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From left: Ted Flato, David Lake (seated); Kim Monroe, Greg Papay, John Grable, Karla Greer, Bob Harris, and Matt Morris (standing). Photo © Bob Maxham

LAKE | FLATO's desert architecture partners seamlessly with nature

This Texas firm blends Modernism, regionalism, and sustainability
to create architecture that responds to the sun, the shade, and the breezes, collaborating successfully among themselves in the process.

By David Dillon

David Lake, FAIA, once described himself as a romantic and his partner, Ted Flato, FAIA, as a rationalist. "I prefer eccentricity, and he doesn't," he explained, to which Flato replied that he had "a great fear of doing something trendy that I won't like after 10 years."

Lake/Flato Architects of San Antonio, winner of this year's American Institute of Architects Firm Award, celebrates its 20th year. That delicate balance between reason and romance, tradition and invention is intact.

	• 2004 Honor Awards index • Architecture Awards • Interiors Awards • Urban Design • 25 Year Award • Firm Award • Gold Medal Award

The architects remain physically and imaginatively attached to Texas by virtue of what the late William Turnbull called their "specifically Texas insights," meaning responsiveness to the imperatives of sun, heat, and wind, the challenges of a vast landscape, and the richness of local building traditions.

"We believe in an organic architecture that springs from its place," says Lake, "one that acknowledges precedent and that solves basic problems simply and elegantly. I think that's what Bill was getting at. Architecture should be comfortable and easy to live with, rather than just eye candy."

From a familiar and unapologetically romantic base of barns, silos, stone walls, and metal roofs, their work has grown steadily more refined and abstract in ways that show how to make Modernism come to terms with history without lapsing into empty nostalgia.

In the late 1970s, Lake and Flato went to work for O'Neil Ford, the master of midcentury Texas Modernism, who taught them the importance of materials and construction, of knowing how things go together instead of how to make arbitrary shapes. "Architecture isn't sculpture," he'd preach.

Consequently, instead of theorizing, Lake/Flato builds, or perhaps one could say they build based on theories about earth instead of air. Like their mentor's, their houses, schools, and churches are intensely sensory and tactile; the first impulse on entering them is to run your hands across walls and doors, to read the architecture through the pores.

Lake started out designing Modern sodbuster houses in the Texas Panhandle, followed by adobe houses in northern New Mexico that evoke dense historic prototypes while remaining remarkably open and bright. In the 1980s, he and Flato teamed up on a series of evocative ranch houses, mostly in South Texas, that combine simple forms and homely materials—corrugated metal, oil-field pipe, cattle fencing—to create culturally and climatically appropriate designs. The individual pieces typically form courtyards with big porches and deep overhangs that offer protection from parching Texas sun and wind.

Attractive, appropriate, skillfully detailed, yet not enough to justify the Architecture Firm Award. The breakthrough came in 1990 with the Carraro residence outside Austin, an abstracted, almost skeletal version of a Texas farmhouse that uses steel salvaged from an abandoned cement plant to create a series of light, airy pavilions for living and entertaining.

"The client had this very romantic notion of a stone barn out in a field, with an old Butler building as the frame," recalls Flato. "We didn't want to get involved with that, so we convinced them to buy this 40-by-180-foot shed and break it into three pieces, with a little stone cube in one for the living quarters. It was a case of using the limitations of budget and the original idea to create a more interesting project."

This combination of light steel frame and heavy stone appears frequently in Lake/Flato's later work, giving the reason/romance paradigm a new tension and edginess. The Carraro house won an AIA National Honor Award, the first of three, and dramatically elevated the firm's profile.

Lake/Flato now employs 45 people, half of them architects, who collaborate as a matter of course. This is another gift from Ford, who gave young designers extraordinary freedom and also surrounded them with a repertory company of craftsmen—masons, weavers, furniture makers, ceramicists—who softened and enriched his special brand of Modernism. The difference between real collaboration and a facsimile is the difference between bringing a covered dish to the supper and cooking together. Lake/Flato cook together.

They also get out of the studio to teach, lecture, and serve on design juries. They sponsor a residency program at the University of Texas at San Antonio and have helped the city's mayor come up with a Smart Growth Plan. A belief in good design as a public responsibility as well as a private passion lies at the heart of their practice. As the firm has expanded, so has the range and complexity of its projects. In the past decade, Lake/Flato has designed museums, churches, libraries, and corporate headquarters, along with a cemetery, a botanical garden, and a school of nursing.

Scale remains their ally and occasionally their albatross. The sprawling Burlington Northern Santa Fe headquarters in Fort Worth (with KVG Gideon Toal), for example, gets a bit heavy-handed in its evocation of the railroad vernacular. Likewise, the SBC Center, home of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, is festooned with structural Texana that comes across as forced rather than inevitable. Understatement is their game.

Considerably more successful is the Trammell Crow Visitor Pavilion at the Dallas Arboretum, which opened in 2003 and in many respects epitomizes their earlier work. Here, rugged Texas limestone walls meet light steel and glass pavilions to form a small village with an open central plaza. The pavilions are contemporary abstractions of traditional barns and sheds, their appeal residing in the intimate scale and honest craftsmanship, rather than in bold architectural gestures. And the entire project blends seamlessly with its natural surroundings, enhancing rather than overwhelming them.

The new University of Texas School of Nursing in Houston is Lake/Flato's most ambitious exercise yet in sustainable design. Using 50 percent recycled materials and consuming 40 percent less energy, the building attains a LEED Gold rating without compromising architectural integrity or turning technology into a fetish.

Economy, pragmatism, simplicity, comfort without pretension, elegance without irony, these features distinguish Lake/Flato's best work. Their architecture shows respect for materials and construction, for the values of place and precedent and the needs and aspirations of its users.

2004 Honor Awards index | Architecture Awards | Interiors Awards
Urban Design | 25 Year Award | Firm Award | Gold Medal Award