Mickey Muenning : Dreams and Realizations for A Living Architecture 9781423637523, 9781423600701

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Mickey Muennig Dreams and Realizations for a Living Architecture

Mickey Muennig

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Foreword by Herb Greene Essay by Alan Hess Principal photography by Alan Weintraub

Mickey Muennig Dreams and Realizations for a Living Architecture Digital Edition 1.0 Text © 2014 Mickey Muennig (text and drawings) “Foreword” © 2014 Herb Greene “The Architecture of Mickey Muennig” © 2014 Alan Hess Photographs © 2014 Alan Weintraub except as otherwise noted All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review. Gibbs Smith

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P.O. Box 667 Layton, Utah 84041 Orders: 1.800.835.4993 www.gibbs-smith.com ISBN: 978-1-4236-3752-3

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. —Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act IV

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Mickey Muennig Table of Contents

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Foreword Introduction Some Thoughts About Architecture The Architecture of Mickey Muennig Selected Work Foulke House, 1963 Mineral Museum, 1966 Muennig Studio, 1972 Prussin Residence, 1975 John Psyllos Residence I, 1977 John Psyllos Residence II, 1978 Muennig Residence, 1980 Michel Petrucciani Residence, 1983 Bazinet Residence, 1984 Hawthorne Residence Addition, 1985 Witt Residence, 1988 Post Ranch Inn, 1988 Hunt-Badiner Residence Remodel and Addition, 1990 Witt Studio/Guesthouse, 1992 Lihu Lake Hotels, 1993 McDade Residence, 1993 Caddell Residence Remodel, 1994 Hawthorne Gallery, 1995 Barklie Henry Barn and Music Studio, 1997 Esalen Institute Baths, 1998 Pavey Residence, 1998 Scharffenberger Residence, 1998 Nusbaum Residence, 1998 Work by Mickey Muennig Selected Publications 7

Acknowledgments

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Foreword Herb Greene I KNEW I WAS looking at architecture that showed signs of genius when I saw Mickey’s design for the Foulke House of 1963. He had invented a fresh structural scheme by slightly rotating 2 by 6 inch wood members extending from a single straight ridgeline sloping down to form sensuous, undulating arches that formed openings for windows and doors. The metaphors of Mickey’s creation are many: undulating waves of energy and running water, a powerful single mass differentiating into rhythmic living movement, and historical thatch roofs shedding rain and snow. Mickey’s design was one of the most original architectural forms of its decade, creating a beautiful interior in form and finish, insulation, and a suitable surface to accept wood shingles all at one stroke. About 1968, while teaching at the College of Architecture at the University of Kentucky, I showed Mickey’s model of this roof to Lou Kahn, at that time probably the most admired architect, as determined by the academic and mainstream professional establishment. Kahn, who happened to be at the university for a lecture, stared intently at the model for several minutes, then turned away without comment. Kahn’s 9

own work was based on selected precepts of a decaying twothousand-year-old intellectual dynasty that, through the funnel of 1960s Modernism, limited architecture to the expression of structural systems and mechanical equipment within the geometry of euclidean squares, circles, cones, and splayed angles. The Foulke House, along with Bruce Goff’s Bavinger and Ford houses, probably were the strongest examples of a new architectural reformation. Precepts of this reformation included the response to site, clients’ wishes, and existential needs; expressive materials; the necessity of enhancing sensory awareness; and the need to extend architectural form beyond euclidean limits. After Mickey settled in Big Sur, I visited the first Psyllos House while it was under construction. I was much taken with its beautiful roof structure and ceiling. Gracefully curved and uplifting wood beams were supported by splayed wood columns that again expressed actual structural forces in poetic form. The later Scharffenberger House interior and Mickey’s own house show delicately tapered wood columns, sometimes separated from the ceiling by small expressive metal brackets. I know of no other architect who packs more poetry into a column, combining metaphors of the raw nature of sloping tree trunks with bodily gestures of lifting, exaltation, and the importance of the human understanding of the visible world given by texture and touch. By any standard, the Post Ranch Inn is a masterpiece in site planning, architectural forms, use of materials, and fine detailing. The natural continuity of the extraordinary site is undisturbed by rust-colored cabins supported by wood columns. Tree houses are lifted high enough, with spacing between the units, to create the feeling of making us aware of

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the views to the surrounding landscape in a fresh way. In some units there again are natural wood columns with splayed brackets that express arms as if lifted in prayer as they provide structural support. The dining room seems a perfect orchestration of wood columns, wood slat ceiling planes, and glass mitres, with delicate metal mullions that seem to enhance views. Mickey’s architecture not only passed the strict California Coastal Commission codes, but adds to the beauty of this unique landscape to the benefit of tourists from around the world. Mickey’s work and his personality have contributed greatly to the legend and reality of Big Sur, while his best work will live as a contribution to World Architecture. Herb Greene is an architect, artist, and author living in Berkeley, California.

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Foulke House. Interior.

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Introduction I WAS BORN in Joplin, Missouri, on April 20, 1935. My parents named me George Kaye Muennig. My sister thought I looked like Mickey Mouse, and I’ve been known as Mickey ever since. I lived in Joplin for the first eighteen years of my life. I started my studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I intended to study aeronautical engineering. After my first year there, another student took me to visit the architecture building, where I was overjoyed to see the drawings on display. I had read an article on Bruce Goff in a 1947 Architectural Forum that amazed me, and I was fascinated by the Bavinger House and other projects that Goff was doing. When I learned that he was teaching at the University of Oklahoma, I decided to transfer. The work being done by his students was truly fresh and original. It was organic, with more of a living architecture to it.

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Bruce Goff always put up inspiring things for display, such as Japanese prints and fairy-tale illustrations by Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen, and other master illustrators. Students were invited to his house every Thursday night, and we would lie on the floor with the lights turned out and listen to music by contemporary classical composers such as Stravinsky and Takemitsu. He knew all he had to do was inspire the students to get the best work out of them. In the fifth year, he offered a course called Architecture 273, in which he would lecture on music composition elements such as rhythm, and then have the students design a project based only on rhythm. After years of formal training, these unusual challenges guided us in new directions, and some of the students’ finest work came out of that course.

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I stayed in close contact with Bruce Goff after I finished school. After graduating, I served various apprenticeships. The first took me to New Orleans to work with Phil Roach, an old Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice, and Arnold Schoendorf. Next stop was Long Beach, Mississippi, where I worked for Vinson Smith. Then the Foulkes called me from Joplin, Missouri. Halley Foulke remembered me because I had once been their tenant, and they knew I was an architect. They wanted me to design a small house. This was my first chance to design a house on my own that would actually be built. I opened an architecture practice and pursued my career. I bought a house on Fifth Street and Moffett Avenue in Joplin, where I lived for six years with my wife and two children. In 1969, we moved to Denver, Colorado. Herb Greene, a gifted architect and friend with whom I had studied at the University of Oklahoma, had found a job for me, and we flew to Denver together. When we got there, the economy had gone bad, and the architect couldn’t hire me. I looked around for another job, and Max Saul hired me. I worked on high-rise apartment buildings and condominiums. In 1971, I took a two-week vacation to take a class on Gestalt therapy at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. I was late to my first class. The instructor said, “We are going to turn out the lights, and I want everyone to stand up and walk around until you bump into someone. Then feel them all over.” This was an enlightening experience, as I bumped into a wellendowed young lady. (I’d thought I was going to be sitting at a desk, taking notes.) This was the beginning of a new experience for me, and I stayed an extra week. One day, Al 17

Drucker walked into the room with a set of drawings under his arm and asked whether I was an architect and if I would help him design his house. This prompted me to move to Big Sur and changed my life forever. When I told Bruce Goff I was moving to Big Sur, he said, “I would never go out there because they have that horrible, restrictive Coastal Commission.” Bruce Goff died in 1982. After some years, we buried his ashes at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, next to Mies van der Rohe, an architect he always criticized for being too conservative. May he forever rest in peace. Big Sur felt like home, and I stayed. I felt fortunate to be able to pursue the free life that lay before me. And I have been fortunate to continue my career in a beautiful place, with many exceptional clients and exciting opportunities.

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Caddell Residence. Wedding platform facing the Pacific Ocean. “‘[Mickey Muennig] has important lessons to give us about how to build with the land, rather than on it, and how structures can delight in their use of materials,’ Aaron Betsky, curator of architecture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art said.” —Lucie Young, “The Nabobs Rough It and Love It,” New York Times, May 8, 1997

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Some Thoughts About Architecture

A TINY SEED SPROUTS, grows into a plant, and eventually becomes a tree. There are many stages in this process of growth and development. The tree’s magnificence is sometimes not noticed. It simply is. To me, organic architecture looks to the natural world and tries to be as graceful as the tree. Organic architecture is alive, respectful toward the environment, tuned to the people who will live or work in the space, and suited to the landscape and its surroundings. The construction, materials, and the compatibility of its parts all form a whole inspired by an interaction in my mind that considers the clients and their needs and desires, the site, and natural ways of bringing them together. In my design process, I enjoy spending time with people, learning about them and what they want, and then I try to develop a concept that tunes soul to structure. People have many dreams that they want to incorporate into their houses, and I find that an interesting experience to work through. I observe, listen, dream, and draw. Then I listen some more, and then I draw more.

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The client, architect, and builder form a holy trinity. It takes all of them working as a coordinated team to make a really successful building. I believe the architecture that people inhabit every day can turn their minds around, and I want to do that in a simple and sincere way. The best spaces can help people see and feel beyond their vision. “Mickey Muennig . . . became the first master of eco-minded architecture, perfecting green-roof construction more than 30 years before it became the fashionable way to build. . . . He’s an unsung hero of the green movement precisely because he never made an effort to publicize himself.” —Alastair Gordon, “California Grass,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2009

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The Architecture of Mickey Muennig Alan Hess THE BIG SUR LANDSCAPE defies art. Windswept, pounded by indigo waves, it remains incorrigibly wild into the twenty-first century. The sublime challenge of the landscape has attracted artists from William S. Burroughs to Ansel Adams to make their homes on this perilous, ethereal borderland between continent and ocean. Against this backdrop, mere buildings may seem inconsequential. But the sometimes transitory, sometimes passionate architecture of Mickey Muennig manages to capture the spirit of the place. Balanced skillfully between primeval past and daring future, between humility and bliss, Muennig’s work fits here. Big Sur belongs to Muennig as the prairie belonged to Frank Lloyd Wright, or as Manhattan belonged to Raymond Hood. Like those other American places, Big Sur also deserves to be interpreted. It captures important facets of the country’s

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psyche. The natural landscape is as pure, mighty, defiant, and remote as any frontier. And yet if you can survive the torrential rains of winter that wash out highways, or tinderbox summers that occasionally ignite a forest fire, the climate is generally welcoming. It is a place that worships isolation and yet has nurtured an ongoing community strung precariously along fifty miles of the thin ribbon of Highway 1. It is held together by iconoclasm, by art, by free spirits, by the exploration of the inner soul and the preservation of the spectacular natural setting and its creatures. For the homes and gathering places of this unusual community, Mickey Muennig has produced architecture of lightness and resilience. His buildings do not defy the might of the coast. They often sit lightly on the land. They use glass and steel to perch their inhabitants in the very midst of the coast’s plunging cliffs, swirling fogs, and brilliant sun. Besides the physical difficulties of building in remote sites accessible only by rutted dirt roads, there are also severe bureaucratic restraints: the California Coastal Commission keeps a wary eye on all construction near the coastline—which includes all of Big Sur. Muennig has the right credentials to work and thrive within such constraints. For one, he is a Midwesterner, born in Joplin, Missouri. The Midwest has a legacy of ignoring the boundaries of politics and art. The progressives of the early twentieth century defied East Coast banks and political establishments to proclaim—and establish—a new populist man. The Midwest also gave birth to the Prairie style and organic architecture, for once a completely new idea of architecture, space, and ornament that launched the Modern century.

