunate accident at school, had a heart attack, and, uh, that threw our family into total chaos. And I just was, uh, uh, really ready to come home. And my brother, my older brother, who’s a rancher in Lampasas—I got tired of him telling me that I talk like a Yankee.
00:22:45
And I told him I hadn’t even crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. And he’s like, hey, you come back from Virginia, you tell—talk like a Yankee. [laughing] How can I be like a Yankee? I haven’t—anyway, came back to Texas to, uh, uh, heal our family’s wounds and be in Austin again. And—and went back to University of Texas into Architecture School.
00:23:07
That was 1972. And in ’72 that—at UT, there was this incredible group of architects who were renegade architects and they weren’t, uh, because they’d run out of sss—space at the Architecture School and because the dean really didn’t want these wild-eyed guys around, we—he moved them into this church over on 26th Street, uh, now Dean Keeton, and it was this crazy-quilt wooden—I think it was an old Methodist Church with shaped, uh, it almost looks like a Denny’s, you know, kind of thing. But it was a church.
00:23:45
And Pliny Fisk and his wife, Daria, was there. And—and the Burnett’s had—they’d all come—all this—this group of people, Wolf Hilbertz, they’d all come from Penn. And Daria and Pliny had both worked with, uh, Louis Kahn, the great architect from Pennsylvania, uh, and they’d also worked with Ian McHarg, who’s, uh, still probably wrote the Bible on how you design with nature. He wrote this book called Design with Nature which is about mapping our—our entire earth’s surface and then wherever we go looking at water, soils, geography, all the—the trees, the endemic species and placing manmade elements where it has the least impact—once you map all these things and layer these things.
00:24:44
So there are these remarkable people hanging out in this ad hoc annex we called it and it was all, at the time, no one talked about sustainability. No one talked about self-sufficiency or resiliency but Pliny Fisk, in particular, was madly dr—dreaming up ideas on how a house could be self-sufficient or how you could build a wind generator and generate your own energy or you could harvest water and—rain water and not use any water. Uh, so he was thinking already about designing houses more like boats, where they’re almost self-sufficient, they capture rain water.
00:25:28
They’ve got pedals under the sink that you can stand on the pedals for hot and cold and use a lau—lot less water because you’re not reaching up to turn off and on the water. [laughing] I mean, Pliny’s just got more ideas than he can keep up with. Uh, but he was very inspiring and I—I worked with Pliny as a student and for a semester and I got so intrigued with what he was up to that I convinced my dad to give the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems or Max’s Pot, uh, some money and we ended up building an Oklahoma wa—turban wind generator, which really looked like a—a bicycle with spokes, with blades, uh, on a very simple big wheel that spun at quickly—feathered into breeze quickly and was—and then we built it and it generated power and we were all excited.
00:26:25
Uh, and, at the same time, Pliny was—had—had this very quirky Mason—I can’t remember his name but he—I’ve always found masons that usually have a big fat pencil on their shirt and they have big, stubby hands because they’ve been picking up—their hands have to be incredibly powerful to move bricks or stone and stuff drops on their hands all the time. So they have these big beat up hands. And he would tell us about—and we made caliche block and different kinds of earth block with his help.
00:26:59
And so immediately we—I’m immersed in building from the land, responding to the climate, the energy of the sun, and beginning to think about, uh, resource efficiency and how a building should not spring from, uh, just a sculptural idea about what it should look like, but it should emerge from the land in response to local materials, craft, culture, climate, and immediately be authentic to that place. And that’s where I got—I was grounded in, uh, uh, um, an environmental approach to, uh, drive architectural design. Uh…

DT: And—and so, um, let’s see you—you’re entering—this is graduate school in architecture?

