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Abrams,
Harold |
Russell
Forester, AIA
At age five, Russell Forester moved to La Jolla from Salmon, Idaho with his mother and younger brother. Earlier, his father, an architect, had abandoned the family. His mother became a librarian at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Russell graduated from La Jolla High School in 1938. Russell served in the Army Corps of Engineers (1943-46), where he worked as a draftsman alongside noted San Diego architect Lloyd Ruocco, designing replacement depots. Much of his free time away from the drafting table was sketching. Eleanor Forester (born December 11, 1924, to Eva Lucille Puckett and George Albert Hedenberg) moved to San Diego with her mother and stepfather, Kenneth J. Darrell, in 1939. After graduating from Hoover High School she worked as a draftsman for Concrete Shipyards in San Diego designing barges for the war effort. At Concrete Shipyards, she met her future husband, Russell Isley Forester. They immediately hit it off, forcing the head of the draftsmen, Lloyd Ruocco, to move their desks apart since Russell spent too much time turning around to talk to her. After the war, Eleanor and Russell married on April 13, 1946, in La Jolla. In 1948 Russell opened his first office as a freelance architectural designer. Formal study began at the urging of Lloyd Ruocco (and financing from the GI Bill) in 1950 at the Institute of Design (later IIT) in Chicago where Mies Van Der Rohe was spreading the International Style gospel. His foundation course focused on perception, space, light, proportion and texture. The young couple returned to San Diego when Russell's mother became very ill. Eleanor built three houses with Russell (they divorced after 20 years of marriage);
their first house at 724 Rushville Street in April 1948, a house on Hillside
Drive in 1952 and a spec house in the upper Shores area in the early 1960s.
Eleanor and Russell spent a year in Spain in 1955-56 while he ‘worked
for a firm of engineers and architects on U.S. bases in Spain’ as designer
and supervising architect. After two years he returned stateside ‘as
a designer on the Los Angeles airport for the firm Pereira and Luckman.’ By the time he obtained his architectural license in 1960, Russell had already completed a wealth of modernist structures including his second home at 7595 Hillside Drive in La Jolla. Known for not compromising his designs for clients, Russell was among the first wave of practicing architects to push Mies Van Der Rohe’s brand of steel & glass modernism on commercial and residential clients across San Diego. From his La Jolla practice Mr. Forester is credited with many high profile commissions for local art patrons Lynn and Danah Fayman as well as restaurateurs like Bob Peterson. For Peterson (Foodmaker CEO), Russell put Mieisian modernism into pop culture by designing the first Jack in the Box restaurant in 1951. As Jack in the Box “Machines for dispensing food” (Forester, 2001) grew to well over 200 drive-thrus inside 20 years, Peterson would also have Russell design the Family Tree, a more elegant setting for dining in San Diego, as well as his personal residence. In 1962, San Diego & Point described his artwork as arresting, constructivist, severe, functionalist, and mainstream all in the same article. Of the second home he designed for the Russell family, the magazine stated “the house….has a quiet elegance and air of privacy. The feeling, both inside and out, is one of discipline without rigidity, elegance without opulence.” “Had it been up to him, he would have gone directly into the arts (rather than architecture). He liked the Bauhaus ideology of diverse disciplines,” remarked widow Christine Forester. “Had he been an artist since his 20s he may have not been as productive. Russell was often discouraged from pursuing his art. By the time he devoted himself full-time to art in his 50s, there was a sense of urgency. By this time his hand was very secure and there was little waste and few mistakes,” said Mrs. Forester. Russell Forester spent three decades juggling his passion and vision for fine arts and architecture only to give up the latter for the former in 1976. With the aid of his second wife and architectural firm partner, Christine, Russell began his full-time career as a painter and sculptor when many of his contemporaries were retiring or at least retiring their modernist principles for safer ground.
Russell Forester defined architecture as problem solving. From his Philosophy
of Practice: We are entering a new age of building. An age in which a new set of ideas is taking hold. These ideas are not solely technological in nature: they are also philosophical. Relating first to larger questions of environmental planning and then concern for the isolated technical details. Russell Forester’s career melding art and architecture was honored by his unusual FAIA recognition. Rather than his career of progressive building designs being honored, Mr. Forester was recognized by his AIA colleagues for his contribution to art and architecture aesthetics. Russell believed the central tenet to integrity of design was his residential client’s lifestyle. Some of his clients would later become patrons of his artwork –filling their Forester-designed homes with Forester-designed artwork. Clients like Lloyd Russell, Danah Fayman and Bob Peterson commissioned Russell time and again. Clients may have understood him better than his colleagues in architecture. Recurring themes in his aesthetic flow through his career both as artist and architect. One only has to look at the ceiling of Park Prospect Apartments to understand Russell’s fascination with repetition. Many of Mr. Forester’s commissions include rows of little round light bulbs -- these “dots, lines and light” (Forester, 2001) are recurring themes in both his art and architecture. Whether using rows of light diodes, or punctuating his painting and sculpture (sometimes in steel) with a sewing machine, the linear repetition reflected this dots-in-line theme. From his La Jolla home, Russell grew fascinated by coastal mist seen through the expansive glass walls. His art often reflects coastal mornings by painting, washing, and repainting and the use of gauze to reflect this misty feeling.
