ART / Allan Jalon : Business Would Aid Art Under Bowers Museum’s Blueprint for Expansion

The worst clients for an architect, says Arthur Strock, are those who don’t know what kind of building they want. Strock learned that lesson as an architect, and he’s applying it these days as a client.

Strock and developer Roger N. Torriero are members of the Bowers Museum’s board of governors and are charged with figuring exactly how the museum wants to execute its recently revised concept for expansion.

The city-owned museum has decided to root its growth in a partnership with a private developer; Strock and Torriero are putting together a proposal for the Bowers board and are looking for the best developer for the task. The two meet once a week and speak almost daily about the plan, trying to settle details and a schedule.

Until March 15, the museum’s board had planned to spend $9.2 million in city redevelopment funds on a free-standing structure, designed last fall by the New York architecture firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. The plan was completed over two years at a cost of $1 million and was unveiled in September.

But a group of new board members added over the past year--including Strock and Torriero--had another idea: New museum space could be included in a commercial structure that a developer would be invited to build on museum land. The 52-year-old museum would not only get its new space (about 45,000 square feet, which would triple the amount of space it has now) but would share in the income from the new building’s tenants.

During a recent, joint interview, Strock and Torriero said they’d like to find a financially powerful developer with whom the museum would be, in Strock’s words, “as passive a player as possible.” By “passive,” Strock said he meant that the museum would invest as little of the city’s money as possible in putting up the building. “We are not,” he asserted, “putting this museum in the business of investing in real estate.

“We are looking at a concept that will take us into a ground floor of a commercial structure or structures,” said Strock, a heavyset, 6-foot, 4-inch 42-year-old from Newport Beach. “The Museum of Modern Art in New York had a developer build for-sale condominium housing units (as the upper floors of a new museum building in the mid-1970s). They sold the right to build in one shot. There was not a cash flow. We want that cash flow. We are talking about office space. We’re taking a long view of this. . . . We’re not looking for a windfall.”

“What we’re doing will be very entrepreneurial,” added Torriero, the bearded, 35-year-old president and founder of Griffin Realty Corp. “It is well known to people in the arts in this county that a lot of institutions here, including the Orange County Performing Arts Center, are finding themselves strapped for money. They are having to push harder and harder for corporate funding, and they can’t do all that they want to do, and they are looking for alternative ways to think about getting funding.”

Both men acknowledged, however, that the demand for office space in Orange County has slackened recently. Given such a soft market, is it realistic to be talking about building and leasing new offices to derive income for a museum?

“Roger thinks it can be done, and he’s a bright guy,” said Strock. “You’re questioning the collective wisdom of a lot of bright guys.”

Perhaps, but bright ideas for expanding the Bowers have faded before. In 1980, there was a $17-million plan to expand the museum. That campaign was in disarray by 1982, as support groups quibbled over the design and donations lagged. Another effort veered off track with a change in City Hall leadership in 1984. And this isn’t the first time that some kind of private/public partnership has been proposed. What makes Torriero and Strock think they will succeed?

“In the past, the Bowers was a benign, passive thing, an inactive artifact,” said Strock. “It existed by depending on the city, and nobody paid much attention to it. Now we have a more activist board than ever before. There is a lot of determination to make the museum stand on its own.”

He and Torriero noted that the museum took a major step toward independence in 1987 when the city agreed to establish the board as a private, nonprofit corporation. The board has nearly doubled in size since then, to 14 members; an additional eight or so are expected to be brought aboard in the coming months. With the right income, prestige, connections and professional skills, these new members could give the Bowers unprecedented momentum toward its goals.

But Strock and Torriero say they’re also preoccupied with a topic more fundamental than the structure of a real estate deal. At a retreat the board took in January, Strock recalled, “a big topic of conversation was what kind of museum we are and what kind we want to be. There is a traditional way of identifying a museum, and that is by its collection. We identify the Metropolitan Museum in New York by its fine collections, including, say, its fine Dutch paintings, its Rembrandts. But a museum’s purpose is also educational. . . .

“I don’t think museums can afford to build great collections the way they once did. I think we will de-emphasize collecting as opposed to the educational uses of the museum.”

Strock has been visiting the museum since he was 10, when he moved to Newport Beach from Los Angeles. Torriero, who grew up on the East Coast, became aware of the Bowers more recently. “I’m more interested in where we are today and where we are going than where we have been,” he said. “I’m not completely steeped in the history of the museum, but I’m going to help by concentrating my professional background on making a concept a reality.”

He paused and looked at Strock. “We are going to be very pragmatic.”