John Hurtig
www.hgfarchitects.net

click to enlarge Drawing from 1955

John transferred to OU from Kansas State with two friends and fellow students, Jim Gardener and Norm Froelich. LaterJohn started a practice in Pueblo, Colorado and asked these two to join him. They are still in practice together as of 2008. John was three or more years younger than I and I graduated before getting to know him. Upon returning a year or so after graduation I visited BG and the school. John had a very original motel design on the exhibition wall, a spiraling structure looking in outline something like a screw thread. The design in section, plan, and elevation, was very complex but its organization was clear and to say the least, something new. I also remember seeing some of his fourth year work which blew me out of the water. A crescent shaped tower of a museum for the artist, Wolfgang Paalen, again with a clear and imaginative structural idea. John went into the Air Force after graduation, then went to Canada to work for an architect and there he produced the finest, more powerful feats of drawing and insight into form and human feeling that I have ever seen.

After moving into the Prairie House which these drawings had influenced, John stopped by bringing a girl of Latvian descent with whom he was romantically involved. I do not remember him paying much attention to the house. The couple went on with their traveling. Some months later, John appeared at the house. He was upset. His girlfriend had run off with a short-guy from the boarding house. John talked without a break for a couple of hours. He had not taken care to give the girl enough attention and care. Next John had chosen Pueblo to start a practice, after a time he met Barbara. They married and started a family.

Hurtig remains the enigma of my life. Endowed with far more with genius and talent than any of BG’s many other talented students, he turned the design of office projects over to Norm and Jim while he attended board meetings, supervision, and production. Hurtig was a large, six feet plus, solid looking blond Swede, quick to laugh with expressive, darting hands and eyes. He could smoke a cigar. He could meet and converse with anyone. Perhaps his personality led him into the more public aspects of practice. Perhaps it was his tenderness (I remember his hurt expression when I visited his house under construction and how he remarked how the neighbor lady had told him his house blocked her view of Pike’s Peak some thirty miles distant and barely seen on the horizon.) He had begun construction of his house for his family at the edge of town. The house was formed by two large and long steel trusses that he had salvaged. He sporadically worked on the house for years. When I last saw it in 2006 it had been completed into a large many leveled house that demonstrated at least some of his originality and creativity. I am bent on getting his early drawings published. This year he has made about a hundred spontaneous new drawings of huge constructions sprawling across a western landscape to add to his collection.