What can a book hope to accomplish? Can it do it?
Against my better judgment, I spent eight unpaid years writing a book about an architect already dead whose houses were visionary, unusual, the results of the combination of the dreams of clients and the structural imagination of a genius architect. I don’t regret doing it, and here’s why!
In 19__ one of the Mills houses, on a magnificent site, was bought by developers and neither I nor my architect and historian friends from around the world (more than 30 letters!) could slow down the desire of the building department to increase the tax base with a bigger house there. At that time there were no pro-preservation rules on the book, and nothing to slow down the hasty removal of a house of enduring value. Gone.
Mark Mills grieved as he watched the house prepared for demolition. He asked the new owners if he could salvage the front door, of slump glass and bronze. They said no. They had no use for the door. It was just a mean-spirited slap at him because his friends and admirers had presented an obstacle to their plan.
Then he died, and no one was left to explain his structures and why they were important…except me. I had transcribed my tapes from 20 years earlier when I interviewed him for a career-retrospective essay for a journal for Frank Lloyd Wright apprentices, like Mark. I had taken time to record his comments and he had taken time to discuss the ideas behind each house: the structural inventions and the new applications of materials he used; the stories of the clients’ requests; his solutions to the requests. He had not given many interviews. He was a very private person and his career had been limited by his reluctance to broadcast his brilliance. He never had an office in town. He worked from home, with his wife typing his specs, and very occasional helpers. Only those “in the know” in the area knew of his work. Clients found him.
I knew when a project had me. I knew this book would cost me dearly and that I absolutely HAD to write it. Eight years later, the book is out and the first Mills house from the book has been bought by an owner intending to preserve and restore a house that had fallen into disrepair.
The owner is a friend of the owner of this house (HAAS) which he bought while I was writing the book. Mrs. Mills and I had feared that it would be torn down, it looked so disheveled. Now it is being put into the Historical Registry and is in a good position to last a long time.
The event that makes me feel the book was worth the effort, however, is the sale this week of another Mills house, from an owner who kept rescued dogs in the house, and filled it with stuff, with no sense of the beauty of the basic space, to a new owner who is a friend of the owner of the Haas house. He bought it because it was a Mills house, and could be restored to its original beauty. And he found out about Mark Mills and the house because of the book.