COVER STORY : The Hot Wave From L.A. : There’s a new school of architects in Southern California, and Japan loves the look, commissioning projects that may be models for the next century

Eric Owen Moss is flipping through architecture magazines in his Culver City office. There’s Moss’ 708 House on one cover, his Petal House on another, his Adams House on another. Nearly two dozen magazines are marked to indicate photographs of his projects, but he hasn’t a clue what the captions say. He can’t read Japanese.

Moss hasn’t built a thing in Japan. He was invited to compete for Tokyo’s New National Theatre a few years ago, but he didn’t get the commission. Yet his work has been exhibited in Tokyo galleries, he’s lectured in Japan and he just shepherded a group of Japanese university students through his crowded offices here.

“The story’s not over yet,” Moss says. “The presumption is that given the (Japanese magazines’) wide distribution, the right people will see them. I’ll be able to spread the contagion of Los Angeles around the world.”

He won’t be the first. David Martin, who designed Sanwa Bank Plaza in downtown Los Angeles, is working on both a large resort and a health club complex in Japan. And Jon Jerde, who brought us both Los Angeles’ Westside Pavilion and San Diego’s Horton Plaza, is redesigning chunks of Japanese cities as well as helping to create new ones.

Much as out-of-towners like Pei Cobb Freed & Partners nabbed the Los Angeles Convention Center expansion and Richard Meier won the Getty Center commission, so are more and more Los Angeles architects packing suitcases. In Tokyo alone, Southern California-based Morphosis is doing an office tower, Josh Schweitzer is designing restaurants, Frederick Fisher is designing apartment buildings and Ted Tanaka is designing a mausoleum (see Page 5).

Informed by international publications and Hollywood movies, linked by satellites, cellular phones and fax machines, the world’s design community is getting smaller. Talking about Johnson, Fain and Pereira’s huge resort project in Guam, for instance, a Micronesian business journal recently referred to that firm’s “Die Hard” building (Fox Plaza, where the film’s exteriors were shot). And Santa Monica-based Moore Ruble Yudell is doing a housing project in Kobe, Japan, for a real estate developer who first saw the firm’s work in Berlin.

Southern California has clearly become a major player on the world’s architecture game board. Numerous Southern California architects have projects in various stages of development in Japan, and Japanese businessmen regularly make what Jerde calls “Lewis and Clark expeditions” here to identify architecture and architects they’d like to see at home.

Particularly since the 1984 Olympics, when Los Angeles got to show off its design savvy as well as its climate, the city has made the most of its position at the edge of the Pacific Rim. “A connection is bound to be made with Japan,” says architect Philip Johnson. “Your being physically closer has to make a difference.”

Architects here as elsewhere deal with projects halted, stalled or simply chastened by a rough economy. It isn’t as bad here as on the East Coast, but most firms admit to layoffs. All of which makes the Asian market that much more attractive.

Walk into nearly any up-and-coming architect’s office and look at the models out front or the drawings they’re turning out back at the drafting tables. While Japanese architects report the start of recession there as well, Southern California architects are no longer limiting themselves to sushi dinners on Melrose Avenue.

Los Angeles, they say, is more and more the jumping-off place to the Pacific Rim and not a final destination. “All of a sudden something is happening on the other side of the ocean,” says architect William Fain, a Southern Californian who came home from the East Coast 10 years ago. Putting his hand up to shield his eyes, he looks off into the distance: “We’ve all just arrived here, and we’re like this.”

Japan is becoming more open to foreign architecture, whether those foreigners come from the United States, Britain or elsewhere. Los Angeles architects are jockeying for position in what many consider the world’s strongest architecture market.

“Japan is wealthy, going through major infrastructure improvement and is very forward-looking,” says architect Paul Katz at New York’s Kohn Pedersen Fox, which has several large projects in Japan. “Projects being developed in Japan over the next 10 years might well be models for the next century, and even a small project can have a lot of visibility.”

