STYLE : STYLEMAKER : Building on L.A.

Architect Norman Pfeiffer needs that urban feeling. That’s why he works in the Fine Arts Building in downtown Los Angeles, travels to New York once a month and finds himself involved in projects such as the renovation of the Los Angeles Central Library, which “build and elaborate on what we already have here.” He’s a man with a mission: “I want to watch and inform the growth of Los Angeles while preserving its heritage. It needs to get denser, not bigger.”

The debonair 52-year-old arrived at his vision for Los Angeles by way of the suburbs of Seattle and the skyscrapers of New York. Raised in Washington state, he attended architecture school there to learn how to “make buildings the old-fashioned way, learning the rules and looking at the indigenous architecture. But I didn’t live in a city and had no conception of it.” Then he went to Columbia University in New York and “instantly became an urban convert.” In 1967, he teamed up with Malcolm Holzman and Hugh Hardy to start an architectural firm that has gained acclaim for the curved glass-block headquarters of Best Products in Richmond, Va., the “basket-weave” ceiling in the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, Ore., and the restoration of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and Rockefeller Center’s Rainbow Room. Most recently, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates won praise for its typically low-key transformation of Bryant Park, where simple plantings and pavilions turned a drug haven behind the New York Public Library into an urban sitting room.

When the firm was commissioned to pull together and expand the Los Angeles County Museum, the architects designed the Robert O. Anderson Building, whose sandstone and glass-block bands give the museum a billboard-like grandeur. The addition was linked to the existing buildings with a nave of steel pipe and a court covered with translucent plastic panels. During this project, Pfeiffer decided to move to Brentwood. “I loved coming back to the West,” he says, “but it was also a business decision. We were known for institutional buildings and wanted to design more commercial structures. Los Angeles seemed the natural place to do that.” To his surprise, most of the bicoastal firm’s work here still involves historic structures: Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer is adding an eight-story, glass-enclosed atrium to the downtown library (originally designed by Bertram Goodhue and set to reopen in October), returning City Hall to its 1920s glamour and extending the Warner Bros. studio in West Hollywood with Spanish arches and Art Deco detailing. “Los Angeles does have a history,” he says. “It is up to us to make something out of it.”

“I’m committed to spending my life here, other than the one week a month I spend in New York,” says Pfeiffer, whose wife, Patricia Zohn, is a film producer. “I want to reweave the city. For a recent (unbuilt) office project, we photographed all the buildings that make Wilshire Boulevard such a great street, and then extended that in the way we designed our building.” There is a bigger issue here, he says: “The time for making objects that stand alone is over, here and everywhere. We see our buildings as fragments in an evolving city.”