Guy Carwile

Architecture professor Guy Carwile lives at the intersection of scholarship, design, and family

article by MICHAEL DEVAULT | photographer by BRAD ARENDER

Guy Carwile remembers going to his father’s office as a child and watching him work. The elder Carwile was an architect, and Guy was fascinated. So it was no surprise that, when it came time for him to go off to school, his interests lay with building and design. “I grew up around it and I’d go to see him at his office, so I was attracted to it,” says Guy, a professor of architecture at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston. “He recommended I not go into architecture because it’s not very lucrative. He suggested I try engineering instead.”

That’s precisely what Guy did when he entered classes as a freshman at Louisiana State University. For a year and a half, he studied engineering. But, eventually the call of design won out, and he changed his major. More schooling would follow, of course, but Guy knew from the outset he was on the right path. “Architecture is one of the most exciting design activities that one can do, in my opinion,” Guy explains. “When you have an idea and you can convince a client to go along on the ride, and then you get it built – there’s nothing more satisfying than that.”

Early on, Guy recognized he might like to one day try his hand at teaching. He enjoyed life on campus and could see the value of the experience both to the professors under which he studied and the students he shared studios with. “When I was a graduate student, I thought at the time I’d like to throw my hat into the ring and try to be a part of the academy,” he says. “I wasn’t terribly motivated to get that ball rolling, though.”

In fact, he was enjoying work too much to follow that path. He spent five years working in Baton Rouge and another ten in Houston. Along the way, he completed his masters and continued to grow his skills and knowledge as a practicing architect. He married, and they had two children. That’s when life changed.

His wife, Stephanie, is a north Louisiana girl. Her family still lived in the region, and he knew the importance of a family support structure for young children. So he decided to take the leap in 1994 and try out the teaching gig. “I’ve been at Tech for 23 years,” he says. Little did he know at the time that moving to Ruston, teaching college there, and becoming a part of Louisiana’s academic community would lead him onto one of the most fulfilling journeys of his career. For it was through his position at Tech that he would stumble upon a defining passion in his career. Like so much before, though, this discovery would have to wait a bit. Discoveries like these come in stages, after all.

First, he inherited a vital course to teach. Since the 1970s, Professor F. Lestar Martin was a respected member of the Tech faculty and, during his tenure at the school, he developed a popular documentation course on historic Louisiana buildings. When Martin retired, Guy was tapped to lead the class. “I sort of inherited the class and the work,” he says. Martin’s class had begun the process of architectural documentation, a practice which he continued when he took over. “We started doing documentation projects on more traditional buildings, particularly in Natchitoches.”

Architectural documentation centers on creating a record of the what, how, and why of a building, how the architect blended elements, implemented new innovations, or created a sense of space. The work requires careful observation, exacting measurements, and skilled, detailed drawings of elements found in the building. For students who hope to eventually practice in the field, architectural documentation can be the design equivalent of a gross anatomy class. “When you draw something, you’re looking at the physical artifact,” Guy explains. “You take the measurements. You get into the head of the designer, and then you can make discoveries about that designer’s process.”

These discoveries help students develop their own ideas about how to create and innovate in building design. The skills they’re using – drawing, measuring, critical thinking – are the skills they’ll draw on when they eventually pick up pencil and address paper to design their own buildings. “When they’re measuring and drawing elements of these buildings, they’re getting into the head of the designer and understanding something of the design process,” Guy says. “There are just countless ways of tackling a project, but to understand how one person did it, one designer you’re fond of, that helps you fine-tune your craft, even though that may not be your particular direction in the business once you leave school.”

He began documenting buildings with students in 1999. Since that time, he estimates he’s tutored more than 100 student-researchers in the practice of architectural documentation. Developing these skills in a new generation of architects requires buildings for them to examine. As one would expect, those skills are quite valuable to local governments, chambers of commerce, and investors seeking to preserve an historic building or restore a property that’s fallen into disrepair.

Through this work, Guy stumbled headlong into a fascinating study. The Wiener brothers, architects in Shreveport, had built a number of modern buildings in the Caddo Parish area, and Guy was smitten. “The work was so unique in Louisiana, and Shreveport has the largest concentration of orthodox modern buildings in the state – by a longshot,” Guy says. “The Wiener brothers are very significant, and they were widely published back in the 30s and 40s.”

Samuel G. and William B. Wiener had the good fortune to be born into a prominent family in northwestern Louisiana around the turn of the 20th Century. Coming from a family of means – their father was an entrepreneur in the area – the brothers decided to pursue joint careers as architects. On a trip to Europe in 1931, Samuel and his wife, Marion, were offered the opportunity to visit Bauhaus, the near-fabled German art and design school. The experience left its mark on the brothers and their work.

Bauhaus design marked a radical departure of more staid traditions of architecture. Gone were the columnar facades, fenestration with classical moldings, and heavy pediments. In their places were left sleek, unbroken lines of glass and concrete, wide, open spaces, and spartan exteriors almost devoid of ornamentation.

