|
|
|
|
||
 |
|||||||||||
Issue: Spring 2004 Williams the Conqueror - Playing Easy to Get He designed buildings in dozens of cities across the Southland – more than 300 in Beverly Hills alone. Looking back, many believe one house started it all. The story of Cordhaven remains one of Williams’ great triumphs. By Shashank Bengali One day in 1932, Paul Williams picked up his office phone and heard a gruff voice on the other end. The caller turned out to be industrialist E.L. Cord. The automobile baron wanted Williams to drop everything and survey some land he had just acquired in Beverly Hills. Williams tried to postpone the visit a day, but Cord was adamant. “On the strength of our telephone conversation,” Williams later wrote, “I judged that he worshipped prompt action.” Williams was a man of action himself. And he knew the story of how architect Cass Gilbert some years earlier had won the coveted contract to design the now-legendary Woolworth Building in Manhattan. Other architects had asked for at least two weeks to come up with plans; Gilbert had sketched his plan right in front of Frank Woolworth. Williams decided to try a similarly pro-active tack with Cord, which he recounted five years later in American Magazine: After we had gone over the building site, he [Cord] warned me that he had already discussed plans with a number of other architects and demanded to know how soon I could submit preliminary drawings. “By 4 o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” I answered. “Why, that’s impossible!” he cried. “Every other architect has asked for two or three weeks!” He regarded me shrewdly for a moment. “Go ahead,” he said. I delivered those preliminary plans by the scheduled hour – but I did not tell him that I had worked for 24 hours, without sleeping or eating. The colonial-style mansion that came to be called Cordhaven covered 32,000 square feet and contained 16 bedrooms and 22 bathrooms outfitted with 14-carat gold and silver fixtures. The stately white exterior was a classic example of traditional East Coast architecture imbued with modern touches such as impossibly narrow columns supporting the two-story entrance porch, a contemporary architectural trompe l’œil. The Cord residence was an immediate sensation, cementing Williams’ status as a premier society architect. It quickly became a showpiece, inspiring hosts of imitators and securing many more projects for Williams in the Beverly Hills area. Cordhaven no longer stands. The Cord family abandoned the place years ago; developers tore it down in the 1960s and split the lot into 13 parcels. But it remains legendary in architecture circles. And it never would have happened without Williams’ awareness that he had to try harder because of his skin color. “The weight of my racial handicap forced me, willy-nilly, to develop salesmanship,” Williams wrote. “The average, well-established white architect, secure in his social connections, might be able to rest his hopes on his final plans. I, on the contrary, had to devote as much thought and ingenuity to winning an adequate first hearing as to the execution of the detailed drawings.” Not that he was complaining. “I think that I am a far better craftsman today than I would be had my course been free,” he wrote.
|
|||||||||||
