Carl Frelinghuysen Gould - Biography

Biography

He was born in New York to Charles Judson Gould. He graduated from Harvard in 1898, then spent five years at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After his return to New York, he apprenticed with McKim, Mead and White, D. H. Burnham & Company, and George B. Post and Sons.

In 1908 Gould moved to Seattle. After working briefly for other architects, Gould initiated his own practice. His early commissions were primarily residential. Gould quickly emerged as a leader in city planning, as he campaigned for Bogue Plan (1911), which proposed a City Beautiful civic center for the city. In 1912, Gould became president of the Seattle Fine Arts Society, serving until 1916. He also began giving lectures in domestic design at the University of Washington.

In 1914, Gould partnered with Seattle architect Charles H. Bebb to form Bebb and Gould, a firm that soon won the commission to plan the University of Washington campus (1915). Thereafter Bebb and Gould completed a number of campus buildings; most important was Suzzallo Library (1922–1927). From this auspicious start, the firm emerged as leading designers of institutional and other buildings in the Pacific Northwest. Their work included residences, churches, schools, hospitals, memorials, club houses, commercial structures and other buildings. The firms work was stylistically eclectic, reflecting Gould's Beaux-Arts training and the tendencies of the period.

Gould founded the University of Washington program in architecture in 1914 and served as the first chair of the Architecture Department (1914–1926). Gould modeled the program after that of the Beaux-Arts as it had been adapted by Ameriican collegiate programs in architecture. Throughout Gould's tenure the program belonged to the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (BAID), although Gould supplemented BAID programmes with studio assignments he and the other faculty developed themselves.

He married Dorothy Wheaton Fay in 1915.

Gould contributed to the U.S. effort in World War I, by designing a 3,000-worker community in Washington as a company town supporting the Spruce Production Division. The half-mile-square townsite was laid out with bunkhouses, and dining and recreation halls styled after Adirondack lodges.

Gould again served as President of the Seattle Fine Arts Society from 1926 to 1929 and was instrumental in its restructuring as the Art Institute of Seattle (predecessor to today's Seattle Art Museum). Gould served as President of the American Institute of Architects Washington State Chapter (predecessor to AIA Seattle Chapter) from 1922 to 1924. He was elected a Fellow in the AIA in 1926.

By the 1930s, Bebb's role in Bebb and Gould declined and the firm's work began to reflect the emergence of Art Deco. This new direction was reflected in the design for the Seattle Art Museum building (1931–1933) (now the Seattle Asian Art Museum) in Volunteer Park. (The design of the front elevation reflects the influence of draftsman Walter Wurdeman who had joined Bebb and Gould after graduating from the University of Washington.) Work slowed thereafter, as the Depression limited opportunities, although the firm designed several more University of Washington buildings in this period, and, as campus architects after 1932, supervised designs by other architects.

He died on 4 January 1939.

Students in the University of Washington School of Architecture Program who took classes in Gould Hall during the mid-1970s and spent most of their waking hours there were never informed by the faculty about the remarkable achievements of this vital, local figure, i.e. neither Carl Gould nor his theories of design were studied at all - as if they would poison the minds of young architecture students. The Beaux Arts style of architecture, which formed the basis of the magnificent UofW campus design and informed the great gothic revival Suzallo Library on the Uof W campus had been buried/ excised by the dogma of the "Modern Movement" which considered the theories of the "Beaux Arts" tradition passe' if not morally corrupt. The war-cry of the Modern Movement was Adolph Loos' statement "Ornament is a crime" and the UofW architecture faculty in the mid-1970s had swallowed the kool aid to the extent that local luminary Carl F. Gould had become a non-person and his great achievement, That VERY campus, one of the World's most gorgeous, was never discussed in the program. At the Harvard Graduate School of Design, later in the 1970s, the fruitful Beaux Arts tradition, in which Carl Gould studied, was given its proper place by inclusion: study and lectures along with all salient design movements of the 20th Century, ironic, because it was at Harvard, under the great Modernist educator Walter Gropius that the Modernism that provincials at the UofW had swallowed in its entirety to the exclusion / fear of all else was born in the United States at the Harvard Graduate School of Design under the direction of Walter Gropius. Harvard was the alma mater of Carl Gould.