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Muennig has a direct link to this aesthetic ferment. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology to study aeronautical engineering, but an exhibit at the architecture school of the work of Bruce Goff reawakened his first joy in seeing Goff’s work in the pages of Architectural Forum in 1947, at age twelve. Glimpsing an alternative path for his life, he transferred to the University of Oklahoma in 1957 to study with Goff. Goff came by Modern architecture honestly. As a teenager he, too, had discovered the work of a great architect, Louis Sullivan, and commenced a correspondence with that great creative soul (then suffering the consequences of years of rejection and alcoholism.) His career as an architect and as head of the University of Oklahoma School of Architecture proved that Sullivan’s organic architecture could lead in an astounding range of directions, much wider even than the fertile mind of Wright could explore during his long life. In 1947, the Ford House in Aurora, Illinois, combined the arc trusses of the mass-produced Quonset hut by tilting them on edge, creating a circular, doughnut-shaped space rising from a gleaming black anthracite coal foundation. The 1950 Bavinger House (an early favorite of Muennig’s) dramatically redefined Modern space not as a crisp steel box, but as a vertical spiral volume enclosing hanging rooms. Goff’s fertile, unfettered imagination was widely misinterpreted and criticized by much of an architectural profession that cherished right angles, repetitive modules, and the simplicity of the machine. But Mickey Muennig had migrated to Norman, Oklahoma, precisely to explore the freedom Goff proclaimed, and it was what eventually led him to move to Big Sur in 1971. Organic architecture had been

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born of the American encounter with nature (or Nature, as Ralph Waldo Emerson had it.) Placid Walden Pond inspired Henry David Thoreau. The rolling Midwest prairie inspired Wright, William Purcell, George Elmslie, Walter Burley Griffin, Marion Mahony, and the other Prairie School architects. The rural, small-town dignity of Midland, Michigan, inspired Alden Dow, and the woods of Arkansas inspired Fay Jones. But nature’s full Promethean splendor is seen nowhere more distinctly than at Big Sur. This is what Mickey Muennig took on when he moved there.

There was, however, another facet to Big Sur. Its isolation and beauty has attracted pioneers of art and literature, and of the human potential movement, from the bohemian iconoclasts of Jack London’s circle, to William S. Burroughs

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and the Beat Generation, to the Gestalt frontiers of the Esalen Institute. In architecture, Rowan Maiden and Mark Mills (both apprentices of Frank Lloyd Wright) launched their careers on the Monterey Peninsula in the early 1950s. The thrilling freedom of this inward exploration of the soul attracted Muennig as well. The boy from Joplin, Missouri, had discovered his spiritual home. His architecture over the next forty years would not only address the natural scene, but the community of Big Sur: houses for the locals, galleries for art, studios for music, hotels for visitors, restaurants and shops for the community. After the original baths at Esalen were destroyed in the pounding storms of 1998, Muennig designed the newer, more secure bathhouse for the institute—an essential part of the Big Sur community. Shops, homes, hotels—these are building types found in any community, of course. But the sites, the prospects, the challenges to build structures that complemented (if it were not possible to match) the setting, and the desires of the clients living in a place apart, gave Muennig’s designs an unconventional and daring aspect. His success in capturing these qualities, at the edge of the North American continent and at one of the frontiers of American thought, makes Mickey Muennig’s architecture extraordinarily significant. The concepts Muennig studied with Bruce Goff set him on his course. But it must be said that Goff gave Muennig nothing that did not already resonate with his own inner vision. The first time he saw Goff’s work, he recognized something he had been looking for, which aeronautical engineering did not fully satisfy. The design of an organic building, for Muennig, is as simple and as complex as the design of a tree: rooted to a specific site, its roots, trunk, and leaves perform individual

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functions, and yet the tree’s form unites these diverse elements into a single unified/diversified organism. As a Modernist, Muennig, like Goff, avidly employs modern engineering and contemporary materials, but he does not turn his designs into sleek machined abstractions. His Modernism, like Sullivan’s and Wright’s, incorporates the same delight in contrast, richness, intricate detail, color, and texture that differentiates a tree from a drill press. Muennig’s structures are varied. He uses wood poles, wood trusses, steel columns, steel trusses, concrete, or glass. Some of his buildings burrow into the earth, some float freely above it. Some directly reflect their structure, some incorporate historical forms. He does not approach each design with a predetermined idea; structure, plan, and materials emerge from the client’s wishes, the site, and the budget. His Modernism cherishes choice and freedom rather than imposing modules and repetition. There is an identifiable lightness to Muennig’s buildings, which takes many forms. Some designs have the lightness of a tent, as if only the least assertive structures can properly balance this powerful landscape. Then there is the light, sociable touch to many of his houses, matching Muennig’s easygoing personality; in the sometimes enforced isolation of Big Sur’s washed-out roads, gatherings of friends are essential, and his houses have large, comfortable social spaces. There is also the casual arrangement of many of his plans. No strict grids organize his buildings; living areas, outdoor areas, and private areas are laid out in a seemingly spontaneous response to an extraordinary view, the slope of the ground, the serendipity of the site. Rigor simply isn’t important here; taking full advantage of the genius loci is.

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Muennig brings the same light touch to the use of historical architectural elements. While canonical Modernism disdains the use of history, Muennig is more lenient. His early design of the Foulke House in Joplin (where he first set up his own office after apprenticing in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Long Beach, Mississippi, after leaving the University of Oklahoma) is an interpretation of Anne Hathaway’s thatched cottage in England, for which the client held a special affection. The roofline, which dips to the ground, takes the soft curves of thatched roofs and dormers. But the roof, constructed of splayed wood rafters, takes a scale and repetitive sine-curve shape that also calls attention to its beautiful abstract, modern form. Historical architectural starting points are seen in the Psyllos House II (evoking whitewashed Mediterranean villages) and the Witt House (a towered Tuscan castle). Early on, Muennig’s lithe imagination had it both ways: satisfyingly historicist, contemporarily inventive.

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John Psyllos Residence I. View through the house to the canyon beyond. Note the Greek motif on the gate.

Muennig has also been far ahead of the green curve, using solar panels and passive heating throughout his career. Houses half-buried in the earth, or with berms piled against their walls, or with sod roofs to insulate against cold have long been key to his vocabulary. Interior stone walls in the first Psyllos House absorb sunlight and slowly release heat through the night. Earthen swales, he has learned, deflect the ocean’s howling winds. Some of his designs reflect the earth and their specific sites as efficiently—and beautifully—as a sand dune. Big Sur’s remote building sites often provoke imaginative solutions to structures and materials out of sheer necessity. Steep, winding roads rule out certain lengths and weights of materials, calling for readily available materials. A 29

friend’s Chevy powered the electric tools for construction on one project. The Prussin House blends a large wood A-frame roof with octagonal pyramids, creating a large, lofty interior space. Set beneath the exposed wood ceiling of the great room sits a 10,000-gallon wine vat used as a water tank for radiant and fan coil heating. There are no traditional rooms; the space is free form and uncluttered, focused on a freestanding sheet metal fireplace, and with high windows looking up into the tree branches above it. Passive environmental controls, forms blending with the shape of the earth, exposed natural wood and stone; Muennig’s designs reflect the serious interest in protecting the earth and natural resources that first became widely popular with the first Earth Day in 1970. The Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand was a bible of design and living in the period, and its ethic of passive energy use and living lightly on the land was shared by trained architects and amateurs alike. There are some parallels between the experimental, unorthodox attitudes seen in Muennig’s work and that of the “wood butchers” who built communes in the 1960s and 1970s, avidly using recycled materials, old doors and windows, and a casual, amateur approach to building. As in many Muennig designs, their houses rejected the constraints of the conventional house, adopting unusual, flowing, ad hoc spaces. Muennig’s own first house was a glass teepee. But like the work of J. Lamont Langworthy (another architect who spent time in the hippie enclaves of Big Sur and Laguna Beach), Muennig’s work is decidedly architected. His designs are 30

irregular, but never makeshift; the structure is carefully considered and often complex, not thrown together with the delight and innocence of the yurts, domes, and shacks of hippie communes such as Morningstar and Wheeler’s Ranch, near Sebastopol, California. Muennig’s spaces are loosely defined, but always intentionally accommodate a view, a quality of light, an intriguing texture. If Muennig’s work is more disciplined than the 1960s wood butchers, he never adopted the regimented technological formality that other 1960s countercultural architects embraced. Buckminster Fuller promoted the universal shape of the Dymaxion dome for everything from houses to military facilities, and for sites ranging from the Arctic to the equator. The inflatable structures of Ant Farm and the biomorphic sprayed gunite shapes of John Johansen, and other architects such as Mark Mills, James Hubbell, Charles Haertling, and Wallace Neff, all let their technology determine their form. While Muennig uses modern structural systems (note the cable suspension roof on Barklie Henry’s Studio), his distinctive forms incorporate many influences tailored to individual, not universal, conditions of the project.

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McDade Residence. Interior tropical plant garden.

THE SITE IS ALWAYS a major component of Muennig’s designs. This is seen especially at the Post Ranch Inn, where the lodgings are divided into many small bungalows to reduce their impact on the ridgetop site. Some are dug into the cliff’s edge like small caves. Others are tree houses standing on stilts in the oak forest just back from the cliff. A third grouping uses two-story turreted structures that echo tree trunks. Muennig also designed a glassy restaurant building to take advantage of the view, and a small reception building. Muennig’s houses on the cliffs, where the continent plunges into the restless ocean, show the impact of the site most dramatically. The Caddell Residence on Partington Point,

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halfway down the cliff, requires a long pathway through a gateway from the highway above. The spectacular views of white-water coves, framed by cypress limbs, introduce the character, color, wildness, and textures of the landscape. The house itself then weaves them together. The living room is a dramatic two-story space that echoes the steep vertical space of the cliffside itself. Though a solid stone fireplace anchors the room to the hill, the enclosure is a light, filigreed steel and glass cage. The steel is gorgeous. Like a thin ink line etched against the sky, it doubles back on itself here, and disappears there, to create a lighthearted and daring statement about a person’s right to live perched on the edge of nothing. There are nods to the ancient past of nature and history in the stone; there are nods to our dependence on technology in the graceful curves of the metal and cable railing lining the mezzanine, and the large pivoting glass doors.

