Architects See More Theaters in Their Future

When architects for the Orange County Performing Arts Center were chosen in the spring of 1981, the first name announced was Claudill Rowlett Scott, a giant Houston-based design and engineering firm with sufficient prestige to dazzle potential fund-raisers.

Only two weeks later did the public learn that the design of Costa Mesa’s ambitious, theatrical landmark would be done in joint venture with the Blurock Partnership, a much smaller, local architectural firm.

The Blurock partners say they considered the delayed announcement of their firm’s selection “a little disappointing,” and they believe that partly because of it many people won’t know Blurock’s role in the project when the Center opens later this month.

“Even to this day I don’t think that they (the Blurock partners) get the same recognition” for working on the Center, said Ray Watson, who chaired the committee that selected CRS and Blurock.

But in the long run, Blurock partners expect that their firm’s participation in the creation of the Center will catapult it into prominence as a theater architect. Already Blurock has begun to compete for more theater contracts and says it has landed tentative agreements to design 20 amphitheaters throughout the nation in the next five years.

In fact, associating with larger and more illustrious firms is the kind of compromise that Blurock has made throughout its 30-year history to become Orange County’s longest surviving and one of its largest home-grown architectural businesses.

It was Blurock, after all, that sought out CRS (which later through a merger with another firm became CRSS) as a joint venture partner when it looked as if such an association would be essential to win the Performing Arts Center project in competition against bigger-name, out-of-town architectural firms.

Other contenders included Los Angeles-based Welton Beckett, which designed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill partnership in San Francisco whose bid was championed by Henry Segerstrom, one of the Orange County Center’s principal benefactors.

Bill Blurock, the firm’s chairman and chief executive officer, said that although he was elated that his firm survived the first cut made by the Center’s facilities committee, that wasn’t enough. “We felt we also wanted the job,” he said of the project, which he coveted as “the most prestigious that has ever come along in the county.”

Big in County

With annual fees of $4 million and 13 architect partners, Blurock is one of the biggest fish among Orange County-based architectural firms, but the privately owned firm is a minnow compared to CRSS, a publicly held corporation which reaped $357 million in gross revenue in its last fiscal year.

And although Blurock had built numerous school theaters and auditoriums, including a performing arts complex in El Cajon, before tackling the 3,200-seat Orange County Performing Arts Center, it had done nothing to compare with the three huge performance centers that CRSS had designed in Houston; Akron, Ohio, and Louisville, Ky.

Those involved in the development of the Orange County Center say Blurock was shrewd to have aligned itself with CRSS. “They would not have gotten the job without CRSS,” said John Rau, who was president and chief executive officer of the Center when the architectural team was selected. He added, “I’m sure they’ve gotten a hell of a boost to their reputation.”

Swallowing its pride, Blurock agreed that CRSS would supply the lead design architect, while Blurock’s architects would take on the less glamorous and more detailed job of producing working blueprints and supervising day-to-day construction.

Similarly, in the mid 1950s Blurock plunged into what ultimately evolved into a lucrative business of designing community colleges by associating with a larger Los Angeles architectural company, Neutra & Alexander, to work on the first buildings at Orange Coast College. Later Blurock became the lead architect at that Costa Mesa campus.

Blurock further enhanced its stature as a community college architect and gained what later would prove to be an important professional association when it joined with CRSS in the 1960s to design Cypress College.

International Reputation

Over the years, Blurock earned a local as well as international reputation as a designer of schools and community colleges. Chances are that anyone raised in Orange County will have attended an elementary, junior high or high school designed by the firm. In addition, the company says it has done architectural work on nine of the county’s 10 community college campuses.

Under contract with Irvine-based Far West Services, subsequently acquired by W.R. Grace, Blurock also designed more than 300 restaurants throughout the country, including numerous Coco’s and Rueben’s outlets and three floating replicas of Mississippi river boats, the first of which was the Reuben E. Lee in Newport Beach.

Other Orange County landmarks that bear the Blurock imprint include the civic center mall in Santa Ana, which Blurock master-planned, the Sherman Foundation Gardens and Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar, the Marriott Hotel in Newport Beach, Allergan Pharmaceutical’s corporate headquarters in Irvine, and the new Santa Ana Transportation Center.

Blurock senior partner Robert I. Hench said the firm is bent on doing “more exciting architecture” and seeking more publicity for it.

Several local architects said Blurock has a “solid reputation” as a competent architectural firm that can keep a project running smoothly. The firm, they said, has never been noted as a flashy designer.

Blurock, in joint venture with the larger Los Angeles firms of William L. Pereira & Associates and A. Quincy Jones, Fredrick E. Emmons & Associates, helped to draft the original master plan for the UC Irvine campus. But the only major building at the UCI campus that Blurock has designed is the student center.

Hench said he believes that UCI has “young people on the (architect) selection committees who read the architectural magazines,” which he said feature more “avant-garde” architectural firms.

Although lacking a reputation for architectural pizazz, Blurock has begun to land some prestigious jobs beside the Orange County Performing Arts Center. For instance, it designed Home Savings of America’s 2-year-old, 300,000-square-foot headquarters in Irwindale. Blurock was chosen as the architect partly because Home Savings wanted a “campus like” environment for its employees.

