Things Are Looking Up : Best Is Yet to Come in County Architecture, Exec Says

Ernest C. Wilson Jr. has been watching buildings go up for a long time. Some of them he even designed. In fact, if you were picking the architecture firms most responsible for Orange County’s cityscape--which has been both praised and damned--then his 39-year-old Langdon Wilson Architecture Planning of Newport Beach and Los Angeles would be among the first choices.

Not everyone has been impressed with the face of Orange County. The New York Times, for instance, said much of the county’s architecture “celebrates not the whimsy of Disneyland, but the conformity of glass boxes and other architectural banalities.”

The county’s problems aren’t just aesthetic ones. They’re such things as traffic jams, the smothering of hillsides and meadows with roads and houses, the growing inability of the poor to find housing. But architecture, at least, is an easier problem to fix. Some local developers, in fact, have already turned to prestigious firms from outside the county. Most of the local firms, everyone seems to agree, have gotten better as a result of the competition.

Wilson, a graduate of USC and senior managing partner of Langdon Wilson, now one of the nation’s 20 largest firms of its type, came to Orange County from Los Angeles in 1971. A big building was six stories then, and Langdon Wilson was a small L.A. firm. That was a time when bean fields turned into office complexes almost overnight, when people poured into the county in numbers beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The county is living today with the legacy left by developers, architects, engineers and planners. In a conversation with Times staff writer Michael Flagg, Wilson recently assessed that legacy.

Q. The critics say there’s a large number of architecturally unimpressive--if not outright ugly--new buildings in the county. Do you agree?

A. I really don’t think there are. I think the environment here is actually much better in terms of excellence of design than most places. Our planning of our properties in Orange County can’t be matched anywhere, as far as I’m concerned. The thoughtfulness of the planning has been very good. Anybody can take shots at something, and what you may like I may not like. I read critics sometimes where I wonder if we’re looking at the same building.

Q. Isn’t there a certain sameness to the buildings here, though, with that sort of boxy glass modernist cube repeated endlessly?

A. We’ve done a lot of glass buildings, but we’re doing a lot of granite-faced buildings too. By and large, we have a pretty good set of buildings here. Yes, there are some groups of buildings that you look at and say: “I remember that, that was kind of 1965.”

Q. Orange County now seems to be neither fish nor fowl, city or suburb, but some self-contained entity that has less and less to do with Los Angeles. Should we hold what’s essentially a suburb to the same aesthetic standards of a big city? And what are the prospects that the design of local buildings will improve as the county increasingly urbanizes and becomes more like a big city?

A. In a lot of ways our standards are higher that some big cities’. It goes back to planning, by the developers and by the cities themselves. We have not allowed buildings to be built side by side. You see a lot more open space than you see in other places.

Q. Can you lay at least some of the blame for an ugly building on the client--who may be cheap or lack taste--as well as the architect?

A. I suppose you could. But there’s no one person to blame for a bad building. A lot of it is economics. I think a lot of times we see a relaxation of standards on the architect’s part when the budget starts to go away from him. And he compromises. He starts to take things away from the concept, and pretty soon you end up with a project that doesn’t quite measure up. People don’t know exactly what’s wrong with the building, but they look at it and they see there’s something wrong. It’s probably something that was chopped out of the building as a compromise rather than studying the building again and fitting them to the client’s budget.

Q. Donald Bren’s interest in architecture is well known. (Bren is chairman of the Irvine Co., the county’s largest private landowner.) Are the tastes of the big developers--Bren, Henry Segerstrom, Donald Koll--getting more sophisticated architecturally?

A. I think so. They all care about their buildings. That’s one of the reasons they’ve been highly successful, that they do care about how one building sets up against another building. They spend a lot of time on that, and it shows.

Q. Is there a sense of one-upmanship among these guys architecturally?

A. I don’t know. I’m not sure that there is, really. Don Bren has massive amounts of property and big challenges ahead of him. Segerstrom has a different environment he’s working in over in Costa Mesa, and Koll’s is somewhat different from that. To a certain extent they compete, but I’m not sure there’s one-upmanship. More important, I think the three of them drive other developers to make their projects better.

