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Dilip Vishwanat
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At dusk, a bone-chilling rain begins to fall—but it doesn’t matter. The house at 4 Graybridge Lane has a comfort that transcends weather, and as the first party guests arrive, making their way down the hill to the front door, the evening begins its steady evolution into the memorable.
Inside, as the guests congregate, brothers Peter, Paul and Stephen Shank make their way into the radiance of the kitchen—its walls exposed brick and knotty pine, its American Modern dishes glowing coral and mustard yellow. There is an easy familiarity about the brothers—also the sort of shorthand communication of signals you find in families where good feelings are hard-wired, and in which, in spite of whatever frictions may have sparked disagreements along the way, the fraternal welds hold fast.
The brothers show evident affection, perhaps even veneration, for this beautiful house where they grew up. It is one of the ways they define themselves—“our focal point,” Steve calls it. When they gather here, the ease that settles upon them seems like some sort of nonsectarian benediction.
Their father, Isadore Shank (1902–1992), designed 4 Graybridge Lane. Completed in 1941, it is an unpretentious house, but architecturally authoritative—and although its scale is modest, the impact is anything but. Isadore lived here with his wife, Ilse, a sought-after illustrator; her sister, Adelheid Giessow, an award-winning jewelry designer, visited often. All three Shank boys grew up to be artists, and they continue to learn their father’s mind through his work.
“His use of materials—wood, glass, brick, stone—is a constant delight and amazement,” says Peter. “All the years I’ve known this house, there are aspects that surprise me.”
Tonight the Shank brothers are entertaining fine-arts graduates of Washington University after a memorial service for a cherished mentor, the painter Arthur Osver. But despite the solemn summons, this party is spirited, irreverent and lighthearted. Conversations are rich, full of reminiscences and rough edges. Artists tend to say what they think without a lot of fussing about whose sensibilities might be offended, and bones of contention are on the menu, served up with the steak and salad and many bottles of wine. There is gossip about Washington University’s new Sam Fox School of Design & the Visual Arts: Some love it, some turn up their noses; everyone has an opinion. Talk, talk and more talk ricochets off the walls.
“My parents loved conversations,” Peter says over the chatter. “My father designed the dining room table, and it was there that everyone came together to talk about art and left-wing politics.”
The table is a rectangle, big enough to fit eight people comfortably, a dozen in cozy proximity. It is spare and free of ornamentation but certainly not stark, and thus is a reiteration of the house itself—gracious and free of excesses.
The table responds to the space that surrounds it; similarly, the house sits lightly on the land, nestled into the hillside, responding to the terrain rather than imposing itself. Inside, the living room and dining room flow without interruption one into the other, and light streams in from big windows. The common areas of the house have a modest, Modernist spaciousness; the private spaces are small and enveloping.
***
Isadore Shank was one of the great architects of St. Louis’ Modernist golden age (which stretched through and beyond the first half of the 20th century). The Graybridge house occupies one of the lots on 15 or so acres he purchased with a few colleagues and business associates. They never made a fuss about their philosophy, but there were utopian aspects to this Ladue subdivision. Seven houses were built here before World War II, five of them designed by Shank. They were uniformly fresh and stylish residences, with a clean aesthetic and attention to individual desires. Understanding of the rewards of open space, Shank and his colleagues endowed the subdivision with five acres of forest where two creeks flow together, land dedicated as common ground in perpetuity.
At Graybridge, the Shank brothers say, children wandered in and out of their neighbors’ houses, and their parents spent time together. Just about everyone, one way or another, had a connection with the visual arts. “It was almost communal,” Peter says.
Now in their sixties, the three brothers agree that their childhoods here were touched with magic. Although they have left St. Louis for varying lengths of time, 4 Graybridge Lane is where they set down the sharp points of their compasses. It is home, in both the literal and the psychological senses of the word. After his parents died, Peter acquired the house and settled in.
Isadore Shank worked in St. Louis from the 1930s through the 1960s. It was a time when progressive ideas and optimism battled fashion and pretense and, in genuinely satisfying ways, sometimes won the fight. Prominent patrons of contemporary culture and design were willing to spend money for well-designed new houses, commercial and institutional buildings. Even in the rather stodgy, emotionally and aesthetically constipated civic establishment, there was an openness to what was frankly, unashamedly new and not merely a pale imitation of the old.
