L.A.’s New-Wave Designers Draw Global Attention

In his studio in Vienna, architect Wolf Prix sat reading an Italian design magazine featuring Los Angeles’ avant-garde design, and licked his lips in envy and delight.

“So much creative energy seems to be pulsing out of Los Angeles,” he said. “To most young European architects like me, Southern California is the most exciting place to be right now.”

Prix’s feelings about Los Angeles design are widely shared by architects all over the United States and around the world. In the last few years, Los Angeles designershave spun a glittering web that has trapped global attention. International design magazines often headline their projects, and leading avant-garde architects everywhere watch Los Angeles with envious eyes.

Los Angeles’ new wave has enlivened the urban scene with marvelously atmospheric new restaurants such as Kate Mantilini and Angeli, with glittering showrooms such as Design Express and vividly expressive media production houses such as Propaganda Films, with small shops and office buildings filled with color, light and verve, and with a host of architecturally innovative private homes from Malibu to Irvine.

These experimental designs challenge the viewer’s conventional feelings about space with their skewed perspectives and oddly angled walls. Rooms are slashed with unexpected openings. Crude materials like corrugated iron sheeting and raw particle board shock the eye. Rusted iron and raw concrete surfaces jibe with sleek alabaster, set off by a palette of colors that seem to leap from the pages of Batman comics.

New-wave buildings expose the guts of their construction by giving glimpses of their structural skeletons. They comment upon their own architectural pretensions with an engagingly ironic wit, by using common items in uncommon ways. And they play with forms, often distorting them to recreate them anew.

Play, says architect Michael Rotondi, who founded the experimental studio Morphosis, has long been a serious business in Los Angeles. “The unraveling of the mundane through the magic of fun is intrinsic to our style,” he said. “Look at our movies. Look at our architectural extravaganzas like Robert Derrah’s Coca-Cola bottling plant, shaped like an ocean liner. Look at our Brown Derbys and Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stands shaped like the things they sell. The movies taught us we can build anything we can imagine and imagine anything we might care to build.”

At the heart of this busy new design web is Los Angeles’ dreaming spider, architect Frank Gehry. After years of anonymity, Gehry has recently won many international honors including architecture’s Nobel--the prestigious Pritzker Prize.

Gehry’s vibrant web extends its strands from his Santa Monica office across the Westside, linking the growing number of younger architects he has influenced.

The catalogue of “Gehry Kids” includes Michael Rotondi and Thom Mayne of Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss, Fred Fisher, Frank Israel, Rebecca Binder, Michele Saee, Julie Eizenberg and Hank Koning, Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung, Robert Mangurian, Brian Murphy, Coy Howard and Janek Bielski, and a widening circle of Gehry’s spiritual grandchildren.

Although architecture launched Los Angeles’ new wave, non-architect designers have also captured the world’s attention.

These include graphic designers April Greiman, Sheila de Bretteville, Charles White and Deborah Sussman, artist-designer Peter Shire and artist-photographer Jayme Odgers, lighting designer Ron Rezek, and a host of new wave interior designers including Larry Totah and Roy McMakin. The vigorous Los Angeles design spectrum extends to fashion designers such as Michele Lamy, whose casually chic couture epitomizes the admired L.A. look.

The labels given Gehry and the Gehryians are clumsy and confusing. Some critics dub them “deconstructivist.” Others prefer the equally obscure “technomorphist.” At different times the style has been tagged “blendo,” “free style” and “pop-modernist” but these descriptions didn’t stick.

Gehry prefers the metaphor of a cocktail party for the chaotically ordered style he has spawned.

“At a cocktail party everyone--short and tall, male and female, the striking and the conventional--is very much an individual, yet collectively they create a fascinating interaction,” he explained. “I do the same thing in a building. I break it down into its component bits, then find an energetic way to fit the pieces together again.”

Crossovers and collaborations among Los Angeles architects and designers are blurring the boundaries between the design disciplines.

Architects feel free to design furniture and clothes while designers feel free to design buildings. At the same time, mixed groups like the newly formed Harmonica, which includes architects Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung, graphic designer Charles White and artist-photographer Jayme Odgers, combine to create multimedia designs that cover everything from light shows to rock temples.

Many of these innovative designers are associated with the crucible of the Los Angeles avant-garde--the Santa Monica-based Southern California Institute of Architecture, known to the cognoscenti as SCI-ARC.

In SCI-ARC’s crudely converted industrial sheds, about 400 students worry about the problem of reinventing architecture. Its scruffy students are known for their fierce unconventionality.

