How is this scenario for a wonderful if somewhat improbable life? Dick, a boy from Manteo, grows up in the Depression, attends North Carolina State University and is in the first graduating class (1950) of a revolutionary design school under an iconoclastic dean, Henry Kamphoefner. At age 21, he wins the internationally acclaimed Prix de Rome and attends the prestigious American Academy of Rome where he studies with some of the finest artists, authors, sculptors and designers in the world.
Our hero then convinces his teachers to allow him to travel across three continents studying the sites and artifacts associated with the great religions and cultures of the world. He and a fellow student sally forth equipped with camping gear and Lambretta motorcycles. Thirty countries later, this intrepid scholar-traveler makes his way back to North Carolina, meets the girl of his dreams at the first Jockey's Ridge Pirates' Jamboree, and then goes off alone to sunny Florida to work with a mentor whose firm is commissioned to landscape the grounds of the fabulous Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach.
From there, our fledgling professional makes his way back to North Carolina to accept a job with the National Park Service to work on the master plan for the land newly acquired and designated as the Cape Hatteras National Seashore-only to find the job has not yet been funded. So in 1954, this peripatetic adventurer returns to Raleigh and opens his own landscape architecture practice with partner James A. Godwin. The practice takes hold, he becomes reacquainted with the girl of his dreams and marries her, and together they begin to develop both a family and a unique artistic and commercial endeavor known as Water Garden.
I know. Too cool to be true. But in October of 2004, Richard Bell will have practiced the art and science of landscape architecture for 50 years with his wife Mary Jo Harris Bell at his side in a setting admired around the state. Water Garden, possibly one of the first mixed use developments in North Carolina, is a home, an office complex, a design studio, and an art gallery, all nestled under mature trees by the side of two ponds on less than a dozen acres off Highway 70 West just outside Raleigh.
A sampler of some of the hundreds of projects completed during Bell's long career shows an impressive diversity of genre and scale. During the early '60s and continuing through the early '70s, when the Bells were developing Water Garden, the firm worked on master plans for NCSU, Peace College, Meredith College and St. Mary's School. Often such planning work led to commissions for site improvements, many of which are still campus landmarks today. A request for a planting plan for 10 NCSU buildings evolved into the centrally located University Plaza, better known as The Brickyard, a major hardscape installation using materials Bell managed to have donated by the brick industry. The space lends unity to an eclectic collection of buildings and acts as a transportation corridor, gathering place and sculpture garden.
When the president of Meredith College asked Bell to design a way for students to circumvent a muddy slough, Bell's solution was to build the campus amphitheatre, where grassy terraced seating overlooks a tranquil lake covering a swamp. Another memorable project completed in this period was the North Carolina Legislative Building, designed by the firm of Edward Durrell Stone and overseen by managing architect Ralph Reeves. Bell states that he loved working for the state, both on the major campuses and on projects like the Legislative Building. "They offered opportunities to utilize and see implemented all the site planning skills that were drummed into us in college at State," says Bell.
During this period, Water Garden began to take shape physically and philosophically. "This has been our home, our business, and my laboratory," says Bell. "Mary Jo and I married in October of 1955 and shortly after that bought the first six acres of what would become our 11-acre Water Garden. In November of 1956, we were expecting our first child and building a rudimentary house on an existing foundation on the property." The Bells and their newborn baby Sharon moved into the house (1800 square feet with a pot-bellied stove and four glass walls), and toughed out the cold days until spring. After a good business year, there was enough money to put in a heating and air conditioning unit and spread some pine straw around the foundation. Two years later, in 1958, they had another child, Richard Jr., while waiting out a recession. "It's the recessions that kill you," says Bell. "In my experience, business runs in cycles like the Bible says, 'seven years of plenty and three of lean'."
In 1961 Bell moved his design studio from Downtown Raleigh to a converted tool shed in Water Garden. He was tired of working on urban renewal projects that seemed to do more harm than good and was struggling to find new business. What kept him going, he remembers, were the nurseryman-sponsored flower and garden shows held frequently in Dorton Arena. The Bells worked together on their rented display spaces and incorporated sculpture from NCSU School of Design faculty along with the plants and flowers that were part of Bell's designs. The firm began to attract business from the various contractors and developers who attended shows.
The Bells' Dorton Arena flower and garden displays were prescient; they integrated plants, flowers, art, sculpture, site planning and landscape design, soon recognized as the hallmark of Water Garden and of Dick Bell's professional style. Growing out of that experience was the idea to use art to promote the design firm, and in 1963 the Bells decided to build their first office building at Water Garden. It would have an office and studio for Dick and an art gallery for Mary Jo, who majored in art and education at Greensboro College. The building, a happy collaboration among Bell, his partner Hal McNeely and architect Truman Newberry, was of glass and wood and overlooked the larger of the two ponds.
A NATURAL HOME FOR ART
Surrounded by a natural setting that enhances the senses, the Garden Gallery (which is still in operation today, though in another location on the property) showcased all aspects of the arts, including fiction, poetry and performing arts, as well as the work of painters and sculptors. "It became a kind of salon," says Dick Bell, "and reminded me of the experience I had had at the American Academy in Rome." Water Garden provided the general public enjoyable access to the arts and good design, and in its heyday during the '60s, '70s and early '80s was visited by thousands of North Carolinians from all parts of the state. Artist Maud Gatewood remembers that Water Garden, including the Garden Gallery, was the first setting in the area developed from the ground up as a contemporary nature-loving preserve. (The current Garden Gallery, built in 1971, is an addition to the Bell's residence.) Gatewood notes, "It is the only gallery I know which was designed as a gallery from the ground up. Most galleries have to be adapted from buildings that were designed for another use."
