by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Dropping a hand-written note in architect Bart Prince's mailbox paid off for some students.
In response to the note, Prince hosted an educational gathering at his famously weird home on Monte Vista Boulevard last week for an experiential learning group called the Foppish Academics.
The group was formed by student Wesley Morton and alumnus Lane Easley.
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"It was a brainchild that was hatched in Spain two years ago with me and my friend Lane," Morton said. "It's hands-on. It's outside of the classroom - just rethinking how you do education."
About 15 students gathered last week in Prince's studio room, surrounded by photographs and housing models, while he told them about his views on art, the creative process, architecture, architects, fate and fame.
Prince, with his unusual eye for design, has built homes in the Southwest and all over the world.
Fate called him to architecture when he pulled Frank Lloyd Wright's name out of a hat in his seventh grade class to write a report. But his passion for work began when he was 6.
"Long before I picked that out of the hat, I didn't know what architecture was yet, but I had been doing designs and making drawings and building things," he said. "It's hard to know what is it that makes somebody who's 6 or 7 years old do something. My parents were very worried early on. 'This kid is nuts.' I'd get home from school, and I'd go straight to the garage, and I'd go back to work, and everybody was out playing. They were trying to drag me in to watch TV."
Someone from the group asked what his teachers thought of him.
He said that in college, his professors were concerned about his designs because they looked impossible to build.
"I just worked twice as hard as everybody else," Prince said. "I went on to learn about other things - great buildings in Thailand and Spain and (Antoni) Gaudi in Spain, and then a lot of great buildings that we don't necessarily know who the architects were. What you learn from them isn't how to copy them, but you learn how they responded to their situations, what they were presented with."
When a student asked him how he gets work, he said he doesn't look for jobs, because it feels wrong.
"To me, it's like a lawyer calling and saying, 'I hear you're thinking of getting a divorce. Say, how's your grandmother feeling?'" he said. "Especially with things being more of an art, not just a business. It's better if they find you. It means there's been some kind of connection already, and you're not trying to talk them into something."
He said some contractors roll his designs back up as soon as they see his name.
"I was building that house in California with the big undulating roof," he said. "I had a big carpenter on there who had years of experience."
Prince wanted the delicate roof built to precise plans.
"He said, 'You can't span 36 feet with a 2x6.' And I said, 'I know normally you can't, but if you follow these drawings, you'll see that it works,'" Prince said. "He threw down his tools and quit."
He later found two surfers bringing in their boards from the beach.
"They started talking to me, and the next thing you know, they ended up building the whole thing," he said. "I said, 'Just follow these drawings, because they are engineered very carefully, tells you where the nails go.' Somebody with too much knowledge can get in the way, because they think there's only one way to do something."
Prince said the highest form of art aspires to be like music - free of gravity, free of hard edges, and yet it still has structure and a feeling of space. This is partly how he thinks of his buildings.
"Gravity is one of the irritations that we have to deal with," he said. "It is the bane of my existence. I'm always trying to get rid of gravity and the horizon line."
Prince wound up the conversation after an hour so he could get ready for his art opening later that evening.
The Foppish Academics meet with interesting locals who have made noteworthy accomplishments. Their kick-off gathering was with Frederico Vigil, a muralist who learned his trade from an apprentice of Diego Rivera.
"I was at the first meeting with them," Foppish student Annie Ozaksut said. "I've never met a more inspired group of people ever anywhere. It's really fantastic that they're right here in Albuquerque."
Morton said their next goal is to meet with Harrison Schmitt, the last living man to have set foot on the moon.