00:27:49
DL: No, I’m a—uh, I was a itinerate student. I would start and stop and start and stop. So I—I started in ’72. I graduated in ’76. It took me fi—a long time to get a—even just a four-year degree, uh, I’d already spent two years at UVA. And I would go work for architectural firms, like I’d—I’d take a semester off and I’d work for, uh, what was once Brooks, Barr, Graeber and White, which then became another firm, 3D International, uh, and then [inaudible 00:28:22] very, uh, uh, yeah, their early work was because of their connection to the Brown fou—family and LBJ. And they did work all over the world and they’re right here in Austin.
00:28:36
And, uh, and David Graeber was quite a—a intriguing design—he was the design principal for the company. And—and Brooks was basically a—a, uh, a lobbyist, uh, and got—knew exactly what was happening so they got a lot of federal work, a lot of state work. Uh, sometimes they didn’t do it very well—like the Post Office here. It—it spans over the road that—that stately monstrosity. Um, some of their work was a little heavy handed but, uh, I would take off. And then I would work for them and I’d go, hmmm, do I really want to be an architect because if we’re going to be designing these kind of things.
00:29:20
So I was, uh, I had misgivings about arch—where architecture was going and what—and how it was produced. And, uh, so when I graduated, I went—I started—I was build—I was building solar adobe houses, uh, uh, with a friend and, uh, we had a project—a client in Ruidosa. So I moved to Ruidosa. We built a solar adobe house there and then, uh, somebody from Amarillo had a house next door and they saw it. They said why don’t you come to Amarillo and design a house for me in, uh, Friona, which is right next to Bovina. You get into these cow names.
00:29:59
You get Bovina and Hereford and anyway, I went up to cow country, uh, and we did a, uh, solar adobe houses—two solar adobe houses. Each one was dug into the hillside, uh, looking out to the south. And playas—these depressions that are out in the landscape. Uh, so if you look to the south, you get great solar heat and it’s very dry up there. And if it’s got cows grazing on the roof, that means a tornado can’t tear the house up. So we would use recycled telephone beams and poles and, uh, all kinds of stuff where we would just find, uh, a—a castoff, uh, shipping crates, you know, when they used to take pretty good wood and make shipping cartons, uh, out of, um, uh.
00:30:54
And so I started, you know, just being a builder and be—and designing, uh, homes for farmers. And the beauty of that is that farmers don’t care about style. All they would want—all they would love is that they have a house that’s safe from the tornadoes, that heats themselves, cools themselves, pretty self-sufficient. You know, they’re still pioneers at heart. And—and, uh, eh—we would use all manner of ingenuity to craft these houses and make the most with the least, which I think is—was a great lesson to how to make common materials that usually had been cast off, lying around the ranch or the farm and using that in the house, uh, as—as part of—because it’s available.
00:31:50
And, uh, so, that was really fun. Enjoyed that but I—I did it—af—after two years, uh, I was getting a little tired of Amarillo. You know, I—it’s a horizon line situation. I mean, I’m up there—maybe a tree interrupts the horizon line like that every once in a while. Uh, and there was one day where I woke up and there was a sandstorm and then a front came in and the—there was incredible lightning, a tornado so I saw a tornado. [laughing] This is true story. And then it sleeted and then it snowed for a moment and then it was blue skies in a 24-hour period.
00:32:36
And, at that point, I was like, you know, I think I’ve seen it all now. I’ve seen every possible weather situation in a 24-hour period and I think I need to get back to, uh, I need to go test whether I want to be an architect. And I had met O’Neil Ford at, uh, at UT. He had come to UT as a visiting critic. And he was quite a good critic. He would—he, uh, unlike the other professors at school, he would ask probing questions about well what’s this made out of and how are you going to build it? And he was asking questions that professors did not ask.
00:33:18
Uh, or he would be adamant about climate responsiveness and context. And does it fit its place? What’s the neighboring—what’s it like to the left and to the right? And he was asking contextual questions. And, um, I became fascinated with O’Neil. I was in that class and one day he asked me to go with him out to the quarry, which I thought would be a simple trip. Co—okay we go to the quarry, look at the stones. He was working on the Communications Building at UT at the time and he wanted to get these big, heavy blocks of limestone for the base.
00:33:56
So I didn’t know that Neil was—he had this old Porsche and I didn’t know he was a former, uh, fighter pilot trainer. And he drove that car on a gravel road about 80 miles an hour. There was no way we could have ever stopped if we ever had to. We’re on gravel and he’s trying to—to scare me. I mean, he just loved an audience and he loved to, you know, just entertain. And so he’s trying to get that Porsche to leave all fu—wheels on these ridges on a gravel road going out to the quarry. And, uh, we ca—we became fast friends. [laughing]
00:34:33
I had great respect for him because he was such a entertaining, uh, lovely, uh, storyteller and architect. And, uh, he cared passionately about how buildings were crafted and how they—how they were ss—ss—supposed to mirror the very best of our—our culture and our, uh, our, uh—he—he really, truly felt that—that there is art in architecture. And the art springs from this collision of craft and culture and context and—and art. Uh, so anyway I knew that I want—if I was going to go to work for some—anyone in Texas, I wanted to work for O’Neil.
00:35:22
And so I left Amarillo, came to work, uh, for O’Neil in—in San Antonio. And so I moved from Amarillo to San Antonio in ’78. Uh, and, uh, kind of late ’78 and I worked for O’Neil for five years. And did everything from restoration of Galveston historic buildings on the Strand to, uh, working on some restoration of the missions in San Antonio, uh, and, uh, and then doing houses. And, uh, it was quite a learning laboratory. I mean, at the time, we were in King William and he was—the office—Ford Powell and Carson was in four different houses.
00:36:13
Uh, O’Neil was in one, Boone Powell was in another. Chris Carson was in another and then down the street was the, uh, another group led by Bruce Sassi and others. And so, there are all these little fiefdoms that go on. And each design house sort of had its own kind of attitude about what they were up to. [laughing] It was—it was kind of a village for design. And incredible people there.

DT: Which village were you in?

00:36:43
DL: I was the, uh, I was in the O’Neil Ford Village and the Chris Carson Village and briefly in the Boone Powell Village, depending on where I was needed at what time. But, uh, you know, San Antonio too because it’s, uh, O’Neil loved San Antonio. He moved there from north Texas where he had worked, uh, with, uh, Fred—was it Fred Williams—no—Frank Williams—can’t remember. Anyway, uh, uh, uh, a really classic Texas modernist in north Texas, uh, and he was honing his craft on merging a modernist aesthetic with the ideals of a craft and, uh, and learning from past history about how he would build appropriately and not forgetting, before air conditioning disrupted our way, how we could, again, go back to making buildings that were intrinsically fitted to their place.
00:37:53
Uh, and typically that began with really understanding the climate, the sun, the breezes, cold breezes, hot breezes, uh, and how to orient the house to maximize those, uh, so that you could be more immersed in the landscape because if you close windows and you turn on the air conditioner and you hear the hum of the air conditioner, you’re immediately not of nature. You’re disconnected. You’re looking at nature through a glass wall that’s not breathing, that’s not letting breezes in—in and through the house.
00:38:35
Uh, and so those were all really good lessons to learn and, uh, shape how like Flato begins to look at—at design process. So I met Ted in—two years later, Ted came to Ford Powell and Carson.

DT: Is this Ted Flato?