While Mary Jo somehow managed the gallery, the leasing of office space and three growing children (a third child, Cassandra, was born in 1963), Dick expanded his practice and experimented with the ecol-ogy of Water Garden. "I had everything I loved in Water Garden," says Dick, "a wetlands area with the beginnings of a stream running through it, a pond with aquatic elements, and an upland pine forest." It was during those early days at that Dick began to refine his knowledge of plant materials and to experiment with techniques to limit erosion when building on a slope. Trees viewable through the newest incarnation of the Garden Gallery have flourished for 40 years though their roots were covered with loosely compacted Carolina red clay to form the berm and retaining wall that secure the house and present gallery.
Bell was consciously involved in the burgeoning environmental movement, and his improvements to Water Garden site were viewed and appreciated by visitors to the Garden Gallery. As professionals, Bell, McNeely and many of their colleagues worked to prepare environmentally sensitive plans and mitigate the adverse effects of development on the land, but they often found that important elements of their plans were being lost in the execution. This realization led the partners and four other associates to create an environmentally sensitive design firm that would function as a part of a construction and development enterprise.
"This was a period (the mid-to-late '60s) when we completed some of the projects of which I am most proud," says Bell. Among them was the expansion of the Water Garden office building, providing a second-story level for new studio space for Bell and a new Garden Gallery space for Mary Jo. The architect for the expansion was another NCSU School of Design graduate, Ligon Flynn, whose practice was also located in the design complex. (See the June 2004 Metro feature article on Ligon Flynn).
Flynn, McNeely and Bell associated with Hickory, North Carolina, lawyer and developer Young Smith and began the land planning for two major coastal develop-ments, Litchfield Plantation at Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina, and Figure Eight Island. In 1969, Bell completed a great deal of the site planning for the north-central part of Figure Eight, enlarging on his work in 1965 planning the south-central portion of the property. Then in 1970-72, another recession hit, bringing 22 percent interest rates, and Bell returned to Raleigh and Water Garden.
CONSTANT RENEWAL
Bell began a new design firm with three partners, Dan Sears, Wes Frame and Ralph Graham. The group took on a new round of assignments which included some of Bell's most challenging: the master plan and site improvements for Appalachian State University (a project which continued, intermittently, for 30 years), and the master plans for two major state parks-Stone Mountain in Georgia, and North Carolina's Pilot Mountain. Closer to home Bell worked on the master plan and site improvements for Raleigh's Pullen Park, an example of successful water systems management. "We had to remove 100,000 yards of silt in Pullen Park Lake and make sure it didn't accumulate again," says Bell. "We did this by installing a by-pass channel and creating bridges for the railroad tracks that crossed the area," says Bell.
In recapping his career, Bell credits partner and son-in-law Dennis Glazener with creating a bridge between Bell's generalist approach to the practice of landscape architecture and the more streamlined computer-aided technology required by today's projects and clients. "In 1980, Dennis, another NCSU School of Design graduate, married my daughter Sharon, who is also trained as a landscape architect, and we formed Bell-Glazener Design Group. His background complemented mine. Dennis is computer literate and, in addition to doing several landscape plans for large residences and residential developments, we worked together on updating the Appalachian State University Master Plan and on the preparation of master plans for Guilford College and St Mary's College. We were also involved in two major revitalization projects in Raleigh, the Moore Square transit facility and parking deck and the siting of the new parking deck at Wilmington and Blount Streets.
In the early eighties, with Glazener carrying on the design work and daughter Sharon managing the office, Dick and Mary Jo Bell devoted more and more of their time to nursing Mary Jo's mother, a victim of Alzheimer's disease. The Bells packed up and left Water Garden to move into Mrs. Harris' Raleigh home to provide round-the-clock care. "It was tragic," says Bell of his mother-in-law's last years of life. "Now, with Mary Jo's mother gone and my mother's death in 1988, the world seems not so kind and gentle."
Though he might resist the appellation Renaissance Man, Dick Bell may be as close to one as any of us knows. He credits his parents with giving him a firm grounding in the humanities, in business and in construction. Bell was steeped in literature and history by an English-born father, the master builder for many of the State's historical sites and amphitheaters, including the amphitheater at Roanoke Island where The Lost Colony has been enacted since 1933. He learned business and plant lore from his mother, who established and ran a commercial nursery. His deep love of nature and the environment was kindled during his young years growing up on Roanoke Island, where, with his brothers, he roamed the ponds, marshes and piney woods around Manteo. Then he came to NCSU, and fell under the tutelage of Henry Kamphoefner. "Dean Kamphoefner wanted his students to behave in a certain way. He taught us to listen to classical music and to stand up for what we believed. We left his program knowing it was our responsibility to make something of ourselves and further all aspects of modern design."
The track of Dick Bell's imagination, artistry and designer's sense of the land across North Carolina is clear and lasting evidence that he has taken that responsibility to heart.