Mark Rios on a roll

On a hot Friday afternoon, when most office workers already have cleared out, Mark Rios heads to downtown L.A. to check on one of his firm’s projects: a staff headquarters and education center for the nonprofit California Endowment. Near Olvera Street, on a block edged with chain-link and a few sofa cushions abandoned by transient sleepers, the complex is shiny with promise, its office building awash in shades of the sky. Rios, in a black polo shirt and jeans--his usual dressed-down garb--is jazzed by the progress he sees.

“This is an organization that serves the underserved and promotes health for all Californians,” he says. “They wanted a center that represents their mission of health and the diversity of their staff.” Squinting through the fence, he warms to his description of how Rios Clementi Hale Studios--known as RCH Studios--translated this mission into glass and steel.

The office building’s atrium is topped with clerestory windows that draw the sun and fresh air inside. Blue window slots set at different levels in the facade celebrate that phenomenal California sky and, like jaunty piano keys, evoke a multilayered urban music. When work is finished next year, spilling fountains will invite employees onto cool plazas to enjoy redwoods and sycamores planted in groves inspired by California’s natural landscape.

The $62-million project, for which the company did both the architecture and landscape design, contrasts dramatically with the commercial office towers in the distance. The center’s low-slung forms are graphically accented in a range of coordinated colors. The atrium area is clad in four different greens, which blend together like graded hues in a fabric. Each precise green, and the reds and golds on the other buildings, were culled from the colors of Chinatown and Olvera Street. The sycamores echo the Los Angeles River tree plantings a short distance away. Even the emphasis on light and fluid indoor-outdoor spaces marks the complex as tailor-made for Angelenos instead of, say, New Yorkers.

Not that RCH Studios doesn’t export its West Coast sensibility to the east. Rios and his three partners, Frank Clementi, Julie Smith-Clementi and Bob Hale, are designing New York offices for J Records and RCA as well as a Trump World Tower apartment for TV producer Darren Star. And the firm has taken its made-in-California look international with its zippy housewares line, notNeutral, selling boldly patterned products wholesale, online and through museum gift shops and retail stores such as Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Here at home, the company’s designs for houses, gardens, child-care centers and public plazas are influenced by Southern California’s culture and landscape: A chess-players’ park in Glendale is decked with giant lights shaped like chess pieces that allow people to play on through mild evenings; outdoor courtyards at two Los Angeles Unified School District primary schools use stylized graphics of birds, ladybugs and leaves to distinguish the walls of modular classrooms; plans for private homes often update the simple lines and open plans of California’s mid-century architects and garden makers.

“This is a great city to design in,” says Rios, 49, who directs the landscape architecture department at USC and has been practicing in L.A. since 1985. His ongoing projects number more than 70, including the redevelopment of a two-mile stretch of 1st Street downtown. And the General Services Administration recently hired the firm to propose strategies for creating secure but accessible public plazas.

“More than Boston or New York, there’s a value given to originality and invention here,” Rios says. “It’s the influence of the entertainment industry. We’re less reliant on tradition.” Which is why, he adds, his 30-member company of creative generalists has managed to thrive in an era that prizes specialization.

Six years ago, when USC recruited Rios to breathe new life into its landscape program, the diversity of his practice was a selling point. “Mark’s inclusiveness and his openness to different philosophies reflect the spirit of the program we want to build,” says professor Robert Timme, dean of USC’s architecture school. “His approach is the future. His embracing notion of pluralism and interdisciplinary work will one day be much closer to the norm.”

Perhaps best-known for his landscape work--high-profile gardens for Eli Broad, David Geffen and Cindy Crawford--Rios has always practiced multidisciplinary design. After graduating from USC in 1978, he earned two master’s degrees from Harvard, one in architecture, one in landscape architecture. His first office, Rios Pearson, which he and Harvard colleague Charles Pearson founded in a Los Angeles garage, started with small residential and public projects, and soon added an interior design component. Before long, they were drawing up site-specific furniture and lighting. Rios’ former partner describes him as someone who sees the dishes in a restaurant, knows he can design better ones and then does. “He’s got an original eye. He pushes limits,” Pearson says.

