An Architect’s Architect Succumbs to L.A.’s Charms

As a young Navy pilot flying over England from a U.S. airfield in the 1950s, Barton Myers began to be excited by his aerial panorama of the spires, domes and towers of such architectural glories as Blenheim Palace and Ely Cathedral.

“I happened to live in the guest house of a man named John Crittall, chief of Britain’s major window-manufacturing firm,” Myers recalled. “He turned me on to architecture and sent me off to audit lectures on architectural history at Cambridge University.

“Flying over the old towns and villages of East Anglia gave me a wonderful bird’s-eye view of one of the world’s most attractive man-made environments. When my tour of duty was over, I decided to quit the Navy and study design.”

‘Seduced by Los Angeles’

Myers now owns a home nestled on the lip of the Hollywood Bowl, with a view of nighttime lights stretching from the Cahuenga Pass and the Griffith Observatory to Century City.

“What architect could fail to be seduced by Los Angeles?” said the transplanted Virginian/Torontonian. “Look at the electrographic pizazz of Hollywood Boulevard down there below--all those glowing neon signs and illuminated towers. It truly is a Magic Kingdom!”

Tall, rangy and hawk-faced, Myers is among the many top-flight talents attracted by Los Angeles’ increasing reputation as a leading city for architects and designers in the U.S. He is considered an architect’s architect by his peers, yet is not a superstar.

Myers, 53, fell for Los Angeles when he was invited by the late dean Harvey Perloff to become a visiting professor at the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Planning in the late 1970s.

“I loved the city’s energy,” he said, “and its capacity for change, and its potential to become one of the great metropolises of the world.”

In 1979-80, he led the All Stars team that competed for, but did not win, the development of California Plaza on Bunker Hill. Titled “A Grand Avenue,” the Myers-led entry combined the talents of a galaxy of fine designers, including Frank Gehry, Charles Moore, Cesar Pelli, Ricardo Legoretta and the Urban Innovations Group.

After the California Plaza disappointment, Myers, whose practice was centered in Toronto until he relocated here in 1986, prepared plans for the expansion of the downtown Central Library and for the Pasadena Civic Center. Currently, he is designing the proposed $27-million Cerritos Community Center, the master plan for UCLA’s west and northwest campuses, and a house in Beverly Hills for film producer Ivan Reitman. Barton Myers Associates has recently been chosen as architect for the expansion of Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, and is a finalist, with James Stirling and Moshe Safdie, for the proposed Toronto Ballet Opera House.

In mid-1987 Myers submitted a series of innovative proposals for the development of the properties along 1st Street between Hill and Hope streets, including the planned expansion of the Music Center--now to be the Disney Hall. Myers’ notion, which was rejected, was to place the new concert hall over Grand Avenue, at the top of the Civic Mall, linking it to the open plaza between the Chandler Pavilion and the Mark Taper Forum.

Hailed by county officials as “a superb solution to the urban design and land-use challenges of the site,” Myers’ design was disliked by the Music Center’s Performing Arts Council as “difficult to market for fund raising.”

The first major building Myers realized in Los Angeles was the theme tower of the Howard Hughes Center in Westchester. The theme tower, at 6701 Center Drive West, is the flagship of a fleet of buildings projected for the 69-acre triangular site at Sepulveda Boulevard and the San Diego Freeway.

Ambitious, a Leader

“Working with Barton was a very positive experience,” said Bill McGregor, president of Tooley West Inc., the Howard Hughes Center’s managing developers. “He is a good team leader, yet he can take direction from a client. Although an obviously ambitious man, in the best sense, his ego never made him deaf to our concerns.”

Myers is a sixth-generation Virginian. The family home on Brandon Avenue in Norfolk, Va., built in 1791, now belongs to the Norfolk Museum. The house was constructed by Moses Myers, “probably a Sephardic Jew transplanted to Amsterdam from Spain,” said Myers’ wife, Vicki. The family lost the house in the Depression, a few years before Barton Myers was born.

Vicki George was the girl next door.

“I was 15 when I met Barton,” she said. “He was a cadet at (the U.S. Naval Academy at) Annapolis, training to be a Navy pilot. When, after graduation, he was posted to England, we decided to get married.” Summing up her three decades of marriage to “a great guy, very talented and very obsessed,” Vicki pronounced it “an undiluted joy. It’s been a tremendous adventure.”

Friends describe Vicki as “Barton’s rock.”

“He’s damn lucky to have her,” said close friend painter Phyllis Contini. “Vicki is the base from which Barton forays, and to which he returns. She believes utterly in the man and in the work.

