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Lyman (Frederic) Papers
2011.M.31
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Contributing Institution: Special Collections
Title: Frederic Lyman papers
Creator: Lyman, Frederic P., III, 1927-2005
Identifier/Call Number: 2011.M.31
Physical Description: 110.5 Linear Feet(21 boxes, 108 flatfile folders, 11 boxed rolls)
Date (inclusive): 1923-2001
Abstract: The Frederic Lyman papers document the career of this southern California architect, who although little known today, was
once deemed one of the most talented architects of his generation. Composed of over 1800 drawings and two models, as well
as photographs, the archive records Lyman's architectural designs and provides limited glimpses of his other passions of architectural
education and social and environmental activism.
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
catalog record for this collection. Click here for the
accesspolicy .
Language of Material: Collection material is in English.
The archive is arranged in two series:
Series I. Architectural projects, 1956-2001;
Series II. Miscellaneous professional and personal papers, circa 1923-1975, undated.
Frederic Pomeroy Lyman III was born June 9, 1927 in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, who died suddenly in August 1933, was
an architect specializing in French Provincial style residential work, and Lyman remembered being fascinated as a child by
the drawings on his father's drafting table. After the death of his father, the family moved to Vancouver, Canada and then
to Seattle in 1940.
Lyman was educated at Yale University, receiving his BA in 1950 and a Masters in Architecture in 1953. At this time architectural
education at Yale was undergoing transformation. The new chair, George Howe, who had designed the first International style
skyscraper built in the United States, encouraged modernism but was not doctrinaire in his approach. He introduced a new curriculum
with an integrated course structure. Eugene Nalle, who taught the Basic Design course assisted by Robert Russell, strongly
influenced the young Lyman. The focus on tectonics and hands on design with wood and stone learned in Nalle's class would
show through clearly in Lyman's later work. Similarly, the emphasis on color and color theory brought to Yale in this period
by Josef Albers would find expression in Lyman's renderings. Yet even in school, Lyman was conflicted about an architectural
design career. At one point in his studies, Lyman took a leave of absence and briefly studied engineering in New York, before
eventually returning and finishing his architecture degree.
After Yale, Lyman returned to Seattle. He worked briefly for a construction company as a carpenter's apprentice and then in
1954 he was hired as a draftsman by the firm of Grant, Copeland and Chervenak, a general practice with a specialization in
church design. During his year with the firm, Lyman worked on several projects including apartment buildings, a church, and
office remodeling.
In 1955, Lyman moved to Los Angeles and obtained a position with the firm of Neutra and Alexander, then in the later years
of their partnership. Working as a draftsman and construction supervisor, Lyman was involved in several of the firm's large
institutional and civic projects including the Sydney Opera House Competition, the United States Embassy in Karachi, Los Angeles
County Hall of Records and St John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.
By 1957, Lyman was ready to leave Neutra's firm. With three other young architects, Bernard Zimmerman, John Espinosa and David
Ming-Li Lowe, Lyman rented space in what had been Rudolph Schindler's drafting room at his King's Road house. Not precisely
a firm, the four architects practiced both independently and in sporadic collaboration for the next several years.
Much of Lyman's strongest work was created during this period. Noted collaborations included his work as an associate with
Zimmerman on the Altshuler House, and his partnership with Lowe on the partially-realized Park Hill Estates tract. Lyman's
first completed independent project, his own home in Malibu, however, was his masterpiece.
While still in Seattle, Lyman had decided to build a house using the principles that he learned from Nalle as a student at
Yale. In 1957 he bought a lot in Malibu in Las Flores Canyon for the house he had been designing. Completed in 1960, the minimalist
and surprisingly transparent two-story house had essentially two rooms. The ground floor was an open plan living area, with
French doors creating 10 foot tall glass walls on the long sides. The second story, accessed by an exterior staircase, served
as a sleeping area and studio and had no exterior walls, although a tent-like canvas structure could be used to give some
element of protection from the elements and privacy. The bathroom was in a separate adjacent structure.
The Lyman Las Flores House was striking for its explicit tectonics, the way in which it used wood as a medium and its Japanese
influence, all outgrowths of Nalle's Basic Design class. The house was conceived as two separate structural units. The exterior
framework of massive posts and beams was one independent structure. The living quarters, the "box" as Lyman referred to it,
was constructed without nails using dado and mortise and tenon joints, and was then suspended in the framework, attached to
the posts by mortise and tenon joints and secured by long peg-like wedges. The heavy timber framework of the house with its
modular spacing finds clear aesthetic and technical precedents in Japanese structures like those at the Ise Shrine. The house's
handmade joints, more like cabinetry than construction, also echo Japanese carpentry traditions. The house's simplicity, its
clarity of form and the relationship of the house to its natural setting also conform to a Japanese aesthetic. For Lyman,
this fascination with Japanese architecture had several sources. Lyman had been studying Japanese architecture since Nalle
and Russell had introduced him to the work at Yale. He was therefore primed for the broader mid-century trend of Japanese-influenced
architecture in the United States, encouraged if not begun by the popularity of the Japanese Exhibition House displayed at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1954 and 1955. Family history may have also played a role as his mother Amalia Partridge
Lyman spent much of her childhood in Kyoto, where her father was bishop from 1900 to 1911.
Starting your career with a masterpiece is hard. Although Esther McCoy, the noted architectural critic, early on identified
Lyman as one of the leading talents of his generation, little of this promise was fulfilled. By 1963, Lyman had left King's
Road and opened an independent office in Sherman Oaks, operating briefly under the name Community Design Associates, and then
he soon moved his architectural office out to Malibu. Lyman had a small, steady flow of clients, but very little of this design
work was ever realized. Whether Lyman didn't build much because he was distracted by other interests, or he had other interests
because he didn't build much is unclear, but in the 1970s design and construction were becoming secondary to Lyman. Other
aspects of architecture, such as education and advocacy, and civic and environment activism now engaged Lyman.
