Woodie Garber was a Cincinnati architect, like his father and grandfather before him, but they got to design significant public buildings around the city. In 1945, then only 32, Garber did win a design competition for a glassy local high-rise, only to have it nixed by an anti-modern senator. He successfully designed, however, the Modernist but low-rise Cincinnati Public Library of 1955, which was much admired and is still in use. Mostly, he was commissioned for private residences. This memoir by his daughter is about the life she, her brothers, and mother led in the structure intended as their dream house, on which they collaborated beginning in 1966—a years-long effort that, while physically taxing, proved absolutely grueling emotionally.
Elizabeth, the eldest of three, is 13 when they move in, and happily takes on the sanding and gluing of veneers for the extensive plywood built-ins. But as the chores go on, extending to the heavy work of landscaping, she and her brothers want to see friends on weekends. This is not allowed. Their story is like a romance novel in reverse, a dystopian version in which the hero grows gruffer and wilder instead of tame and tender, and the alluring mansion becomes the place the heroine needs to flee. It’s a relationship built on architecture but destroyed by the presumptions of the architect.
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