00:38:56
DL: Ted Flato, my partner. And we, uh, did not like each other. Uh, we, in fact, O’Neil I think—O’Neil loved to—he loved to pit—he loved to squabble. You know, he loved creating chaos. So he—he told me because I’d been there a while, he said, “I want you to kind of educate this guy on it because he’s coming in from Stanford and, you know, Stanford people.” That—because he had absolute—O’Neil had no—he just could not stand highfalutin degrees, you know. He had a correspondence degree from Ohio, a mail in correspondence degree that was plastered on his wall and he would—whenever you started talking in postmodern theory or any kind of theory whatsoever, he would just point to that and go, I’m from Pink Hill, Texas.
00:39:49
I don’t have a—all I care about is how am I going to build it and how’s it going to fit. And, um, anyway, I was supposed to be kind of marshaling Ted on this bank job. And we fought. We fought over—I wanted Romanesque arches. He wanted square arches, you know. I wanted to do brick or stone. He wanted to do brick, steel wood, I mean, every—every si—decision was a fight. And O’Neil loved it. He—he’d always come in chewing on his cigar, come into the room and he’d listen to us make our case for whichever design and he would just look at it and go, why not just make it simple. [laughing]
00:40:38
He didn’t, you know, so we would okay, I guess we better figure out—we would learn to compromise, to work together to make it simple. And th—in the process of compromising, collaborating and working together, we began to really like one another and then really love each other as brothers. Uh, and, uh, but Neil was quite a strong critic and he would, uh, one of the best things he would do is he had this big, fat carpenter’s pencil that he loved, that he would whittle. You know, he loved to make a mess on your desk.
00:41:10
Take his knife out and whittle, get the stuff all over the desk, and then get the pencil and say, David, if you don’t know how to build it, you sure as hell can’t draw it. And he’d get this pencil and he’d draw detail, full sized. This is a brick coming into the jamb [laughing] and what you’re drawing, how can you even, I mean, it doesn’t even work. That was, of course, true but, uh, it’s gui—quite a good lesson in just the everything we do is about thinking about how it gets built and the process of building.

DT: So now it’s [overlapping conversation] the details.

00:41:47
DL: It’s the details. He was very detail minded but he was also a great designer of form too. Uh, but often if he really wanted—if he got really exasperated, and this was an era of, uh, post-modernist—Michael Graves and Venturi and, uh, Charles Moore, were doing all these very, what he would call, “venereal buildings”. [laughing] So he would just take—he said they’d take ven—veneer and they turned it into “venereal architecture”. [inaudible 00:42:26]. That’s pretty strong O’Neil but he hated it because it was all about putting a character on the outside without any regard for really what happens on the inside.
00:42:38
And it was just antithetical to him completely. So he called himself a pre-modernist meaning that he much preferred the architecture before post-modernism. So he was a pre-modernist. And, uh, he always would say if—if we were having—if Ted and I were having a really good argument about a design, he would weight in and say well, I don’t think—I—I think you haven’t reduced this design to its essential elements. What happens to this design in five hundred years when weather and time have acted upon it and it’s now a ruin?
00:43:25
Is it a good ruin because if it’s not a good ruin, it’s not a good building. And to cap that off just to make us like whoa, he would say Machu Picchu. He loved Machu Picchu. He had been there. He took a photograph of the sacred altar from up above at Machu Picchu. It was the only photograph in his office on—at his desk. And I think it was a great lesson in, uh, knowing that your design does have to address weather and time and move away from cru—cultural artistic trends and think about a building spanning m—at least a hundred years.
00:44:16
And if it’s spanning that duration of time, building for the ages, building that’s timeless, make it simple, ground the building in its place.

DT: So don’t design for architectural magazines?

00:44:31
DL: Don’t design for the moment. Don’t design for the photograph. Design for the people who are in the building. Uh, Neil was a—quite a strong believer that the built environment was for the common good, that the built environment helped shape, uh, to the benefit of the common man. And he would often say, “Never forget your fellow citizen. Never forget the impact the building has upon everyone, including the people who don’t come in the building.” Uh, and he was a political activist and did a lot of great work in San Antonio, uh, with the Conservation Society.
00:45:22
Uh, you know, one of the great battles he won was keeping the highway from going—TxDOT wanted to take the highway, uh, straight through Brackenridge Park. And not only was it in violation of Brackenridge’s gift, but it was the most direct route to downtown. But he and Wanda [Ford] and the Conservation Society fought that, took it all the way to the Texas Supreme Court. They won and they forced TxDOT to keep the freeway on the edge of Brackenridge Park, which is why it’s got a big S curve in it today but it kept the park land intact.
00:46:02
And, uh, so I think, you know, being an activist architect and thinking about the city and thinking about what makes cities better was also a great lesson, uh, that you can’t just be at—this insular architect who does really good buildings. You have to also get beyond the individual building and think about the common good and th—and be engaged in the built environment, which is everybody’s building, how do we—we’re only as good as the building next to us. So elevating all the votes, right.
00:46:41
Getting—getting everybody to be better and that’s the beauty of being in San Antonio is there are a lot of, uh, great architects and a legacy of great architectural firms, but there’s also incredible trades. There’s third and fourth generation masons, plasterers, metal workers. Nowhere else in the United States do you have this legacy of tradesmen who are her third, fourth, fifth generation, uh, craftsmen and he loved that. And he would often drag a mason to our office to—to tell me how to lay that stone on the dr—detail and how that I was totally crazy and couldn’t be done. And not only that, it wasn’t being true to the material. [laughing]

DT: Well it sounds like O’Neil Ford was a huge influence in your life, uh, and—and also was the—the person, the place where you met Ted Flato and—and started, I guess, to build the firm that—that you now help fun.

00:47:46
DL: Yeah. We—we—we met and we, uh, when Neil died in ’82, uh, we—I—I had decided that I just couldn’t stay there any longer and I—I left to—I had a project I was working on in Colorado. And, uh, and then Ted left, uh, three or four months later and we decided to—to team up and have a—a—luckily Ted had a house that he was working with his sister on here in Austin, and I had a house for this client in Colorado and then later I had a house for my mom. So our—our families luckily were our first, uh, patrons. But quickly thereafter, we started doing mainly ranch houses, uh, in the landscape.

DT: Tell us about [overlapping conversation].

