"Jack Rice: Portrait of a Stonemason"
by J. R. Ball
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| Jack Rice sits on the hearth of a fireplace he built for Carl and Leta Malone on Amy Way in 1981. Photo c/o the Messenger. |
In Topanga, when folks start talking about stonework, the name Jack Rice usually crops up somewhere in the conversation, for over the years the nearly 62-year-old mason has become legend in the Santa Monica Mountains.
His credentials are stacked up
all over the hillsides.
Neatly stacked retaining walls of
granite boulder, immaculate Mexican tile and slate floors, masonry block walls,
rock-studded swimming pools, and, of course, his famous 30-foot rock
fireplaces. He has built over 50 fireplaces. If the canyon burned to the ground
tomorrow, his 24-ton fireplaces would still be standing like monuments to the
spirit of the builders and craftsmen of Topanga.
The Topanga contractor never did
quite fit into the mold of your average tradesman. He's college educated,
sometimes gruff in manner, and constantly demonstrating his passion for architectural
aesthetics. "I prefer work in which I have a relatively free, or at least
a strong hand in design as well as execution." he says.
"Do me one favor in the
article, don't call me a bricklayer,"
Rice said. "I am a
stonemason. I've done a lot of brick work, but I don't consider myself a very
good bricklayer. I am interested in the use of bricks in an imaginative way.
There is such a diametric opposition...in bricklaying you use exactly the same
kind of units to arrive at some kind of shape. It involves a geometry that I am
not related to. My use of brick begins with a nonmathematical use of brick. I
deplore all the units being exactly the same."
"The greatest bricklayers in
the world are the Arabs and the Dutch. Total precision. That's bricklaying.
Stonemasonry is exactly the opposite. Complete imprecision. Irregularity.
No duplication. Every move you
make is calculatedly different than the one you have just made."
Asked if he considered himself an
artist or a craftsman,
Rice replied: "I guess it
has to do with the seriousness of one’s intent...a person's commitment to a
project...whether you are willing to throw your soul into the breach. Let's
just say I think the line between the artist and the craftsman is a very thin
line and one that is crossed and re-crossed continually."
Standing in the kitchen of Rice's
home in Topanga, there is evidence of Jack's masonry skill nearly everywhere.
The floor is Mexican tile, the walls are brick, one wall consisting of an
enormous fireplace executed in the New England style. It is so big you can walk
right into it, and off to the right are a series of brickwork cookers used for
barbequing and smoking meat.
"I feel every house built in
the canyon should give off its own sense of drama or romance taken from the
area it occupies. I prefer houses of adobe or stone. Low rise housing that
takes advantage of the terrain," Rice said.
He cited the Anderson home
located on the corner of Sischo and Bainum in the Fernwood area of Topanga as
one of the best examples of this kind of dwelling. "The house was designed
by Earl Weir with the help of Bob Bates. The materials used were cement, rock,
glass and wood. No adjustment was made to the hillside. Nothing was
disturbed."
Another favorite canyon structure
is a house on Bowers Drive in the Fernwood area of Topanga. Built by LA County
Lifeguard Mike Stevenson, the house is framed in immense wooden beams taken
from the Old Venice pier. Rice performed extensive masonry in the living area,
including one of his 30-foot fireplaces whose brick chimney provides an
eye-pleasing counterpoint to the weathered antique beams and siding. The
Stevenson house is a crystalized example of indigenous design, a sort of
"canyon architecture" influenced and dedicated to the Santa Monica
Mountain living experience itself.
Rice considers his most extensive
assignment to date to be a house recently completed on Grand View and owned by
Mrs. Rita George. It is an eclectic stone design, a multi-level dwelling
featuring two octagonal towers, the stone tower capped by a copper roof. The
effect is pure Tolkien fantasy.
Rice moved to Topanga with his
wife, Barbara, nearly 30 years ago. He has raised four children in the canyon.
"When I first arrived in
Topanga, all the construction work was pretty much handled by a small group of
locals," Rice said.
It took him two years to crack
what he called the "Topanga Labor Guild."
Born into a logging family in
Edmonds, Washington in 1922, Jack Rice spent his boyhood years shuttling back
and forth between Long Beach, California and the Seattle-Bellingham area of
Washington State. When World War II rolled through the world consciousness,
Rice was cast as a Marine still in his early twenties. Jack served in the South
Pacific, island hopping in one landing after another.