An example of SCI-ARC’s essential difference from more conventional architecture schools was demonstrated in a 1986 joint study project for the design of temporary housing for homeless families carried out with students from UCLA and Woodbury University.

While the other students took the troubling responsibility of trying to create a humane architecture for the homeless, the SCI-ARC group designed a deliberately ugly building to honestly reflect the desperation of shelterless families. Why be pretty or polite, they demanded, when the circumstances are so brutal?

The reasons for the recent surge of international interest in Los Angeles design range from the subtle to the superficial.

Much of the glamour is the result of media hype: The constant thirst for new fashions driving the competitive periodicals that follow and foster design trends.

The August issue of Metropolitan Home, for example, dedicates the entire magazine to Los Angeles, “Where trends come from.”

“You don’t have to be an Angeleno to believe that Los Angeles may be purveying more style right now than any other American city,” one Metropolitan Home writer states. “L.A. hasn’t just come into its own as a design megamart--it’s gone global. . . .”

On a deeper level, it’s the freedom to experiment that has given Los Angeles’ avant-garde its brilliant opportunities.

“I’d far rather work in L.A. than Boston or New York,” said noted Albuquerque architect Antoine Predock, who is currently completing several Southland projects. “The scene is extraordinarily rich here, clients are amazingly open-minded and there’s plenty of room for a designer to find his own way through without a bunch of hidebound taste arbiters tying his hands.”

Another factor in this freedom to experiment is the small scale of most of Los Angeles’ architecture. In Los Angeles, the stock of private homes offers an extraordinarily rich and varied inventory of styles.

But the small scale of Los Angeles’ architecture has its disadvantages.

“Where is it?” New York architect Richard Meier asked of the “hot” Los Angeles architecture. Meier, designer of the new Getty Center for the Arts in Brentwood, said: “How many Kate Mantilinis create a city? A few jewels in the trash do not an architecture make.”

Critics of the new wave accuse it of being overly obsessed with image making at the expense of a wider concern for the deteriorating urban quality of life.

“SCI-ARC makes art, it does not make cities,” UCLA architecture dean Richard Weinstein said.

In fact in recent years many of Los Angeles’ prestigious cultural commissions handed out have been awarded to outside architects such as Meier. The five new art museums recently built, expanded or under way in the city have gone to non-Angeleno designers.

On the commercial scene, East Coast architects such as I.M. Pei have designed major complexes like the 72-story First Interstate Tower. Princeton-based Michael Graves was chosen to design the $2-billion Metropolis project beside the Harbor Freeway.

Though Los Angeles’ most imaginative architects don’t have the habit of thinking of the city as a whole, they are now beginning to seize the opportunity the city offers to create the model for the multi-centered city of the 21st Century.

“At every level, L.A. is grappling with the post-modern, post-industrial challenges of the late 20th Century,” said UCLA’s Weinstein, a recently transplanted New Yorker who believes that “the game is over in Manhattan.”

In Los Angeles too the future is increasingly overcast by darkening clouds. “While the Westside enjoys its toys, the Eastside and South-Central L.A. are packed with people who have to deal with the raw issues of crime and shelter,” architect Brenda Levin said. “And all of us have to cope with strangling traffic and choking smog.”

“For me the hard question is--what does design have to offer for our basic urban survival in this city?” said Jon Jerde, designer of the Westside Pavilion and San Diego’s massive Horton Plaza complex.

“You have to have an aerial, not a ground-based perspective of the Los Angeles region to understand and intervene meaningfully as a designer,” he said. “Photos of L.A. taken from a LANDSAT satellite resemble pictures of a huge and malignant cancer, or a vast field of tulips. To me it’s potentially either of those things--and that’s its unique glory.”

Architect Charles Moore believes that Los Angeles is on the edge of incoherence. It is socially and visually shapeless, he said, and he wonders how architecture--understood as the conscious act of designing individual buildings--can make sense in this confusion.

“We no longer seem to have any talent for creating a true sense of place,” Moore declared, “to give people a feeling they belong in a particular time and location. Maybe play is all we have left to make us feel truly human?”

The playfulness of Los Angeles’ avant-garde architecture is perhaps the most persuasive reason of all why it has proven so universally attractive.

As the public and professional eye has grown bored with the proliferation of vaguely historical mannerisms--Egyptoid column capitals, pastel pinks, free-standing archways and copycat mini-malls masquerading as temples--the reinvented modernism pioneered by Gehry offers a fresh perspective.