John Carmody began a career that would take him around the world and close to home. Born and raised in Minneapolis, John enrolled in the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1965, having graduated from Minneapolis West High the previous spring.
In his first studio, John met fellow student Tom Ellison–who would become his first business partner and lifelong friend. John and Tom teamed up for their thesis, sharing research, and developing separate problems in an Education System for St. Cloud.
Describing the design approach, the thesis introduction states:
The Consortium on Urban Design was developed with the belief that any real architectural problem must consider not only its own interior relationships and its immediate site, but also its effect on the whole urban setting in which it takes place.
Later, they go on to note in a section aptly titled, “Past History of Unresponsive Educational Architecture”, that “...architecture seems to cautiously react to these new methods (of education) yet does not fully commit itself to any new directions.”
An essential and critical pattern is evident in this early work that John would employ time and again. He stepped back to see larger relationships and did not passively assume the status quo. Rather, he defined the problem for himself and challenged himself and the project to reach higher outcomes. Inherent in John’s questioning stance is a faith that architecture can rise to meet the challenges presented by culture and society.
It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities...
~Henry David Thoreau (opening quotation from John Carmody’s B.Arch thesis)
Upon graduation in 1970, Carmody lost his Class II – S (student) deferment and was once again eligible for the draft. A pacifist, John applied for and was granted Conscientious Objector status that summer. His petition was supported by his uncle, Lt. Col. Haas U.S. Army, colleagues and friends.
John’s application states:
In my own life, I have discovered that human existence is empty without loving human relationships. Love, forgiveness, and understanding are the only real means of promoting human life…The only way to constructively develop freedom and love is by example, a living example. Men can only learn to love by seeing others act in love. They cannot learn from hostile acts which violate principles they are attempting to defend.
Carmody began his Peace Corps service in the fall of 1970, landing in the Dominican Republic after training in Puerto Rico. Initially assigned to an office job with the Committee for the Development of the Citizens in Santo Domingo, John worked nine to five with few opportunities to get out of the capitol
He seized on the chance to work in the field when Jito Coleman, a friend from Peace Corps training in Puerto Rico, asked him to come to Loma de Cabrera in the western part of the Dominican Republic near the Haitian border. This was perhaps wish fulfillment. John had noted in a journal on December 20, 1970: “I must always remind myself that the most beautiful experiences and people I have ever known came to me. I never found them when I deliberately looked for them.”
The town served as their home base for the next two years. Their aim was to serve the people in the area, and let projects come to them. One such project was a planned community in Santiago de la Cruz for a group of farmers, whose families, isolated on scattered farms, wanted to live in town. John developed the design working with the community elders. Working to honor the land and use it appropriately with sensitivity to the environment such as preserving the creek.
“Just do it. Do it well, and people will leave you alone. Better to act, and ask forgiveness…but we got away with things because we did them well.”
~Jito Coleman
There is one more quote that I love from Don Juan (The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge as noted): ‘Look at every path closely and deliberately… then ask yourself one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks: Does this path have a heart? In my own life I have traversed long, long paths but I am not anywhere. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has heart, the other doesn’t.’
~John’s journal entry September 24, 1970, Ponce Puerto Rico
In fall of 1973 after returning from the Peace Corps, John and Tom Ellsion traveled to North Carolina and teamed up with Richard Pryor, a fellow Peace Corps alum, to build a geodesic dome. As young architects, building a geodesic dome in the woods was a pretty literal expression of Buckminster Fuller’s influence on their generation. According to John’s friend and partner Tom Ellison, Bucky’s broader views on career, ecology and systems had a deeper and lasting impact on all of them.
In a speech Fuller gave at UCLA in June of 1973, you can see the impact of his values on John’s personal search for meaningful work and vocation as he began his career. Two passages in particular resonate. In the first Fuller observes, “What does my experience teach me that needs to be done, that no one is attending to? … If not attended to society will be at a great disadvantage, and if attended to society will be advantaged.” In the second, Fuller considers equity in light of human potential. He said, “I didn't think she (Fuller’s daughter) would be very happy If she grew up and found that I had committed myself to get special advantage for her, in a world where there is an enormous amount of great poverty and want…”
In many ways John’s career, from underground architecture to guidelines, embodies this ethos.
"Every time a man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less."
~R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
Click on images to download the PDF files of the exhibit