Besides Shank, other Modernists made names for themselves here and good livings too: designer Victor Proetz and architects Harris Armstrong, Frederick Dunn, Charles Nagel, Ralph Cole Hall, William Adair Bernoudy, Edouard Mutrux, Hank Bauer, Joseph Murphy, Eugene Mackey. Unlike any of those men, however, Shank was a Jew, and his heritage cost him commissions.
Nonetheless, he had a productive and brilliant career, with about 140 buildings to his credit, both national and international acclaim and uncompromised aesthetic integrity.
He graduated from Wash. U. in 1925 and received a fellowship from the American Institute of Architects to travel through Europe and North Africa. He was especially interested in the work of Modernists like Eric Mendelsohn (who designed what’s now the COCA building, formerly B’nai Amoona synagogue in University City) and Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school. Shank also was fascinated by modern industrial buildings, which he described as “great works of art.” At one point he was interested in going to the Soviet Union because of the social and artistic promises it initially offered, then brutally snatched away.
He was a virtuoso of single-family residential design, a fact clearly evident in the easy, unimpeded circulation through his houses, their humane proportions, the contrasts of light and darkness, the use of light to transform as well as illuminate, the assiduous control of materials, the sense of serenity.
But he also received notable public and institutional commissions. One is the 1928 DeBaliviere Building at the southeast corner of DeBaliviere and Delmar. Renovated in the early 1980s, the three-story building has commercial spaces on its first floor and apartments upstairs. It’s still a slam-on-the-brakes building, distinguished by its façade of terra-cotta tiles (designed by Shank) and the graceful way it turns the corner and boldly addresses the streets.
The DeBaliviere Building received respectful attention at the time of its creation.
The eminent French architectural journal L’architecture d’aujourd’hui featured it, as did other publications. In an interview at the time of its renovation, Shank said many people loathed the DeBaliviere Building, adding, with ironic precision, “Often that’s as good a recommendation as a building can get: mass public hatred.”
He, in turn, loathed most of the buildings that went up in his time.
“He always reminded us,” Paul says, “how much bad architecture there is. We were sensitized to that early.”
Isadore’s other multifamily or public buildings include the 12-story Ambassador apartment building at 5340 Delmar; apartment buildings designed for the Federal Housing Authority in Alton, Wood River and Galesburg, Ill.; and the Teamsters recreation complex in Pevely, Mo. Jimmy Hoffa was apparently pleased with Shank’s work: The notorious union executive gave the architect a gold lighter.
But Shank’s aesthetic muscle was flexed most emphatically in houses similar to his own. The more modestly scaled Shank houses hug the earth of central-west St. Louis County. Many are single-story; others appear to be one story from the street but reveal a second story when approached from the back. Some of the Shank houses in the Hampton Park neighborhood of Richmond Heights are rather grand, and although they put forth traditional faces, the idiosyncratic details (on porches and doorways, for example) reveal the hand of an architect whose sense of style took his work far beyond the imitative.
Shank houses are not hard to spot once you tune your eye to their particulars. The houses’ organic bonding with the earth, the sloping rooflines that testify to spatial contrasts within, the airy openness of common areas and the cozy intimacy of private quarters—not to mention the virtuosic ways in which Shank commingled brick, wood, stone and glass—all set these residences apart from less carefully conceived and sometimes conspicuously tacky neighbors.
Steve says that people who have lived in his father’s houses for many years love them and maintain them well. Once they sell, though, the “bigger is better” tendencies of today’s market put them in instant danger of demolition. All three brothers keep track of the properties and worry about them. “I ask homeowners to let me know if they’re going to sell, and I find people who are interested in Modernism and might want to buy,” explains Peter. “I’m working on one now.” He has also designed additions for several of the houses, saving them by adding enough square footage to satisfy today’s greedy buyers. “Dad’s houses in Frontenac and Ladue are all endangered,” says Paul. “It is as if all we will have [someday] is documentation. It’s almost like theater—ephemeral. All we’ll have left is books and photographs.”
One especially painful loss was the house commissioned from Shank by Sol and Dorothy Dubinsky on Log Cabin Lane in Ladue. Situated at the end of a long driveway, the Dubinskys’ house was a place of genuine elegance, refinement and modernity. Dorothy was a philanthropist, artist and interior designer. She and Shank did not always agree, and there were tussles. Shank liked small, modestly scaled bedrooms, the better to provide room in spaces where occupants congregate. But Dorothy’s daughter, Linda Skrainka, recalls her mother arguing with Shank for larger bedrooms—and winning.
