THAD KUSMIERSKI - HERB GREENE

Thad Kusmierski
www.tekarchitect.com

Photograph by Ken Rice

Photograph by Ken Rice

Photograph by Ken Rice

I knew of Thad before I met him. He had a grant to go to Barcelona and take slides and pictures of Gaudi’s architecture. He gave a set of these slides to Bruce Goff and I got to see some and enlarge my knowledge of Gaudi’s work because this was in the mid-fifties before extensive publications on Gaudi were available. Thad spent several years at Cooper Union after transferring to OU after I had graduated. We met in Berkeley when Nanine and I moved there in 1981. Thad and his wife Carol lived in a very large Maybeck house off Tunnel Road. This was the first two large Maybeck houses that Thad restored in Berkeley with what I thought was near perfect taste, scholarship, and creativity. The House was burned in the great fire of 1989 and Thad restored it to a better condition than before the fire. Thad and I tried to collaborate on my Build with Artists idea and made several trips to Marin County under the assumption that the Buck foundation would fund our efforts to enhance public housing projects. This idea fell through when the foundation changed directors and mission. We did work together on the Franklin Plaza; (link to Franklin Plaza visuals) a near volunteer job to make a sidewalk café out of a defunct fountain in downtown Oakland. Later Thad and Carol divorced and Thad met Anna Berger, a Berkeley therapist with very artistic tastes and abilities. She had lived in Japan when young. They married and bought the second Maybeck house on Buena Vista Road. Thad did a major restoration on the house and after a two and a half year struggle with historical associations and the Berkeley Building Department, added two bedrooms and a bath. The entire project is beautifully done and Thad has made a major contribution to Berkeley’s history and Maybeck’s legacy as the most creative of the California arts and crafts architects.