Enter the young Westside architects, many of them already stars in Japanese architectural publications. “Los Angeles is where a lot of architectural ideas originate,” comments Wayne Fujii, editor of Tokyo-based GA Homes and a frequent Los Angeles visitor. “It’s a very fertile ground, and a lot of young architects are doing interesting work there.”

Both Los Angeles and Tokyo are truly contemporary cities, says New York architect Peter Eisenman, whose sentiment is shared by many architects here. “The Japanese feel an affinity to Los Angeles,” says architect Frank Israel, who is currently negotiating “an industrial project” in Tokyo. “It’s close, and America’s design innovations are here. They want something on the cutting edge and like that which is fashionable. Los Angeles is a fashionable place.”

Los Angeles’ free spirit counters Japan’s more tradition-bound culture, adds Santa Monica-based architect Craig Hodgetts. “The Japanese view us the way the Europeans viewed North Africa, the way Picasso viewed African art in the ‘20s and ‘30s,” says Hodgetts, who recently completed designs for eight Christmas windows at Tokyo’s Hankyu department store. (The windows depict an antique mechanized Santa Claus circling the globe from Japan to the U.S. and finally landing in the Hollywood Hills.)

“The Japanese think of us as possessing a rude primitiveness and not loaded down with a lot of cultural baggage. I think that they perceive something in California that has a breakthrough quality about it. . . . On the other hand, what attracts the architects who work there is that they truly value artistic integrity above all. You can look back to the tea ceremony to see the reverence. You find your work isn’t diluted or compromised. It’s either done correctly or not done at all.”

Museum of Contemporary Art Chairman Frederick Nicholas points to the institution’s Grand Avenue structure by Arata Isozaki as another magnet for Japanese visitors. Isozaki has had a continuing relationship with MOCA, and Nicholas recalls Isozaki bringing along two Japanese bankers on a recent trip who not only visited MOCA but toured other architectural attractions here as well.

Firsthand exposure to Los Angeles buildings also led to a major assignment for restaurant designer Schweitzer. The owners of a chain of steakhouses throughout Japan came to Los Angeles where, Schweitzer understands, “they fell in love with Campanile (restaurant). They loved the sense of color and the space.” The result: a contract to develop a concept for expansion that would involve 300 new restaurants.

“There is a certain process of Los Angelesization of the world and/or the Disneylandization of the world,” says architectural designer-historian David Greenberg. “This town was built on fantasy and there’s a lot of it in architecture. Disney brought it to a point where it became very exportable.”

(Tokyo Disneyland, in fact, opened in 1983, bringing Space Mountain and other famous Disney attractions to Japan. Architecture has become a major concern of the Disney empire since company Chairman Michael Eisner came on board in 1984, and Disney has commissioned more than a dozen prominent architects at its assorted projects around the world.)

Martin is developing a master plan for a hotel and golf resort north of Tokyo, and he says his firm’s Japanese clients “came to us because all the resorts they like are in California. There’s a California mystique that . . . goes back to the movies, a lifestyle and communication these people knew of since they were young. Videos only continue to reinforce that idea.”

Architect Jerde calls it Japan’s “love affair” with Los Angeles: “You can’t export Los Angeles, but the technique can be exported.” Not only is Los Angeles the gateway to the Pacific, summarizes Jerde, but its planners have experience attaching pizazz to mundane activities. Japan’s cities grew so quickly and densely that they didn’t take into consideration the average Japanese citizen’s newly found leisure time or disposable income, he says.

The Jerde Partnership counts up 20 projects redesigning districts of major cities like Osaka and Tokyo as well as building entire new ones there. “What Los Angeles has contributed to the culture of America has been an awareness that you can manipulate qualitative life experiences,” Jerde says. “It’s the difference between Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade and downtown Burbank. We’re creating districts (in Japan) which (improve) the quality of experiences like dining out or going to the movies from utility to visceral richness.”

How did all this happen?

“When I started out 10 years ago, I never thought I’d work in Japan or France,” says Santa Monica-based architect Fisher, who has now worked both places. “(But) Los Angeles is now a major stop for people from Europe, Japan and the East Coast (who) feel Los Angeles is a phenomenon that has to be seen like everyone used to go on the Grand Tour of Europe.”