00:48:34
DL: So—so the beauty of a ranch house—designing a ranch house—is, uh, they’re in the wilds kind of like these children there in the background we’re hearing. Uh, they’re, uh, in and of the landscape and so they’re innately, uh, should be responsive to climate. And most ranchers and people who want to use these ranch houses are there to be immersed in nature and to be in the—engaged in the landscape.
00:49:06
And so we would often build with local materials, local stone, or adobe and, uh, create houses with great porches because we felt like the porch was the threshold between the manmade and the natural world and if you had this great porch and you size it to be a living room, you were immediately immersed in the landscape, uh, because there’s no glass between me and the—and the breezes of—you’re feeling the wind, you’re feeling the sun, you’re intrinsically of that immediate place. And, um, and they work great to—got to keep the snakes out.
00:49:51
You got to keep the bugs out. You got to keep the moths out at night. Uh, so they had a—a great many purposes and it would mean that—that you could open all the windows on the porch and not worry about all those things getting into the house but it allowed breezes to flow through and—and encouraged it because you always loved being on the porch. And it would enable you to build a little bit smaller living room and therefore be economical. So we were [laughing], you know, all these things were being driven by economy, sp—practical, again, using the ingenuity of ranching because ranchers are intrinsically, they just, you know, there’s not a rusted pipe they don’t like.
00:50:37
So we would often build some of these porches out of rusted pipe and welding because they can weld and everybody can weld [inaudible 00:50:44] on the ranch. So there are some innate, uh, crafts that happen on a ranch, uh, but mainly just being really smart and practical. And so these houses will reside in landscapes that, uh, we—were—each one was really different. We did one down near the—near the, uh, Rio Grande that was more inspired by the buildings along the Rio Grande, these great, old buildings that were built in the 1750s.
00:51:19
Local stone, uh, and, uh, stucco. We actually whitewashed the brick—Mexican brick with a lime wash with colors that we got from Mexico. Classic. You know, and so when it rains, they start kind of peeling a little and wa—getting so the brick [inaudible 00:51:38] gets all mottled and…

DT: Wobby?

00:51:40
DL: [inaudible] wobby. Exactly. Um, kept the big, round cistern. We actually put the house near this beautiful, concrete cistern because it was so lovely. Uh, had a—kind of had a little, uh, you know, real windmill going. So it was very romantic. These were all—I think ranch houses are innately romantic. They should be. They’re about being immersed in their place and so they’re—they should evoke th—the place and the spirit of the culture that went on before and how they’re—those things were built there.
00:52:17
Like if you’re building around Fredericksburg [00:52:18], it’s more like the Sunday houses and those great old stone houses that the generals built. As you move south, you get into, uh, more of the Hispanic culture, uh, parapetted ray—parapets and roofs in between and, uh, the Roma architecture. So we were inspired for—by letting the immediate place inspire each design.

DT: So would you often go to a place where you were planning to build a new building and look at some of the historic buildings that were of that place and of those materials that were local? Or?

00:52:54
DL: Oh yeah. Absolutely, because we—the one thing Neil really pounded into us was learning from what was the—built before. And, uh, and they’re lovely buildings and they’re—they’re slowly leaving our landscape unfortunately. Uh, but the buildings of Roma or the buildings, uh, all around Fredericksburg and the Hill Country, uh, yeah, really loving how those buildings emerge from the ground because they’re—typically if it’s stone, it’s stone from right there and they just seem to grow from the ground up.
00:53:31
And, uh, but they’re very quiet, simple buildings. They’re not egotistical. They’re not trying to convince you of your—their genius. They’re really there to—to shelter and to nurture the people within them and to be innately practical. Like there’s—O’Neil just loved barns. So, I mean, he would—we’d be driving along—any barn—he would stop the car. Well I got to look at this barn. He just loved barns because they were the most innate, functional, truly, uh, you know, this whole idea of—of function follow—form follows function, which was the old, uh, mandate by the—by, you know, modernists that don’t—you just don’t throw up a form.
00:54:25
It needs to have a function first and then the form follows the function.

DT: Get the order right.

00:54:32
DL: Uh, get the order right, yeah. We don’t do that today. We do sculpture and then maybe function in some cases. Um, but, uh, but yeah, we really, uh, being immersed in the history of each place and since this is about—an interview about history, right, that’s what we’re supposed to be talking about in a way is they’re the legacy of history in their state. Uh, uh, I think learning from what has come before, I mean, all—all great architects and all architects learn from those who came before them.
00:55:10
And—and at—and that way, it’s a very—I love the integrity of that idea that our profession is building upon those who came before us, as opposed to just throwing things out of our sleeve that have nothing to do with those who came before. So, uh…

DT: So some history plus some experience plus some imagination. You get something new but that it has a—a legacy. Is that fair to say?

00:55:41
DL: I—b—b—buildings sh—should be rooted to their place. And that’s a, um, and to do that, they have to spring from the, you know, we—the culture, the climate, the craft, uh, context of each place. And if you do that, then they will be, uh, innately of the place and they’ll be authentic because you—you have looked at the history of what’s been built before and you have been inspired by that but not shackled by it. And, uh, especially now when we design, we—we look to the future about how systems, uh, systems integration, science, engineering, shape buildings, uh, like this building is shaped, um—the library was shaped to be the most day lit library in the United States.
00:56:39
In order to do that, we had to think about the library as a light funnel and to bring light in as you typically do on the perimeter, but then also how we bring light down in the middle and disperse light throughout the building so that 85 percent of the floor area is day lit on this building. And we were able to accomplish that by putting all the opaque—fire stairs, mechanical systems—in the middle of the building so that they become reflectors of the light that’s coming in through the atrium. So there was quite a bit of daylight and engineering that went on and that was the first thing we did.
00:57:23
We didn’t think about the exterior. We just thought about how do we get daylight to permeate the building, uh, completely. And what is that section and how we beam light down to—in six floors to get that even illumination. So the science of, uh, engineering, um, doing mechanical systems, plumbing systems that recycle water. This building recycles water. We capture water on the ro—on the roof. They go down into a cistern that we found when we were, uh, demolishing the old, uh, uh, building that was here.
00:58:05
They had le—there was a cistern, uh, an enormous pipe basically was taking water from Lady Bird Lake up into the Seaholm Power Plant to cool the generators. Well we said don’t take it out. It was underneath, uh, extension of Second Street. We’ll use it as a reservoir for rainwater. So it—we now have a reservoir of 275,000 gallons. [laughing] So we—we flush all the toilets with that water. We irrigate all the plants around our building plus the plants beyond with rainwater. Uh, you know, water is a life source. Water has meaning. Water is more than resource.
00:58:48
Uh, and we do the same with solar energy. We have, uh, fillable tanks on the roof and over the porch on the—on the butterfly garden. And those provide, uh, on a good day, about 15 percent of the energy demand of the building. And all the systems are designed for low energy use. And, in addition, all the materials are, uh, either produced within a 500 mile radius or—or high recycled content. So, for instance, these aluminum systems are all ninety percent recycled aluminum. Uh, so it takes a lot of energy and wr—and engineering to think through how do you—how do you build a building that’s light on the land, resource efficient, energy efficient, water efficient, and layer all these things together into a cohesive, uh, you know, shelter for reading, learning, creating community, sharing knowledge.

