Bernard Judge "Tree" House, Hollywood Hills, "Award-winning House-on-a-Post Goes Anywhere," Sunset, November 1978, cover, pp. 109-9. Cover photo by Glenn Christiansen.
Judge was drawn to architecture through his architect father Joseph who was Dean of the School of Architecture at Penn St. University and later worked for Eggers & Higgins. Various projects took Joseph and his family to different parts of the world including France, Mexico, and Nicaragua. While still in high school, Bernard helped his father build a house, thus learning the construction process firsthand. Experience in his father's office also led him to his first job after high school as a draftsman for Harrison & Abramovitz working on the United Nations Headquarters Building. This was an exciting time for Judge who recalls, "There were literally two architects from every nation in the U.N. in the drafting room. So for me that was a way of looking at architecture in the universal sense rather than in the parochial sense." (Smith, Kathryn, "Bernard Judge, AIA," L.A. Architect, March 1980, p. 2).
Judge added more practical experience through a four-year term of service with the Seabees during the Korean War where he gained an insight into architecture through construction. Much of this Navy time was spent in Morocco and North Africa. After his release in 1954 he traveled around Europe until his Seabees savings ran out and then spent a year at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. Bernard's extensive travels exposed him to a wide variety of cultures and vernacular architecture and indigenous building materials which helped formulate his life-long design philosophy of "living lightly on the land." By the time he arrived in Los Angeles to enroll in the USC School of Architecture in 1956 he was ready to begin his studies in earnest.
Before beginning discussion on Judge's first project, his "Triponent" House, I must digress to lay some groundwork pertaining to his inspiration for same, none other than Buckminster Fuller.
- See more at: http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2011/07/living-lightly-on-land-bernard-judges.html#sthash.x6rLbiBk.dpuf