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Hunt-Badiner Residence. Kitchen at left and patio below at right.

The logic and potential of a cliffside site is seen again in the irregular shapes of the Scharffenberger House. The roofline is the metaphorical cross section of a wave, filled in with glass. Behind the wave is an undulating roof of splaying wood rafters, colliding and mixing like the eddies of a wave in the cove far below. The restless walls of the house create small, protected courts and patios on the sheltered uphill side; on the ocean side a walkway soars out into the air and then returns to the earth.

Scharffenberger Residence. Roof framing during construction, showing a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean and the coastline to the south.

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Muennig’s formal inventions are wide ranging. The large, curving wood-ribbed roof of the Psyllos House I arches like a canopy over the interior space. Usable spaces are suggested by curving walls of wood or stone, and gentle wood ramps. Glass is used not as a statement of sleek mechanistic modernity, but as a useful infill between roof and ground. Much like John Lautner’s 1979 Segel House in Malibu, the free-flowing shape and warm wood surfaces create a modern cave. In contrast, the Psyllos House II nearby is entirely different in concept and structure, drawing on the client’s Greek heritage. Whitewashed stucco walls over concrete block sink into the earth. From the uphill approach, its sod roofs make it unobtrusive; it is in fact a three-level house, nestled into the earth. All levels look out downhill to the view. This southfacing façade is mostly glass, absorbing solar heat into the walls and floor to rise through the levels to warm the house. In contrast to the gentle curves of the Psyllos houses, the Bazinet House combines angular spaces, spread over several open levels, echoed in the angular shapes of the roofs, concrete walls, and glass clerestories above. The McDade Residence uses angles also, but rendered in peeled wood columns that lean, evocative of a primeval forest. Muennig’s second house for himself high on Partington Ridge, 1,500 feet above the ocean, mingles numerous images and ideas into a unique form. Near the edge of the cliff, the house is buried in the earth to ward off the winds. But it opens itself wholeheartedly to the view through the front door—a moon gate with the Pacific Ocean as its front yard. Once inside, the house is a circle, centered on an indoor garden. The glass and steel roof overhead is designed to open to the 35

sky, while the kitchen, dining room, hearth room, and study line the perimeter of the circle. Plain white plaster contrasts with wood; elegant steel filigree makes up the steel frame of the overhead skylight, resting on peeled tree trunks. The house evokes many sources: the dramatic isolation of a Greek temple in a vast landscape, the friendliness of a Spanish hacienda courtyard, the far-sightedness of a Jules Verne superstructure, the tended vegetation of a Victorian conservatory, with Mediterranean trellis vines and the thin, feathery quills of a peacock’s topknot as ornament. The Barklie Henry Studio is a performance space used by the community. To aid the acoustics, the ceiling is a hanging plane of wood slats resting on catenary cables, dipping low at the center, rising higher to the glass wall and the forest view. The slatted wood ceiling spreads the tones; visually they add a rich pattern worthy of Goff. The splayed steel columns holding up this roof are space age: tapered I-beam columns lightened by holes cut in their webs. But the wood ceiling draped over them counters the sleek tech imagery with an ancient simplicity, like the fabric draped over a bedouin tent pole. Clearly Muennig has no interest in following a standard midcentury modern expression of high tech for its glamour. He uses the tools and structures of the new age as it serves his purpose. To create these spaces—and certainly those that cling to vertiginous cliffs—he manipulates advanced engineering ideas. For all his structural inventiveness, Muennig is also a social architect. He found a community in which to practice architecture steadily for forty years. His clients have run a range. Many have been original thinkers, like him; this was as true in his Midwest work as in his Big Sur work. 36

The Big Sur community has allowed Muennig to practice architecture as it suits him. Bulldozing, sawing timbers, and other construction needs are often bartered, and always conducted at the unhurried pace that Big Sur fosters and Muennig honors. Construction can take years, a bit at a time; his own house, designed in 1980, was completed in 1994. In Big Sur, his house clients have been attracted to the remote site for the same reasons as Muennig himself: for peace, for communion with nature, for a supportive community. Its bohemian lifestyle still thrives, and forms part of his clientele. In recent years, of course, the price of land has increased exponentially. Though Muennig has always had well-to-do clients who retreat to Big Sur for vacation or retirement, this trend is notable in the Post Ranch Inn, an expensive hotel with a four-star restaurant. Yet its luxury does not reside in its formal ostentation or expensive materials. The architecture is still as simple and direct, drawing from the views and the site, as any Muennig design. California culture has always drawn on a reverence for the state’s spectacular and varied forms of nature. Mickey Muennig’s architecture reflects this deep-rooted appreciation, just as it reflects the equally well-rooted fascination with modern technology. In this way there is much of the spirit of Bernard Maybeck in Muennig. Each was an immigrant architect who discovered his vision when he launched out onto a wooded hillside lot with his tools and his open-minded clients and created simple homes in harmony with nature. In the twenty-first century, Muennig continues the craftsman’s love for the luster of natural wood, for handcrafting, and for living humbly with the riches of nature.

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Perhaps the overwhelming power of nature at Big Sur does cause us to overlook the architecture. Perhaps the architects working here in the shadow of nature simply know better than to shout. They are fortunate enough to be here, with this landscape as their palette, and they seem to know it. It is no wonder that organic architects like Muennig, Rowan Maiden, and Mark Mills have thrived here. Organic architecture is an ongoing current in Modern design. It has included John Lautner, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Paolo Soleri, and today includes such architects as Wallace Cunningham in San Diego County, and J. Lamont Langworthy in Sonoma County. This current remains strong, even as it remains outside the mainstream of corporate Modern architecture and its vanities. These architects honor individuality, expressing the client’s needs and character, capturing the rugged truths of nature, acknowledging the individuality of every soul. The range of Mickey Muennig’s work testifies to this. The vivid creativity of his structures, his ornamental flourishes, his breathtaking spaces as extensions of breathtaking vistas—all demonstrate the possibilities of organic architecture as a vital, ongoing force in American Modernism. Alan Hess is an architect and historian living in Irvine, California.

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Selected Work

Foulke House, 1963

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Joplin, Missouri

I was a recent architecture school graduate, working with Vinson B. Smith in Mississippi, when Emerson and Halley Foulke called and asked whether I would design a cabin for them in Joplin. They wanted to reproduce Anne Hathaway’s cottage in England, which had eyebrow windows and a slightly curving roof. I took these cues into consideration and blended the design with a waterwheel grinding mill that had burned down on the site some time before. I visualized water running over the crumpled foundation of the mill, and I came up with the idea of building the whole house out of undulating 2x6’s put together to form the structure to express the music of water. I built a model to show the Foulkes, and they loved it. They asked me to go ahead and build it.

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Emerson didn’t pay my entire fee or that of the contractor who built the house. He traded me an old Chambers stove and a pottery wheel from his garage to try to make up the difference. He promised the contractor to trade land for his services, but never followed through. I heard a rumor some years later that he was caught running across the Shoal Creek Bridge naked and screaming at the top of his voice, and that he was picked up by the sheriff and put in jail. I suspected he couldn’t live with himself for cheating and not paying people for the work they did for him. The house stood up well for decades. When I visited in 2003, while attending my fiftieth high school reunion, I met the new owner, who had replaced the shingles and some broken floor tiles to bring it back into shape.

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Foulke House. View from the southwest. Photograph by Bob Bowlby.

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Foulke House. Perspective from the Shoal Creek Bridge.

Foulke House. View from the southeast, showing the entry to the house.

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Photograph by Bob Bowlby.

Foulke House. Exterior from the northeast. Photograph by Bob Bowlby.

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Foulke House. Floor plan.

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Foulke House. Bathroom, with the ceramic-tiled floor extending up the wall of the shower to skylights made of colored plexiglass. Photograph by Bob Bowlby.

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Foulke House. Entrance at left, a column containing the refrigerator in the center, and the kitchen/dining area at right. Photograph by Bob Bowlby.

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Mineral Museum, 1966

Joplin, Missouri

One day Willard Elsing called me about designing a mineral museum to house his vast collection of minerals and crystals for preservation and study. He had two-and-a-half-foot-tall quartz crystals and geodes that were three feet across, huge lead crystals, beautiful pyrite and zinc specimens, all quite amazing.

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I liked this assignment very much. Growing up in a mining town, I had a special interest in crystals and minerals. I found them in the tailing piles around Joplin and bought others in mineral shops. I liked them because they were in the form of buildings I imagined in my mind. Willard said he was going to talk to several oil companies to see if they would finance and build his museum, because he didn’t have the money to build it himself. The oil companies were making a lot of money at this time, and I thought it seemed pretty reasonable. I was going out on a limb, but I liked and trusted him. I showed him a preliminary drawing, which he liked, so I went right to work on it. In a way, the structure was like the Foulke House, consisting of straight produced members that were all put on a bias, forming a shell to spray the structural cement onto. I poured myself into this project and patiently waited for him to give the go-ahead. I spent more time talking with Willard, and he told me about riding in flying saucers on occasion. My high hopes began to deteriorate a little. Eventually, he said he was not able to get financing to build it. Even though it wasn’t built, I felt the museum was well worked out and well suited for displaying his mineral collection.

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Mineral Museum. Overall perspective looking from the southwest.

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Mineral Museum. Top: Section through the building. Middle: West elevation, showing the back of the building. Bottom: Entrance façade.

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Mineral Museum. Top: Upper floor plan. Bottom: Ground floor plan.

Muennig Studio, 1972 52

Big Sur, California

I came to Big Sur, California, and bought a piece of property on Partington Ridge. This turned out to be an important step in my life. I needed temporary shelter to live in while I built my main house. I thought the only way to get it approved was to build it as a greenhouse. I picked a spot spontaneously, then made drawings to present to the Monterey County Building Department. It rained two days before I had to turn the drawings in, and they got soaked, so I had to peel them all apart before I took them up to the building department in Monterey. They looked at me like I was a nut and asked me to do overturning calculations on it. I did that, and they gave me a building permit.

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Giles Healey, a neighbor who was a noted archaeologist, anthropologist, and astronomer, and an expert in stellar navigation, came down with his theodolite and aligned the structure to 1/100 of a degree off of the North Star. We kicked a stake around for a while, in which time the theodolite lost some of its accuracy, but it was accurate enough. The studio was an experiment with solar heating and living in a small space, sixteen feet in diameter. We built stone walls up five feet tall, put a sloping conical glass roof on it, and hung a loft on 4x6 rafters that separated the sixteen trapezoidal glass panels. A friend came up and built it, using an inverter in his Chevy to run power tools. When the building inspector came, I told him my wife was going to grow orchids in it. The orchid that grew was me. There is a small kitchen area, a fireplace, and a sleeping loft above. Drapes provide shade from the sun, and there is a fourfoot circular opening with a skylight that can be closed when it’s cold or rainy. The bathtub/shower is outside. I lived and worked in this space for sixteen years or so. Besides my human friends, visitors included a peacock, raccoons, a rattlesnake, and a one-legged blue jay that liked to watch me draw.