DT: So you—you—I guess you’re concerned both about the energy the building consumes as it operates but also the embedded energy that’s in the aluminum, for instance, the—the emollients and the [inaudible]…

01:00:05
DL: Even, yeah. The concrete’s, uh, actually, uh, recycled aggregate, not new aggregate. So when they crush up—when you see TxDOT tearing up roads and concrete, that gets milled up and it gets re—reused as aggregate. Um, all the rebar is high recycled content steel, uh, and then we use, uh, fly ash from—which is a byproduct of coal fired plants, which is about the only thing th—th—good a coal plant does is it creates fire ash and we use—the concrete is about 35 percent fly ash as a substitute for aggregate and it actually means we use less cement.
01:00:51
So cement’s a big impact on the environment so using it—less cement in the concrete means it’s a lower impact. So yes, thinking through every material and its impact downstream, uh, on the environment is pivotal to seeking to make truly resilient, sustainable buildings.

DT: I think that we were—we had talked about the recycled content, uh, and—and we were just edging into the thought about some of this material being specked to be low in toxic aspects. And could you talk a little bit about how you made those decisions?

01:01:32
DL: Yeah, so those, uh, uh, w—we have, uh, an in-house engineer who—and we actually have a sustainability team within our office who focus on chasing down materials that are, uh, that do not outgas toxic materials at all, uh, and furthermore that we speck materials that are the least possible impact to the earth so we do—we try and avoid vinyl. Uh, we try to—all this carpet’s recycled content. Uh, we avoid outgassing like formaldehyde, lot of materials that come in places you wouldn’t expect—uh, plywoods. Some plywoods are terrible.
01:02:13
Some plywoods are okay. You have to chase down, uh, and get the specifications on how those materials perform. So, yes, this building is—it needs to be a healthy building for everybody and all the occupants. And so, uh, uh, not only is it providing energy and recycling water and—and providing shelter. It’s also providing a healthy, uh, nurturing place to encourage this transfer of knowledge that I think’s so amazing about libraries. They’re this—the hub of knowledge, hub of transfer, community hubs, uh, kind of, uh—you know, growing up in Austin, we never had a—a kind—a city living room.
01:02:59
Right. We never, you know, UT had all the big public spaces. Our City Hall doesn’t quite pull it off but we wanted to make sure that this library was seen as the city’s living room. And…

DT: Is this like—I’ve heard people call it the third place—not home, not office—but someplace else.

01:03:19
DL: Well that’s a high compliment. Uh, uh, but yeah, I think, uh, it’s fun to be in this building and see the—how inclusive the audience is, how it’s old and young. It’s, uh, east, west, north, south Austin. Uh, it’s, uh, it’s students from UT coming. It’s students from high schools coming. Um, being up on the—on the rooftop garden. It’s very gratifying to have a building, uh, serve its community and, uh, and also be at this amazing juncture of Lady Bird Lake, Shoal Creek, um, at the nexus. The re—very reason Austin is here is because of water—being next to the Colorado River.
01:04:08
You know, that’s why you put cities near rivers. You needed that water and it’s nice to—to recalibrate that now into that this building’s actually capturing running water and—and is a—a kind of a story about how to build for the future. And, uh…

DT: You mentioned how, uh, the Central Library is—has been sort of adopted by the community, that it’s part of the larger context of Austin. I understand that—that, uh, in your firm and in Lake Flato that often you take the lead on, uh, urban design, urban planning, uh, issues. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that kind of role that you—you play?

01:04:53
DL: Uh, well we have a—a—a—Lake Flato’s, uh, based in San Antonio and Austin. And we’re—we’re broken into studios—six studios—but, uh, uh, I typically address and am interested in—in how to make our cities better, how to make our cities more dense, how to, uh, move away from our reliance upon the car and letting the car shape our cities and think about future of mobility in transportation, resource efficiency, green infrastructure, uh, how are we going to—Austin can’t possibly continue in the way it is.
01:05:35
It’s—it can’t continue sprawling into the Hill Country and having people commute longer and longer and longer periods and having more and more cars. That’s just not a viable solution. And so I—I’m interested in getting more people living, uh, near downtown or in districts. Uh, you know, great neighborhoods—making neighborhoods not just be limited to single family houses but build to the thoroughfares and have, uh, much like Omar [01:06:06] has apartments and restaurants along its course and it slowly drops down to single family residential. That…

DT: [inaudible] dense corridors.

