Emilio Ambasz: Pragmatic Poet

My first personal encounter with Emilio Ambasz was deliciously serendipitous. I had just returned from an astonishing exhibition at the Design School in Zurich of the pioneer modernist bridge builder, Robert Maillart. I had been reading it up to New York on the train from Philly. I had arrived before any of the staff, and was killing time at the locked elevator up to his atelier. Suddenly this smartly tailored man appeared with a key. I asked him if he knew how I could meet Emilio Ambasz for an appointment. He smirked genially, winked, and said You have. A bit boggled by this happy turn of events, I grabbed at the straw of the book I had been reading. I've just returned from seeing this extraordinary Robert Maillart exhibition in Zurich. Are you familiar with his work?

He pointed me to one of his sleekly designed Vertebra chairs and replied, I guess you could say so. He's what got me into architecture. I was rooting through architectural books in a store in Resistencia, Argentina (my home town) when I came across Max Bill. He's the man who is said to have continued the Bauhaus tradition after the war at the Design School in Ulm. I learned in that book that I could be a civil engineer and architect, just like Maillart had been. That led me to apply to Princeton where the leading American authority on Maillart, Donald Billington taught. I applied, with a goofy kind of three D application, and got in.

Ambasz was no ordinary student. At the end of his first year, Billington posed to Emilio on the spot some complicated equations on structure. He solved them easily. Billington announced: Nice going. You're now in graduate school! He had always been that kind of an easy overachiever. After Princeton, he was appointed the head of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art, where for ten years he invented fresh ways of looking at design and architecture.

Take his Taxi Project. It dawned on this world traveler that it would be a good thing for the automobile industry if they all started looking at better ways of designing the worlds taxis. So he solicited opinions from all the manufacturers throughout the world. Except when he got to the president of General Motors, he got back a snippy snotty reject which amounted to Young Man, we sold 55,000 cabs last year and we don't need any counsel from you. Which Ambasz printed in the catalog. To the highest GM dudgeon, including a law suit. The judge had only one question: Did you write that letter? Yes. Case dismissed. Except that the head of the Board at MOMA, one William Paley, Chairman of CBS, had told Emilio he didn't like the idea of the Taxi Project at all, at all. That didn't stop the intrepid Argentinian from getting his seed money from one Dr. Frank Stanton, aka as the brains of that same CBS network. So shall we say that Mr. Ambasz has what they call South of the border, los cojones. He doesn't look for fights. He just sticks by his ideas, come hell or high water.

I asked him if it wasn't a bore to be organizing exhibitions at MOMA when he could be out there designing buildings of his own. Not at all. Its been great fun helping other architects to get their good things under way. When he finally started doing his own thinghis first big project was modernizing the Beaux Arts Museum of Art in Grand Rapids, MI. In that transaction he became chums with the local congressman, one Gerald Ford, later to sub for the ousted Richard Nixon, a relationship that stood him in good stead during the Taxi Project! And in the architecture culture that is characterized by silent civil wars among competing designers, he is curiously above it all. He even won a Japanese commission although he came in with the highest projected budget because the local media staged a protest on his behalf because they knew his solution was more poetic than the low ballers. And he is the polymath to end all polymathery. I talked about sitting on his chair. When I was curious as to who designed the Cummins Diesel engine strangely gracing his office. I did, he replied proudly.

With offices on three continents, EA continues to display that meld of pragmatism and poetry I so much admire in his work. No Titanium Gehry flamboyance for this reticent genius. When confronted with the facts of summer life in hotter than hell San Antonio, EA went underground with his Conservatory. No Richard Meier signature white metal panels. Each job demands an idiosyncratic solution. No goofy beams that don't meet a la Peter Eisenman. Every detail is quietly arranged to do the work of the client. No chest thumping architect he.

Ambasz is a creative servant, not a Star architect in search of a Signature that guarantees the next assignment. In the noisy cacophony of contemporary architecture, Emilio is a reticent genius, a soft persuasive voice that convinces the thoughtful. I've never seen an EA that didn't lift my spirit. And I've never seen an EA that reminded me of another EA. Each work is sui generis.