Aggressive Leadership

The Blurock Partnership’s growth and diversification is credited in large measure to the aggressiveness of Bill Blurock, who is both a founding member of the Orange County chapter of the American Institute of Architects and a member and past president of the California State Board of Architectural Examiners.

J. Herbert Brownell, another longtime Newport Beach architect, described Blurock as “good at politics. . . . The guy likes to get out and meet people and get business.”

The son of a dentist, Blurock grew up in Los Angeles and attended Manual Arts High School and later the USC School of Architecture. Then he made a beeline to Orange County.

“I always wanted to live at the beach,” said Blurock, who is an avid sailor and surfer. Blurock achieved the life style of his dreams in 1974 when the firm moved into a former shipyard building that he and his partners bought and renovated on Newport’s peninsula, just six blocks from his waterfront home. Since then he has been able to commute to work by car, foot or boat.

Now 65, Blurock is easing out of the daily grind of running an architectural company. He is spending more time on his 50-foot yacht in Vancouver, Canada, and gradually selling much of his stock in the firm to his two senior partners, Alan E. Smith, 55, and Hench, 58. Hench said that under the terms of a stock purchase agreement, he and Smith will own a majority interest in the Blurock Partnership within a year. He said Blurock will continue to work on special projects, do some marketing and serve as company spokesman.

Blurock recalled that when he moved to Orange County as a fledgling architect in 1947, he mostly designed houses. “All the big jobs went to architects in Los Angeles.”

So Blurock said he “ganged up” with a number of other Orange County architects to take on larger projects such as schools. A multi-architect firm was formed in 1953 that was called Pleger, Blurock, Hougan & Ellerbroek.

Blurock said that the firm, which changed its name with the coming and going of partners, has worked on “29 high schools in Orange County in the last 30 years,” in addition to numerous elementary schools, junior highs and community colleges.

Innovative Design

The Blurock firm gained international eminence in innovative school design primarily because of its association, starting in the 1950s, with an experimental School Planning Laboratory at Stanford University. Although the laboratory eventually closed, its former director, James D. MacConnell, continued to work as a private consultant and frequently recommended the Blurock firm to his clients throughout the country and the world.

MacConnell described Blurock as “people architects. They try to bring a home atmosphere to the school.”

Blurock, with dry humor, says he has tried to design schools that “look less like prisons.” His firm, he says, was one of the first in the country to use carpeting in classrooms when it designed Corona del Mar High School, which opened in 1962.

But the “bellwether school” for modern educational design, Hench recalled, was Estancia High School in Costa Mesa, which was built in 1965. Estancia was one of the first schools to have corridors replaced by clusters of classrooms that open into common areas for departmental displays and libraries. The Blurock philosophy is that schools should be “shopping centers” designed to stimulate student interest in their wares through the use of mall-like architecture, eye-catching kiosks, bright colors and murals.

“A lot of schools are official boxes of boredom,” Hench complained.

Expanding far beyond its home base, Blurock designed the American School of Rio de Janeiro. Within the last three years the firm has designed six new schools in Italy and a $40-million private school built by the Arabian American Oil Co. for 1,300 Muslim children in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia and master-planned the International School in Bahrain, a group of islands in the Arabian Sea. Blurock’s diversification into non-educational projects was spurred by Proposition 13 and the declining birth rate, which for the last 10 years has severely reduced the number of new schools built in California.

Hench said that while schools have always been Blurock’s “bread and butter,” the company’s work on school cafeterias gave it an entre into restaurant design, and its work on school auditoriums opened the way to theaters.

Blurock’s theater endeavors were also advanced by an employee, John von Szeliski, an architect who had a doctorate in theater arts. Von Szeliski made an important contribution to the design of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, according to those close to the project.

Pursues Assignments

Although von Szeliski left Blurock about a year ago to found his own theatrical consulting firm, the Blurock firm continues to pursue theater assignments. Von Szeliski said that as a consultant he may work with Blurock on specific projects.

Blurock partner Bill Bethmann said the firm has made proposals to design four indoor theaters in San Diego, Marin, and Monterey counties in California and Pima County, Ariz.

In addition, Bethmann said that to his knowledge Blurock is the only West Coast architectural firm that is actively trying to secure business in the nationally burgeoning amphitheater market. Allowing huge crowds to congregate in relatively cheap facilities, amphitheaters cater to the demands of young rock music fans.

So far Blurock has designed the 18,500-seat Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa for Nederlander Westand and the 17,000-seat Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View for Bill Graham Presents. The tent-like roof of the Shoreline Amphitheatre, which opened in July, was specially wrought in silicone-coated fiberglass to deflect the gusts of wind blowing off San Francisco Bay.

Also, Bethmann said Blurock has tentative agreements with entertainment firms to design 20 more amphitheaters over the next five years.

Blurock partners acknowledge that as a result of cost overruns stemming from the complexity of the main theater and the challenging requirements of the acousticians, their firm made virtually no profit from its work on the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Though pocketing little financial gain from the project and being obliged to play second fiddle to CRSS, the Blurock partners say they are thrilled by their part in building the Center. They expect to reap even bigger rewards in additional theater assignments after the Center opens Sept. 29 and is appraised by critics, spectators and performers.

“Let (Charles) Lawrence (the CRSS lead designer on the Center) take all of his bows,” Bethmann said. “We made it work.”