The Visceralist

The connection between the crystalline geometry of BCJ’s Apple cube in Manhattan and the theatrical log columns of its Grand Teton National Park visitors’ center (or even the brawny roof beams at Combs Point) is not immediately obvious. Karl Backus, the San Francisco principal in charge of Apple, remembers a speech Bohlin gave in 2008 at the University of California, Berkeley, on just this topic. “The given theme was about making places,” Backus says.

“Peter chose to present the store on Fifth Avenue and the visitor center. Peter talked about the two different building forms looking like they fit in elegantly and gracefully in their settings.” On Fifth Avenue, Bohlin says, “we made it”—the GM Building plaza—“what it should have been. I have always been interested in the nature of people, how you titillate them to draw them through a building. If you make an intelligent structure for a place, then it all seems inevitable.”

Bohlin doesn’t use a computer or e-mail. The breast pocket of his blue-and-white-plaid shirt is stuffed with a large flip phone, a case for his glasses, and a handful of soft Itoya pencils. (All his partners draw too.) It is with these tools and a large monthly planner that he runs the practice. He spends half of each month on the road, checking in physically with the offices in Seattle and San Francisco and visiting buildings under construction. He selects certain projects to get deeply involved in while serving as a sort of visiting critic on others. On the car ride back from Seneca Lake, he calls several BCJ partners in turn, checking on Apple stores in Georgetown, London, and Paris; a Uniqlo store in Shanghai; and a client who needs prodding to proceed with a house. Bohlin gets straight to the point without notes or drawings in front of him.

One of the projects that Bohlin is currently devoting his time to is a new civic center for Newport Beach, California. The firm entered the competition at the suggestion of Daniel Lee, a young architect in the Philadelphia office, who has come to Wilkes-Barre today to go over the plans with Bohlin. BCJ is headquartered on the top floor of Wilkes-Barre’s tallest building, a 12-story tower designed by Daniel Burnham. Out the windows, wedding-cake terra-cotta is visibly sagging in places. The civic-center design, which recently won the competition, is distinctly Californian (and distinctly un–Wilkes-Barrean): low and broad, with six glass-fronted bays containing offices and culminating in a silvery half-dome council chamber. The dome will be made of tensile fabric (the lightest suggestion of monumentality), while the administrative offices will be shaded with a series of wavy projecting roofs.

Today Bohlin is fixated on the long, ramped hallway that links the office pods. “It is like a necklace connecting these sections,” he says, “and we need to tune it where people are going to touch the handrail or turn the corner.” Tuning is another frequently used word in his architectural vocabulary. It is what happens in the design process after the spaces have volume but before they have a quality. They need to be tuned for comfort, for beauty, for affection. It is a word from music, but to Bohlin it has a tactile quality. He describes “combing” the living room of his own house with horizontals: shelves, cabinets, drawer pulls, an elevated stone hearth. Other words Bohlin likes are touching (the emotional connection of people to places) and potent position, which illustrates the moment when a space is revealed to a visitor. The dining table at Combs Point is in the potent position. You are in the potent position as you enter the Apple cube. He describes his role in the practice as “rattling”—keeping everyone on their toes by never being satisfied or by taking on new challenges (like this competition, a rarity).

Bohlin’s longstanding devotion to residential architecture is also a form of rattling. He seems to feel that it keeps him honest as an architect. “A house you can do with two or three people,” he says. “Doing it yourself is a little trite, but a small building you can do in your head.” There is an obvious line from the Forest House (his first big break) to the Combs Point residence, completed in 2008. Both are sited in ravines and designed to follow the existing paths and preserve their trees. Both open to the sun and protect the private zones. That the Combs Point house is grander—with its winking roof, separate guesthouse the size of an early Marcel Breuer residence, and Frank Lloyd Wrightish fireplace—seems justified by the passage of time. That Combs Point is still totally casual seems the result of Bohlin’s experience and the circumstance of his relationship with the clients.

“My husband’s stepfather is also an architect and lives in the same town as Peter,” Kim Weeks says. “We ended up sitting around the table at our old lake house, just talking and really enjoying each other’s company. It wasn’t until after we had already decided to move forward that we had any idea who he was. I didn’t even know how to spell his name!”

The same ideas about planning and community that Bohlin explores in his public buildings are evident in all his houses. Bohlin tends to turn buildings into necklaces of separate spaces, making an interesting path where there would otherwise have been a boring hall. Each project is a small, chatty town with Bohlin as its honorary mayor. The warmth and naturalness of his buildings, from the 1960s to the 2010s, are a product of his personality, engaging rather than dominating the client, landscape, or city.