Meyer Picks His Successor : Cliff Allen Lays Stress on Design for Social Good

When the founder of a successful architectural firm gets along in years he becomes concerned about the continuity of the practice that bears his name.

Who will maintain the momentum and carry the office into the next generation? Who can be trusted not to diminish a reputation it may have taken decades to build?

Architect Kurt Meyer has faced this situation for the past few years. At 65, after three busy decades, Meyer is thinking of easing up on his heavy workload to make time for private pleasures and public issues that have long exercised his mind.

‘Fresh Young Blood’

Meyer’s successor is 37-year-old partner Cliff Allen. Friday, Kurt Meyer Partners, based in Beachwood Village, north of Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, changed its name to Meyer & Allen Associates. Allen has been named president of the practice, and will eventually take over as major stockholder.

“My aim in appointing Cliff is to ensure continuity, bring in fresh young blood and maintain the firm’s assets,” Meyer said. “After searching around, I chose Cliff--who has been with us for eight years--to run the practice because I respect his integrity and dedication. I respect his commitment to the kind of social agenda that has always been one of my primary concerns.”

Allen has a history of concern with social and public issues that affect architecture and urban design. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley, he joined the Los Angeles Community Design Center as a volunteer in 1976. At the Community Design Center, he helped prepare a study on possible conversion of under-used Spring Street office buildings for senior citizen housing.

“I met Kurt when I was working on the Spring Street study,” Allen said. “He was then chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency board, and our proposals caught his attention at a time when the CRA was looking for ways to establish a residential community for the elderly downtown.”

Allen joined Kurt Meyer Partners when the firm was expanding after Meyer’s CRA tenure. Due to Meyer’s demanding role as CRA chairman, his practice--which now has a staff of 25--had shrunk to a core of four associates in the Beachwood Village office he built beside his townhouse in 1977.

Interest in Housing

Allen described himself as “a bit of a leftover-’60s activist out of Free Speech Berkeley.” He participated in marches to protest the bombing of Cambodia and was early on concerned with inner-city Skid Row housing conditions.

“I guess I’ll never quite shake this semi-socialist background,” Allen said with a smile. “My major areas of interest remain inner-city housing, especially for the elderly, and the design of urban areas as they evolve into, hopefully, humane environments.”

A dedicated workaholic, Allen lives alone in Silver Lake. “Marriage and hard work don’t easily go hand-in-hand,” he said. After a childhood spent moving around the world in company with his mining-engineer father, he has settled down in Los Angeles.

The range of projects Allen is handling at Meyer & Allen Associates varies in scale and character, from an addition to the Pasadena dog pound to master plans for the expansion of the Caltech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory campuses, and the revitalization of the Central City West district across the Harbor Freeway from downtown Los Angeles.

Inner-City Design

Among Allen’s major inner-city housing developments are high-rise mixed-use projects in South Park and at Sunset Boulevard and Grand Avenue on the edge of Chinatown.

The Chinatown project, developed by the Lowy Development Corp. and titled Grand Plaza, combines Allen’s concern for social housing and inner-city urban design.

“We held many meetings with the Chinese community,” he said. “And what emerged was a feeling that older people liked to be part of the life of the place, to see the passing scene in the street and the shops, so long as they felt secure. The last thing they wanted was to be shut away at the back of the site with nothing to look at but bare walls.”

Allen cites this as an example of how architects must study people before they seek physical solutions to complex social situations.

‘Aesthetic Arrogance’

“Designers seldom seem to ask the basic question: How do people really live? Too often they carry a baggage of preconceptions that are mainly ideological or abstractly visual. This can lead to an architecture that may be striking, yet remains humanly inappropriate. It’s a form of social condescension fueled by aesthetic arrogance.”

In the Caltech master plan, Allen convinced the institute’s authorities that the edges of the campus must become more sensitive to the urban fabric of the surrounding Pasadena residential districts. This involved a trade-off in which Caltech ceded some of its territory to the city in exchange for permission to almost double the building area within its borders.

“The result is that, when we go before the Pasadena Planning Commission at the end of July, the community will be our allies, not our enemies,” Allen said. “Creating that kind of social consensus is, to me, a vital part of what architecture’s all about.”