“Vicki’s helped run Barton’s office, and is a tremendous social asset to a man whose head is buried in his drawing board 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Her only other real interest has been (only daughter) Suzanne. Now Suzanne’s away at Princeton, Vicki is totally Barton-centered.”

Myers’ Influences Told

In 1961, Myers enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania school of architecture. There he came under the influence of architect and urban designer Louis Kahn and urbanist Edmund Bacon. After a spell as an assistant in Kahn’s Philadelphia office, Myers migrated to Toronto, where he became involved in an international competition to design the Toronto city hall.

At the time, Toronto was in turmoil.

“Expressways, radical urban renewal projects, the destruction of old neighborhoods, all the cockeyed energies of the era were threatening to degrade the city’s historic and social character,” Myers said.

With his partner, South African Jack Diamond, and other allies, Myers helped win a noted victory in 1972 when he spurred the reform-minded new city council to impose a 45-foot height limit on all new downtown construction for two years. Developers were outraged, but the height moratorium gave Toronto time to rethink its options. The city developed a balanced plan that encouraged an even distribution of building densities and a mixture of uses in its central core.

Respected Work in Canada

The partnership of Myers and Diamond resulted in some highly regarded architecture and urban design in Canada--including the Housing Union Building for the University of Alberta in Edmonton and Edmonton’s Citadel Theater--before it dissolved in acrimony over its leadership in 1975.

The house Myers built for himself in Toronto in 1970 is in contrast with his Hollywood Hills Spanish home. High-tech, with exposed foil-wrapped ductwork and an almost totally open plan, the Yorkville townhouse makes a radically modernist statement. The Hollywood home is rambling, undemanding and thoroughly casual.

This transition is a key to the evolution of Myers’ design style. Strongly influenced in younger years by Kahn and Charles Eames, whose Pacific Palisades house is an icon of technological virtuosity, Myers’ architecture now fuses the contemporary and the historic, the high-tech and the vernacular.

Several of Myers’ later projects demonstrate this subtle fusion, including the new Portland, Ore., Performing Arts Center, the small library at Unionville, Ontario, and the Seagram Museum at Waterloo, Ontario.

“In the Unionville Library, respect for context, an urbane wit, and a light grace of means effect a design that is true to its rural heritage yet is ironically modern in its overlay of styles,” wrote Architecture magazine.

Great Craftmanship

“The building shell and the little temples within it have been executed with great craftsmanship and pride,” wrote Architectural Record magazine in a review of the Seagram Museum. “The steel is expressed in the high-tech manner--but it is high tech with a difference. The renovation draws forth a beauty in the old whiskey warehouse’s great pine frame interior.”

In 1985, Myers’ reputation took root at the highest level when he won the competition for the Phoenix, Ariz., Municipal Government Center, beating out finalists Arata Isozaki and Michael Graves.

The design for the Phoenix center, recently exhibited at UCLA’s Wight Gallery and discussed at an October, 1987, UCLA seminar, weaves Myers’ strengths into one seamless visual narrative.

‘Source of Pride’

On an 11-block site in the heart of Phoenix, adjoining the city’s Beaux Arts city hall, Myers devised an urbane civic building complex with a 300-square-foot outdoor public plaza. Mayor Terry Goddard has praised it as “an example to others who will build in downtown Phoenix, and a source of pride for all Phoenicians.”

Myers sees this approach as specially valid for the development of districts like Hollywood.

“What we need in Hollywood is not concentration but distribution,” he said. “New buildings must insert themselves evenly into the area’s rich texture, not rip the fabric with over-scaled and historically insensitive mega-projects.

“We need low densities that allow for open spaces and preserve the vistas of the hills beyond. Overbuilding can destroy this charming neighborhood.”

Design Review

With an office staffed by 30 associates and assistants on the second floor of the old Art Deco Paramount Building on Hollywood Boulevard, Myers considers himself a dyed-in-the-wool Hollywoodian. In late 1987, he was appointed by Councilman Michael Woo to lead a design review committee charged with advising Woo on the evolution of the 30-year, $1-billion Hollywood redevelopment project.

“Hollywood is central, affordable, and close to home,” Myers said. “I can walk down the hill to work. Besides, I love its social and architectural variety, its mixture of fine buildings and trash, of derelicts and tourists, the ‘cooked and the raw,’ as (cultural anthropologist Claude) Levi-Strauss would say. Hollywood is one of the few truly urban areas L.A. has.”