Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 31, 1991 TAG: 9103290016
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE/ NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Virginia Tech's second architecture department head - still active as an architect - laid the groundwork for the college of architecture at the university. He also founded architecture departments at the University of Illinois and a university in Malaysia.
But for nothing, maybe, is the old architect so well known here as the house in which he once lived.
The pagoda house.
If you grew up here, you know the place: the odd-looking house on Highland Circle.
Built in 1961, before stuff like that was built in Blacksburg, it has won several awards. It has even won a tentative early approval for the National Register of Historic Places - an unusual feat for a 30-year-old structure.
"Generally, 50 years is the cutoff unless a property can be shown to have exceptional significance," said James Hill, national register assistant for the state Department of Historic Resources.
An exception was made for the Currie House, said Hill, "because it is a particularly fine example of modernism."
Heady stuff.
But in the beginning, the pagoda house just left folks shaking their heads.
"I think people kind of embraced it with mixed emotions," recalled Currie's son, Bob Currie, now an architect in Delray Beach, Fla. "They'd say, `It might be OK for a clubhouse.' "
"The problem with the house was it was a weird house," said Peter Trower, a professor of physics at Virginia Tech who now owns it. "There wasn't another like it in town. There still isn't. . . . I don't think anyone really understands how good Len is."
Currie is 77 now, and still has an office on Main Street. He and his wife, Virginia, returned to Blacksburg in 1981, after his retirement from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Currie was the first dean of the Illinois school's college of architecture and art.
"I still have the ambition to be the world's greatest architect," he joked. "I may have to settle for being the oldest."
In Blacksburg, at least, he long ago made his mark. Thirty years ago - after Currie arrived to head Tech's architecture department - he created a local stir by designing two unusual homes, known as the pagoda house and the double umbrella house. Both are on Highland Circle.
The umbrella house was built for the late Bill Bradley, a Tech photographer who asked Currie to design something that didn't yet exist in Blacksburg.
"They call it the double umbrella house. It's really more like two square discuses," Currie said. One discus contains the bedrooms, the other the less private rooms such as the kitchen and dining area. A corridor links the two areas. Each roof is supported on a central pole.
The Bradley house created "curiosity and consternation" when it was finished, Currie said. The house has had "major modifications" since it was built, however.
The pagoda house, built six months later, is still largely the house Currie built, said Currie and Trower.
The Curries themselves live in a newer home several blocks away. They considered moving to Spain and Mexico before settling on Blacksburg.
Returning was his wife's idea. "She said, `Why don't we go back to God's country?'" Currie recalled.
It was country that already bore Currie's imprint. Among the other buildings Currie designed before leaving Blacksburg in the early 1960s are the Wesley Foundation near the Virginia Tech campus and the Rich Creek United Methodist Church in Giles County.
Several of his buildings have won design awards.
On a recent Saturday the architect pointed out some of the local buildings he has designed - beginning with the one he designed for his return.
That house, on Carlson Drive in Blacksburg, is as innovative in its own way as the pagoda house, which it resembles.
"Same shape - very similar, but still quite different," is how Currie describes it.
A heating system uses solar panels and two feet of rockbed beneath the house to heat the house evenly and efficiently. Currie's annual heating bills are comparable to his neighbors' monthly bills.
In addition, the house was designed to be free of barriers for the Curries' old age, with most of the living area concentrated on a single floor. There is a mezzanine that includes Currie's office, but he points out, "We don't have to go upstairs."
A few blocks away on Highland is the pagoda house.
When the squarish house - its roof slung from a huge chimneylike core, its high porch without railings and its cantilevered stairs - was built, Currie recalled the reaction in Blacksburg was "mostly unfavorable. They hardly knew what an architect was."
To Trower, who purchased the house after the Curries moved to Illinois, the pagoda house was relief from the "little brick uglies" he kept seeing when he went househunting after coming to Virginia Tech.
Trower took a look at the pagoda house after someone warned him not to pay any attention to it. He bought it without even going inside.
"It is exquisitely simple," Trower said more than 20 years later. "Everything about it is so well thought out. It works so beautifully."
Hill, of the historic resources department, said the house is valuable partly because it shows the influence on Currie of Walter Gropius.
Gropius founded the Bauhaus school of design in pre-Nazi Germany, which stressed - among other things - an unornamented architectural style. Gropius headed Harvard's graduate school of design from 1938 to 1952.
Currie studied under Gropius and later worked with him at The Architects Collaborative, a Massachusetts architecture firm that is working on the redesign of Tech's Squires Hall.
While at Tech, Currie also designed the Wesley Foundation. The building is a kind of "religious community center," said its director, Glenn Tyndall. It is owned and funded by the Virginia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.
The building's modernistic lines stand in contrast to the classically modeled University Club across the street, which Currie said was designed by Tech's first head of architecture, Clinton Cowgill.
Tyndall recalled visiting the Wesley Foundation in the 1960s, when he was associate pastor of a church in Harrisonburg.
"This lobby was just a showplace, and the brick just glistened," Tyndall recalled. "All the lighting was indirect." He said he still believes the building's strongest features are aesthetic.
A third Currie-designed building is the Rich Creek United Methodist Church in Giles County - an A-frame building that juts 44 feet from a slope above the New River. Lighting is indirect, and inside, a huge cross hangs above the altar from the lofty ceiling.
Since his return to Blacksburg, Currie's small office has worked on the redesign of the Hokie House Restaurant and of Preston Place - for which his firm, Currie and Associates, has won several awards.
When he returned to Blacksburg nine years ago, Currie said, "I remember thinking, `I think I've got another good 20 years.' And every year that passes, I think `Well, I think I've got another 20 years.' I have no desire to retire."
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