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Muennig Studio. Above and below: Viewed from the ocean side.

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Muennig Studio. Looking north, drapes can be seen hanging to provide shade from the sun.

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Muennig Studio. Interior, with a view looking west to the Pacific Ocean. The ladder leads to a sleeping loft.

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Muennig Studio. A view looking north, up the coast.

Prussin Residence, 1975

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Big Sur, California

Sam Prussin was a chemist who invented Right Guard antiperspirant. He called and asked whether I would design a house for him and his wife, Shirley. He had bought a twentyacre piece of land on Partington Ridge from Giles Healey, and he and Shirley were going to move here from Southern California. The land was remote and hard to get to, and Sam seemed to view it as a new adventure. Shirley seemed a little hesitant about the whole thing, so I paid careful attention to what she said. We bought an old bridge and milled all of his lumber from it. The two redwood center poles were thirty-four feet tall and very difficult to haul up the ridge. We got them up and hung the house off them. The glass, which leaned on the outer

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beams, was an important feature of the house. Some of the windows were thirty feet tall, divided into panes. The house was designed around a large redwood holding tank, for which a ten-thousand-gallon wine vat was used, that was in the center of the structure. The hot water collected in the tank heated the house through both radiant heat and fan coil units. The client had some specific ideas: the fireplace hearth moved up and down, the bed retracted as a space-saving feature, the upper windows were motorized to open and close, and the toaster went in and out by electric motor. Sam also wanted to incorporate technologies of the day. He found special solar panels that used evacuated tubes with air vents to take off excess heat. The house sat there and spouted steam like some ancient steam calliope. Solar engineers from Pennsylvania came to observe the installation, and we cooked them tortillas in the evacuated tubes. Being unfamiliar with tortillas, they delighted in their lunch. Toby, the general contractor, and I adjusted the steam valves and made the system work for them. Sam loved to show off his house while it was being built to his employees and associates, who all seemed aghast at the drive up the ridge. Construction went on and on and on, for three years. It was designed as multiple cones at first, but I found that two was more efficient. Sam and Shirley moved into the house before it was finished. Sam wanted to trade me recordings of classical music from Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn for my final fee. It was a sweet gesture, but I declined.

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Following Sam’s death, Shirley continued to live there for a while, then gave it to her children. Later, another family lived there for many years. They added a swimming pool, many fruit trees, and a fence to keep the wild pigs at bay. They eventually sold it to someone else. Sadly, one day the house burned down.

Prussin Residence. Exterior. Photograph by Mickey Muennig.

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Prussin Residence. A ten-thousand-gallon water tank supports Shirley’s studio and works as a heat sink.

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Prussin Residence. Above: Ground floor plan. Below: Upper floor plan.

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Prussin Residence. Living area.

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Prussin Residence. View from the second-level balcony/studio.

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Prussin Residence. The center of the house.

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Prussin Residence. Stairway to the second-level studio, bedroom, and bathroom.

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Prussin Residence. Kitchen.

John Psyllos Residence I, 1977

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Big Sur, California

John Psyllos asked me to meet him for breakfast one day at Deetjen’s. We hit it off immediately and had a lively discussion. Halfway through, an old friend of mine walked in and sat down with us. John fell in love with her immediately. This became a pattern with nearly every lady to whom I introduced him. John had bought two lots on Pfeiffer Ridge and wanted to build two houses. The land is high on a ridge, facing the ocean, and the weather tends to be hot and dry. He wasn’t sure at first what he wanted, so we talked and came up with some general ideas. He loved the sea and told me he had wanted to be a naval architect, which led to more ideas. We decided to build him a “bachelor pad” first. I spent about 71

two weeks on a design, keeping it small and compact. John lived in Corning, California, where he grew olives, and I drove up there to show him the design. He loved it. The house resembles an upside-down boat. Spiraling rock walls absorb the sunlight, making an efficient passive solar space, and define small, intimate living spaces. The tops of the rock walls are continuous planters, with vines growing out of them. The entry door opens onto a bridge, and a ramp leads down toward the bedroom and into the kitchen. John was a great cook, and the kitchen was first-class. At the opposite end of the house is a living space with a guest bed. Sun shines through the house. A beautiful stone patio contains a hot tub, an oven, and a grill, creating a wonderful spot for enjoying sunsets and entertaining friends. Revelry on many occasions included Greek dancing through the spirals until the early hours of the morning.

John Psyllos Residence I. Exterior, viewed from the south.

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John Psyllos Residence I. Exterior, viewed from the east.

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John Psyllos Residence I. Floor plan.

John Psyllos Residence I. Ramp leading from the living room to the front door.

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John Psyllos Residence I. Living room, at right.

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John Psyllos Residence I. Living room with fireplace.

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John Psyllos Residence I. Looking from the living room toward the kitchen.

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John Psyllos Residence I. The kitchen/dining area.

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John Psyllos Residence I. Exterior showing the entrance.

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John Psyllos Residence II, 1978

Big Sur, California

I next went to work on the design for John Psyllos’s second house. This house, considerably larger, was to be built on a steeply sloping lot, located below but out of sight of the first. John’s Greek heritage was very important to him, and I tuned in to that. The house is designed with three levels stepping down from the entrance, connected by a curving staircase.

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Again, passive solar heat was incorporated in the design. I used the rise to allow heat to flow up and through the house. Each level faced south, so the sun would wash the walls all day long, and then the heat would rise up through the house. In winter, it would work in reverse, with the cool air falling down the big staircase and being vented out at night. I made another trip up to Corning to show John this design, which he liked very much. We started building it before his first house was finished. The same contractor and crew worked on both. He went to a quarry in Greece and bought brown marble for floors and countertops in the first house, and green marble for the second. The stonemasons, from Utah, had plenty of work and challenges. This house was constructed with standard concrete blocks filled with concrete, later stuccoed to create smooth curves. Although I had envisioned an earth-colored exterior, white stucco walls were important to John. When the Big Sur Design Review Committee objected to white, John decided to grow vines all over the walls to calm them down.

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John Psyllos Residence II. View from the roof, looking south.

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John Psyllos Residence II. Rendering, viewed from the southeast.

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John Psyllos Residence II. Upper floor plan.

John Psyllos Residence II. The south-facing façade.

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John Psyllos Residence II. Marble stairway up to the entry.

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John Psyllos Residence II. Archway leading to the entry on the upper level.

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John Psyllos Residence II. The lower-level guest bedroom shown from ground level.

Muennig Residence, 1980 87

Big Sur, California

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I started designing my home in 1980, looking forward to building it on my new land, which is about 1,500 feet above the ocean, with ocean views from the north to the south and mountains to the east. I worked out several ambitious schemes and ended up building the most feasible design. I had several reasons for building the house underground: I didn’t want it to be visible from the highway, and it needed to be fireproof and earthquake resistant. I finally got Gerry Paddock to come and bulldoze a site for it. Since it was to be underground and I didn’t want it to leak, I was happy to discover hardpan clay underneath the surface. It is just north of an Indian shell mound. I had gone to Italy around that time, and at a museum discovered a model structure that was small and built under the ground. I figured 89

if the Romans could do it two thousand years ago, I could surely do it in Big Sur. I was going to build it myself. Each year I thought I was making steady progress on it, digging it out from under mudslides, but I was actually making no progress at all. After putting up four layers of concrete block, I decided it was too big of a job for me. I learned from this experience that it wasn’t bad to leave the building to professionals who made their living by working at the trade. After twelve years, I finally had some money to start construction. It was completed in 1994. I had envisioned a temple in which I could experience the joys of life, with little maintenance work required. It is built from concrete and glass. The concrete slab incorporates radiant heating pipes, and the concrete mass of the house holds the sun’s heat. I designed a large skylight over the center to let light in to an interior garden of tropical plants. The skylight was designed to open, to let out overheated air and let in fresh air as well. Pivoting glass front doors let in ocean breezes and frame amazing sunsets at the horizon. The house is set on the axis of the winter solstice, and the sun shines through directly to the fireplace on the back wall on December 21. The central space is curved, incorporating living, kitchen, and study areas. The bedroom and bathroom are on the south side, and there are two small rooms to the sides of the entry, one for a second bath/laundry (which also serves as my dog Habiba’s boudoir) and the other a pantry/utility space.

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Side doors, one opening from the kitchen patio, another in the bedroom on the opposite side, provide cross-ventilation. Though the skylight still does not open, the tropical garden has flourished, providing bananas for breakfast and watermelon-sized papayas. Grapes are thriving on an arbor over the patio outside the kitchen, and their vines provide a shady spot on hot days.

Muennig Residence. Above and below: Preliminary studies. The house that was built was simpler and smaller.

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Muennig Residence. Aerial view. Photograph courtesy of Butch Kronlund, Big Sur Builders.

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Muennig Residence. Floor plan.

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Muennig Residence. Exterior, looking west, before grapes were planted over the arbor outside the kitchen.

Muennig Residence. Interior courtyard.

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Muennig Residence. Central skylight.

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Muennig Residence. Pivoting glass entrance doors.

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Muennig Residence. Kitchen/dining area. The arched area behind the sink contains an herb garden, lit by a skylight above.

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Muennig Residence. Above and below: Doors at opposite sides draw fresh air through the house. The arched doorway opens to a trellised kitchen patio (above), which brings cool air through the arch that leads to the bedroom and patio (below).

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“It has always been a pleasure to be part of the creative process with Mickey that brings a structure to its completion and seeing all the varied elements combined in harmony with the woodwork that Mickey would design for me to build. At times the designs would be quite challenging, test my skills, and push me to new levels. At other times getting the details for those designs on more than a napkin could test one’s patience.” —Mark Sullivan, Big Sur Woodworks

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Michel Petrucciani Residence, 1983

Big Sur, California

Michel Petrucciani was my dear friend from France, the most interesting person I have met in my life. He was considered a wizard at jazz, and I loved the music he played.

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I met him when he was seventeen years old and three feet tall. He had a disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as “brittle bone disease,” which left him very fragile. If he went over a large bump while riding in a car, for example, he would likely break a bone. His father was a musician, playing jazz guitar in between odd jobs that he took to put food on the table for his family. Michel played piano, employing a special box so he could reach the pedals. He married my caretaker, Erlinda Montano, who was a fullsize young lady, full of kindness and love. I went to France with them, acting as his roadie. Erlinda and I took turns carrying Michel up and down the subway stairs on the way to his concerts. He decided to build a house in Big Sur. The design required a place for his piano, of course, and a kitchen where he could cook and be comfortable. We raised the floor in the kitchen so he could see eye to eye with people standing on the other side of the counter. He wanted to feel normal around other people. There was to be an interior island terrace where Michel could sit and compose music. That summer, he played fourteen festivals in America and abroad. Michel and Erlinda eventually parted, and the home was not built.

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Michel Petrucciani Residence. Floor plan.

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Bazinet Residence, 1984

Big Sur, California

Ed Bazinet was a friend of John Psyllos. John told Ed about an adjacent lot for sale above John’s property. It was a small building site. Ed wanted to build a small retreat from his busy life, where he could come and relax and spend some time with John.

