Local architect retires after 52 years
Published 6:18 pm Sunday, July 9, 2017
Farm life suits Fugatt
This watercolor rendering of Fugatt’s first house was done hurriedly to help him secure his $26,000 loan. He was doing all the work himself and said the bank wasn’t too keen on making the loan on what they considered an “unusual” looking house.
Architect Ray Fugatt has comfortably settled into retirement after 52 years.
“I really thought I’d just work until I couldn’t,” said Fugatt. “I know people who don’t really like what they do and can’t wait until retirement, but I enjoyed my work.”
In April, Fugatt turned his business over to Champeaux, Evans, Hotard.
Fugatt was one of the first students to graduate from the LSU architecture program.
“I like to tell people I was second in my class,” he said, chuckling.
The photo shows the Trinity Baptist Church’s children’s center, which Fugatt helped design.
When he graduated the Vietnam War draft was in full swing. Fugatt applied to officer’s training school and was accepted.
“My generation learned Vitruvius’ definition, Fugatt said. “Architecture has three things, commodity, firmness and delight or in more contemporary terms, function, structure and beauty. Good architecture still possesses those qualities. Style or period decoration is often applied to buildings in an effort to create good architecture but generally falls short of achieving its purpose.”
Louis Sullivan, over 100 years ago. coined the phrase “form follows function” which became the mantra for modern or contemporary architecture in the 20th century.
McNeese Entrance Plaza and Shearman Fine Arts Complex
“That was the foundation for training my generation of architects,” Fugatt said.
Designing residences have never been his bread and butter, but he has designed a few. One was for Madylene Gregory. It was a flattop red wood house with glass brick.
“The piece of property was interesting and shaped like a baby grand,” Gregory said. “It was covered in trees. I told Ray that I wanted a house that looked like God put it there, to look like it really belonged and I didn’t want him to cut down any of the hardwood trees. He did it.”
Fugatt designed the McNeese Entrance Plaza and Shearman Fine Arts Complex
Fugatt has lived in two homes of his own design.
“When I built the first, I thought I had something to prove,” he said. “It was modern, 92-feet long and 24-feet wide with a two-story common area, all built on a rigid module foundation I designed.”
The Fugatts moved in December 1970. In January, energy prices shot up drastically.
His next home was an almost 100-year-old place on Griffith Street. The historic charm was quickly overshadowed by a foundation difficult to shore up, cracked sheet rock and broken plumbing pipes.
Today he lives in what he describes as a very simple and well-insulated “farmhouse,” which he designed.
Ceilings are pecky cypress. Kitchen cabinets are open. The stained glass front door is by New Orleans Erskin Mitchell. What was once an open field has been transformed with crepe myrtles and shade trees. The eastern exposure is open to the 6-acre pond stocked with fish, once nothing more than a borrow pit.
“I’m not trying to impress anyone out here,” he said.
While he is enjoying life on the farm, he’s not out to pasture.
“I went ahead and wrote my obituary and came up with a couple of columns of hobbies, he said. “I have this problem of being interested in something and having to see it through all the way.”
Currently he enjoys classic cars. He has three in the garage, all Fords: A ’73 and ’71 Mustangs and a ’72 Ranchero. He also enjoys gardening, hunting, fishing and raising quail, pheasant, chickens and myotonic or “fainting” goats.
“The goats don’t really faint,” he said. “It’s genetic. Their muscles seize up when they’re frightened. They never actually lose consciousness.”
Fugatt said he has always enjoyed living close to the land and visual arts.
He was an art gallery owner and artist. His walls are covered with art. To him, such art helps make his house a home.
“Because of my interest in the visual arts I have tried to incorporate graphic art and sculpture into my projects,” he said.
That was the case for the McNeese Entrance Plaza/Shearman Fine Arts Complex, the Sulphur Regional Library and the children’s building at Trinity Baptist Church.
Tongue in cheek, he expresses his greatest “claim to fame” as recognizing the talent of Chinese doctor, Lian Quan Zhen, who wanted nothing more than to be an artist.