The Jefferson Agrarian

The list of past AIA Gold Medal Award recipients reads like a who’s who of American architectural history: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bernard Maybeck, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, both Saarinens (father and son), Louis Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Renzo Piano, Santiago Calatrava, to name just a few.

The 2010 recipient of the coveted Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects has a presence right here in Jeffersonia. The work of Peter Bohlin of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (famous for it’s designs of the San Francisco headquarters of Pixar, and Apple stores in New York and London) is represented in Redding at Turtle Bay Exploration Park.

Oddly, the Jeff found out more about Turtle Bay from the BCJ website than we did at Turtle Bay’s own site. It’s a sad note that Turtle Bay does not seem to celebrate it’s iconic architecture – nowhere on their website is any acknowledgement of their international status in contemporary building design. The Jeff feels that Turtle Bay continues to repudiate a museum’s role of aesthetic authority as oppressively “elitist,” which explains the mass exodus of most of the curatorial staff over the past decade. The current ‘canned’ shows like “The Scoop on Poop” and “The Art of the Brick” illustrates their mindset, and continues to elicit yawns from many potential patrons.

There is also some great info about Turtle Bay on the website of Architecture Week from September 2002. Ray Calabro, AIA, a BCJ associate, stated, “We felt that the building should evoke the mission statement by presenting methods of sustainable construction. They wanted to use the building as an exhibit, so that visitors could understand why the building was made. We utilized the sustainable building elements in such a way that it would be very evident.”

Humble Redding now has the distinction of having three Gold Medal awardees in our midst. Frank Lloyd Wright’s firm, of course, designed the Pilgrim Congregational Church in west Redding. We can add to that list the names of Santiago Calatrava (2005 awardee), architect of the Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay, and, now, Peter Bohlin.

Can we also claim Thomas Jefferson, who won the award posthumously in 1993, as the de facto father of the State of Jefferson? We’re not sure about that, but the message is clear to contemporary architects: come to Jefferson and design a structure, and your internationally known name will surely follow these luminaries!