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The site was difficult because of its size. I designed a passive solar-heated house with three triangular spaces: a large bedroom/master bath and a kitchen/dining room on one level, and a living room on a lower level. I was having difficulty working out the skylight over the living room. As I often do, I left it to be worked out as we got part of the structure up. It was more complicated than I had thought. I spent many days looking at it and scratching my head. I finally just saw it: a skylight fabricated in small angles. When I look at it today, it is one of the most complicated details that I have done. Ed owned a business that involved traveling the world in search of indigenous crafts and art. When he sold his business, he paid for the paving of Pfeiffer Ridge Road, which was a wonderful improvement for those residents who had endured that rough dirt road in difficult seasons.

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Bazinet Residence. Steps down to the entrance to the house.

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Bazinet Residence. Entry.

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Bazinet Residence. Dining room at right, with lower-level living area seen at left. “‘Mickey is kind of magical as an architect, but when it comes to tables and chairs, he isn’t interested,’ said Ed Bazinet. . . . ‘When my house was finished, I asked him where we were going to sit. I have a grand staircase down from the kitchen to the living room, which is seven feet lower. He was trying to convince me this was my furniture. I should just put cushions on it.’” —Lucie Young, “To Sur, with Love: He Builds with the Land,” Orlando Sentinel, November 9, 1997

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Bazinet Residence. Living room. The board-formed concrete fireplace mass contains two fireplaces—one on this level and the other above, facing the dining room.

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Bazinet Residence. Dining room fireplace.

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Bazinet Residence. View from living room to dining area.

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Bazinet Residence. Interior courtyard, with entrance to bathroom at left.

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Bazinet Residence. Spa.

Hawthorne Residence Addition, 1985 113

Big Sur, California

Greg and Susan Hawthorne moved to Big Sur from Michigan and bought a cabin across the highway from Nepenthe. Greg is an artist. He built a barn to use as his painting studio, then asked me to build an addition to his cabin. The cabin is next to a steep slope that goes down to the highway, and there was no flat land to build on, so we put a spiral staircase in the original house and built a living room that spanned above the driveway and led to a bedroom and bathroom on a hill on the other side. This made those rooms private from the rest of the house. The ocean can be seen through the living room arch.

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Hawthorne Residence Addition. Stair tower at right leading to the living room.

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Hawthorne Residence Addition. Floor plan.

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Hawthorne Residence Addition. Living room.

Hawthorne Residence Addition. View from the north, showing arched window in the living room.

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Hawthorne Residence Addition. Above and below: Bathroom.

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Hawthorne Residence Addition. Addition includes a bedroom and bath.

Witt Residence, 1988 120

Big Sur, California

Paul Witt had purchased property in Big Sur nearly five miles up a very steep ridge, with wide-open views of ocean and mountains. He wanted to build a retreat for his family. We met at Ventana for drinks, and we got acquainted. He went up and stayed on the land for a few days, came back down, and said a Tuscan villa was the only thing to do. I respected him, and designed a 5,000-square-foot stone villa. We used tons of rock, which had to be trucked up to the site, and found a stonemason who was willing to work up there, along with a sizable construction crew. It took about two years to build.

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Entry is down some steps to a grand living area; private areas are up a level in a separate wing. Wide expanses of glass in almost every room open the house to its amazing views. It is landscaped with two-hundred-year-old olive trees.

Witt Residence. View from the northwest. Photograph by Mary E. Nichols.

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Witt Residence. Entrance. Photograph by Mary E. Nichols. “In the many hours we spent talking to Mickey, he came to understand our priorities—harmony with the setting, room for a family with five children, comfort, warmth, and near total access to some of the most extraordinary views on the California coast. He delivered a remarkable structure. No architect can match the splendor of Big Sur; no man comes closer than Mickey Muennig.” —Paul Junger Witt

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Witt Residence. Floor plan for the entrance-level bedroom area, leading to stair tower.

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Witt Residence. Floor plan for the upper-level bedrooms, reached by stair tower.

Witt Residence. Floor plan for the entrance level, which steps down to living, dining, kitchen, and patio areas.

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Witt Residence. Living room. Photograph by Mary E. Nichols.

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Witt Residence. View from the southeast. Photograph by Mary E. Nichols.

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Witt Residence. Dining room. Photograph by Mary E. Nichols.

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Witt Residence. Stair tower. Photograph by Mary E. Nichols.

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Witt Residence. Hallway. Photographs by Mary E. Nichols.

Post Ranch Inn, 1988 130

Thirty Guest Units, Restaurant, Reception Lodge

Big Sur, California

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While I was working on the Hawthorne Residence, Mike Freed came over and asked whether I would help him with a hotel he was planning to build in Big Sur. He said he would give me a thousand dollars if I would design a typical guest unit. I did, and he loved it. He asked if I would design another one, a tree house. He liked that one, too. Then he asked me to design a larger building that would contain multiple units. The elevations reminded him of a butterfly, and he loved that one, too. After I designed the restaurant, he selected me to be the architect for the project. The 98-acre property is a portion of the land homesteaded by the Post family in the 1800s. The site is a long, narrow ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean, at an elevation of 1,400 feet. To the east is the Ventana Wilderness. The land includes redwood forest, stands of oak trees, and meadows. The number of guest units allowed by the California Coastal Commission at that time was thirty, and each guest room was limited to 425 square feet. After exploring and studying the land, I painstakingly laid out each building, trying to capture the best views and allow privacy for each unit. There are three unit types, plus the butterfly building: tree houses, elevated on poles; ocean houses recessed into the earth; and two-story coast houses. All the units have marbletiled Jacuzzi bathtubs and concrete fireplaces. The fireplaces in the ocean houses open into both the bathroom and bedroom. The bathrooms have slate floors.

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“The Post Ranch Inn was Mickey’s first hotel—which was not an issue, as no one associated with Post Ranch had any hotel experience. What Mickey had was passion for design, and doing something that no one else had done architecturally in the hotel business. Not only did Mickey sleep with redwoods and oak trees in order to choose the best location for each building to create a sense of privacy, but he also refused to accept conventional thinking that hotel rooms had to have right angles so that the furniture fit comfortably.” —Mike Freed, Managing Partner, Post Ranch Inn

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Post Ranch Inn. Hand-written project description submitted to Monterey County as part of the approval process.

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Post Ranch Inn. Sierra Mar restaurant, viewed from the south.

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Tree Houses

The tree houses are placed amidst redwood trees, and were designed on poles so that the footings didn’t interfere with the tree root systems. They are triangular in shape, which works well among the trees. They are built of redwood because it is light and a good material to use above the ground.

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Post Ranch Inn. Tree houses.

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Post Ranch Inn. Tree house floor plan.

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Post Ranch Inn. Tree house.

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Post Ranch Inn. Tree house entry.

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Post Ranch Inn. Interior, tree house.

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Post Ranch Inn. Multiple tree houses, showing access stairs.

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Post Ranch Inn. Architect’s conceptual drawing of tree house.

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Coast Houses

The two-story coast houses contain two units each, which reduced the total number of buildings on the site. Round in shape, they were designed to suggest redwood tree trunks. They are also built of redwood. “This space at twilight, cantilevered over the silver-foil Pacific, seems to enfold a visitor in pink striated clouds as the last gold dot vanishes on the horizon. It is typical of Muennig’s work in pulling off what seems impossible: propelling you into stunning, terrifying views while making you feel protected.” —Lucie Young, “To Sur, with Love: He Builds with the Land,” Orlando Sentinel, November 9, 1997

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Post Ranch Inn. Entrance to upper level of two-story coast house.

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Post Ranch Inn. Coast house floor plan.

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Post Ranch Inn. Interior, coast house.

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Post Ranch Inn. Conceptual drawing of coast house.

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Ocean Houses

The ocean houses, built of redwood and concrete, have sod roofs and are faced with glass on the ocean side.

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Post Ranch Inn. Interior, ocean house.

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Post Ranch Inn. Ocean house floor plan.

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Post Ranch Inn. Conceptual drawing of ocean house.

Butterfly Building

The three-level butterfly building has two wings, with three units on each side and a sod roof deck between them. The wings are formed by curved corrugated steel. The two lower units are six feet below ground to comply with the Monterey County Building Department’s rules for a “two-story” structure.

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Post Ranch Inn. Architect’s conceptual drawing of butterfly building.

Post Ranch Inn. Floor plan.

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Post Ranch Inn. Construction photo, butterfly building.

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Sierra Mar Restaurant

The restaurant was placed at the end of the ridge closest to the reception building. The earth-sheltered entrance is tunnel-like, leading into an open area that steps down to expansive ocean views. The restaurant seating steps down by a foot per level so diners see over the heads of other diners and have an unobstructed view of the ocean beyond. The entrance and kitchen are below grade level, and the westfacing dining area is above the grade, where it is supported by poles. The bar is at the far end of the restaurant, next to the fireplace and adjacent to the outdoor deck. Beyond the deck is the basking pool with an infinity edge that appears connected to the ocean. 157

The kitchen design went through many stages, with various people having strong opinions on the merits of open versus closed kitchens. In the end, the design allowed people to view food being prepared, also inviting the spectacular surroundings to inspire the chef and staff. The glass manufacturers were very concerned about the large size of the glass. (There was only one annealing furnace in the United States that could make glass this size.) When they installed the very largest piece, somebody noticed a smudge on the inside of the two layers of glass, and they had to come back and put in a new piece of glass. “Mickey created ‘totems to the gods’ on the beloved Post property. I remember him walking and camping out on the property for two weeks or more, feeling the site’s energy and honing in on that power to create different building structures that would fit and feel just right in those spaces. I feel we accomplished the goal of having the interior spaces flow out onto the exterior landscaping and surrounding space of nature.” —Janet Freed, Interior Designer

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“‘Mickey’s work is organic in the best sense—spontaneous, personal, carefully crafted, flowing directly from a sense of site,’ said Michael Sorkin, an architect who teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. ‘At a time when most architecture seems merely argumentative, these buildings are relaxed and free, filled with—dare I say it?—real joy.’” —Lucie Young, “The Nabobs Rough It and Love It,” New York Times, May 8, 1997

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Post Ranch Inn, Sierra Mar Restaurant. Host station, just inside the entrance.

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Post Ranch Inn, Sierra Mar Restaurant. Floor plan.

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Post Ranch Inn, Sierra Mar Restaurant. Dining tables on various levels are placed to maximize spectacular views from every table.

Post Ranch Inn, Sierra Mar Restaurant. Entering the restaurant, backs of steel banquettes line the passageway through the dining room toward the bar.

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Post Ranch Inn, Sierra Mar Restaurant. The restaurant as seen from outside the dining deck, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

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Post Ranch Inn, Sierra Mar Restaurant. Lowest-level seating area, nearest the bar.

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Post Ranch Inn, Sierra Mar Restaurant. Custom-designed steel banquette. The kitchen is located behind the arched opening seen at right.

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Post Ranch Inn, Sierra Mar Restaurant. Construction photo.