Lyman began to consider entering architectural education as early as the 1960s, encouraged by his Yale instructor Robert Russell.
By the 1970s, as other young architects were beginning to expand architectural education, as exemplified by the foundation
of SCI-Arc in 1972, Lyman's interest became serious. He began searching for an appropriate location to establish a school
and eventually settled on a parcel of land near Sebeka, Minnesota, where he felt the varied terrain of rolling hills, woods
and lakes would be suitably inspirational. In 1978, Lyman sold the Las Flores house to pay for the property and moved to Minnesota.
The Ingham Institute of Environmental Design, named for his stepfather, was meant to spread Lyman's philosophy of "building
in harmony with nature." He felt that architects had a responsibility to lead people to live in coexistence with the environment.
The school was not as successful as Lyman had hoped. It was an enormous undertaking to establish a school from scratch and
there was little student interest. By 1980 he was back in Los Angeles for at least part of the year, and in the following
years up to 1993, Lyman worked from both Los Angeles and Minnesota.
Complementing Lyman's interest in architectural education was his dedication to service and advocacy for the profession. Beginning
in the early 1970s Lyman served the American Institute of Architecture (AIA) on the national, state and regional levels. He
founded and served as the first editor of
LA Architect. He expanded this advocacy to the community and to the environment. Lyman became involved with county planning committees,
often with political and social issues, for example increasing beach access for all citizens. He was President of the Malibu
Township Council and worked to create a national park in the Santa Monica mountains.
The Lyman Las Flores House burned in the Malibu fire of 1993, but it had already been altered beyond recognition by that point.
By the mid 1990s Lyman left Los Angeles for New Mexico, basing himself in Taos, where he died on February 28, 2005.
Works Consulted for the Finding Aid
Buckner, Cory.
The Lyman House and the Work of Frederic P. Lyman. Los Angeles: Crestwood Hills Press, 2016.
Denzer, Anthony. "No Coincidence: Whitney Smith and Japanese Influences at Midcentury." In
Outside In: The Architecture of Smith and Williams, 107-127. Santa Barbara: Art, Design and Architecture Museum, University of California, 2014.
DeWit, Wim. Acquisition Approval Form for Frederic Lyman papers, accession no. 2011.M. 31 July 15, 2010
Drexler, Arthur.
The Architecture of Japan. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955.
"House Floats Inside Itself."
Popular Mechanics (September 1965): 126-127.
Mc Coy, Esther, "Young Architects in the United States."
Zodiac 8 (1961): 168-186.
Lyman, Frederic. Frederic Lyman papers, 1923-2001. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2011.M.31.
Rash, David A. "Grant, Copeland, Chervenak & Associates." In
Shaping Seattle Architecture, edited by Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, 440-441. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2nd edition. 2014.
"Sidney Catlin Partridge, B.A. 1880." Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930,
Bulletin of Yale University (1 December 1930): 80-82.
Stern, Robert A. M. and Jimmy Stamp.
Pedagogy and Place: 100 Years of Architecture Education at Yale. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
Open for use by qualified researchers. For access to architectural models, please contact repository.
Contact
Library Reproductions and Permissions .
Scope and Content of Collection
The Frederic Lyman papers document the career of this southern California architect, who although little known today, was
once deemed one of the most talented architects of his generation. Composed of over 1800 drawings and two models, as well
as photographs, the archive records Lyman's architectural designs and provides limited glimpses of his other passions of architectural
education and social and environmental activism.
Series I comprises documentation of Lyman's projects as an architect. The forty-eight projects represented in the archive
range from Lyman's earliest professional architectural designs to projects from shortly before his death. This archive is
not comprehensive however, as many projects listed in Lyman's resume are not found here, and with few exceptions all the correspondence,
calculations, press coverage and other such material related to the projects are absent. Lyman's drawings form the core of
the series. Over 1800 drawings, both originals and reprographic prints, represent the range of the architectural design process,
including preliminary drawings and sketches, working drawings and renderings. Lyman's richly shaded Prismacolor renderings
are especially noteworthy and the archive holds over 100 examples of them. For half the projects, photographs in the forms
of prints and slides, including work by Marvin Rand, record sites, construction and the finished structure, as well as models
and drawings. In addition to these photographs of Lyman's models, the archive contains architectural models for the Lyman
Las Flores House and for scheme II of Hood House.
Miscellaneous professional and personal papers constitute Series II. Included here is a small amount of Lyman family material,
including prints of a drawing by Lyman's father and family photographs. The bulk of the series, however, is miscellany related
to Lyman's architectural education and career. Of particular interest are Lyman's resume and project lists; examples of his
student work at Yale, including material for his senior thesis project, a rough-hewn wood and stone dairy barn; and reproductions
of Lyman's early work as a draftsman for the firms of Copeland, Grant, Chervenak in Seattle and Neutra and Alexander in Los
Angeles.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Gift of Katherine Starke Lyman. Acquired in 2011.
Frederic Lyman papers, 1923-2001, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2011.M.31.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2011m31
Ann Harrison processed the collection and wrote the finding aid in 2016-2017. Talia Olshefsky assisted with the processing.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Architect-designed houses -- California
Architects -- California -- Los Angeles
Architecture, Modern -- 20th century -- California, Southern
Architecture -- California -- Los Angeles
Los Angeles (Calif.) -- Buildings, structures, etc. -- 20th century
Architectural drawings -- United States -- 20th century
Architectural models
Gelatin silver prints -- United States -- 20th century
Architecture--United States--Japanese influences
Architects -- Archives