Russell’s architectural designs varied in material and style over the decades (1948-1976) while always retaining central design principles – the problems the client needed solving; and how the whole project was vastly more than the sum of its parts. Clients of Russell Forester / Associates Inc. grew to expect a variety of things, central to which was his unquestionable integrity of his designs, passion and vision. During much of Mr. Forester’s architectural career, San Diego’s mid-century design aesthetic was comprised of a “lack of homogeneity in materials and approach to reflecting the region. People continued to come (to San Diego) from other elsewhere and clients wanted styles (reminding them of) from where they were from,”Mrs. Forester summarized. She continued, “He was a brilliant man, extremely talented, cut to the chase, detail oriented, never lost track of detail within content/ context of project “whole was definitely the sum of the details.”
We miss Russell. And with his legacy continuing to be demolished or remodeled, there are ever fewer living examples of his signature on the canvas of San Diego. Partial List of San Diego Projects Bailey, G. Newton ("Newt") and Doris P. Residence (1954) Bronowski, Jacob
and Rita Residence (ca. 1965) Brown, Dr. James D. Residence (1967) Byerly Residence (1969) Callahan, Richard and Lucille Addition (1969) Cromwell, Townsend (1949) Cromwell, Townsend and Katherine Residence (1955) Dailey, Helen Ruth (1948) Dill, Robert and Gloria Residence (1955) Driver, Robert (1955) Edison, Simon and Helen, (1974) Family Tree Restaurant (1965) Fayman, Lynn & Danah
Residence #1 (1962) Fayman, Danah
Residence #2 (1969) Forester, Russell
& Eleanor Residence #1 (1948) Forester, Russell
& Eleanor Residence #2 (1952) Forester, Russell Spec House (1962) Forester, Russell & Christine Residence (1971) Forester Office Building (1973) Frautschy, Jeff
and Frances Residence (1954) Freitas Residence (1968) Gewalt Residence (1956) Gist, Richard and Allison Residence (1955) Gross, Max Hudson and Louise J. Gross (1963) Herman, Edmund
& Elsie Residence (1961) Inman, Douglas and Ruth Residence (1955) Jack in
the Box Mark I design (1951) Jack in the Box, Mark II design (mid 1950s) Jack in the Box, Mark III design (early 1960s) Jack
in the Box Jack in the Box Offices Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jack in the Box Jefferson Gallery
(1965) Jones, Chalmer E. Residence (1962) Klapper, Roy B. Residence (1957) La Jolla Country
Day School Fountain (1967) La Jolla Veterinary Hospital (1950) Mayne, Don & Marilyn Residence (1962) Mayo Residence
(1951) Means, Rodney (1962) Miller, Paul G. Residence (1959) Moore, David and Claire Residence (1955) Nelson, Ralph B. (ret) and Sigmund Wald Residence (1961) Olsen Residence
(1950) Park Prospect
(1964) Patten, Stanley, R/Adm Residence (1961) Peterson, Robert
O. Residence
(1964) Private
Residence (1963) Private
Residence (1961) Ridland, Mr. and Mrs. Residence (1961) Russell, Lloyd
and Betty Residence #1 (1948) Russell, Lloyd
and Betty Residence #2 (1962) Russell, L.E.
Residence (1962) Sampson, Horace
and Dorothy Residence (1972) Schmidt, Dr. A. G. Residence (1961) Schreiber, A Residence (1956) Shor, George and
Betty Residence (1954) Shumway, George and Ann (Revelle) Residence (1955) Smith, Com. & Mrs.
W.A. Residence Remodel (1949) Spiess, Fred and Sarah (1955) Sunset Engraving (1963) Tompkins Residence (1962) Urey, Harold and Frieda Daum Residence (1954) Whisenand, Dr James M. and Mrs Juanita Residence (1958) Wood, Elizabeth Residence (1953) Zane, John Residence (1959) Zemlick, Maury Residence (1967)
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