ARB FRIDGE

From the start, Buster worked hard to prove that he's a graffiti artist, not some little hoodlum with a sneer on his face, paint stains on his fingers, and a can under his jean jacket. Buster is the nom de plume, or perhaps more correctly, the nom de guerre of Jesse Ortiz, 22; he carries a business card and an album full of photos of his art work, including the abstract mural he painted for the San Diego Automotive Museum in Balboa Park and the logos he completed for a local Top 40 radio station. Still, he gets little respect from cops and security guards. Truth is, Buster will always value the walls of a building more for their size and texture, their ability to serve as blank slates for his imagination, than for anything that could possibly be inside them. Last December, a security guard tried to chase him away from what he and other graffiti artists refer to as the California Street walls, near the Santa Fe railroad tracks, just north of downtown San Diego. "I go, 'What do you want?'" Buster says he asked the guard. "He goes, 'What are you, some kind of punk? You think you're a badass trying to mess with me?'"

Actually, Buster had permission to paint at the site. He'd met late last summer with the manager of Cousins Warehouse, just east of the railroad tracks, and showed him his portfolio and asked if he could practice his art on the massive retaining wall behind the store parking lot. The manager gave his approval warily— and only to Buster. But soon a whole flock of young graffiti artists and hangers-on were gathering at the site, turning the wall behind Cousins, as well as the back wall of Southwest Safety and Supply, on the west side of the tracks, facing Cousins, into a riot of color and design. Some called it art. Others just called it trouble, big-time.

Eventually, almost every square inch of the two walls was covered with spray paint— an imprecise medium, to be sure, but one whose practitioners take great pride in the precise drawings they are able to create. It's all a matter of can control, they say. The walls drew curious onlookers and photographers, who cautiously stepped out of their cars to see the urban art work: simple cartoon characters, outlined in bold, dark lines; black-and-white portraits of singer/dancer Paula Abdul and of a female bodybuilder; the torso of a robot; big block letters filled with colors that fade into each other; a sinister creature clutching the strings of a marionette; examples of the often-illegible interconnecting letters once known as wildstyle; and other samples of the New York graffiti style that West Coast kids have been imitating for more than a decade.

And the graffiti was not confined to the two walls, each of which measures more than 250 feet long. It was scrawled over dumpsters, over two long-forgotten refrigerators lying on the ground and filled with empty spray cans (their nozzles removed to keep younger kids from spraying the leftover paint on the walls). A silhouette of a human figure was painted on the cracked concrete lot, where more graffiti spread like a rash in every direction. Spaghetti noodles of color stretched across an abandoned Plymouth, covering even its broken windows, its four flat tires.

Buster was the pioneering artist at the California Street walls, but that doesn't mean he's ever been king of the walls. That distinction was earned a few months ago by Sake (pronounced like the Japanese beverage). Sake is the nickname used by the leader of a graffiti art crew named No Suckers Allowed. The crew has another name too: 594— the California Penal Code section dealing with vandalism. Sake says he was first caught in the act of vandalism five or six years ago when he and a couple of friends were chased out of a school yard as they were spray-painting the outline for their piece (as in "masterpiece") onto a wall. To this day, Sake believes the man who chased them must have been a ghost because of his great speed and because the man was listening to a transistor radio tuned to what seemed to be a Padre game— at midnight. "You could just see his silhouette," says Sake. "It was really weird."

Sake is now 20. He wears three gold hoops in one ear; his curly hair is cropped short, except for the braided tail that rests on the back of his gold turtleneck. As of last fall, Sake confined most of his wall art to the California Street walls, the place where he earned the title of king by battling the former king, Quasar. Insiders know that a battle is a contest to determine which spray-paint artist can create the best piece. And they know that a tagger is a young wannabe artist who scrawls his name everywhere (on buses, electrical boxes, fences, storefronts) to get up, be recognized. They know a toy is an unskilled amateur— not really an artist at all— and that a sucker, the lowest of all earth crawlers, destroys artists' pieces or fraudulently claims others' pieces as his own work by signing his nam

Name: James Ingraham Clark Residence
Architect: Runnells Clark Waugh and Matsumoto Architects
James Ingraham Clark, Project Designer
Year Designed: circa 1946-47
Builder: Don Drummond
Year Completed: circa 1947
Size: Unknown
Location: Leawood, Kansas
(Greater Kansas City Area)
Type: Residential
Style: Modern
Status: Good
Photographer: Fred Gund
Photos scanned from and article excerpted from: P/A (Progressive Architecture) April, 1949, pp 66-69.