01:06:19
DL: So creating dense corridors is—strengthens our—our city by getting more people—by not sprawling our, uh, and it also enables us to—by getting density—to hopefully look at better mobility options in the future, whether it’s light rail or van sharing or smart buses, um, and you can’t do that if we’re continuing to sprawl out into the hinterlands and not have density. Uh, so I care about urban design. At Pearl Brewery, we took the 26 acre site in San Antonio which was, uh, two miles from downtown Riverwalk and basically two miles from Olmos Park, Alma Heights, Terrell Hills—uh, it was a no man’s land.
01:07:08
And it was a warehouse district where there was nothing going on. All the industry had left. There was no one living within a 2 ½, 3 mile radius almost. And we took the site and with Silver Venture’s help, uh, they bought the site and they, uh, hired us to dream with them about a city, uh, that leveraged the beautiful brewery buildings from the 1880s to about 1950, the succession of different building typologies and we, uh, we really looked at how we could create a new place, a new destination, a new district.
01:07:51
And luckily, Kit Goldsbury, founder of Silver Ventures, loved food and his idea was well I want to focus because—because San Antonio doesn’t have a food district, doesn’t have a restaurant district, let’s make this district about—grounded in culinary arts. And there’s a need for training in culinary arts, for all the tourism in San Antonio. And so it—we basically created a district that revolves around the art of food. And so there’s a school—Culinary Institute of Art—or of, uh, uh, is there—Culinary Institute of America and now there’s fifteen restaurants and 2,000 people living there, uh, where there was zero.
01:08:39
And there’s office, uh, so it’s a—you live, work, play, uh, sleep. You know, these are—I think districts should be like great village centers. You know, that has—it has a commons which is a plaza where families come just to have their kids run around, not necessarily to buy. You can go to Pearl and not buy and not eat. It’s a welcoming destination. And we were keen on it being local, that we weren’t going to have a Starbucks and we weren’t going to have a national chain, that we were actually going to have it be, uh, promote local crafts and arts and not only the culinary arts but in retail.
01:09:26
And so it deals particular to its place. And it’s on the river and so we improved it, uh, the river, uh, and the river in our section from the Riverwalk all the way up to Pearl. You can now take a ri—riverboat up from the Riverwalk all the way up to Pearl, turn around and go back again. So it’s almost a shuttle, uh, but only if you want to take like thirty minutes out of your day and better still, get a margarita, then you’re good about it. And you can make the trip from Pearl to the Riverwalk.
01:09:58
Uh, but, no I think, uh, moving beyond an individual building and, uh, thinking about that we don’t necessarily have to craft every building, that we’re—we’re hiring great architects and working with other architects and making great places. This combination of buildings that become a district, uh, and uh, it really is a highly collaborative effort that involves civil engineers all the way through to ecologists, water systems users, the whole green infrastructure. So we’ve—at Pearl, we’ve planted over a thousand trees.
01:10:41
Uh, there were very few trees at Pearl and now it’s a sustainable district. All the infrastructure is designed, the storm water goes into bioswales—it doesn’t go into pipes. The bioswales then water the trees. It filters the water then it migrates through and slowly makes its way into the river. Uh, and when it does, all the water from the streets go into a wetland next to the river. The wetlands filter that water so that any pollutants, heavy metals, get filtered out and the wetlands—the wetlands thrive and then the water’s cleaner.
01:11:19
Uh, so, as a source of water, which every watershed is, uh, Broadway basically flowed right through the Pearl District, uh, in a flood and so we’ve taken all that water [laughing], slowed it down, filtered it, and let it move into the riparian zone at the right speed and cleaner. Uh, so it becomes a story about how man, you know, making a place can actually engender nurturing all species and also, uh, that makes a much healthier place to be.

DT: You know, can we take the two examples of—of the Central Library and, uh, Pearl Brewery Complex and talk a little bit about all the disciplines that you’ve had to weave together in your firm because it sounds like there are lots of problems that aren’t purely architectural that you’ve had to confront and you’ve had to have special expertise, um, to deal with the, you know, the water or the electrical systems, um, you know, perhaps other aspects?

