The Bold Roofs

Do you think that by any splendor of architecture--any height of stories--you can atone to the mind for the loss of the aspect of the roof?

Thus, in 1853, English Critic John Ruskin lectured an Edinburgh audience. The popular concept that the roof is the very essence of architecture became so deeply ingrained that Louis Sullivan, Chicago's famed skyscraper builder, felt it necessary to crown his tall buildings with huge, floriated lids. Frank Lloyd Wright made the roof the dominating motif of his houses. But as modern architects worked away at the box-on-stilts ideal, the roof all but disappeared from view.

Today, the roof is making a dramatic comeback. One prime mover in the trend is Florida and Manhattan Architect Vic tor Lundy, 37. Working in laminated wood and reinforced concrete, Lundy has designed churches, schools, homes, motels and shops that seem to make a whole building out of the roof. The results are structures that have an evocative beauty, come at bargain prices, and pack a strong emotional wallop (see color pages).

Safe, Cubular Things. Manhattan-born Lundy won his rebel's spurs honorably. An automatic-rifleman with Patton's Third Army, he was one of 16 out of a battalion of 360 to survive, ended up for eight months in an Army hospital with his left arm nearly shot off by a German tank. At Harvard's Graduate School of Design, after the war, studying with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, Lundy began as the wildman of the class: "Everything came out that had been bottled up during the war," he explains. "I gave it the works. I splashed emotion and color all over it. Well, they gave me a Pass, and I think they thought they were doing me a favor."

In time he settled down to turning out the "pristine, safe, lovely cubular things" that won him a $3,000 Rotch Traveling Fellowship and an 18-month tour of Europe. But a close look at aging modern landmarks abroad made him tear up his schedule. He began to pay more attention to the great architectural monuments of the past, from the cathedrals of France to the temples at Luxor.

Fountains of Concrete. Back in the U.S., Lundy settled in Sarasota hard by a rival Harvard classmate and fellow prizewinner, Paul Rudolph (TIME color, Feb. 1). In the scramble for commissions, Lundy made his reputation when he designed a handsome drive-in church for as little as $35,000 by using laminated southern pine. He proved equally adept at designing commercial structures. A flower-shaped furniture showroom in laminated redwood pulled business right off the highway. His Warm Mineral Springs Inn, sheltered by 75 overlapping concrete shells suggestive of the nearby tourist-touted "Fountain of Youth," was such a successful traffic-stopper that the luxury motel was forced to add an additional wing.

Lundy's fanciful roofs have now brought him commissions for a ski resort in New Mexico, a school in Westport, Conn., a Unitarian church in Fairfield County, Conn. But more than commissions and prizes (his $80,000 St. Paul's Lutheran Church just got an Award of Merit from the American Institute of Architects), Lundy treasures the enthusiastic response of the people who use his buildings. "There is nothing contrived about my architecture," he says. "It is bold and naked. If it doesn't succeed, then everybody knows about it."

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