Q. Those three, then, would be the trend-setters architecturally in the county?

A. They’re probably the most visible, because they’ve been here a long time and their impact on the county is huge. They’re building more buildings than other people because they have the land to built it on.

Q. What does it say about Orange County that television minister Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove has one of the better architectural pedigrees hereabouts, having been designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee?

A. What we’re experiencing here is no different from what other areas have experienced. From time to time, architects come from different locales--New York or Chicago or whatever--and somebody sees a building there and likes it and brings them in. So we’re seeing in Los Angeles and Orange County architects from all over. We’re working with architects from New York, in fact, and even from Japan. And architects from Orange County design buildings all over the world. There’s a lot of competition.

Q. Do your clients really care that much about what a building looks like, or are they more focused on costs?

A. Oh, they care. We’ve done over 350 office buildings so far, and while they’re all looking at economics, the aesthetics are always right there. They won’t just accept anything. In fact, sometimes they’ll see something an architect has done and try to transpose a building that’s much larger than they’re going to build, and that makes it difficult for the architect, because what the client’s been looking at is maybe 40 stories high and what they’re going to build is maybe 15 stories.

Q. What is the biggest change you’ve seen in the last 20 years in buildings in the county?

A. It’s been the growing up of the environment. In the early days, 20 years ago, there were nothing but small buildings around Orange County Airport. All the high-rises were over at Newport Center. When we conceived the idea of Koll Center Newport it was to compete straight on with Newport Center. You could look over the hill and see the tops of their buildings. You still can. But there was nothing to compete with out in this area. It was strictly two-story offices, some industrial. In fact, this was conceived as an industrial area, not a high-density office area. We have some industry, but it’s not down-and-dirty manufacturing, heavy industrial.

Q. It’s ironic, because the Irvine Co. in a sense created its own competition for Newport Center right over the hill here, since they owned most of this land as well.

A. In a way, because they sold off two large parcels, one each to Rockwell and Lockheed. And those parcels were taken over by (developers) Morrison-Knudsen and Koll. And they’ve proven that these two parcels were too valuable to be factory space.

Q. Let’s go back to planning for a minute. The Boston Globe’s architecture critic said the county’s architects--and those working in other U.S. suburbs--don’t look beyond individual buildings to see the suburban sprawl, boring cityscapes and traffic jams that suburban development has created, a pattern the Globe critic said “doesn’t work now and can only get worse as (the suburbs) age.” Is that a fair criticism?

A. I think the planning in Orange County has followed the topography. And it’s one of the things that makes Orange County a nice place to live. We haven’t done the sort of grading where they end up with a boring crisscross grid pattern. We’ve done better than just cutting off the tops of the mountains and superimposing a grid system on them. I think that comment must be totally out of context, because I just don’t understand it.

Q. Well, I think this critic and others have said there’s nothing wrong with the grid system, which is sort of considered passe today, especially compared to the walled enclaves we’re building housing behind now, where it’s not easy to get in and out and there’s no sense of neighborliness.

A. I don’t agree with that. You can make a curvilinear system work just as easily--and in some cases easier--than a grid system. A grid system pulls cars together eventually at an intersection whether you like it or not. But a curvilinear system can get away from traffic coming together at a crisscross.

Q. What do you look for--in laymen’s terms--in a good building?

A. What the ground plan looks like, how it sits on the ground and what the surrounding area looks like. Has it been placed properly? Is it turned or was it just dropped on the site? And if it’s pleasant to walk into, if it works. You don’t have to have a road map the minute you get in the front door to figure out where the heck you’re going. Not that it’s so simple that you go in every building and turn right and know you’re going to find the elevators. But a plan that works.

Q. Aside from your own projects, are there some local buildings you particularly like?

A. Henry Segerstrom has that building next to the Performing Arts Center (Center Tower, near South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa). That’s a nice building; it was done by CRSS out of Houston.