That phenomenon, of course, builds on the tradition of such people as Greene and Greene, Irving Gill, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Ray and Charles Eames as well as the Case Study Houses of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Los Angeles, says UCLA architecture and history professor Thomas Hines, “is one of the great cities in the history of 20th-Century architecture. Major architects here have shaped and reflected important movements (which) were picked up all over the world.”

But Southern California edged back into the architectural limelight again only fairly recently. Just a decade ago, when the Getty selected the architect for its $350-million project, no Los Angeles architect was in the top seven candidates. Barton Myers, who recently snagged the prestigious New Jersey Performing Arts Center commission, moved here in 1980, while many of the city’s most sought-after young architects have only been in business 10 or 15 years.

Often educated at such non-traditional institutions as the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or among the dozens of young architects employed at one point or another by the city’s best-known architect, Frank Gehry, new generations of architects started coming into their own. The Olympics were a global hit, and Gehry won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Attention was paid.

The potential promise of wealthy and adventuresome Hollywood clients, what architect Norman Pfeiffer calls a “blank piece of paper” downtown area, and an economic boom in the Pacific helped lure architectural talent here as well. I. M. Pei, Henry Cobb and James Freed, for instance, are all represented in Los Angeles--from the Convention Center addition downtown to the Creative Artists Agency headquarters in Beverly Hills--and nearly every out-of-town architect queried for this article was either working here or hoping to in the future.

Frank Israel, for instance, came here from New York in 1978, he recalls, after Philip Johnson told him: “California is the place to go now--it’s where all the action is going to be.” Both Israel and Johnson still think so--”Frank came out just when he should have,” Johnson says--and Israel was not hearing isolated advice.

“Senior architects you meet in Europe or Japan see Los Angeles as sort of the main game intellectually,” says Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s graduate school of architecture and urban planning and a transplant from New York since 1985. “New York, because of its concentration of culture, is still alluring. But at the same time they want to build in New York, they tacitly acknowledge that New York belongs to the past and Los Angeles belongs to the future.”

So they head west. The local chapter of the American Institute of Architects today tops 2,200 members, making it one of the organization’s largest chapters. Over the last three years, says dean Robert Harris, USC’s school of architecture has had the largest pool of applicants in its history. Young architects setting up spaces in Venice, Santa Monica and elsewhere come from Austria and Australia as well as from Portland. Says Frank Stepper, who came here three years ago from Stuttgart: “Los Angeles is the most open architecture scene in the states.”

Ricardo Legorreta, often considered Mexico’s premier architect, estimates that 25% of his work today is in Los Angeles, and close behind all those migrating or visiting architects are influential admirers. Gehry’s office receives a request to publish something every day from design magazines here and abroad, says Gehry partner Bob Hale, while the lesser-known Schweitzer candidly admits astonishment at the number of European and Asian publications that have put photos of his 950-square-foot house in Joshua Tree on their cover.

Talking about how people from both Europe’s big cities and its countryside know what is happening in Los Angeles architecture, J. Paul Getty Museum director John Walsh says people here “don’t see what the rest of the world is reading about in the architecture magazines. . . . We’re a big exporter of architectural ideas.”

Fujii, for instance, is in Los Angeles at least four times a year scouting articles for GA Homes and other Tokyo-based architecture publications. In 1985, his magazine devoted a special issue--and an exhibition at its GA Gallery in Tokyo--to the work of Morphosis and Moss, and regularly reviews other Southern California-based architectural work.

Gehry has done just one building in Japan--a restaurant in Kobe completed in 1986--but architectural designer and one-time Gehry employee Elyse Grinstein credits Gehry with stimulating Japanese interest here. “What Frank did was give us all permission to explore, to play with shapes and forms and not be afraid of experimenting,” says Grinstein, who is designing restaurants in Hawaii. “What we’re exporting is that kind of aesthetic, freedom (and) permission that everything doesn’t have to look like Mies van der Rohe or Richard Meier.”