For a child-care center at Warner Bros. in Burbank, Rios arranged buildings around a dead--but beautiful and sculptural--tree as a symbol of the resonant past. He has carpeted gardens with inlaid-tile “rugs,” turned landscape walls into glowing lanterns and crafted antic, wave-backed Adirondack benches that look as if they’ve been squeezed through an extruder. He is quick to emphasize that he never designs anything alone. “I see our office as a think tank, a collective,” he says. He and Pearson worked this way, and Rios continued the practice, first with Rios Associates, founded in 1991, and with RCH Studios, established four years ago.

Nevertheless, Rios is the firm’s most high-profile partner and often serves as its spokesman. He has had to be inventive when explaining sometimes unconventional ideas to clients. Once, to make a point about achieving harmony among paving patterns, he raced home before a meeting and grabbed a handful of neckties to scatter across a conference table. To show how strong paint colors might work together in a house, he loaded the same table with a mix of vegetables from a farmers’ market.

Rios’ story helps explain the trajectory of his career from that first garage office to his present sleek two-story Melrose headquarters. He grew up in Fullerton, the only child of a Norwegian American dietitian and a Mexican-born surgeon who spoke five languages and sat on the board of Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum. Their ‘60s tract house rose amid tropical greens arranged by Clark B. Lutschg, one of California’s first registered landscape architects. Rios, who by age 10 had already designed and built a series of backyard forts, watched Lutschg with fascination, and later augmented the finished garden with his own full-scale, rock-edged pond.

An even greater influence on his developing aesthetic were his family’s frequent visits to relatives in Mexico. Rios was enthralled by the exaggerated lushness of the jungle, and by the pounding rain, baking heat and rich, saturated colors of buildings, flowers and people’s clothes. “Everything seemed extra-vivid and emotional there, full of heightened sensations and suggestions,” he recalls.

These same qualities often are evident in his firm’s work, such as the stylized flowers that etch the windows of the RCH Studios building and the vibrant orange-and-pink lanterns in the entry. “Mark and his office have been leaders in the mid-century design revival,” says Marina del Rey architect and landscape architect Katherine Spitz. “But they’ve made modernism more engaging, not as cold, infused with color and fun.”

Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the offerings of notNeutral, which the firm launched in 2001. Julie Smith-Clementi, the architect who heads the division, says its dinnerware, table linens and wall panels are meant to “counteract the status quo and feel very Southern Californian. So much on the market is plain, white and safe. Our world includes skateboarding and surf culture. It’s relaxed, loose, multiethnic, very different stylistically from the East.”

The colorful, practical products have struck a nerve with consumers raised on Marimekko, and with their children. NotNeutral’s Black Links dishes and other pop-patterned items have appeared on “Friends,” “The Apprentice” and MTV’s “The Real World: Las Vegas.” Brisk business has led the firm to contemplate opening stores, but not yet. “We’re focusing on wholesale now,” says Smith-Clementi, who has worked with Rios for 16 years.

Meanwhile, notNeutral’s graphic-mad look provides an additional outlet for a busy staff’s ideas. Generated partly by computer, the designs they dream up for one purpose often wind up serving others. A block-letter pattern developed for a notNeutral fabric became the design on a custom carpet for a client’s house. A sycamore-leaf pattern for a commercial lobby by Clementi (Smith-Clementi’s husband, a graphics whiz) surfaced on wall panels for notNeutral. Similarly, says Bob Hale, the firm’s lead architect on much public and commercial work, an idea for a public project--a lightweight plant container--may be useful in the private realm, and vice versa.

To keep ideas moving, the firm has research committees that staffers join according to their interests. The committees meet weekly to share related discoveries in different areas of design. For a commercial project that required roof-top planting, the sustainability committee presented historic research into sod-roof culture, the landscape group recommended specific plants for the site and the technology committee weighed in with proposed computer-generated planting patterns. “What we do is exploratory, more in the vein of Lewis and Clark than Procter & Gamble,” Clementi says.

USC’s Timme calls Rios’ firm “the closest thing we have now to the creative richness of Charles and Ray Eames’ studio during the mid-20th century. Looking back, it’s easy to see the Eames’ work in so many design fields as iconic. In another 20 years, I think we might look back that way on the Rios office.”

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Resource Guide

Rios Clementi Hale Studios, Los Angeles, (323) 634-9220.