Office Boy

Last January nearly 600 novice architects began work on the preliminary problem for the 25th annual $4,000 Paris prize of Manhattan's Society of Beaux-Arts Architects. All but eight of these were eliminated on the second problem, and in April all but four. The four were told to design an opera house, were put into four small cubicles in the Beaux-Arts Institute. They were isolated, put on their honor not to communicate with each other, given ten weeks to finish.

Finalist Richard H. Granelli, 25, a self-taught office boy, had won one of the Institute's $500 scholarships last year for study at Fontainebleau. He figured music buildings brought him luck. He figured further that the main problem of an opera house was to get the people in and out quickly. Concentrating on the cloak rooms and taxi driveway, he drank gallons of black coffee, slept on the floor of his cubicle, drew and erased with furious care. There is no telephone in the Bronx home where Finalist Granelli lives with his father, an Italian mosaicist. But last week he got a telegram. He thought the judges, including Architects Ely Jacques Kahn and Whitney Warren, had decided. Fran tically he jumped into a taxi, urged the driver to speed. They were arrested. At midnight Richard Granelli reached the Institute at last, heard the news that he had won the $4.000 prize, giving him 18 months at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, another twelve months of travel or study elsewhere. He kept his taxi, called up friends, did the town. Slight, enthusiastic, brown-eyed Prize man Granelli has had encouragement from Architect Henry Wildermuth and from 1921 Beaux-Arts Winner Lloyd Morgan, a junior partner of Architects Schultze & Weaver where Granelli was office-boy. Second and third finalists were Max Abramovitz and Theobold Holsopple.

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