Q. Conversely, what makes a bad building?

A. I guess everybody sees a building differently. Sometimes there are little things about buildings that startle you. What was the reason for changing the material at that point? And color; it might be the color of the glass or the selection of two kinds of marble that might not please me but evidently pleased somebody else. Those are curious.

Q. A particular building come to mind?

A. No, not really.

Q. Let’s talk about older buildings for a minute. Which of the county’s few remaining historic buildings do you like, and why?

A. None, really. If a place has some older buildings, I think they should be evaluated properly. But you pick up a paper and see emotion, people wanting to save a building when in fact it’s an earthquake nightmare or has other problems. The county’s growing up fast.

Q. In Huntington Beach, as one example, preservationists complain that historic buildings are being demolished rapidly as part of the city’s redevelopment. What’s Orange County’s record on preserving some of these older buildings? Should we do more?

A. That’s a very tough subject. We’re not that old here. Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, those places were just summer communities. Then Huntington Beach became an oil town, but there were never any major construction projects there. And the buildings that have been here since 1920, they aren’t very old and they’re not really significant buildings. I like to look at old pictures of the cities, for instance. They’re fun. But things change, and I don’t know how you can stop that. Americans, for one reason or another, tear down buildings as opposed to the Europeans. If you’re an architect in London, you almost can’t do a new building; you’ve got to remodel one.

Q. So you’re saying there’s not that much worth preserving.

A. I don’t think so. There are farm buildings and some schools that are interesting, but they’re not very large buildings.

Q. How are some of the smaller, local firms adapting to this influx of bigger, more prestigious architects? You have some good contacts, especially at Koll Co. How does Langdon Wilson compete in this intensely competitive market?

A. We’re doing projects with a lot of them. We work together from the very beginning. And you just work very, very hard. Connections are one thing, but if you do a good job, you’re going to get a chance to do another one.

Q. What kind of input do local governments have in the design of buildings, other than the usual things like building code enforcement? Should they have more?

A. Sometimes they do get involved in aesthetics. It’s interesting to see certain smaller communities get really involved with what a building looks like. Sometimes it’s exasperating to listen to lay people--who are usually not in the (development) business at all--come up with ideas on how a building should look. I think that’s wrong. To have people sit there and decide whether it’s going to be a glass building or a granite building is totally wrong.

Q. What towns are you talking about?

A. I’d rather not name them. I might get hit by a spear.

Q. Let’s change tack for a minute and talk about houses. Orange County has some of the more influential residential architects on the West Coast. As an architect, what kind of job do you think these guys are doing? What about the incredible density, where it’s getting so you can’t drive a golf cart between half-million-dollar houses?

A. The competitive nature of the business drives architects to higher level. They’re very innovative. They’ve changed the visual concept of a house. In the 1930s you went in the front door and you were in the living room, and you had the three bedrooms and the bath and the kitchen. Period. It was a little box. Even in smaller condos these days, the rooms have interesting shapes and the layout is pleasant and fun to live in.

Q. How do you think the architects have solved the problem of increasingly larger houses the builders are constructing on steadily smaller plots of land in order to justify the high cost of land these days? The New York Times called it “cramming a remarkable amount of space into a somewhat clunky shell.”

A. I still think they’re doing a very good job. This is a pleasant place to live and work, and people are going to continue to come here. The density is disturbing from an aesthetic point of view. But it’s the only way to build a house economically these days. Nothing’s perfect, but I’m not so sure “clunky shell” is a fair characterization.

Q. What’s the county going to look like in 25 years? Will it look better or worse, and will it work better or worse?

A. I said over 10 years ago that we’d have lots of high-rise buildings, and I got a lot of people said I was crazy. I don’t think we’re going to see the canyons of New York City, because our superior planning will prevent that, but we will see some higher buildings and more intense development in certain areas. Not long streets with 30-story buildings on them. Simply because of the airport and the flight patterns you’re not going to see a lot of 30-story buildings. I think this is a great place, and we haven’t seen anything yet.