For the Wiener brothers to return to the United States and to begin their prodigious output of Bauhaus-inspired building would have seemed a Sisyphean undertaking, were it not for their family position, as Guy explains. “It’s not so much about Shreveport as a progressive city,” Guy says. “It was the wealth of the Wieners and their Jewish heritage. A lot of their clientele were family, and those who weren’t family were very close friends.”

Given their individual wealth and their social and financial connections, the Wieners could build the buildings they wanted, in the style and design of their choosing, with the freedom to innovate and experiment, which is precisely what the brothers did. “They didn’t have to practice to put clothes and shoes on their children,” Guy says. “They did projects because they were doing them for friends and family, or as commercial work of their own, and so they had a real interest in doing things the way they wanted to do them.”

Working with a revolving cohort of student architects, Guy undertook the task of documenting the Wiener brothers’ works. They chronicled building materials, the sizes of finish elements, even the plumbing and fixtures. Each time, he was impressed by the novelty of what they found.

One project he remembers documenting is the home Samuel built for his family. The Samuel G. Wiener House is situated on Longleaf Road, in Shreveport. While he and his students were just embarking on a dissection of the home’s design elements, they stumbled upon something surprising. “We were wandering around, opening cabinets and so forth, and all of a sudden we see what appears to be an exhaust fan in the bathroom,” he recalls. “We went outside and found the grill in the soffit.”

The fan was more than just for additional ventilation. In fact, it was vital to preserving the modesty of individuals who might be bathing in the room at a time before central heat was common, and ventilation was provided via an open window. “If you were taking a hot shower in the winter time, the differential pressure created would push the drapery out,” he says. That pushing out might expose those inside to their neighbors. “The exhaust fan helped prevent that differential pressure.”

Also, within the home, he found other surprising elements. For example, in the upstairs bathroom, a mosaic tile floor at first appears to be a random assortment of tiles, tossed down and fixed into place. Closer examination, though, reveals something much different. “It looks very haphazard, but when you look at it closely, it’s actually an exterior elevation of the house,” he says. There in a tile floor on the second floor, preserved for all to see, is the house in which they’re standing, immortalized in the very tile. “So he knew he had designed something pretty incredible.”

At a conference in Jackson a few years after he undertook the process of documenting the Wiener brothers’ works, he had the chance to meet Dr. Karen Kingsley, a noted architectural historian from Tulane who had once curated an exhibition on Modernism in Louisiana which included the Wiener brothers’ creations in Shreveport. Guy knew her work, and he had even seen a catalogue of the exhibition. When he met her, he knew he wanted to work with her. Kingsley, too, saw the potential.

Where her earlier work had focused on the histories and images of the buildings, Guy’s work centered on precise, technical and structural information – the kinds of materials later generations would need if they wanted to understand the buildings and the processes. Both understood the importance of the Wiener brothers. “They introduced a European, modern way of designing to Louisiana, and they were two of the earliest designers in this modern manner in the United States,” she says. The chance to further expand on their work was too good an opportunity to miss.

Along this same time, Guy had an opportunity present itself to him. The academic publisher at his alma mater, LSU Press, was seeking new book proposals. He took the idea to Kingsley, and together they agreed to collaborate. Kingsley notes the casual manner in which the project manifested itself. “We had a chat and decided to turn his drawings and my research into the book,” she says. She adds that the ease with which the project came together is as much his manner as it is because of their shared interests in the Wieners. “He’s very easy to work with, very cooperative and pleasant.”

Kingsley also notes that the depth of knowledge he has about the field of architecture and design was also vital to the project’s success.

She calls him “very knowledgeable about the making of architecture,” how architecture itself works as a creative process, which helps him understand how other architects work. “He understands what materials can do and how buildings are put together. He also knows how to build a building – and to understand other people’s buildings.”

The book was released in 2016, and since that time it’s brought a renewed interest in two of the nation’s lesser known, yet quite important, architects.

These days, Guy continues teaching his classes at Tech, instilling in a new generation of architects an appreciation for the process and fulfillment that comes with the field. He’s also sent his kids off into the world, and like his father before, one of them is working in design, albeit interior design, for an architecture firm in Houston. His other child is a student of English Literature. He enjoys teaching as much as designing, and while he still dabbles in design from time to time, teaching others is where his heart’s passion lies. He explains why:
“It’s kind of like asking why does a conductor want to conduct instead of playing an instrument. You can hear all of these different voices coming together through their instruments. It’s satisfying. And some students really just shine. When that happens, it’s incredible.”

Guy Carwile holds the Ken Hollis Endowed Professorship in Architecture at Louisiana Tech University. He and his wife, Stephanie, still live and work in northern Louisiana. For more than two decades of service to the region, preserving and documenting some of the region’s most vital treasures, Carwile is Bayou Icon for the month of April, 2018.