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Issue 103 Spring 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.
Drawing of a city of liquid villas that would float on the sea. Made by Katavolos and the Guild for Organic Design in the late ‘50s for the book Organics. All images courtesy of William Katavolos and Henry Harrison.
William Katavolos’s career as an avant-gardist spans 60 years, beginning in the late 1940s when, after giving up painting, he and fellow Pratt students Ross Littell and Douglas Kelley produced a furniture line including the “T” chair, which is now in the collection of MoMA and the Louvre. Katavolos lived the high life of the time in the company of Frederick Kiesler, Eva Zeisel, John Nichols, John Moran, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. He went on in industrial design to conceive furniture collections for the legendary Laverne International, partition systems for Time-Life and Owens Corning, a suspension ring system for the Moscow Fair, and the Agricultural and Solar Pavilions for Salonika. Folklore has it that he and Philip Johnson were in a race to the finish on the construction of their glass houses (Katavolos’s was completed in 1950 and still stands in Cazenovia, New York). His 1961 essay “Organics,” subsequently canonized as a “modern manifesto” in Ulrich Conrads’s book Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, predicted a chemical architecture grown from polymers, a proposition that has gained him new following among the current generation-genome architects.
It is one of his earliest experiments that is now the centerpiece of his continuing research at the Center for Experimental Structures at Pratt Institute, which he co-directs. In 1947, a dome he induced in a paper lid on an upside-down glass of water and a subsequent vacuum dome he laid out in Gardiner’s Bay near his family’s Ram’s Head Inn on Long Island inspired his liquid architecture—the subject of this interview. As he explained in a New Yorker Talk of the Town in September 2003, “Mies van der Rohe used to say, ‘We don’t invent a new architecture every Monday morning.’ It takes about 33 years to refine a new thing. It is not a young man’s work.”
