THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 10, 1995 TAG: 9507100022
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARTHA SLUD, ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
Mounds of dirt and stone and piles of scrap pipe, brick and cable clutter Haigh Jamgochian's 10-acre property in a middle-class Richmond neighborhood. From this mess, Jamgochian boasts, will rise one of the greatest buildings ever constructed.
Jamgochian, a 70-year-old maverick architect, has worked nearly 30 years to fashion a jungle-like paradise of sorts replete with ponds, causeways, roads, a small beach, a heart-shaped island and a stone spire that will be his dream house.
``When I finish I'm going to drop dead,'' says Jamgochian, a robust yoga master who eats seven times a day to keep up his energy. ``It's all basically worthless - but gee, it's fun. I don't feel 70. I feel 12.''
Jamgochian won worldwide attention in the 1960s for his bold ideas and flashy style. However, only two of his innovative building designs were ever completed.
``Instead of crying, I'll just do what I want to do,'' shrugs Jamgochian, the son of Armenian immigrants. ``I was born to create.''
Jamgochian gestures dramatically to a bulldozed dugout where he says he will build the centerpiece of the project - a circular house whose foundation will rise 50 feet. The interior will feature multiple levels and ramps.
The house's simplicity will evoke images of such classic designs as the Eiffel Tower, the Washington Monument and the Great Pyramids, Jamgochian says.
Jamgochian - long on ambition but short on funding - hopes to finish the house by 2000. That's a lofty goal considering he works alone and hasn't begun building yet.
The rest of the project will take another 30 years to complete, he estimates.
Jamgochian toils 12 hours a day, seven days a week to transform the former stone quarry into his architectural Eden. He bulldozes, mixes concrete and antagonizes neighbors and city building inspectors with the ruckus.
Some local contractors donate their scraps to him. He pays for other needs with the modest revenue he receives from properties he bought as investments years ago.
Jamgochian, who lives in a 1930s art deco home on the site, wants to give the project to Virginia Tech or another university to use as a satellite architecture school or alumni center. So far, no takers.
``Haigh is such a strange character,'' laughs fellow architect James Glave. ``He certainly has a high imagination. The unfortunate part is that in a city like Richmond, his work really didn't fit.''
Jamgochian became a Marine in 1943 at age 18, served in the South Pacific in World War II and rose to the rank of sergeant. He enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1946, but quickly realized he wanted to be an architect and switched to Virginia Tech. He went to Princeton on scholarship and earned a master's degree there, then returned to Virginia where he taught nights at Tech, the University of Virginia and Richmond Professional Institute, now Virginia Commonwealth.
In 1962, newspapers worldwide published Jamgochian's design for a simple ``treehouse'' style apartment building he devised for downtown Richmond. The building would fit a small city lot, he explains, because its column base would balance 15 floors that would branch out like tree limbs.
In Richmond, where history and tradition prevail, no one commissioned the structure, but it captured the attention of a local insurance firm that hired him to design its new quarters. After four years of wrangling over money and design, Jamgochian in 1966 concocted something that resembles three large metal rings sitting atop each other.
The building - sometimes dubbed ``The Flying Saucer'' - stands alone amid the bourgeois office and retail landscape of Richmond's suburbs. ``No one was more surprised than I was that it worked,'' he says.
One more project followed that year - a crescent-shaped house built for a flamboyant local used-car dealer.
The ideas kept flowing but the clients stopped coming. Jamgochian says a design for two side-by-side revolving hotels in Virginia Beach caught the interest of some developers, but they balked.
``They thought it was great, but then like most clients they built something like a box,'' he grumbles. But Jamgochian blames himself, too: ``I always say the wrong thing.''
Jamgochian likens himself to Louis Sullivan, a pioneer of modern, functional architecture. His most famous student was Frank Lloyd Wright.
For years, Jamgochian's friends have told him his life seemed like a page out of Ayn Rand's 1943 novel, ``The Fountainhead.'' The novel's renegade architect-hero, Howard Roark, destroys his own creation rather than allow it to be desecrated by conventional society.
Jamgochian says he tried to read the tome once but got bored.
``On page 23, that's as far as I got,'' he says. ``I figured I could be out doing something.'' ILLUSTRATION: ASSOCIATED PRESS photo
Haigh Jamgochian works 12 hours a day, seven days a week to
transform this former stone quarry into his dream house.
by CNB