01:12:32
DL: So we have a—we have a—a wonderful staff who are—who, uh, are dedicated to de—designing and building these resilient, sustainable places and buildings. And, uh, really it’s a collaborative effort, you know, the—the—the idea of a—a single person designing a place is just, uh, an inaccurate idea. Uh, I didn’t design this building by myself. I designed this building with a partner of Shepley Bullfinch Richardson who’s designed over 120 libraries out of Boston. We teamed with them because they know libraries.
01:13:18
And we had—I think we had a—about 22 consultants—mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, plumbing engineers, we had ecologists, landscape architects, uh, a whole bevy of, um, you know, communications specialists, uh, all these rooms, you can go and rent online and sign up for these rooms. We had to think through all the technology that’s inherent. So we’ve we—woven technology throughout the building because we want the building to be able to respond as technology changes and it will. Uh, when we started this building, uh, there were not smartphones.
01:14:02
So, you know, ten years ago—we forget that these little handheld computers were not everywhere present as they are today, uh, and thinking about how those have changed our lives. So, uh, lots of different consultants but we rely on teaming with other consultants. We do have in-house engineer, uh, who’s first rate that keeps us honest, uh, at Lake Flato and she has, uh, so we have a sustainability, um, department that over—looks through all of our projects and makes sure that we’re seeking the appropriate goals and ideals for each building.
01:14:44
And from a per—performance cross—perspective, not a design perspective. But we’ve—we’ve imp—we basically have melded design and building performance into one process because you can’t—you can’t do a building of this, uh, sophistication without having a really great team of consultants and then having the consultants collaborate and agree to goals of building performance. So, yeah, it’s innately, uh, part of what we do. One of the things we do, uh, very well with—is—is—it’s almost a—it’s more—it’s more rarely understood is when we do buildings and landscape for arboretums or visitor’s centers.
01:15:31
They’re, uh, innately of that particular geography or ecology or riparian zone. And so each building is unique to its place. And we’ve done buildings that are living buildings. So that means we’ve done a building in North Texas that’s completely off the grid. It procures its own power by itself with solar energy. It harvests all of its own rainwater. The—the septic system is, um, held within itself so it’s not being pumped into another field. It’s actually going through a—a—a—a mulching system that is a [inaudible 01:16:11] so that the net result of that is better earth to then grow the native grasses, which is what this visitor’s center’s all about is about sustainable farming, ranching with endemic grasses of the north Texas plains.
01:16:27
And so that—that’s the first building built in Texas that’s compl—that call—considered a living building, which is a—a—an amazing accomplishment to get a building completely innately resilient and off the grid and self-sufficient. And that’s our goal on all the arboretums because they’re—you go to an arboretum typically to learn about a garden or learn about a landscape or learn about a—a geography. So they are the gateway to that place. They’re the threshold for—they’re the manmade threshold where you learn about the natural realm and you are out in it.
01:17:11
And so we love to do big porches that double as kind of the—the—the event spaces that are, uh, le—you know, im—immediately of an—of that particular place. Uh, one thing that I’ve always, uh, O’Neil was, uh, he loved nature and he loved trees and he could not stand it if a building was going to cut a tree down, just drove him crazy. You know, can’t we do something to save that tree? In fact, one of the good stories is that when he was building the, uh, old hotel next—near La Villita, there was a anacua tree—this amazing tree that grows in south Texas, doesn’t get up into Austin because it’s—it’s fairly cold sensitive, although now, hell it could be in the Red River, uh, the way we’re going.
01:18:09
Uh, the anacua feels like a sandpaper. If you touch its leaf, it’s incredibly like sand. It’s just amazing, very deep green leaf with these really rustic bark. Well there was an anacua that was the largest anacua downtown and it was right where that hotel had to go. So Neil got with the arborist and they dug a twelve foot wide, six foot deep trench, eighty feet long and they leaned that tree over after they had carefully dug all the way around its roots, balled it up, and slowly pulled it down that trench.
01:18:45
They weren’t lifting it and—and it is thriving today in the middle of the courtyard at this hotel. And he said after we—you know, I went down with him when they had finished the work and he was just loving it. You know, he had all this publicity from moving a tree. But he told me, uh, and Ted, he said, “You’re never going to design a building as beautiful as a tree.” It was like—it was like that was it. You’re never going to be as good as a tree. Yeah. A tree’s rooted to the place. It bends to the wind. It adds leaves to shade itself from the summer and it sheds those leaves in the winter so it can be heated.
01:19:33
You’ll never be that good. Well every day at Lake Flato, we seek to design buildings as resilient as a tree and, uh, we aim for that lofty goal because I think, uh, we, as architects, uh, the people are responsible for the built environment. Uh, all of us should be thinking of a new future where we are building as lightly on the land as possible, where we’re preserving as much buildings as possible to breathe new life into them because that’s the most sustainable thing you can do. And we also need to be thinking about all species, nurturing not only the earth but all creatures great and small.
01:20:28
I mean, I just think, uh, if we could all yearn for that goal and seek that goal, uh, and we—absolutely, at this point, it’s beyond—we—we should be in survival mode honestly. We’re—we’re, uh, as a species, we’re responsible for our horrific chain of events that’s happening and we’re not accepting our own science—some of us—are not accepting of the science and of the knowledge and of the many hundreds, I mean, how is it that the Romans could apply science better than we can two thousand years ago? I mean, it’s embarrassing.
01:21:09
So, um, we owe it to our species to be better stewards of this earth. Uh, and that’s what we think architecture should do. We think it should immediately immerse you in place. It should engage you in the built environment and make you realize you’re an auth—authentic, wonderful, wondrous place, and it should also seek to preserve the wildness of nature and [inaudible 01:21:42]. You know, we need to curtail our forays into—into the wilds and make our cities more dense and make them more livable and make them more open and accessible and have equity for all people because there’s going to be a significant challenge moving ahead with water, food, resources.
01:22:08
Climate change is not limited to just weather. It is affecting our—the ecology of the world. Uh, so we have lofty goals. You know, as a architectural firm, we seek to build something as beautiful as a tree. Uh, and I think that this library takes a good first step towards doing that. Uh, and I’m just really proud to be an architect and to be, um, part of this long line of creative builders, uh, that have crafted our manmade environment. Uh, so…

DT: Uh, I have—I have one more question. I think David may have a question.

[misc.]

DW: So I know, uh, when we were talking at the very beginning kind of almost off-camera, you mentioned na—now I’m veering into politics and then we went back away from it. But, as I look at this building and it’s a large public structure and it obviously represents a large public investment in an infrastructure and then you mentioned that when it was started, there were not smartphones. There might be some-call it cynical—who would say, you know, a bank of servers and a Google and a search engine and an algorithm will take the place of the library and they’re probably those Silicon Valley types and the venture capitalists who see that as—and will tell you in Wired magazine that it is inevitable. Why then and how hard is it to get public officials, the elect—the electorate—to understand that what, you know, hundred million dollars, what—is actually an investment, especially when they might look at it and sa—and a pragmatic tech person will see lots of empty space that’s not filled with the infrastructure and—and the Google and the, you know, herein the servers and there’s the same knowledge you’re getting from those books on the shelves. Why and how—how hard was it to convince a public—if this was indeed publicly funded, I’m guessing, I don’t know.

01:24:15
DL: Oh yeah, no it was.

DW: How hard was it to get that and was that just special because it’s—because it’s Austin and Austin’s just so hip, it’s easy to do?