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Post Ranch Inn, Sierra Mar Restaurant. Infinity pool, adjacent to the restaurant deck.

Reception Building

When it came time to design the reception building, I was told to make a rectangular building. So I designed a rectangular building. But I couldn’t let it go at that. Wood 4x4’s support corrugated steel roofing in a curved shape that forms both roof and wall. In the other direction, I did another 4x4 roof that supports another curved corrugated steel roof. The interplay of the two forms was quite exotic. A stairway to the second-floor balcony leads to a walkway up to the ridge.

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Post Ranch Inn. Reception building, where guests arrive and check in.

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Post Ranch Inn. Reception building section.

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Post Ranch Inn. Interior, reception building.

Hunt-Badiner Residence Remodel and Addition, 1990 170

Big Sur, California

Allan and Marion Hunt-Badiner came to me to remodel a house they had bought. It was built in the 1940s and was pretty run down by this time. It is in a beautiful spot, and I decided to do it. They wanted a beautiful palace, and at first I felt I could only do so much with it. It had water leakage and other problems. I started out by designing a new garage, and from there it got more complicated. I was looking for decent wood; good redwood was getting hard to find. I was under time pressure during the entire job, but I managed to find some nice redwood. The contractor had a hard time keeping the cost down.

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I kept the basic footprint of the existing house, and created more living space by enclosing the basement, which had originally been open space. I added a lot of glass on the ocean side. Japanese carpenters from the Bay Area constructed the meditation room, which was a focal point of the house. Allan wanted to remodel the guesthouse, which he used as a workspace for writing. Pivoting bookshelves, with hidden controls (which he took great delight in), separate the sleeping area from the workspace.

Hunt-Badiner Residence. Floor plan.

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Hunt-Badiner Residence. Exterior, view from the northwest.

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Hunt-Badiner Residence. Above and below: Living room.

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Hunt-Badiner Residence. Bathroom.

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Witt Studio/Guesthouse, 1992

Big Sur, California

While his main house was under construction, Paul Witt gave me free rein to design a studio/guesthouse nearby. I designed a compact two-level structure with two private sleeping spaces, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It is constructed of concrete and Cor-Ten steel.

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Witt Studio/Guesthouse. Exterior, viewed from the south.

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Witt Studio/Guesthouse. Rendering.

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Witt Studio/Guesthouse. Exterior, viewed from the north.

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Witt Studio/Guesthouse. Seating area.

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Witt Studio/Guesthouse. Kitchen.

Lihu Lake Hotels, 1993

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Remodeling, Floating Hotel, Restaurants, Shops, Condos, Parking

Wuxi, China

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When I met John Huang for breakfast at the Post Ranch Inn, he was accompanied by his beautiful wife, who was a famous Chinese actress. He asked if I would like to go to China to help with a building project that he was doing. I thought, “Why not?” We made arrangements and I flew over and met him at the Hilton Shanghai Hotel, where he had rented a suite of rooms on the upper floors. Later that day we went to look at the Jing An Hotel with intentions of remodeling it. We got some old working drawing plans of it, and I worked on converting some of the stories into two-story spaces within. John was up for any ideas I had. We started working on an underground series of shops and underground parking. John wanted to take me to Wuxi to look at another hotel, so we took the train. Once we got there, I started drawing plans to remodel the existing Hubin Hotel, a ten-story structure on land adjacent to Lihu Lake, and to design another new tenstory hotel nearby. This new hotel would have a ramped corridor that would allow wheelchair escape from a fire if necessary, a rare but sensible safety feature. John wanted to develop the area, creating a tourist center that included shopping areas and restaurants, where people would come to spend a weekend or more. Then we explored a design for another hotel on the water, to be accessed across a bridge. This structure would be either built on piers or floated on a barge. On our way back to Shanghai, we had a meeting with some businessmen about remodeling the Hubin Hotel, and they seemed approving.

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I thought I had some good ideas for the three hotels and shopping areas, and I had an exciting trip. The project remains in the design state.

Lihu Lake Hotels. Concept for commercial development, Wuxi, China.

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McDade Residence, 1993

Big Sur, California

Tommy McDade, a building contractor with whom I have worked, was finally ready to build his own house, and he asked me to design it. Accessed down a long, steep driveway, the site faces the ocean beyond Pfeiffer Ridge. The house is built of concrete, glass, and redwood.

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The front door opens to a kitchen/dining area that steps down to a living area with fireplace and interior garden. Glass doors across a hot tub fold back against the wall to make it open to the outside. Raccoon footprints in the house led Tommy to put barriers under those glass doors to keep them from swimming in. The master bedroom, on the northeast side, has sliding glass doors that open to a private area with oak trees. The bedroom also opens to a bathroom with sunken tub, shower, and tropical garden.

McDade Residence. Exterior, viewed from the north.

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McDade Residence. Entrance.

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McDade Residence. Living area, with a dining area up the steps on the left.

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McDade Residence. Living area. The sloping columns directly support the curving beams above.

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McDade Residence. Floor plan.

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McDade Residence. Kitchen.

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McDade Residence. Hot tub with folding glass panels that can separate the inside from the outside.

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McDade Residence. Tropical plants thrive throughout the house. These are in the hall leading to the guest bedroom. “Trekking 100 yards down a 30° brush-covered grade, I helped this Einstein-looking, white- and wild-haired man into a large manzanita bush facing the Pacific. Holding him there quietly for what seemed like hours, I helped him down and off we went. Several weeks went by until finally one morning he calls and tells me he has got the footprint of the house worked out between the trees and slopes. The house fit into the space available like a glove, master bedroom and bath encircling the oak grove with the living, dining, kitchen area and indoor-outdoor hot tub all looking to the Pacific.” —Tom McDade, Big Sur Construction

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Caddell Residence Remodel, 1994

Big Sur, California

Mike Caddell bought the Partington Point house from Richard Clements, a lawyer who built it circa 1954. Mike asked me to remodel it. Richard Clements was an interesting and intelligent man. Without architectural training, he built this house himself on extremely steep terrain. The landscape has the essence of a

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Chinese painting. One hundred fifty wooden steps lead down to the upper level, which overlooks a two-story space and the ocean. Migrating whales pass close by, and sea otters swim and live in the waters below. Yggdrasil, a five-ton sculpture by Gordon Newell, was flown in by helicopter and installed to view from his kitchen. .

My understanding is that Clements built the house with the idea of turning it into a hotel. He also had plans to build hotels one day’s trek apart in the Himalayas, so that trekkers could eat and bathe in comfort before starting out the next day. Mike Caddell wanted to update the house and add a bedroom. We did major revisions to the kitchen, took walls out of the bathroom to open it up, and added a bridge made of industrial grating on the ocean side. We installed sandblasted glass doors to the guest bedroom, which made it and the bath private from the rest of the house. We built a new bedroom, with a hot tub next to a fireplace, and a bathroom with steam shower, and placed a TV/music area in an old stone vault that Richard Clements had started to build. It was tough to remodel. We had to build special ramps to pour the concrete into, and the concrete pipes got clogged up more than once. Beams, including one that was two hundred pounds, and all the materials and tools had to be transported by hand down a long, steep distance. Ramps helped, but the going could be treacherous. Mike Caddell had fun remodeling the house. Many days, after supervising the construction, we would go to Ventana or Nepenthe for lunch, where we worked out the remaining problems of the day. Mike was an intense and good client. He 195

paid attention to the details and didn’t shortcut anything. I feel the house is among my best remodels.

Caddell Residence. View from the northeast. Cor-Ten steel siding and glass are changes that have been made to the original structure.

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Caddell Residence. Floor plan of the second story of the addition.

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Caddell Residence. Bedroom addition.

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Caddell Residence. Living room.

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Caddell Residence. Dining area on the kitchen level.

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Caddell Residence. Bathing area for the guest room on upper level.

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Caddell Residence. Fireplace and hot tub in the bedroom addition.

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Caddell Residence. View of the deck from the living room, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

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Caddell Residence. Bedroom addition, in foreground.

Hawthorne Gallery, 1995

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Big Sur, California

Greg Hawthorne called me one day and said he wanted to build an art gallery. He had a vision of a family gallery combined with a café and storage space, to be built on the highway across from Nepenthe. This piece of land had long been Carl Hartman’s woodlot, where people bought cords of wood. The café concept was eventually dropped due to opposition from Nepenthe. My idea was to build the gallery like a bridge, with two trusses supporting the second floor, eliminating columns and creating an open space on the ground floor. Diagonal braces on the second floor are trusses for the bridge. Greg wanted the construction exposed, and he wanted a staircase in front that would be visible from the outside.

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“The glazing on the west side looking out in the direction of the highway had originally been intended to look down. When Mickey saw the way the view was framed in the rough, he changed the aspect to the upper frames which look out at the long view, a completely spontaneous design call that Greg [Hawthorne] supported and we were able to easily accommodate.” —Frank Pinney, Pinney Construction Inc.

The lower level has expansive wall space for display of paintings, while the upper floor is more open to the outside, providing a good space for sculpture and furniture. An outside deck on the second floor provides a sculpture garden and roof for the storage area below. A glass inset in the upper floor created problems with the Monterey County Building Department. We couldn’t find a manual that said glass could be walked on, so we laminated four pieces of 3/4-inch glass together, and it was reluctantly accepted because it could take more load than the wood floor. The concrete floor is built in sections that can be jacked up if an earthquake should occur and the floor settles.

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Hawthorne Gallery. Upper level. .

Hawthorne Gallery. Ground level.

Barklie Henry Barn and Music Studio, 1997 209

Big Sur, California

Barklie Henry is a longtime friend of mine. Music has always been important to him, both as a performer and producer. He asked me to design a barn and music studio on his property in Big Sur. I thought a roof suspended on cables would be good for acoustic resonance. Barklie agreed, and I continued the design. A ramp on the upper level leads to the studio. Bays underneath, which are used for vehicles and storage, open in the opposite direction at the lower level. One of my happiest moments was the premier concert by pianist Omar Sosa, attended by Babatunde Olatunji. The sound was crystal clear. My concept worked: the sound bounces off the reverse curve of the suspended roof all the way to the end of the studio and reaches everybody.

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The space is frequently used for recording and performances, including Big Sur drumming and belly dancing. In 2006, engineers from Bose Corporation came out to test their newly designed speakers in the space.

Barklie Henry Barn and Music Studio. Exterior viewed from the west.

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Barklie Henry Barn and Music Studio. Viewed from the south. The music studio is on the upper level. “Mickey built me an amazing studio in Big Sur which is close to perfect sonically. This means you will hear each instrument playing exactly from where it is . . . no matter where you are in the room . . . and you will hear nothing else. Mickey is a firstclass acoustic architect!” —Barklie Henry

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Barklie Henry Barn and Music Studio. Interior of studio. A portable recording booth can be moved around within the space.

