From the Archive: The Iconoclastic Rise of Charles Haertling

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s July/August 2008 issue.

Joel Haertling, son and de facto archivist of the late architect Charles A. Haertling, faxed over a single page written by his father. Titled “Thoughts on Architecture,” it’s a blurry, typewritten list. Charles Haertling succumbed to a brain tumor in 1984, but the text is immediate and cuts across the years: 21 enumerated glimpses into a creative mind. Someone has circled point number 14: “Design is always a tortuous, grueling, almost maddening, though heavenly sweet, task.” The line is as familiar as it is revealing. Look at Haertling’s houses with their radically pitched roofs, daring cantilevers, and mushrooming facades—products of a career spent building in the Boulder, Colorado, area—and you can see both his pleasure and his pain. 

Haertling’s work might be categorized as “organic architecture,” a genre that draws inspiration from natural forms and materials, interpreting leaves, trees, and rocky outcroppings in wood, glass, and stone. Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff are the best-known practitioners of the style and their influence on Haertling is clear. “You could hardly grow up in America and not be influenced by Wright,” explains his widow, Viola Haertling. But with the exception of an afternoon spent visiting with Goff on a family trip to Missouri, he never studied with the masters. His development was iconoclastic—a reaction to the Colorado environment and an expression of futuristic ideals.

Fresh out of Washington University, Haertling arrived in Boulder in 1953 and began teaching at the University of Colorado, where he also worked as a designer for architect Jim Hunter and protégé of Marcel Breuer Tician Papachristou. It is difficult to pinpoint when Haertling began his formal experimentation. When he received his degree in 1952, architecture training followed modernist credos: flat roofs, glass facades, and boxy volumes. By the time he built the Noble House in 1958, an early commission for his solo office, the signature elements were already in place. Described as a “wigwam” by Haertling, each of the two octagonal folded roofs are topped by a metal spike. As the eaves lift, the interior is flooded with light. Though the project was published in the Italian architecture magazine Casabella, the Denver Post headline is telling: “Space Craft Home Draws Traffic in Boulder.”

As Haertling’s designs became more complex, his career was peppered with equal parts praise and controversy. Located in west Boulder, the Volsky House (1964), a family home for psychology professor Theodore Volsky, was organized around a circular floor plan; the bedrooms and the kitchen radiate out from an interior garden. The prow-like living room offers a panoramic 360-degree view of the mountains on one side and the plains on the other. During construction, outraged neighbors circulated a petition against its odd profile.

It took a special client to brush aside not-in-my-backyard judgment and invest in a chancy Haertling design. The architect would interview potential clients at length before accepting a commission, occasionally sending them on to more conservative firms. “He was the only one in town who was doing experimental things, and we knew we didn’t want a ranch house,” says Kenneth Kahn, who still lives in his Haertling-designed home.

A doctor engaged in innovative research, Kahn wanted an equally forward-thinking architect, so he hired Haertling to build a house for his family along a steep road overlooking Boulder. The timber, stucco, and glass design cantilevers over the hillside. “The main thing is the view,” explains Diana Kahn. “Chuck liked the idea of it blending with the outside. The ledge is straw-colored and so is the living room, so the exterior flows in. We didn’t call it ‘organic’ in those days—in 1969 there was no such word—but it incorporates the surroundings.”