[sound cuts out 01:24:25 – 01:24:32]

01:24:33
DL: So public buildings, uh, are, uh, like this one are, uh, created with the public good in mind and it’s also the taxpayers’ money. Uh, the bulk of the funds came from the taxpayers, the 120 million dollars that it took to build this building was, uh, provided by bonds through the city. Very little equity came from outside except to do the technology and the furnishings. And so it was a battle to talk about the role of a library now. What is the role of the library? And it required, uh, great leadership.
01:25:10
Will Wynn was the mayor who found the site originally, uh, shut it—thought it should be at the confluence of Shoal Creek and Labor Lake. It was an old site filled with, uh, relay stations for Austin Energy. So it was a grey field site. Uh, and then, uh, following him, Lee Leffingwell, uh, put in a good fight and actually got additional twenty million dollars’ raised because our hundred million that had been allocated was not enough to build this building of this scale. And then, uh, finally, uh, Mayor Adler, uh, continued to push for improvements and, uh, funding for the building and gave an incredibly eloquent opening speech about now is the time for Austinites to make this your library.
01:26:05
And, uh, I think, uh, to—the—the question really is what is the role of, uh, civic buildings in our lives. Uh, sure we could all continue to communicate through, uh, phones or through computers but, uh, having grown up in Austin, I know that we never had a living room. We never had a common public space. We never had a commons. This is really Austin’s commons. This is where people come to share knowledge, to learn, to have meetings, to grab a quick bite, to, uh, have a variety of meetings. That’s why we have all these, uh, seminar meeting rooms scattered throughout.
01:26:54
There are 22 different meeting rooms that you can reserve offline—online—and have meetings. And I’ve seen startup companies starting here. I’ve seen, uh, you know, uh, really good ones are the high school students studying [laughing] because they’re having fun. Um, uh, uh, it’s just a memorable place so that, uh, it requires leadership. It requires people who understand that governance is for the common good and that the common good can be served by a building just as readily as our hike and bike trails serve an enormous populous, you know, the open space—now I—I consider this kind of the—the—the commons of our greater linear commons, which is the hike and bike trail system in the riparian zone of Austin.
01:27:51
I mean, that’s what sets Austin apart. Can you imagine Austin without the linear trail systems? Uh, I don’t think it’s possible. Can you imagine, uh, what that would be like not to share outdoor space on ACL or anything happening in Zilker or going to Barton Springs, doing the deep eddy, uh, it’s that sharing of nature and participation in being in the out of doors is, uh, I think this building now serves as a function of—when it’s inclement weather or when you want to have—create community and come together, you come together in this—the living room of Austin.
01:28:37
And I think that’s, uh, it’s been a long journey to get here. It’s taken us nine years from when we were selected but, uh, having grown up here, I know that it’s so much fun to see the inclusive nature of everyone using this library and being really excited about it. And I love hearing the kids running through, uh, going up to the third floor to use the—their, uh, reading room. And, uh, the high school students love the rooftop garden. So they’re at—they—everybody fights for those chairs that are up there. So it’s fun to have people fighting over a seat.
01:29:18
I mean, what other—what other building has such pressure on every floor to take a place and have a presence and share it? Uh, it’s an—inherently, uh, communicative place where community is created. Uh, so that’s exciting. It’s incredibly exciting to be part of this creation.

DT: We—it—I think you—you’ve had a career in—in, um, in—in building things, um, but building things that are set in nature and that really are responsive to site and place and I was hoping that—that you might answer one last question for me at least—you probably have other things to add—is, is there a special place in—in nature, whether it’s, uh, you know, a—a backyard lot that might have been, uh, an army base or—or perhaps a place out in—in the rural lands of Texas that—that means a lot to you that offers you some sort of solace, um, and a reminder of why you go to work and—and—and try to connect people with nature?

01:30:24
DL: You know, it’s interesting. I, um, I don’t have a favorite place. Um, every place that has wi—wildness is my favorite place. So wherever I go, I always seek out, uh, being out of doors and being immersed in a natural landscape, not a—not a manmade one. I’m not a fa—you know, my preference is not to be in manmade shelters. It’s to be immersed in the landscape. Uh, so I go hiking in Telluride because I can be in Telluride and I can do a twelve mile hike and never get in the car and go right out of the town, leave ma—the manmade environment, be immersed in the Rocky Mountains and come back and enjoy the—the beauty of community and of a town of four thousand.
01:31:23
Um, so that’s, uh, I—I do that a lot but my favorite place in Texas is really every place that’s—has wilderness still thriving. Uh, uh, you and I both serve on the Environmental Defense Fund. I mean, it’s—it does an amazing job of, uh, leveraging the entrepreneurial spirit of our culture and—to the benefit of nature. And, uh, you know, really melding science with—with governance and—and legal challenges and balancing all those. And that’s, uh, it—it’s an amazing organization but it—I get a lot of fun now out of working with Environment Defense Fund, working with cities to make city planning more inspired and more sustainable and dreaming about a future of Texas that is far more, uh, committed to the natural realm than it currently is.
01:32:38
Uh, so, uh, that’s, uh, it’s incredible to be in a—in a firm that has like-minded souls with outstanding talent who all share the same goals of waking up every morning and thinking about I’m going to design something as good as a tree. Uh, and, uh, that’s what we try to do.

DT: It’s a great goal.

01:33:05
DL: Yeah.

DT: Well thanks very much for your time. Is there anything you’d like to add before we close?

01:33:10
DL: Um, well yo—I—I think, uh, I just want to say again that, um, we grew up in Texas, right, and, uh, Texans are kind of crazy. Uh, th—they think, um, every piece of land is their land. [laughing] And we’re a big property rights state but when you get to the population we currently are and when you, uh, enable poor politics to lead decision making, as we do, uh, and we ignore science at our peril, uh, it’s really important that all of us enjoy what is Texas and what is Texas is really the natural beauty of our place.
01:34:03
It’s not like we’ve got the world’s best looking cities. Come on. We do have some of the most beautiful and spectacular ecologies anywhere on the planet and we need to embrace those, save those, preserve those. And the way you do that is actually making the manmade better and that’s really a lofty goal in and of itself, but one that we should all strive for.

DT: A good goal.

01:34:33
DL: Thank you.

DT: Thank you, Dave.

[End of Interview with David Lake – November 13, 2018]