Text by: David Dillon

“Oklahoma Architecture.” What does that phrase call to mind compared, let’s say, to “Texas Architecture,” or “Chicago Architecture,” or “New England Architecture?” Probably very little. For most people, Oklahoma is a foreign country, where the wind comes sweeping o’er the plains; a hot dry place, impressively flat and infinitely extended yet with pockets of remarkable beauty in the form of blood red earth, golden grasslands and a sky the shape of an inverted tureen.

Like most frontiers, Oklahoma mocks fussiness and pretension. It is a place for pragmatists who know how to do a lot with a little; and for spare, uncluttered design that solves problems instead of striving for Faberge effects. It is neither the epicenter of the latest trends nor a focus of national critical scrutiny. Few Oklahoma architects have the luxury of specializing in hotels or art museums; doing well here means making the most of what comes along.

Rand Elliott has been making compelling architecture out of these restrictions for 25 years. Since graduating from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, he has been searching for what he calls “the spirit of the place.”

“I am looking for a spirit or an emotion that comes from here, one that I can bring to my architecture and that won’t run dry.”

Out of this search has come a body of work that is stunning in its execution and remarkable in its range - houses, museums, office buildings, interiors, restoration and adaptive reuse. No big civic or institutional commissions; no big work of any kind, for that matter. Each project looks different, with no suggestion of a signature style or look. Most of them are low-key and economical. Several of his best buildings had budgets of less than $250,000. Yet in spite of these limitations - or maybe because of them - the work combines appropriateness and inventiveness in compelling ways.

Well into his thirties Rand Elliott was a kind of prairie Miesean, absorbed in abstract form and structural precision. Traces of Mies still show up in his work - in the elegantly spare American Bank in Edmond, with its intersecting I-beams and pristine geometry, and in the minimalist interiors of his house for a Connecticut art collector, the latter a particularly clear and direct expression of modernists principles about space, light and the merging of interior and exterior.

Yet while Elliott’s exercises in rationalist abstraction brought him critical acclaim they provided little emotional satisfaction. He felt increasingly disconnected, as though he were practicing architecture in some geographical void. Twice he considered leaving Oklahoma for the East Coast, even interviewing with several large firms in New York City. Ultimately, he recognized that, for better or worse, he was wedded to the sparse dusty landscape of his home state.

“It was a difficult time,” he recalls. “I couldn’t decide whether to leave or to dig in and try to make something happen here. I finally chose to stick around and see if I could reinterpret modernism in light of this place.”

Digging in architecturally meant, among other things, coming to terms with heat, wind, dryness and the other climatic imperatives; with a Native American culture that is both ubiquitous and elusive; and with the absence of a rich architectural culture that can inspire and nurture a young designer. Instead, Oklahoma offers a stock of sturdy pioneer buildings sprinkled with singular masterpieces by Frank Lloyd Wright, John Johansen and especially Bruce Goff. Between these extremes Elliott resolved to make a place for himself.

The Land
Sun, wind, dust, hail, tornadoes, these are the great imperatives in Oklahoma - inevitable, inescapable, intimidating. The architect who doesn’t understand prairie light or which way the dust blows in April is courting disaster.

Rand Elliott’s buildings are compelling exercises in accommodating the inevitable. The broad sheltering roof of the ESEO Credit Union, with its deep overhangs, is a direct response to the harsh Oklahoma sun. So is the cullet glass wall at the American Bank in Edmond, which turns potential strip mall blankness into art; and in a different idiom, the dense sandstone walls and deep cool porches of the Reif house in Oklahoma City. Elliott often uses local materials, not in a nostalgic revivalist manner but in suggestive juxtaposition with synthetic and industrial ones. A number of his buildings, including the Parkridge Medical Center in Lawton, feature shaded interior courtyards with fountains and plants. Meticulously crafted sunscreens are common. Even at their most adventurous, these designs are grounded in necessity and utility rather than fashion.

But protecting against the fierce, slanting Oklahoma light is only part of the story. In Elliott’s work light is never an afterthought; it is a catalyst, first principle and definer of form. “My first question,” he says, ”is where is the light coming from?”

