Firm in U.S. Tries Eastern Exposure

Landscape architects Andrew Spurlock and Martin Poirier are among a growing number of American design professionals doing business overseas. While projects by many San Diego firms have slowed during the recession, Spurlock and Poirier’s office is bustling with new business, 40% of it in Japan.

With the help of Tadashi Yamaguchi--a Japanese, Orange County-based landscape architect with contacts throughout Japan--Spurlock and Poirier, neither of whom speaks Japanese, have landed half a dozen Japanese projects during the past two years. These range from designing an urban plaza beneath a pair of high-rise towers to planning entire communities.

Spurlock and Poirier say the Japanese are good at large-scale planning, such as laying out roads and providing essential services. They are also adept at designing intimate gardens and landscapes. But they are not so competent when it comes to creating urban plans and inviting public spaces that would bring these elements together. That’s where Spurlock and Poirier come in.

Traveling to Japan every month or so can cause culture shock, for reasons ranging from unfamiliar food to long work hours (often 60 a week) to the dense concentration of buildings and people in Tokyo, more dense even than New York City.

But Spurlock and Poirier are willing to put up with such adjustments. They have found many advantages in working with the Japanese. Overall, they say, Japanese developers, much more than their American counterparts, give landscape architects the freedom to come up with fresh planning and design ideas.

The San Diego partners see their Japanese designs--none of them built yet--as a chance to help Japan grow up gracefully and with its own identity.

“They might say they want a project to look like Orange County, Venice (Italy) or the Marina district in San Francisco,” Spurlock said.

“We’re often in a position to say, ‘You don’t want Orange County,’ ” Poirier said. “They’re aware of what happened in Saudi Arabia during the 1970s, where American designers created black glass buildings in the desert with little regard for the culture and the environment. I felt strongly that, if we had a chance to do international work, we should be more sensitive to the culture.”

One of their Japanese projects is a public plaza beneath the two high-rise towers that will anchor Kogakuin Techno Campus, a new college in Shinjuku.

An earlier design of the plaza was inward-looking, making few connections to the surrounding city. With the help of San Diego architect Jennifer Luce, whom they brought in as a consultant, Spurlock and Poirier came up with a design that responds to the surroundings. They used changing patterns of sunlight and shadows on the site as their inspiration.

Forms created by the landscape materials echo these patterns, Luce said. To funnel light down to two levels of underground retail space, she proposed a translucent, sculptural “lantern.” The Japanese loved the symbolism.

“The light is a symbol of the university--light and knowledge,” Luce said. “Japanese clients love symbolic imagery; they’re different than the U.S.”

One of Spurlock’s and Poirier’s largest Japanese jobs is designing the open spaces, streetscapes and landscape master plan for Makuhari New Town, a development on Tokyo Bay that would house 26,000 people beginning in 1994.

The residential development represents only a small portion of the building boom on this 45-mile-long, 1.5-mile-wide strip of bayfront land, once submerged but reclaimed during the 1980s by engineers.

Besides the residential component, the Makuhari complex includes a gigantic (1.4 million square feet) convention center designed by leading Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. Several corporate powerhouses are taking space in the Makuhari Business Garden, including Sony, Fujitsu and Seiko. Five hotels offer 3,159 rooms at a leisure resort. Tokyo Disneyland is only a few miles from Makuhari.

The Japanese are at the forefront of city planning. They had laid out the Makuhari New Town in the American “neo-traditional” manner advocated by such planning gurus as Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Instead of the meandering, confusing street patterns of 1960s and ‘70s tracts, neo-traditional planners favor the grid-like street pattern of earlier American cities.

The Makuhari residential neighborhood would be tied together by a network of public parks developed by Spurlock and Poirier. They have also been retained to design the first three of these parks, which will range in size from 2 to 10 acres. They hope to do artful, contemporary designs that would depart from the longstanding Japanese tradition of trying to mimic nature.

Another major project is the planning of Gakken New Town, the urban heart of the new Kansai Science City, three nodes of development that will ring the Kizu River Valley between Kyoto and Osaka. The Kansai regional branch of the Japanese Housing and Urban Development Corp. developed a plan that proposed arranging the towns around the valley. But they were also considering office development in the valley, and Spurlock and Poirier recommended keeping this natural amenity free of development.

With concise, up-front planning that would carefully control development, they hope to limit urban sprawl of a kind too familiar to Southern Californians.

“The corridor between Kyoto and Osaka is not unlike Los Angeles-San Diego, where suburban development was starting to happen because of pressure from Kyoto and Osaka,” Poirier said. “But they nipped it in the bud with this new town planning. Instead of the way Los Angeles bleeds into San Diego, the Japanese want to confine development to four focal urban centers.”

Spurlock and Poirier proposed a layout for the core of Gakken, which could eventually house 80,000 people. They would like to see Gakken New Town arranged around a network of public open spaces.

The partners feel that many of their planning ideas will be embraced by Japanese developers as these various projects move ahead.

“My guess is that there is more acceptance for centralized planning in Japan,” Poirier said, “whereas in the U.S. there is more sense of private property rights.”

Known for imaginative, cutting-edge work that isn’t every San Diego developer’s cup of tea, Spurlock, Poirier and Yamaguchi met during the early 1980s while employed by the large Los Angeles landscape architecture company POD. They all worked on California Plaza, a massive development on Bunker Hill in the heart of Los Angeles’ redevelopment area.

Spurlock moved to San Diego and joined a company called Land Studio in 1984 and started his own company in 1988. Poirier worked with San Francisco-based landscape architects Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz from 1985 to 1987. Poirier joined Spurlock’s firm in 1988, and the two became equal partners in 1990.

As their Japanese client list has lengthened during the past two years, Spurlock and Poirier have adjusted to new ways of working.

On the most basic level, there’s the time difference. When Friday rolls around stateside, it’s already Saturday in Japan, so traditional end-of-the-week project deadlines don’t work.

Also, Spurlock and Poirier say Japanese developers operate with a much higher degree of trust than their U.S. counterparts. Apparently, the U.S. litigation craze has not yet hit Japan. A typical Japanese design contract is a loose, one-page document, compared with U.S. contracts that run 10 pages or more and spell out every last detail of the designer’s responsibilities.

But chances to be creative outweigh these relatively minor adjustments. As the first of their Japanese design projects are realized in the years ahead, the reputations of these San Diego landscape architects will be enhanced. And now that they have established some solid contacts in Japan, there’s a Japanese tradition working in their favor.

“Japanese clients tend to be very loyal,” Spurlock said. “I’d like to keep these relationships for a long time.”