George Brook-Kothlow

SPEAKER: RICHARD OLSEN

With Deference to the Terrain: The Regionalism of George Brook-Kothlow, Architect.
Of the reported 5.8 million sightseers who in recent years traveled the 100 miles of coastal highway between Carmel and Hearst Castle, the percentage of those who failed to register any of the multiple George Brook-Kothlow-designed houses that are in fact within eye-shot of Route 1’s natural spectacle would have to be great. Of course, for Brook-Kothlow, the late Carmel Valley architect (1934 - 2012), a leading figure, along with Mark Mills and Mickey Muennig, of the Santa Lucia Range’s consummate yet little-known example of Organic Modernism, this was always the absolute intention. Similarly, Brook-Kothlow, in his near 50 years of practice, routinely aimed to keep himself out of the spotlight. Unlike many architects of his generation, he did not write and publish on the subject of his work, nor was he generally keen on self-promotion. This despite having created, starting in the late-1960s, one of the Central Coast’s most thrilling architectures, the fully evolved bridgetimber house. Uniquely suited to the region’s rugged coastal sites, Brook-Kothlow’s monumental heavy-timber architecture, with its characteristic light-filled, flowing skeletal spaces, is an idiom that, tellingly, held supreme interest to other artists. Throughout the 1970’s, it promptly secured him a string of successive custom-house commissions, typically on the most visually arresting but challenging of sites, including in Pebble Beach for the Monterey Peninsula’s most high-profile resident. Indeed, for too long, George Brook-Kothlow, his contributions to the architecture of the region, has warranted a reappraisal, a closer look.

Followed by reception at First Murphy House, NW corner of Lincoln and Sixth, Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Speaker
Formerly the Senior Architecture Editor for Architectural Digest and a veteran editor of New York architecture-book publishing, Richard Olsen is a Los Angeles-based architectural writer-photographer and the author of both the 2012 Rizzoli book on 1960’s-70’s counterculture architecture, Handmade Houses, which includes multiple Brook-Kothlow works, as well as the forthcoming Rizzoli book California Green: Houses of Environmentalism, which again looks closely at the houses of Brook-Kothlow.

AIA CE Pending