In Ackerman-McQueen Advertising, light is a large blue box within which people and ideas interact, as in a movie. The windowless MidFirst Credit Union comes to life through a sophisticated combination of skylights, floating ceiling lights - which Elliott compares to flying saucers - and sconces that saturate the walls with soft, even light. In the Connecticut house, the careful orientation of the windows allows the mood of the house to change from hour to hour and season to season.

Native American Culture
The first design to bring Elliott national attention was the monumental Iron Feathers, 70 feet high, at the entrance to the Will Rogers Memorial Airport in Oklahoma City. He had been encouraged to explore Native American culture by the late New York Yankees pitcher Allie Reynolds, himself a Creek Indian. He got him access to dances and ceremonies that allowed him to begin to mine the rich prehistory of his home state. Although the arrows may seem a bit literal and obvious now, they mark a turning point in Elliott’s thinking.

“It was so powerful,” he recalls. “Those people were in touch with things that I had never experienced. They responded to the earth in profoundly spiritual ways.”

In later projects the Native American influences have become subtler and more integral to the design. In the ESEO Credit Union, for example, the four sacred Indian colors - red, yellow, white and black - appear the design of a cabinet in the board room, transforming what might have been just another piece of furniture into a metaphoric focal point. In the same spirit, he included a symbolic campfire circle in the adjacent parking lot to commemorate the Native American presence on the site.
The design of the Morris Agency draws explicitly on the Native American myth of the wind spirit, which moves silently and stealthily through the landscape. The four copper wind cutters over the front door funnel the spirit over the building.

Yet it is Elliott’s attitude toward the land and his deft handling of scale that the Native American influences is most telling. His buildings tend to touch the ground lightly, insinuating themselves into it instead of trying to dominate it. The Morris Agency appears to be a series of metal outbuildings that are sinking slowly into the earth, merging with it instead of dominating. The steel braces of the ESEO roof touch the earth only at a single point, as though the roof were an insect stepping gingerly over the ground. Both buildings are strong yet deferential, as though they want to minimize their intrusiveness.

Drawing on the Legacy
In 1992, Rand Elliott was commissioned to restore the Mummer’s Theater, John Johansen’s eccentric masterpiece in downtown Oklahoma City. Conceived in the spirit of an erector set, with tubes and towers and ramps arranged in exhilarating asymmetry, the theater expressed the region’s latent experimental spirit. Yet by the time Elliott began his restoration the theater had been dark for several years, the victim of a slumping economy and a conservative backlash. Elliott’s restoration was subtle and respectful, bringing back the energy and exuberance of the original building while making the functional changed needed to give theater a new life. Only someone who was both a modernist and an experimenter could have pulled it off.

But Elliott’s more conspicuous debt is to Bruce Goff, the American original whose finest work is in and around Oklahoma City. Combining mundane and exotic materials with an organic philosophy of design, Goff created a distinctively American architecture of remarkable inventiveness and formal ingenuity. Elliott has largely ignored the formal part, but has obviously been inspired by Goff’s fascination with materials and construction, his genius for making do. The American Bank in Edmond, with its wall of cullet glass, is a direct reference to Goff’s Bavinger House in Norman. His design for World Neighbors features polished concrete floors and raw fiberboard walls, embellished hardware store lamps and door pulls made out of pieces of rawhide. The rockwork at the Honey Springs Visitor Center is reminiscent of Goff’s use of volcanic stone in many houses.

With its combination of pragmatism and invention the K.J.McNitt Headquarters in Oklahoma City epitomizes Rand Elliott’s aesthetic. The concrete walls are braced by lengths of oilfield pipe that are simultaneously pragmatic, inexpensive and evocative of teepee poles of the plains Indians. They frame an outdoor room that is planted in native buffalo grass, where the industrial and the vernacular, the architecture of mechanical production and the architecture of place come together seamlessly. It is a building very much of its own time, in which the vernacular elements are responses to real needs instead of empty nostalgia.

Discovering Oklahoma, like discovering any region, requires getting beyond the comfortable and the familiar. Any architect can copy; it takes talent and commitment to find the truth beneath the surface distractions. For the issue is not simply making artifacts but discovering the layers of meaning that have accumulated over centuries and that lie deep, like geological strata. That is the only kind of regionalism worth talking about, the kind that slices to bedrock. And it is the kind that Rand Elliott is pursuing.

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