The Collapse of an Architectural Pillar Jolts L.A. : Real estate: Arthur Erickson Associates’ financially ailing Southland office was abruptly closed last month. Its renowned Canada-based principal admits that he is no numbers whiz.

Not so long ago, Arthur Erickson Associates was a Los Angeles business celebrity, a small but high-profile architecture firm with a hand in some of the most prestigious projects in Southern California. Now, it’s a mess.

Bankruptcy is only a stack of legal papers away. The firm’s sleek West Los Angeles offices were closed hastily last month, scattering its remaining staff and sparking unfounded reports that its famed principal had vanished. A few embittered employees are openly accusing their former boss of financial improprieties. Unpaid consultants are threatening to sue. Crisis management experts are sifting through the debris of a ruined business.

And the man at the center of it all, internationally renowned architect Arthur Erickson, is feeling “fragmented, shattered and devastated” by the public airing of his Los Angeles firm’s collapse.

In a manner endearing to his supporters and equally aggravating to his critics and creditors, Erickson forthrightly acknowledges his inattention to finances. “Absolutely, I don’t have any business sense. . . . I abdicated the (financial) responsibilities and gave complete trust” to those designated to handle the business aspects, he said from his offices in Vancouver, British Columbia.

But Erickson’s is the admission of an artist, bearing no apology, nor even any cognizance of a need for one. “My whole concentration,” he said, “is design. And when you concentrate on one thing, you sacrifice everything to that end.” In fact, Erickson maintained that architectural firms that are successful in business “are not renowned for design. They’re renowned for proficiency.”

Even now, as the financial morass of his Los Angeles firm is threatening to undermine his reputation and his Vancouver operations, Erickson can rattle off the names of projects his firm has designed--including the California Plaza office towers on Bunker Hill, the San Diego Convention Center and academic and government buildings--but cannot bring to mind the name of the attorney handling preparations for the bankruptcy filing.

Erickson prefers to think of the Los Angeles office as being “temporarily closed” while he looks for a larger firm as a merger partner. Talks with two firms, including giant Leo A. Daly, have fallen through, in part because the Erickson company’s books were in such a shambles, he said. It is likely that attorney Steven E. Smith of Banning, Gill, Gould, Diamond & Spector will seek Chapter 7 bankruptcy--liquidation rather than reorganization--by the end of the month, leaving about $1 million in unpaid bills and effectively ending Erickson’s stint in Los Angeles.

Erickson and Los Angeles had seemed a perfect match: a celebrated architect with a global reach, an eclectic portfolio of Modernist designs and a penchant for high living, and a name-conscious city whose sprawling mishmash of architecture quickly dispels its style-over-substance image.

Erickson already had achieved acclaim in his field and had two offices in his native Canada--Vancouver and Toronto--when designs he supervised were selected by California Plaza’s original developer. He opened his office here in 1980, sharing work on the first office tower and anticipating more than $12 million in fees over the intended 10-year span of the $1.2-billion project.

But the project--also the site of the Museum of Contemporary Art--was bedeviled by delays and the pullout of its original developer. The 52-story Two California Plaza, designed by the Erickson team as the second of three planned towers, is still being constructed. The project’s current developer, Metropolitan Structures, said it has not decided whether Erickson will be involved in the design of the final tower.

Erickson attributes much of his firm’s financial woes to the discrepancy between expected and actual income from the California project. Nonetheless, the firm was riding high in the late 1980s.

In 1986, construction was begun on the Canadian Embassy in Washington, a bold--but, some critics say, flawed--attempt to mesh his Modernist spareness with the district’s old Classicism style. That same year, the American Institute of Architects awarded Erickson its Gold Medal, one of architecture’s most coveted honors.

In 1989, the new San Diego Convention Center opened to rave reviews for Erickson’s design. “We were making progress in 1987 through 1989 and were full of high expectations for the company,” Erickson said. The staff grew, to nearly 40, and additional offices were rented.

At the beginning of 1990, Erickson said, work began to slow down and advisers suggested that he be more aggressive in attracting clients and engage in public relations. But former associates and employees of Erickson’s Los Angeles office contended in a recent Los Angeles Business Journal article that, rather than campaigning to attract business, Erickson and partner Francisco Kripacz were using company funds to support lavish personal lifestyles.

“I’m confident there’s no impropriety,” Erickson said.

Vancouver business consultant Robert Wilson, who has been trying to help sort out Erickson’s finances since last fall, said: “I have watched Arthur operate for the past five to seven years. He’s a wonderful architect but a terrible, terrible businessman. . . . Arthur felt the way to promote (the Los Angeles operations) as a stand-alone, self-sufficient operation was to spend his way into the business community.”

It didn’t work. By the end of the year, the firm was looking for a merger partner and had trimmed back its staff to 10 architects. Talks with merger partners broke down, Erickson said, as architects began to feel the effects of the recession and the Gulf War. “By this time, we were hanging on by our fingernails, trying to keep the office open. My objective was to keep the office open so we could settle with our creditors--that was uppermost in my concern.”

Now, it appears certain that creditors will not be paid. Although Erickson said he is still in talks to merge the Los Angeles venture with another firm, even he characterizes it as a desperation move. “The L.A. office was one of the best,” he said. “It was really doing wonderful work. And it’s heartbreaking to leave it.”