Ambasz’s Mythical Vision Evident at La Jolla Exhibit

Last Saturday night, a diminutive, fashionably dressed man strode to the podium at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s Sherwood Auditorium and announced that architect and designer Emilio Ambasz, the subject of the museum’s new exhibition and the evening’s scheduled lecturer, could not attend. The man said he was an acquaintance standing in.

In fact, the man went on to say, there is no Emilio Ambasz. Instead, there are two creators who occasionally collaborate. There is Ambasz, who designs practical objects such as chairs, razors, lighting systems and diesel engines--useful things for people. Then there is Emilio, the architect who wants his buildings “to be received by angels.”

This mythical approach to architecture, as well as Ambasz’s profound reverence for nature, make his work feel like a fresh gust blowing through spec-built America.

Americans seem hungry for what Ambasz has to offer. At one point during his talk (nobody was fooled by his introduction), the crowd cheered after he showed photos of a hotel lobby in Lugano, Switzerland, an abstract diorama of mountains, sky and clouds.

After all, he told the audience, “architecture and design are myth-making arts.” He then proceeded to talk about the ideas that have made him one of the world’s most innovative and prolific designers. For the quality of his work, he is also one of the least known.

On the industrial side, Ambasz estimated he holds 150 to 180 design patents for products, ranging from a flexible ballpoint pen to ergonomically sound razors, toothbrushes and flashlights, many of them still in the development stage. One of his crowning achievements in industry was the redesign of a Cummins diesel engine. He cooled it with oil instead of water, which made it more compact and longer-lasting, and designed it with a sleek, flat-black exterior he hoped would leave “smitten truck drivers swooning.”

Among his buildings, the Lucile Halsell Conservatory, a recently completed botanical garden in San Antonio, Tex., is becoming a photogenic darling of the design world. A main distinguishing feature is an Ambasz trademark: the way most of the building space is covered with rolling green landscape.

Yet the Argentina-born Ambasz is no Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I’m a city jungle boy,” he confessed. “Give me seven days of nature and I get sick of it.” Of his fascination with nature, the way he often camouflages projects beneath landscaping, he said: “I’m doing this for other people. If I’m going to build, I have to ask permission of the place. I have to fold the building into what existed.”

At the Texas project, stunning glass pavilions erupt through the carpet of green like primeval geology in the making. The largest is conical and houses giant palm trees.

Also typically Ambasz is the way the visitor enters the garden, through a carefully choreographed series of enclosures strung out in a long, straight line, a formal procession borrowing heavily from the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome.

The entry is through an opening in a wall holding back the earth above the structure. Then comes a circular courtyard decorated with a single tree, a corridor, the first pavilion and, finally, a courtyard ringed by exhibit rooms.

Ambasz loves the cloistered courtyard--giving a building’s users a controlled slice of Eden at the heart of a project, while the exterior often presents blank walls.

His project list is worldwide, including a new department store and 30-story twin towers in Japan, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City, a Mercedes-Benz showroom in New Jersey, a planned computer research center in Mexico City and the interiors for branches of the Banque Bruxelles Lambert in Europe.

Unfortunately, Ambasz’s mythical architecture remains mostly mythical to date. The San Antonio project is the only built and photographed design. He said a house in Spain, for a secretive and wealthy couple, has also been built, but no one connected with the show has seen any evidence. Even Lynda Forsha, the museum curator who put the show together, seemed unsure about whether to take Ambasz’s word on the house.

“There are a lot of myths surrounding it, and no one’s sure if it’s built,” she said.

The Japanese high-rises are under construction, Ambasz said, and, according to Forsha, a cultural center and department store in Japan appear close to breaking ground.

Somewhere, however, the La Jolla exhibit ought to make it more clear that Ambasz’s architecture remains largely unrealized.

His designs include houses that consist of rooms around a sunken courtyard concealed behind a high, L-shaped wall of rough white stucco. But he says he doesn’t want residential work right now.

“That requires a very deep relationship with a client. I perhaps am not mature enough. Perhaps when I’m older and wiser.”

Ambasz has strong feelings about what an architect’s priorities must be, and why much of contemporary urban America has been built up in mediocre fashion. In America, big business is too driven by the pressures of Wall Street to invest in revolutionary designs, he said.

“American corporations want every investment to pay off in the next quarter. There’s no long-range vision.”

We could learn from the examples of Italy, he said. Italian industry is committed to quality and innovations in design, not pricing. Wealthy Italian financiers appreciate good design. A competent design press keeps the public aware of the latest trends. And middle-class Italians are quite different from middle-class Americans, he said.

A woman who cleans his New York apartment, he said, might come across an unusual design object and react with, “Move this.” His cleaning woman in Italy would probably remark, “How beautiful!”

“I certainly could go to an Italian client and say a project’s beauty is reason enough to do it, and they’ll find a way to do it,” he said. That won’t often work in America.

The architect or designer should “believe you have to posit alternative solutions,” regardless of the expected reaction of the client or the financial feasibility.

This no-holds-barred creativity is what allows him to come up with ideas such as his competition-winning master plan for the 1992 Universal Exposition in Seville, Spain, a world expo celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America.

Ambasz decided that the most important thing was what Seville would be like after the exposition. So he created a series of man-made lagoons in which exhibits would have floated on barges. When the expo was done, the barges would motor away down the Guadalquivir River, leaving a pristine public park for the people of Seville.

Unfortunately, this, too, is among the great Ambasz designs never to be built, Forsha said, adding that it remains unclear what political forces vetoed his winning scheme, or even whether some other design has taken its place.

Ambasz has had an unusual and precocious path to the height of his myth making. He polished off the undergraduate program in architecture at Princeton in a year and, by the end of the next, had completed the master’s. He was curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1970 to 1976, where he curated shows on Italian design and Mexican architect Luis Barragan, among others. He has maintained offices in New York and Bologna, Italy, since 1976.

Certainly Ambasz is hoping that the attention he gets from this traveling show and from national media attention paid to the San Antonio project will help him rise from the ranks of the paper architects.

The La Jolla exhibition includes architectural models, drawings and photographs, as well as many of Ambasz’s product designs: the revolutionary Vertebra chair and its cousins, lighting systems and much more.

La Jolla Museum Director Hugh Davies, who took classes from Ambasz at Princeton, had wanted to do a show of his work for a long time.

The excellent exhibit installation was designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who concealed each object behind a folding paper screen.

After its La Jolla premiere, which lasts through Aug. 6, the exhibit will tour internationally through the end of 1991.