“Woodie” Garber came from a family of Cincinnati architects. He attended Cornell and worked briefly in New York City for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and other firms before returning home in the early 1940s to become Cincinnati’s most extreme and experimental Modernist architect. An advocate of the International Style, Garber admired the works of LeCorbusier and interacted first-hand with German-immigrant originators of the movement including Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Before the end of WW II, Garber captured national attention with his proposal for the Schenley Corporate Headquarters building on Lytle Park in downtown Cincinnati (1944-45). If built, it would have been the first fully modular, steel-frame, curtain-glass-wall skyscraper in America. Extensively published, this design placed him on the cutting edge, not just of Modernism in Cincinnati, but in the U.S. Its site, facing the Taft Museum, also placed him in opposition to the Tafts, Cincinnati’s most powerful family, and predicted his lifelong struggles to introduce his high-octane Modernism to his conservative hometown. Despite his controversial personality and being far ahead of his context, Garber found progressive patrons, such as Carl Vitz (head of the Cincinnati Public Library) and Mary E. Johntson (enthusiast of Modern Art and heir to the Procter fortune) who enabled him to create some extraordinary buildings, including the Cincinnati Public Library (1955, downtown) and Procter Hall (1968, at UC). He also designed eye-catching commercial buildings and factories, master plans for public schools, and a number of stunning glass residences, including his family’s home in Glendale. His buildings combined unorthodox planning and challenging experiments in structure and materials, including steel-shell, hyperbolic parabola roofs that could span over 60 feet with only three inches of thickness. Garber’s reward for being Cincinnati’s most unconventional Modernist was a lifetime of struggles and contentiousness that progressively took its toll on him and his family--as his daughter Elizabeth Garber powerfully documents in her 2018 book, IMPLOSION. During his lifetime, Garber achieved national celebrity while watching many of his Cincinnati buildings reviled, 0altered, and demolished, culminating in the 1991 implosion of the 26-story Sander Hall dormitory at UC, only 20 years after its completion, an event the architect insouciantly remarked from a boat in the Ohio River while drinking champagne. This destructive trend has continued after Garber’s death, resulting in the loss of some of Cincinnati’s most avant-garde Modernist buildings. One of Garber's greatest surviving legacies is the number of UC architecture students that he trained and employed in his office and who worshipped him and carried his fervor into future generations. (Patrick Snadon)