This is the home of one of the architects – James Ingraham Clark. -- looking south down the slope

House: Leawood, Kansas
Runnells Clark Waugh & Matsumoto Architects

PROGRAM: Suburban residence for a growing family. Space provided under present bedroom wing for duplication of facilities on upper level.

SITE: Land at end of cul-de-sac street; one acre sloping toward the south; stone ledge under most of actual house site.

SOLUTION: Plan organized to turn its back to the street side and open out to the east and south. Design developed to have advantages of prefabrication although built on the side. Ledge proved both solid and flat; hence, prefabricated heating panels and foundations were laid directly on the stone; footings needed under bedroom portion only where rock ledge ran out. Plan worked out on a 4’-1/4” module – the 4’ to take standard sheets of plywood; the Ľ” to allow a space between sheets, eliminating any fitting or butting at the joints. Dry construction throughout.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

CONSTRUCTION: Framing: wood. Walls: no footings; stone foundations on solid rock; native stone. Interior finishes: Douglas fir plywood; exterior: 5-ply waterproof plywood. Floors: wood sash: double-insulating glazing; glass block (bathroom only). Insulation: acoustical; cement-impregnated wood-fiberboard exposed on ceilings; thermal’ double-thick expansible blanket; flameproof cotton: glass-wool batts: blown-in wool type. Partitions: frame. Surfaced both sides with plywood. Doors: birch-surfaced hollow core; solid flush exterior doors.

EQUIPMENT: Heating: hot-water radiant panel, zoned for three areas; gas-fired boiler; automatic controls; attic fan. Kitchen: electric stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, garbage disposal unit, deep freeze, and exhaust fan. Special equipment: water softener.


See also: The American House Today : 85 Notable Examples Selected and Evaluated by Katherine Morrow Ford and Thomas H. Creighton, Reinhold, 1951, pp 134-135


KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

Built for one of the partners in an architectural firm, this house of the James Ingraham Clarks is planned carefully for expansion as the family grows. It turns away from the street – originally a quite thoroughfare which has since became much more busy, partly because people come to see the house – and faces towards the south and southeast on a sloping site which ends in a wooded creek bed. When the house was built there was one child; now there are two, and family plans are for two more. Hence it was desired that the house could grow both in bedroom accommodations and in living space. Facing the street is a “core” which will not change: utility rooms, kitchens, laundry and garage. Past these rooms as one enters the house is a living room which is at present reasonably large, but certainly not oversized. In the future, as the plan indicates, this room will be extended, and even may have a porch on the end as a final expansion. The solution to the addition of bedrooms is made possible by a steep drop of fifteen feet in the site at the point where the bedroom wing breaks from the main house. Under the present two bedrooms there is now an open terraced space which, can, when the family has grown, be converted into a lower bedroom floor with three rooms. Mr. Clark is thoroughly objective about the value or lack of value of a number of ideas that went in the house. Orientation for sun control, studied mathematically, has worked out excellently. Plans to use a certain amount of site prefabrication – panels constructed on the property and raised into place – did not work so well, because of unfamiliarity of the available labor with this system. There is “nearly too much: storage space in cupboards, drawers and shelves. These are minor troubles, however. In general the dry-wall construction, the acoustic ceilings, the efficient kitchen layout, and the orientation have worked very well.

RUNNELLS, CLARK, WAUGH & MATSUMOTO, ARCHITECTS
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KCMODERN's David Benton Runnells House Tour and Party will feature at least six Modern Houses by the architect. The dates of the events are September 19, 2009 for the Runnells House Party and September 20, 2009 for the Runnells House Tour.

David Benton Runnells 1913-1973

Architect, David B. Runnells traveled extensively in Europe after graduating from University of Illinois. He was heavily influenced by the work of Alvar Aalto while traveling through, Finland and Sweden on a scholarship to th