Orderly Succession for the Heirs to L.A.’s King of Architecture

If any individual can be credited with creating modern architecture in Los Angeles, it would be William Pereira.

A heroic figure at a time when the city was becoming a regional metropolis, Pereira was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 for his work as master planner of Orange County’s 93,000-acre Irvine Ranch. When he died in 1985, he had chalked up an Oscar-worthy list of design credits in a practice that spanned more than 50 years.

But in the late 1970s, plagued by health problems, Pereira had begun to cast around for younger architects to breathe fresh life into a practice that had gone stale. Looking beyond the walls of his own office for new talent, he settled on two bright young men: Scott Johnson and William Fain. Johnson was named director of design at Pereira Associates, Fain director of planning. Shortly before his death, Pereira made them major partners in charge of the practice which on June 1 will change its name to Johnson, Fain & Pereira Associates.

How well has the transition worked? And how have Johnson, 37, and Fain, 43, fared in succeeding a figure as influential and flamboyant as Bill Pereira?

In fact, the contrast in styles between Pereira and his successors couldn’t be more marked.

A Cesar Romero look-alike with a helmet of white hair and a noble profile, Pereira had star quality and a panoramic, wide-screen approach to architecture and city planning. He came to Los Angeles from his native Chicago to work as both architect and art designer for Paramount Studios, conjuring up special effects for Cecil B. DeMille’s “Reap the Wild Wind.”

His flair for the flamboyant is evident in the design of San Francisco’s needle-like Transamerica Tower and the spindly-legged Theme Restaurant at Los Angeles International Airport. He also devised the master plan for NASA’s rocket launching complex at Cape Canaveral.

Fain and Johnson, on the other hand, are more intellectual than their predecessor, and less charismatic, as befits the city’s more sober and corporate era--as well as the practice of architecture.

Evaluations of their work are beginning to surface, and appear mostly favorable. Judging from the response of national architectural magazines, Johnson and Fain have brought a new savvy and sophistication to the Pereira style, in both architecture and urban design, while continuing his concern for the large-scale environment.

Fox Plaza in Century City, the first example of a new breed of post-Pereira high-rises, is sleek yet distinctive. Glinting like Tutankhamen’s mummy case in the sun, the building’s multifaceted, colored-glass surfaces can be seen for miles around. The tower’s careful siting on a prominent rise dominating Olympic Boulevard displays an awareness of its important role in the articulation of the urban landscape.

“The unique character of skyscrapers in Los Angeles is that they tend not to be clustered, as in New York City, say, but stand alone as urban markers among a sea of low-rise building,” Johnson explained. “This makes their individual impact all the more striking.”

Fain’s contribution can be seen in the master plans of major urban complexes, from the expansion of the UC Irvine campus (which Pereira originally designed) to the creation of the new city of Ewa on the outskirts of Honolulu.

Fain and Johnson are old friends. They were classmates at UC Berkeley and Harvard Graduate School. Johnson was chief of design for New York City’s Johnson/Burgee Architects before joining Pereira Associates in the early ‘80s. Fain and Johnson had worked together earlier on the town plan for Woodland, Tex.

Fain said Pereira knew that his firm was drifting as architecture began shifting its focus.

“The Los Angeles he knew so well, and the Modernist design style that ruled the architectural ideology of his time, were in transition to a more complex era,” he said. “Most of the other five major architectural firms that had dominated the L.A. design scene in the post-World War II period--Welton Becket Associates, Daniel Mann Johnson and Mendenhall, Gruen Associates, the Luckman Partnership and Albert C. Martin and Associates--seemed to be in decline or stuck in a rut. Pereira resolved that the practice that bears his name would never suffer a fatal hardening of the creative arteries.”

It was Fain who brought Johnson to Pereira’s attention. “I felt Scott had the right combination of originality tempered by a hard-headed understanding of the essentially compromised and collaborative nature of the business of architecture,” said Fain.

Transition of Power

“I wanted to be a name designer, which I could never have been in Philip Johnson’s office,” Johnson explained. “Pereira was sympathetic--though there were some managerial problems to be overcome in the succession,” he added, refering to the complicated transition of power, first to seven partners, then to chairman Roy G. Schmidt, and finally to Fain and Johnson.

Johnson, who grew up in the Salinas Valley, is enjoying his return to California after his spell in New York City. (“I love the flat, white L.A. light,” he said). He settled with his wife, Meg, a gynecologist, and his 2-year-old son, Max, in a house in Hancock Park, a five-minute walk from the firm’s Wilshire Boulevard office.

Fain and his wife, Jennifer, a former legislative aide to Arizona Rep. Morris Udall, have two young daughters. Jennifer Fain is a docent at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which was designed by Pereira in the mid-1960s.

William Fain is a member of the board of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects, a trustee of the Los Angeles Library Assn., a member of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Architecture and Design Support Committee, and a nominee to the Mayor’s Design Advisory Panel.

‘A Tool of Thought’

Johnson, by his own description, is “a very private workaholic.” In his spare time, he does a great deal of drawing as “a tool of thought,” researches urban and architectural form--”the shape of things, the color of things”--and enjoys listening to music, which he compares to architecture as “the orchestration of varied elements into a strong formal structure.”

They describe their method of running the 70-person Pereira office as “a bivalve approach.” Johnson calls Fain “one of the best urban designers in the country, and a splendid contract negotiator.” Fain, in turn, points to Johnson’s “formal genius.”

Few of Pereira’s old clients have vanished in the succession, but “we’ve had to project a whole new energy level to keep the loyalty of our long-time clients, plus pull in new ones,” said Fain.

“In the last year or so, since Fox Plaza was finished, we’ve had a lot of new commissions. Fox Plaza was our watershed in establishing the credentials of the new Pereira Associates. Now we’re busy with a whole range of projects, from the design of the new campus for Otis Parsons School of Design near MacArthur Park to the big, new Rincon Center in San Francisco, a winery in the Napa Valley, a 67-acre master plan for Calabasas Park Centre, and an urban design study for a 4-mile stretch of the main highway in Indian Wells.”

“We are pragmatic visionaries,” Johnson added. “Purity of expression is not what we’re about--but then, neither was Pereira, despite the often Hollywood bravura of his architecture.

“I feel we’ve kept the faith, in our own fashion.”