ART : Architecture Panel Limited by Design

The Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana held up an X-ray of its programming instincts Thursday night with a panel entitled “What Is and What Will Be: An Examination of the Architectural Selection Process in Orange County.”

On one level, the justification for this panel was the facility’s display of a traveling exhibit of famous architects’ drawings for buildings never completed.

Mike McGee, the museum’s curator, said he decided to have a panel exploration into how clients chose architects in Orange County.

Thus, the Modern Museum charged up to $10 to hear “prominent architects, developers and Realtors involved in the selection process talk about the fact that local architects are often overlooked in favor of people from outside,” he said.

Unfortunately, the selection of panelists raised doubts about the impartiality of their views and the museum’s judgment. The group predominantly seemed to reflect self-interested associations that prevented the event from touching on the breadth of architectural activity in the county.

Just one private developer took part: Roger N. Torriero, president of Griffin Realty Corp., a real estate investment company that developed the building in which the Modern Museum of Art gets free space. Torriero also sits on the Modern Museum’s board of directors.

Beside him sat the only local architect speaking on the panel: Carl McLarand, senior partner of the Costa Mesa-based firm of McLarand Vasquez & Partners--the architect on a Torriero project in Huntington Beach.

The only out-of-county architect speaking was New York-based Norman Pfeiffer, who has done $1 million worth of design work for the rebuilding of the Bowers Museum and is bidding to do more work for Bowers. Torriero is one of the two members of Bowers Museum’s board of governors who will play a leading role in evaluating of the bids. The night’s moderator was Arthur V. Strock, a county architect who is also a Bowers governor who will examine Pfeiffer’s bid.

Free agents on the panel were David J. Neumann, campus architect at UC Irvine, who has helped plan buildings by such well-known architects as Robert Venturi, Frank Gehry and Charles Moore, and Sam Hall Kaplan, architecture critic for The Times.

How can one expect anything approaching an intellectually honest, balanced discussion about hiring architects when the presence and connections of one participant--Torriero--so permeated the event?

Strock, a director with the county’s American Institute of Architects (AIA) chapter, said he sought various other architects and developers without success.

“If I could do it over again, I’d wish I could have a few more people,” he said afterward. “Perhaps I was naive about it. I didn’t know McLarand was doing work for Roger (Torriero) until after it was over.”

Before about 30 people, Torriero dominated the evening with talk about his developments and views, which can be easily summarized: His developments are “progressive” and wonderful; city planners who regulate developers are stupid; slow growth is “wrong” because it thwarts development; McLarand is a fine architect.

Torriero took a hard shot at McLarand, asking: “How do you feel when other architects (win contracts) for which you are able to compete?”

McLarand said it didn’t please him, but he did say he likes working for “entrepreneurial developers, people like Roger,” one of several plugs he gave his client.

Through it all, UCI’s Neumann said relatively little, while Kaplan of The Times addressed himself to the night’s topic by dismissing its legitimacy. Whether architects are local or foreign, he said, is not an issue, but rather the quality of the architecture.

“The problem with a home-grown architecture,” he said, “is that it can be incestuous and produce a kind of blandness. . . . What does that mean: ‘local-born’ architects? Who cares? We can have extraterrestrials build our buildings. I don’t care. . . . (as a user of the building), the thing that concerns me about Griffin Towers is not who built it, but what it looks like and will it suit my needs.”

Torriero argued with Kaplan’s complaints about county architecture by holding up an example of “very interesting” work by a local architect. Guess which one? That’s right--McLarand.

There are other highly regarded architectural firms in the county. Some have recently been involved with important local architectural work. Leason Pomeroy Associates of Orange is designing the new terminal at John Wayne Airport; the Blurock Partnership of Newport Beach was involved with the Orange County Performing Arts Center. None was represented.

No one from the most prominent developers in the county--the Koll Co., Irvine Co. or C.J. Segerstrom & Sons--took part.

No one asked for a representative the Newport Harbor Art Museum, museum director Kevin Consey said. The Newport Museum has brought Renzo Piano, one of the world’s leading young architects, to the county to build its new home in Corona del Mar. (Piano was on site just last week.)

Betsy Olenick Dougherty, a Newport Beach architect who is statewide chairwoman for the AIA, said she wasn’t approached. No city planner, public official or public interest representative involved with the politics and bureaucracies that inevitably affect local architectural choices was there.

The evening might simply be set down as another harmless wisp of Babbittry dispersing in the Orange County night, but Torriero and the Modern Museum do not seem likely to drift away.

Torriero is a key player on the Bowers board at a time when the museum faces major changes. He is in a position to apply at Bowers the values reflected in his work at the Modern Museum, which is courting the sort of publicity accorded more established arts institutions.

Nobody should be so naive as to think that museums’ programs are all fully detached from the ambitions of people empowered by wealth, history or accident to pull the little strings that make such programs available. But some organizations are more blatant than others about exposing the strings and how hard they pull.

On Thursday, Torriero and the Modern Museum program’s organizers indicated that they define a museum as a place that gives its overseers an audience for their personal purposes. One might lament their apparent ignorance of the fine differences between education and self-promotion, between a museum program and a trade fair for little verbal favors.

But they probably know where the lines fall. The question is whether they care.