Los Angeles architects often get work in Japan after introductions by Japanese clients they’ve built for in Los Angeles. “Japan is a very difficult place to work unless you know people,” says Venice-based Tanaka, who’s been working there three years now. “It’s all connections.”

Some U.S. firms do have Tokyo offices. But more likely are affiliations with Japanese architects and construction firms who know their city’s grid, building codes and eccentricities.

“The world is a never-ending strip,” says Scott Johnson. “If our engineers are in San Francisco, we sleep (when) they sleep. But if we work with engineers in Tokyo, they’re nine time zones away. We come in at 9, work all day, fax all our work to them at 4, then go home and go to bed. They work all night and when we come in in the morning, their finished drawings are waiting for us on our fax machines. So we’re actually working faster with somebody in Tokyo than with someone in Van Nuys.”

Not that architects aren’t on planes all the time. Richard Keating, who has projects in Taiwan and Japan as well as at home, wasn’t surprised to run into Johnson and Fain in the customs line at Tokyo’s Narita Airport several months ago. “We’re all working all over the world,” he says. And Morphosis’ Thom Mayne, whose firm expects to start construction on a golf club outside Tokyo later this year, stopped in Tokyo and Taiwan as well as Berlin and London on a lecture tour last spring.

“You could make a mistake and think of Los Angeles as an edge city, “ says San Diego-born Keating, who came here from Houston in 1986. “But from an architectural standpoint, it’s very central. Los Angeles architects, graphic designers and renderers are all being asked to go elsewhere because Los Angeles has become a source of architectural talent. We are going east, west and north--going south will be next.”

For some architects, Japan is just one site of Pacific Rim activity. Olivier Vidal, a French architect who came here to create the Rodeo Collection in Beverly Hills a decade ago, is now taking that notion of high-end retail centers to various Pacific Rim sites. Mid-size and larger firms here as elsewhere report sizable projects in South Korea and Indonesia.

Other architects see the Japanese market as both specialized and “a hard sell,” while their colleagues tire of discussion that simply doesn’t materialize into work. Plenty of time can be involved too: Schweitzer, for instance, guesses he talked to half a dozen different people from Japan or representatives of Japanese companies before his restaurant job came about.

Asked about his own plans in Japan, Gehry says he lectures there and has an exhibition scheduled there next year but no building plans. The architect says he was recently offered housing and commercial projects through a broker there “and the fee schedules they proposed were so low that we couldn’t afford to do them. . . . It seems to me, based on what I’ve seen, that you can do very commercial stuff there, but something like Disney Hall would not be given to a gaijin (foreigner).”

What difference does it make here at home that these architects are getting work in Japan? Several architects say they hope attention abroad could result in more work in Los Angeles. “I’m always amazed how unsupportive Los Angeles is of its own talent,” says Morphosis’ Mayne. “You just about have to go out of town.”

Interest at home appears to be building, however. The Getty plans to collect, show and study architectural material at its new center, says museum director Walsh, and several architects here have discussed founding an independent architecture museum endowed with their own work.

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s three architecture shows--on Gehry, Isozaki and the Case Study Houses--drew its largest attendance; in 10 weeks, says director Richard Koshalek, the Isozaki show attracted more than 100,000 people. “Ten years ago, people came to MOCA and wanted to know about painters and sculptors in Los Angeles,” says Koshalek, who himself holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture. “Now they want to know about architects.”

MOCA, which has a 130-member Architecture and Design Council, has had some “very preliminary and tentative” talks about becoming the “custodian” of landmark buildings here by Wright, Schindler and Eames, Koshalek confirms. The museum is sending its recent Isozaki show off to five museums in Japan, and its coming exhibition of architect Lewis Kahn’s work includes a stop at the Museum of Modern Art in Gunma, Japan.

Moss, meanwhile, isn’t studying Japanese, but says he is learning to bow properly. “Aside from the opportunity in Japan, we’re talking receptivity. Audiences there are perhaps more open to less conventional work. I hope they are. We’ll find out.”

Times librarian Dorothy Ingebretsen contributed to the research in this article.