ARCHITECTURE : Simple Shells Often Conceal Rich Interiors
Most of Los Angeles is “first growth,” that is the buildings you see are the first structures built on their sites.
As the city gets denser, those buildings are being hollowed out, their original uses replaced by functions that are often more refined, but also more ephemeral. The anonymous shells of West Los Angeles are becoming enlivened by a continually changing, highly designed interior world. These hidden worlds change frequently, exploiting the shells they inhabit, then finding themselves replaced before most people have a chance to see them.
One recent renovation seems to comment on that very process. Architect Frank Israel has transformed what was once a car barn on Abbot Kinney Boulevard into a stage set for the image consultant firm of Bright & Associates. He has done it with an architecture of grand, idiosyncratic and theatrical forms that bring the building to life. Israel makes those people who do get inside the building aware of the history and changeable nature of the world they are inhabiting.
What makes this particular transformation all the more significant is that in between being a garage and then an image firm, Sol Abbot Kinney (or West Washington, as it was then called) was the studio of Charles and Ray Eames. These champions of mass-produced modernism used the brick-clad, bowstring-trussed space to produce their signature furniture, films and architecture, all of which tried to adapt new materials, forms and methods of production for the construction of easy-to-use, modular and attractive building blocks for modern living.
When Ray Eames died two years ago, Israel found himself faced with a double legacy: that of the original building and that of two people who pioneered the transformation of Los Angeles through modernism.
You won’t be able to see much of this from the outside of the 901 building, as Bright & Associates is still fondly known in architectural circles. It is really a compound of buildings, including the original car barn, a two-story brick annex and a new stucco box sitting in the middle of the parking lot facing the street. Israel has woven these pieces together with small interventions on the outside, including a triangular steel and glass canopy over the entrance, a steel “mask” in front of the fire stairs to the side and a metal “flag” that announces the number of the building from Hampton Street in the back. Once you follow these clues and step inside, you’re in another world. A yellow stucco courtyard soars above the entrance desk and a galvanized metal tunnel leads you to the heart of the main building, where a plywood conference room spins you around and down an axis of stucco arches organizing the offices and design studio. These gestures stand in deliberate contrast to both the raw simplicity of the original space and the legacy of the Eameses.
What ties it all back together is the details: a delicate web of glass, exposed wood studs and steel connectors fill in the gaps between the sculptural forms and knit them back both to the wood trusses of the original building and to the modular network that formed the backbone of the Eames’ work. The result is an architecture whose seeming idiosyncrasy translates the by now rich legacy of this simple building into a beautiful patch in the quilt of Los Angeles.