It was while serving in the South
Pacific that a friend began filling the young Marine corporal with stories
about a small college in North Carolina that had become a melting pot for a new
philosophical aesthetic. Black Mountain College had become steeped in the
spirit of the Bauhaus Movement, and it was the principles of the Bauhaus that
would help shape the destiny of this short, leather faced, red-haired Irishman.
Using the GI Bill, Jack Rice enrolled there in 1949.
The Bauhaus Movement was founded
by architect Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus Commune School opened its doors in the
German Weimar Republic in 1919. Hitler didn't like the Bauhaus people, and when
he came to power in Germany they fled, one of them, painter Joseph Albers fled
to North Carolina where he began teaching in the Art department of Black
Mountain College. Although it initially sprang from the School of Design,
Bauhaus principles would spill over into other areas of the Arts and would have
an effect on art, literature and poetry.
"The purpose of the Bauhaus
Movement was to reintroduce the artist into the industrial picture," Rice
explained.
"One particular tenet of the
Bauhaus principles would have a deep effect on me, and that is that the
designer doesn't just design—he also does it."
Rice studied literature at Black
Mountain College, and later anthropology at Mexico City College. He holds a
degree in both fields, still on a gut level Rice had developed a passion for architectural
sculpture along the way.
"Architectural sculpture is
something as big as a house," Rice explained. "It is something that
occupies its own site. It is wedded to the land as a house is."
In 1954, Jack Rice ended his
college studies and headed west hoping to find both an occupation and a new
home for his family in the redwoods of Northern California.
He never got there.
"I went broke in Utah,"
Rice said.
Financial pressure forced Rice to
settle with his family here in the Southland. They rented a small house in
Artesia, which in those days was surrounded by dairy farms. What followed next
Rice describes as a "desperate struggle* working as a furniture maker, an
exterminator for a termite company, and a string of mangy, unsatisfactory jobs.
The following year, Jack and
Barbara found themselves living in Highland Park with another child on the way.
It was here that Rice fell into the world of masonry rock when he began working
for a Yugoslavian mason who taught him the rudiments of the trade. "They
call it the Queen of the Trades," Rice said. "Masonry is where all
building began."
That year, the couple began
searching around for a place that offered a more rural lifestyle. One day,
Barbara told her husband about a
canyon that she had once driven through, and that afternoon they came to a stop
in front of the real estate office of Bob DeWitt so many years ago.
Back in the 50's Bob DeWitt
played an important role in Topanga history, becoming a local legend as a sort
of Brigham Young of Bohemia. A lifestyle which has left its stamp on the canyon
for decades. DeWitt has been described as "an artist, a real estate
salesman, goat milker, first canyon hippie, and a collector of people."
"I remember he was standing
outside of his real estate office when we drove up," Rice recalled.
"He was barefoot, wearing a poncho and playing the bongos."
DeWitt had studied art at Chouinard.
He knew all about Black Mountain College, and Rice got along well with him.
DeWitt even managed to get
serious enough to sell Rice a ramshackle house on Canyon Trail for $5,000. At
today's prices that wouldn't buy you a chicken coop in the Santa Monicas.
The following year, Jack sold his
first house, moving to his present home in Old Canyon. The site affords an
excellent view of a large chunk of mountain running up behind Malibu.
It wasn't much more than a
one-bedroom shack sided with asbestos shingles when the Rice family moved in
nearly three decades ago. For most of that time, the house has existed in a
sort of constant state of remodel. Today, it is a multi-level, 3-bedroom affair
worth an estimated $350,000. Here they raised their children: Megan, Caitlin,
Anthea and Erin.
"My daughter Caitlin married
34-year-old Randy Just,"
Rice said. "Randy began as
an apprentice and today he is my right arm. Nowadays he works the opposite side
of the fireplace with me."
Over the years, Jack Rice has worked on countless homes in the Santa Monicas, building his fantastic fireplaces, designing and building stone pools and waterfalls, garden walls, and floors of stone, brick, slate and tile. He has become mentor for young builders in the Santa Monica Mountains, and the advice he gives them is as solid as his masonry rock. "Love the work," he tells them. "Love the work."
