DAN HEINFELD : Orange County president, LPA Inc.
Office space is vacant. Cities have little money for public works. Retail centers have gone belly up. So how is an architect supposed to make it in these tough times? The Irvine office of LPA Inc., one of Orange County’s largest architectural firms, has a portfolio of contracts ranging from city halls to churches, most of them with budgets much lower than they would have been three years ago. Dan Heinfeld, president of its Orange County office, spoke to Times correspondent Ted Johnson on how designers of buildings are making it in the 1990s.
Clients are cutting back on how much they spend on a project. How is your firm coping with this?
Everyone is looking for ways to maximize their dollars in many ways. For us, it is the ability to maximize the budget that is given and find the most creative way to do that. I’m doing city halls now that cost 20% to 25% less than they might have four or five years ago. We have been actually very successful in getting the limited amount of contracts that are out there.
What sorts of things are you doing to save money for a client while not sacrificing design?
We found that we could do building much more efficiently in terms of how they are used by people. You concentrate your dollars where people are going to see it and touch it. So, for a city hall, you spend your money on the council chambers or the counter area. All the places where the public comes. That’s what they will remember about City Hall. Then you do the back-of-house, behind-the-scenes things very efficiently. The same thing holds true with corporations: You spend on boardrooms, lunchrooms and things like that. In the 1980s there was kind of a narrowing of what architects did. Instead, we’ve taken the approach that we have expanded our services, such as landscaping, interior design, graphics. By being able to control these dollars, we are sort of able to move them around. A good example: A landscape feature like a fountain may cost, say, $100,000. If you were to put that additional $100,000 into the building skin, that wouldn’t probably buy you very much. But it would allow you to buy a very good landscape feature that becomes sort of the memorable part of the project.
Is the slowdown tougher on smaller firms?
The Orange County chapter (of the American Institute of Architects) has about a thousand members. They have lost probably about 20% of the members (during the recession). It’s tougher if they didn’t diversify. But right now is not the right time to diversify.
With city and state cutbacks, are public contracts slowing down?
There is still budget money that was approved from the propositions for educational buildings, but there is still a general slowdown. The interesting thing is that although cities are facing these tough budget problems, the demand for the space hasn’t changed. People are still moving into the county. Every agency is looking for ways to deliver buildings in non-traditional means, such as privatization or partnerships with developers. You’re going to see a lot more of that. An architect can play a role in putting those energies together.
What are the design trends?
When architecture becomes very trendy it sort of becomes like fashion. In the 1980s, that was sort of a dangerous trend. What was happening was the importing of styles no matter what it was. It can’t be changed like a suit. We like to look at it a little differently. We look at what is intrinsic in value to that particular place and create something unique to that entity as opposed to importing style.
With the Mission Viejo City Hall, we didn’t just say, well, ‘We’re going to build in Mediterranean-villa style.’ We found a very interesting historical story about the city of Mission Viejo, how it was discovered. We created this thing called Portola’s Trail, named after the person who founded the place. That was the public veranda for the City Hall. Along this trail were different courtyards that reflected the changing landscape of Mission Viejo. The first courtyard had historical precedent in the missions. As you got down to where the City Hall was, there was an arroyo courtyard where there was water and shade, which reflected being up in the valleys (near Mission Viejo).
Southern California often is viewed as a homogeneous place with long boulevards of strip malls. How can architects change that?
The problem Orange County has with that is no different than what they have in Tyson’s Corner near Washington, D.C., or Contra Costa County outside of San Francisco. Part of it is the construction of freeways. Then there was the whole notion of single-use zoning to prevent factories from being built next to residential areas. So those two phenomenons created what is called edge cities. Orange County is one of them. Everyone is looking at (those things) and seeing what it created. And it didn’t really create very livable places. Now there are things like mixed-use developments happening, change in zoning laws. Southern California is at the cutting edge of that. It has the opportunity to bring back much more pedestrian-friendly communities. An architect has a chance to deal with traditional values like how people interact.
How have you tried to design discount retail centers, with stores such as Price Club and Ikea, and avoid the boxy, warehouse look?
When you go and look at some of these power centers, architecture is one of the last things that people thought about. They are not that handsome. The Tustin Market Place is a project we are real proud of. Our client, the Irvine Co., wanted to do something different with these big promotional boxes. It was about trying to find a way to make these boxes a little more humane and find a way to be more people-friendly and create an environment that people could go to. We’re currently working on a project at Anaheim Plaza, which is taking an enclosed mall and changing that into a (power) center as well. We sort of looked at the agricultural roots of Anaheim. We’re creating an arbor that runs the entire expanse of the project. It becomes a backdrop for all the (stores). It’s an overall framework for creating the sense of place.
On surviving in the recession in commercial development. . .: “Diversity is the key. We do public work, we do corporate headquarters, we do retail, institutional buildings, college buildings. Everything.”
On architecture’s role in luring people to retail centers. . . : “If you have several places where the price is the same, what is going to attract you? It gets down to architecture and amenities.”
On revitalizing blighted areas. . .: “Obviously we can’t solve all of the social ills, but we can help create a place that people can identify with. The notion of creating these public places is becoming very important, in a lot of ways more than an individual building.”
On renowned architects, such as Caesar Pelli, designing in Orange County. . .: “It sort of raises everybody’s expectations of other projects. That’s very positive for the county.”
