Architects Explore the Creative Urge

What prompts architects to shape and style buildings the way they do?

That question was explored by about 700 designers at a conference here last weekend entitled “Sources of Inspiration” and sponsored by the California Council of the American Institute of Architects.

As can be expected at a gathering of peers in a competitive profession in which political and promotional skills often triumph over design skills in the battle for commissions, the answers ranged from candid to disingenuous.

Design Inspiration

They included being “inspired “ by needing to meet a payroll; fearing failure; seeing the designs of others in magazines; serving the complex needs of clients and those who eventually will use the structure; enjoying the process of creating the structure; or simply wanting to create.

One had to be wary when listening to the architects expound, for given a forum they can be quite verbose when explaining their creative processes, often saying one thing to get work and placate clients while designing something else to please themselves or to attract the attention of trendy trade publications.

Nevertheless, the conference at the idyllic Asilomar Center in Pacific Grove provided an engaging forum for West Coast architects to listen to select pundits, view some interesting projects, have their own discussions, renew old friendships and hand out a few awards among themselves, between pleasant walks on the beach.

Among the visiting pundits was Peter Blake, chairman of the architecture and planning department at Catholic University in Washington, and former editor in chief of the late and lamented Architectural Forum magazine. He also is the author of “Form Follows Fiasco,” among others books.

Blake voiced concern that architects these days were not facing up to the challenge of “the human condition,” and instead were retreating behind artistic pretensions and the fake facades of the Post Modernism, a style that uses classical architectural symbols as decoration. As for his own buildings, Blake said they were shaped by social concerns and inspired in large part by the works of Le Corbusier, a proponent of the simple functional forms that grew into modernism.

‘Self-Indulgent’ Style

Also coming down hard on Post Modernism was architectural critic Allan Temko, the self-described “aging enfant terrible” of the San Francisco Chronicle. He denounced the style as self-indulgent, called on architects to face up to their social responsibility and in one of his many asides declared, “if there is a God,” he will punish the designers of the motels defacing the Monterey Peninsula shoreline.

Among other principal speakers was Paul Rudolph, who was chairman of the Yale Department of Architecture from 1958 to 1965 and now a practicing architect in New York. The much-honored architect cited sources of inspiration, including the structure and play of light of a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that he visited when he was 14. He also cited the sense of scale, space and history embodied in the Piazza San Marco in Venice.

The presentation by Anthony Lumsden, a principal with the firm of Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall in Los Angeles, was a strained collage of slides and philosophies. If anything, they indicated to those familiar with Lumsden’s imaginative work that he is more comfortable designing buildings than trying to explain them.

Filling in for the peripatetic Charles Moore was Rob Willington Quigley of San Diego. A genuine celebrity/architect with a commanding style, Moore had been billed as one of the stars of the conference. He was missed. Quigley, who was one of the winners of a council award for design, said that among the things that inspired him were the needs of a client. It was a nice statement that a subsequent description of his design process seemed to contradict, but because it was delivered with an ingratiating elan no one seemed to mind. Designers do like style, even if it is strained and self-conscious.

The big winner at the conference was Daniel Dworsky and Associates of Los Angeles, which received a merit award for the design of a school for the blind in Fremont, Calif., and the coveted firm award.

As for what inspires his architecture, Dworsky said he and his associates draw from the “solid, resolved concepts” of such forceful modern designers as Le Corbusier and Marcel Bruer, while being encouraged on occasion to experiment by such “new wave” designers as Frank Gehry and Eric Owen Moss.

A Politic Statement

It was a politic statement and an indication why--in addition to having some talented designers--the firm has done so well garnering major projects.

On the same panel on which Dworsky spoke was Ted Smith of Del Mar, who delighted the audience with slides of his spirited, practical designs and frank comments. “The reality of my inspiration is that I look at a lot of magazines,” he said with a ready smile.

But Smith added in a burst of candor that Post Modernism featured in the magazines that he had embraced for a while was “too expensive” and to meet the needs of his clients “I’m coming back to modernism as quick as I can run.”

“The nice thing about this conference is that by seeing what other architects are doing you can learn from the bad as well as the good,” commented Anthony Pings of Fresno. As for the source of his inspiration, he said it came when faced with failing to meet a deadline.” The more pressure, the better I tend to work,” he said.

A merit award also went to Raymond Kappe, and Lotery & Boccato of Pacific Palisades for their design of the Santa Monica bus administration facility. “My architecture comes from responding to problems,” Kappe said. “Solving the problems is both my challenge and inspiration.”

A similar comment was offered by Paul Barnhart of the San Francisco-based firm of Kaplan/McLaughlin/Diaz, which won an honor award for a housing complex for the handicapped in Mill Valley. Barnhart was a principal designer on the project.

“Call it what you will, but solving user needs, such as providing workable housing for the handicapped, is what really inspires me,” Barnhart said. “Certainly it gives me satisfaction, more so than working on a speculative project for a developer. Those projects are complex puzzles to solve, though, frankly, not very inspiring.”

Putting Barnhart’s comments into perspective was Robert Harris, dean of the school of architecture at USC. He observed that “architecture at its best simply is about improving the quality of life,” adding that the imagination that this goal takes “is what inspiration is all about.”