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Barklie Henry Barn and Music Studio. A suspended roof spans the space, providing acoustical clarity. “The design for Barklie’s barn was innovative to say the least. Steel columns set at angles to support slack steel cables strung across the width to create an inverted curved roof reminiscent of the main terminal at Dulles International

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Airport. As the framers assembled the 3x4 stringers u-bolted to each cable to create the basis for the roof membrane, they exclaimed how exciting it would be to take the design out to the Midwest and sell these barns to the farmers as an example of how a real barn should be constructed.” —Frank Pinney, Pinney Construction Inc.

Barklie Henry Barn and Music Studio. Section.

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Esalen Institute Baths, 1998

Big Sur, California

Besides Highway 1 washing out, Esalen Institute was one of the big casualties of the storms of 1998. The adjacent hill slid onto the bathhouse, crushing it. The famous hot springs baths at Esalen were no more. Before reconstruction could be considered, Esalen had to stabilize the hillside. This was a matter of drilling in forty feet

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deep and inserting reinforcing bars the full depth, not an easy thing to accomplish. About two thousand rebars at two feet on center and forty feet long were bored into the hillside, with steel mesh connecting them at the outside surface to hold the earth back. Paul Kephart, a landscape expert, planted native plants under the mesh to make it appear invisible. This project took about a year. One day during this time, I was talking with Andy Nusbaum, Esalen’s director. I said a few things about Esalen, and he realized he had no idea that I had ever been involved with Esalen. A few days later, while I was supervising Tommy McDade’s house construction, a committee from Esalen came by to talk with me. I got a call a few days later and was asked whether I would be interested in designing the new baths. I said I would, and I started a design. I had no clue how complicated this project would be. I had drawings of the old bathhouse and took them down to Esalen. The decision had been made to use the same site as before, on the spot where the hot springs water emerges from the earth. My idea was to use formed concrete in place of the concrete block that had been smashed. Esalen thought that was fine, so I went back home and started thinking in terms of concrete construction. As I started working with it, I discovered that low arches would provide an economical solution to the structure, which would include massage rooms, dressing rooms, showers, and bathing spaces. I proposed that to the design committee, and they accepted. By using arches, we reduced the bending moment at each end. The arches provided an opportunity to lower the reinforcement bars at the ends of the arches, where the moment is the greatest.

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Then we started getting into the details. This is where the project became more complicated. We mocked up the doors and brought them to the job site. The Esalen design committee lifted the doors and thought they would be too heavy to operate. They feared that people’s fingers could get caught in the momentum of the sliding doors. We had to come back with a new design. After ten more door designs, we were still faced with similar dilemmas. Andy selected a new design coordinator, who approved the original door design. Nobody has lost a finger yet. Everything we did there was expensive, because it had to be made of bronze or another weather-resistant material. We negotiated the best price for each material we had chosen.

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Esalen Institute Baths. Aerial view. Photograph courtesy of Butch Kronlund, Big Sur Builders.

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Esalen Institute Baths. Rendering from ocean level.

Esalen Institute Baths. Lower level, including hot tubs inside and outside, showers, and a dressing area.

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Esalen Institute Baths. Upper level, with a handicap tub at right, bathrooms, and an outdoor massage deck in the center. “Mickey’s architectural achievements have shaped the Big Sur experience for locals and visitors alike for over half a century. These highly functional residential and commercial spaces interface with our beloved Big Sur coastline with a hug and a kiss. All of the elements are considered. The perpetual diversity of light, sky, mountain shadows, and a moody ocean are fully embraced and factored into each design.” —Jonathan W. Newell, JN Design

Pavey Residence, 1998

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Big Sur, California

Bob and Trish Pavey had bought the first house I designed for John Psyllos. When they decided to build a new house, they contacted me. They had bought a beautiful site that overlooks the Point Sur lighthouse and Pfeiffer Beach, and they wanted to build a larger house similar to the one they lived in. They walked up to their new property, at least three miles from home, to meet me. I laid it out in a perfect spot on their land. When Jeff Norman came up to do the biological survey, he found the chosen site was in the middle of a patch of Hutchinson’s larkspur, an endangered species. He thought we could probably build the house there by planting additional larkspur plants outside of 222

the building footprint. I lived with this for some time until I decided to move the house across the road, out of the larkspur patch. I felt much better about that location. One end of the house is almost totally underground, and a sod roof seemed practical. The other end fades into the ground, which also works well with the sod roof. Solar panels have a nice south-sloping, out-of-view spot below the garage elevation. The garage is underground, which provides a good place for the backup generator. We located the caretaker’s house out of view to the east of the main house. Frank Pinney was the contractor and did a good job on the house. The site is very windy, and it was not an easy job for the crew. Bob left the construction decisions to Trish. They are good and easy people to work with, and the house turned out to be a good one.

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Pavey Residence. Living room, with a view toward the ocean. The inset metal fireplace opens to a bedroom on the other side. The walls are board-formed concrete.

Pavey Residence. View from the south. The garage is at the left.

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Pavey Residence. Floor plan. “We were all transfixed by the way Mickey’s design came into shape—how all the beams fit just so, the way he had envisioned. No right angles anywhere! We continue to be amazed whenever we come down the hill to find our home settled ‘in’ the ridge” —Trish Pavey

Pavey Residence. Living area, looking toward the kitchen and dining area. Door on far wall leads to guest rooms.

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Pavey Residence. Living area.

Pavey Residence. Bedroom. The outdoor patio has a hot tub, shower, and a panoramic ocean view.

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Pavey Residence. Living area. “Standing inside the house feels like being in the belly of a wonderful whale. Ribs of Douglas fir are supported by beams that curve to follow the lines of the Earth, while the central spline is a narrow skylight that keeps the interior from feeling like a cave.” —Alastair Gordon, “California Grass,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2009

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Scharffenberger Residence, 1998

Big Sur, California

Carl Scharffenberger called me one day to ask me to design a new house on the site of the cabin where I first lived in Big Sur. Carl and Mary Ellen were planning on retiring to Big Sur and had bought this site overlooking the ocean with a steep pathway down to a beach.

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The site inspired me to design the house with a roof in the shape of a wave. The house is constructed of concrete block, with each course of block overhanging the last course, challenging the masons. I let the wave continue throughout the house, leaving it as open as possible, with high glass walls to allow the wave to flow through all the spaces. We built the guesthouse first so they could live in it while the main house was being built. El Niño storms hit at the beginning of February 1998, and Highway 1 was blocked by mudslides to the north and to the south for months. Carl was a big man, and the guesthouse was a small space, so it was tight living quarters for both of them during a season of seemingly endless rains. When it became possible to begin construction of the main house, the roof of the guesthouse became a deck that connected to the main house with a bridge. Since the house was so close to the ocean, we had to get special permission to put it on piers. Adjusting to retirement and looking for a new challenge, and perhaps hoping to save some money on the house, Carl took on the job of supervising construction himself. One day while he was walking around and supervising, he fell down one of the pier holes and caught himself with his elbows stretched out. The workmen came to the rescue and pulled him out. Carl and I became good friends. He was a great client with a big heart, a good disposition, and a wonderful sense of humor. He always opened a bottle of wine to greet me.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Exterior, looking south. “The Scharffenberger home is a masterpiece, the peak of what Mr. Muennig has done for private-home design. It has 270-degree views of the Big Sur coast. It is set on two concrete support pillars that double as fireplaces; the pressed wooden beams resemble an undulating wave. The roof itself follows that wave with flowing patterns of wood. The walls are made of concrete block, and the comparisons to Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a principal influence to Mr. Muennig’s guiding force, Bruce Goff, and to Mr. Muennig himself, are inescapable.” —Joel Berliner, “Big Times in Big Sur,” Washington Times, July 7, 2006

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Scharffenberger Residence. Preliminary floor plan.

Scharffenberger Residence. Elevation.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Floor plan.

Scharffenberger Residence. The main entrance to the house from the gate. The garage is at right.

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“Years before, Mickey had lived in the cabin on our property, and integrated the angles of sun and wind perfectly to our environment. A friend once remarked our house was ‘like living in a sculpture’ . . . so very true.” —Mary Ellen Scharffenberger

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Scharffenberger Residence. A stone arch defines the entrance gate.

Scharffenberger Residence. Entrance to the house.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Dining area. Note the undulating roof.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Living room. Note the asymmetrical fireplace opening. Acid-stained concrete floors provide radiant heat.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Stairs from the living area to the dining area.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Hot tub adjacent to the master bathroom. Glass doors open to the outdoors.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Guest bedroom.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Master bedroom.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Industrial grating bridge leading from the house to the roof deck of the guesthouse.

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Scharffenberger Residence. Guesthouse with roof deck.

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Nusbaum Residence, 1998

Big Sur, California

Andy Nusbaum, who was the director of Esalen Institute at the time, asked me to design a house on Castro Ridge, about a mile and a half up a dirt road. The property is very steep, and there was hardly any place to build, except for possibly a spot where a 10,000-gallon water tank was located. After doing careful measurements, we found that if we built it where the

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water tank was, and up the side of the hill, there was just possibly enough space to build on. Though Andy and his wife, Nikki, wanted a bigger house, I finally came up with a one-bedroom house that worked for them. There was opposition from the Big Sur Advisory Committee, which said it could be partially seen from the highway. There was nothing to do except fight. It was referred to the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, which finally approved it because they felt the view from the highway was minor. Throughout the long process, Andy and Nikki were understanding people to work with. It is a small, compact design that overlooks the ocean. The entry level is a kitchen, dining, and living space with a stone fireplace. Stairs lead up to an open living/study area and the master bedroom and bathroom beyond. The bedroom opens to a deck with beautiful views. Unfortunately, the house burned down in a wildfire started by lightning in June 2008.

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Nusbaum Residence. The south-facing bedroom on the upper level.

Nusbaum Residence. The southwest corner of the house.

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Nusbaum Residence. Ground-level living area showing the fireplace and outside patios.

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Nusbaum Residence. Floor plan. “We will never forget handing Mickey a 5 by 7 inch piece of paper at the beginning of our project, with four or five simple numbered items on the page, and telling him this is basically what we wanted. He did them all with no fuss or argument. We were still discovering things we figured he must have known and just did without telling us . . . like standing in the upstairs shower with a direct line of sight to the upstairs fireplace. Most enjoyable, and done without our ever knowing it.” —Nikki and Andy Nusbaum

Nusbaum Residence. Upper-level bedroom, with a view of the outside patios.

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Nusbaum Residence. The kitchen, located on the ground level.

Nusbaum Residence. Upper-level balcony/study, with a view to outside.