***
On a sunny Saturday morning, Peter, Paul and Stephen sit around the dining room table at 4 Graybridge Lane, talking about their struggle to preserve their father’s work. They also talk about their own exotic, bohemian, intellectually and aesthetically rich and complicated histories, which seem to have at least partial genesis in the artistic, philosophical and political atmosphere of the house.
They followed their parents to Washington University—not to the School of Architecture, where their father studied, but to the School of Art, of which their mother and aunt were alumna. “I didn’t like the idea of depending on a client,” admits Peter. “My dad had all kinds of great ideas that were never built.”
Ilse Shank met her husband at Wash. U. She was an elegantly witty, sophisticated illustrator who did covers for Collier’s, McCall’s and the Ladies’ Home Journal as well as fashion illustrations for the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago. Her sister, the boys’ aunt Adelheid, designed coveted jewelry, including award-winning pieces for Heffern-Neuhoff, now Elleard Heffern Fine Jewelers, the discreet carriage-trade jeweler in Clayton.
All three sons paint, and they have exhibited widely. (Some of Stephen’s work, owned by Oppenheimer & Co., was destroyed in the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.) If you go fishing for stylistic relationships between father and sons, Paul’s and Stephen’s paintings demonstrate the connections best, because they have a strongly architectural character, although they are never simple portraits of buildings. Architecture is more a matter of context and character than subject. As for Peter’s work, it is figurative and often frankly sexual and sensuous. “When I lived in South St. Louis, my first-floor apartment was raided because of what was hanging on the walls,” he recalls wryly.
For years the brothers lived in a geographic pinball machine, Paul and Peter especially, bouncing back and forth from St. Louis to the south of France, Switzerland, Rome, New York City, San Francisco, Connecticut, Chicago and Iowa City, racking up points and suffering disappointments before ending up together again in the place where they began.
Peter now shares 4 Graybridge Lane with his partner, opera and theater director Tim Ocel. Paul lives in a Maplewood bungalow—and, though his father didn’t design the house, his spirit has material form within it: three large doors, two from Isadore’s Davis building in North St. Louis County, near the airport, and the other from St. Ann City Hall.
Stephen and his wife, Julie Golden, live in a quintessential Shank house in Frontenac. It sits, sublime, on a small lot with adjacent woods. It was designed for a man who owned dress shops. For him and his wife, Shank designed a house with lots—lots—of closets.
Art is bred in the brothers’ bones. All three think about the relationship of art and architecture to individual lives and the proper maintenance of the civic fabric. All three are concerned not only for the survival of their father’s work but for the survival of other mid–20th-century Modernist buildings in St. Louis as well. “It’s a very distinct period,” Peter says, “and only a few St. Louis architects were there from the beginning. What’s exciting is that it was not for wealthy people. It was for all people.”
Back in 1974, Peter learned from his father about a Frank Lloyd Wright house on North Ballas in Kirkwood. Two decades later, when owner Russell Kraus decided to sell, Peter hurriedly cofounded an organization that purchased the house and turned it into a public museum.
The Kraus House was saved, but the larger mission of the Shank brothers often seems Sisyphean. A Harris Armstrong house was purchased and torn down by a man who wanted to protect and extend his property. The Dubinsky house was demolished and replaced with a house that looks as if it were airlifted into St. Louis County from the Tarn-et-Garonne. The old Morton D. May house, a sweeping modern mansion by Samuel Marx that was a genuine Modernist landmark, was knocked down too, for replacement with some sort of historical reinterpretation or another. Last we heard, it was French, again. The house Edouard Mutrux designed for his family at Sumac Lane and Dielman Road is gone.
Bad taste, greed, ostentatiousness and (naturally) bulldozers spawn 21st-century Huns, creatures who are dangerous, careless, oblivious and destructive. But miraculously, at a time when the region’s mid-century Modernist architectural inventory is gradually, mercilessly being demolished, all the Graybridge houses remain. And with sensibilities forged at the dining room table of 4 Graybridge Lane, the Shank brothers make an eloquent case for art, Modernism, social responsibility and the architecture that is their patrimony.
