Architecture Flunks Happiness Test, UCI Audience Is Told

“We are not making people happy in our buildings,” architect Ricardo Legorreta of Mexico told a capacity audience at UC Irvine on Thursday night. “In good architecture, either a queen or a beggar would feel very happy.”

Decrying the fashionable status of architecture today and the cult of personality, Legorreta, 57, called architecture “an opportunity to continue God’s work” and reminded his listeners that architects should serve society, bringing “good art, good taste and happiness to everyday life.”

The lecture was part of a series on museum design, but Legorreta chose not to show slides of his museum projects (the Children’s Discovery Museum and the Technology Center of Silicon Valley, both in San Jose). Instead, he focused on his designs for private homes and two hotels.

“The most important spaces are those in which you live,” Legorreta said, adding that he sees no difference between architecture and interior design.

He also showed a factory and an industrial complex, and it rapidly became clear that living or working in a Legorreta building involves a sensuous awareness of light, color and space akin to sensations evoked by certain environmental sculpture.

Cutting rectangles and squares out of his simple, blocky walls, he creates windows that project inside instead of outside, and skylights that throw patterns of shadow and light on walls and floors. In one of his houses, he pointed out, the color of the walls changes according to the intensity of available light.

A sense of creative pragmatism infuses his work. In one house, he made the main entrance the one that leads from the garage, because that’s the path his clients normally took. For the 450-room Hotel Camino Real Ixtapa in Mexico, he took out all the public air conditioning (except for meeting rooms) and created outdoor seating areas for a 15% reduction in cost.

Besides, he asked, isn’t it strange that in Mexico and Southern California, where the weather is so beautiful, we are always sitting in the air-conditioned indoors? So each bedroom in the hotel also has an outdoor terrace--and each would have had a private pool, too, except that the hotel owner put his foot down. “They will not go to the bars and restaurants,” he told the architect. “And there will be problems with room service.”

Water is a key factor in Legorreta’s buildings. In the Ixtapa hotel, the public pools are “fountains in which you swim, instead of just swimming pools,” he said, showing several slides of pools in which jets of water spurt fancifully into the air.

Legorreta likes corridors and stairways (“There’s nothing wrong with walking for the pleasure of it”). He is keen on surprises: the mass of the hotel blocks the view of the sea, letting the visitor discover it only after entering.

And he enjoys punctuating his sturdy horizontal forms with simple, boldly colored vertical elements. A sculptural bright purple slab punctuated by a grid of small, square openings stands proudly against the blue sky in a hotel-office-retail complex in Dallas.

The negative public response to the color was identical, the architect said, to the way people greeted the bright purple walls of Tustin Market Place, a Legorreta project designed with Leason Pomeroy Associates of Orange. But the people in Dallas listened when Legorreta asked them to wait and acclimate themselves to the surprising hue, he said. (In Tustin, the walls hastily were repainted brown by the Irvine Co.)

A house Legorreta designed in a coastal area of southern Mexico was influenced in part by the bright blue of the sea. “A blue house!” he thought to himself. “Why not?” But the crowning touch by this master of nature-responsive architecture was to let the house “disappear” under a mass of brilliantly colored flowers.

Sponsored by the Architecture Foundation of Orange County and the Newport Harbor Art Museum--for whose new building Legorreta had been short-listed, losing to Renzo Piano--the lecture was supported by UCI, Haworth Inc. and Wavell-Huber Wood Products Inc. The next speaker in the series, on April 9 at 7:30 p.m., is Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelblau, based in Vienna and Los Angeles.