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Work by Mickey Muennig Note: Dates refer to approximate start of design work. Works with the designation “project” were designed but not built. 1963 Foulke House, Joplin, Missouri 1963 Barteaux Residence, Joplin, Missouri 1966 KBTN Radio Station, Neosho, Missouri 1966 Mineral Museum, Joplin, Missouri (project) 1968 Leffen Office Building, Joplin, Missouri 1968 Allen Residence, Joplin, Missouri 1969 Skyline Park Apartments, 169-unit high-rise, Denver, Colorado 1970 62-unit high-rise condominium, Denver, Colorado (project) 1971 Washington Park Pavilion, Denver, Colorado 1972 Heinich Residence, Big Sur, California 1972 Muennig Studio, Big Sur, California

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1972 Kelm Residence, Big Sur, California 1973 Dolores Street Residence, Carmel, California 1974 McNair Residence, Malibu, California (project) 1975 McNair (project)

Condominium,

Westwood,

California

1975 Prussin Residence, Big Sur, California 1976 Jones Residence, Big Sur, California 1977 Parker Caretaker Residence, Big Sur, California 1977 John Psyllos Residence I, Big Sur, California 1978 John Psyllos Residence II, Big Sur, California 1979 Ridenour and Dorrell Residence , Big Sur, California (project) 1980 Walling Residence, Big Sur, California (project) 1980 Muennig Residence, Big Sur, California 1981 Bradford Residence, Big Sur, California 1981 Romanow Residence , Big Sur, California (project) 1982 Kelm Caretaker Quarters, Big Sur, California 1982 Kimura Residence, Big Sur, California (project) 1983 Michel Petrucciani Residence, Big Sur, California (project) 1983 Le Bain Retail Shop, Salinas, California

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1984 Bazinet Residence, Big Sur, California 1984 Shlien Barn, Big Sur, California (project) 1985 Lambert Residence, San Luis Obispo, California 1985 Hawthorne Residence Addition, Big Sur, California 1986 Green Residence, Big Sur, California (project) 1988 Witt Residence, Big Sur, California 1988 Post Ranch Inn, thirty guest units, restaurant, reception lodge, Big Sur, California 1990 Hunt-Badiner Residence, Big Sur, California 1992 Witt Studio/Guesthouse, Big Sur, California 1993 Parker Residence, Big Sur, California 1993 Henry Residence, Oakland, California (project) 1993 McDade Residence, Big Sur, California 1993 Jing An Hotel, Shanghai, China (project) 1993 Lihu Lake Hotels, Wuxi, China (project) 1994 Caddell Residence Remodel, Big Sur, California 1994 Peter and Pena Simon Residence, Big Sur, California 1994 Daniel Edelman Residence, Big Sur, California (project) 1995 Hawthorne Gallery, Big Sur, California

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1995 Nature and Fishing Resort, Kanton Island, Republic of Kiribati (project) 1997 Barklie Henry Barn and Music Studio, Big Sur, California 1998 Image Tech Residence, Turtle Bay, Antigua (project) 1998 Esalen Institute Baths, Big Sur, California 1998 Pavey Residence, Big Sur, California 1998 Petrovsky Residence, Prescott, Arizona 1998 Scharffenberger Residence, Big Sur, California 1998 Nusbaum Residence, Big Sur, California 1998 Labuda Residence, Half Moon Bay, California (project) 1999 Guiroy Residence, Salinas, California 1999 Laub-Engle Residence, Big Sur, California (project) 1999 Gaia Napa Valley Hotel, Napa Valley, California 1999 McWethy Residence, Big Sur, California (project) 2000 Wen Chang Residence, San Gregorio, California (project) 2000 Kilbourne Residence Addition, Big Sur, California 2001 Gross Residence, Santa Cruz, California (project) 2001 Treehouse Studio, Tiburon, California (project)

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2001 Balkanski Residence, Woodside, California (project) 2001 Balkanski Residence Remodel, Big Sur, California 2001 Renard Residence, Monterra, California (project) 2001 Waters Residence, Big Sur, California (project) 2002 Morrison Residence, Alpine, Texas (project) 2002 Henry Miller Library Addition, Big Sur, California 2003 Patterson Residence, Big Sur, California (project) 2003 Post Ranch Inn Improvements, Big Sur, California 2004 Humphrey Residence Remodel, Boca Raton, Florida (project) 2004 Esalen Institute Baths Canopy Addition, Big Sur, California 2004 Stechishin Residence, Los Gatos, California (project) 2004 Baghdasarian Residence Remodel, Malibu, California (project) 2004 Lewis Residence Remodel, Malibu, California (project) 2004 Teters Residence, Cambria, California (project) 2004 Sena Residence, Carmel Highlands, California (project) 2005 Wavecrest Ecology Education Center, Half Moon Bay, California (project) 2005 Thorpe Residence, Carmel Highlands, California (project) 253

2005 Chappellet Studio, Big Sur, California (project)

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Selected Publications Books Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind. An exhibition catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition “Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind” shown at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, October 9, 2010–January 2, 2011. Hess, Alan. Hyperwest: American Residential Architecture on the Edge. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1996. ———. Organic Architecture: The Other Modernism. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2006. Olsen, Richard, Handmade Houses: A Century of EarthFriendly Home Design, New York: Rizzoli, 2012. Pearson, David. New Organic Architecture: The Breaking Wave. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Saeks, Diane Dorrans. California Interiors. Cologne: Taschen, 1999. Viladas, Pilar. California Beach Houses: Style, Interiors, and Architecture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996.

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Periodicals Architectural Digest, “The AD 100, Designers Architects: Mickey Muennig,” January 2000.

and

———. “The New AD 100: Mickey Muennig,” January 2002. Architecture and Urbanism, “American School of Architecture: G. K. Muennig” [in Japanese, with English translation], November 1981. ———. “Friends of Kebyar, G. K. Muennig” [in Japanese, with English translation], March 1985. Berliner, Joel, “Big Times in Big Sur,” Washington Times, July 7, 2006. www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/jul/7/ 20060707-084209-3823r/?page=all. Bertelsen, Ann, “Big Sur Aerie,” Northern California Homes and Gardens, April 1990. Brown, Patricia Leigh, and Mary E. Nichols, “Bird’s-Eye View,” Architectural Digest, October 2004. Central Coast Magazine, “Elementary Imagination,” March 2009. Chatfield, Michael, and Melanie Chatfield, “A Work of Art, Inspired by Artists,” HomeStyle by the Sea, 2006. Chirkov, Andrei, “Metaphor of Circle” [in Russian, with English translation], Interior Digest, November 2003.

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Cohen, Edie Lee, “Mickey Muennig: The Post Ranch Inn at Big Sur, California,” Interior Design, July 1993. DaRosa, Alison, “Heavenly Post Ranch a Great Place to Unwind,” San Francisco Examiner, August 18, 1996. Davis, Sally Ogle, “Mr. Post Builds His Dream Hotel,” Los Angeles Magazine, May 1982. Drewes, Frank, “Hotel Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, Kalifornien” [in German], Deutsche Bauzeitschrift, October 1995. Estates Internationale 147 , “At Big Sur, Blending Sculpture and Nature Atop the Surf,” 1996. Frank, Michael, and Mary E. Nichols, “California Counterpoint,” Architectural Digest, October 1996. Friends of Kebyar, “Muennig,” May/June 1984. Geo, “Die Kuste der Aussteiger” [in German], September 1979. Gordon, Alastair, “California Grass,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2009. http://magazine.wsj.com/features/a-housegarden/big-sur-architect-mickey-muennig/. Grippi, Tamara, “Muennig’s Amazing Organic Architecture,” Carmel Pine Cone, March 8, 2002. Hess, Alan, “Blending Inn at Big Sur,” San Francisco Examiner, November 1, 1992. Home, “Rustic Beauty in a Big Sur Addition,” August 1990.

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Home Edition, The: The Home and Garden Resource Directory for the Monterey Bay Area, 1996–1997, “Building in Big Sur.” Kashyap, Keshni, “Coastal Commissions,” Dwell, September 2008. Kennedy, Wally, “Funky Foulke,” Joplin Globe, November 15, 2010. McDonald, Elvin, “Out on a Limb,” Traditional Home, June/ July 2000. Mosca, Brigga, “The Architecture of G. K. ‘Mickey’ Muennig,” Monterey County Magazine, Summer 2008. www.postranchinn.com/wp-content/themes/ post_ranch_inn/uploaded_content/pri_news_mc.pdf. Newman, Morris, “An Environmentally Correct Hotel for Big Sur,“ New York Times, April 28, 1991. ———. “Above Big Sur,” Progressive Architecture, June 1992. Paddock, Richard, “Playground for the Rich: New Resort at Big Sur Is Seen as a Symbol of the Transformation of an Area Once Known for Free Spirits,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1992. Progressive Architecture, “Rippling Rafters,” June 1963. Rennert, Amy, “To Big Sur with Love,” At Home (supplement to San Francisco Focus ) , Summer 1990. Reynolds, Christopher, “Inn of the Environmentally Correct: Big Sur’s First New Resort in Two Decades Blends with Its 258

Surroundings—but at a Price,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1992. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-17/travel/ tr-511_1_big-sur-inn/2. ———. “Room with a View,” Daytona Beach News-Journal, January 10, 1993. Saeks, Diane Dorrans, “Taming the Wilderness,” West (supplement to San Jose Mercury News ), September 17, 1989. Sardar, Zahid, “Nature Roost,” San Francisco Examiner, October 31, 1993, Image section. Schempp, Dieter, “Meine Begegnung mit dem Architekten Mickey Muennig am Big Sur, Kalifornien” [in German], Glas Forum, January 1996. Thorne, Tony, “Let’s October–December 1997.

Go

Organic,”

Hot

Air,

Van Every, Cynthia, “Post Ranch Inn—Big News from Big Sur,” Monterey Bay—The Magazine, January/February 1993. W, “Big Sur,” August 1975. Walker, Michael, and Martin Rapp, “Big News from Big Sur,” Travel + Leisure, August 1992. Watson, Lisa Crawford, “The Hidden Architecture of Big Sur,” Carmel Magazine, Summer/Fall 2006. Webb, Michael, and Grant Mumford, “Nature’s Way in Big Sur—An Architect’s House Celebrates the California Landscape,” Architectural Digest, June 2000. 259

Weintraub, Alan, “Formed from Nature,” Designers West, February 1991. Young, Lucie, “The Nabobs Rough It and Love It,” New York Times, May 8, 1997. ———. “To Sur, with Love: He Builds with the Land,” Orlando Sentinel, November 9, 1997.

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Acknowledgments For the early days of influence, I thank Frank Sharp for sharing many hours of time drawing on dynamite paper with me. I thank Michel Petrucciani, one of the brightest shining stars in my life, for sharing his friendship with me. Then Herb Greene and Bruce Goff for all their guidance and help with learning architecture, and what it really means, and for Bob Bowlby’s friendship and photographs of the Foulke House. My greatest thanks go to my clients who had the courage to go through building a house with me. There have been many people who worked for me and helped me in different ways, including my good friend Tim Brattin, Daniel Piechota, Annie Burke, Sharon Lloyd, and Laura Tugwell. I thank the remarkable people who planned and executed the construction, including Bill McLeod, Frank Pinney, Tom McDade, Torrey Waag, Dan Woods, Butch Kronlund, Mark Sullivan, Jonathan Newell, and all those who helped them. I cannot forget the patience of my parents and my children, Michele and Peter Muennig. I thank Alan Hess for his beautiful story of Big Sur, and Alan Weintraub for his talents and hours spent photographing my houses.

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And I thank Diane Bohl, without whose help this book would not have been made. Regrets to anyone I have neglected to mention.

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