STYLE: ARCHITECTURE : Romper Room

For a child lucky enough to have one, a playhouse is an ideal home for the imagination. Fortress, clubhouse, schooner, stage: It changes roles at the whim of youngsters steeped in the spirit of invention. Though grown-ups are hardly vital to the process, 16 Los Angeles architects and designers have revisited childhood to create the play palaces they might have wanted back then.

Showcased in the Playhouse Project, an event under way at the Santa Monica Place Mall, their efforts range from simple frames for romping on to elaborate, sculptural dwellings. On March 4, these will be auctioned off to benefit the Ocean Park Community Center, a provider of emergency shelters and services for troubled youths, battered women and the homeless.

Organized by Architects for Shelter, a volunteer group of designers, developers and other professionals that holds an annual fund-raiser to support the center, the playhouses reflect many interpretations of the same task. Kevin Daly and Chris Genik of the firm Daly, Genik explored the meaning of shelter and the preciousness of even makeshift privacy to those who live in public spaces. They used common urban hardware--a streetlight fixture, metal decking, steel tie rods--to forge a symbolic refuge that doubles as a place for climbing and swinging. Miriam Mulder and Richard Katkov of Mulder-Katkov focused more on creating a stage--out of galvanized sheet metal and Finnish plywood--for freewheeling fantasy play. On the theory that too much structure restricts imagination, they left out details suggestive of specific dwellings.

Hodgetts + Fung, on the other hand, embraced the suggestive, designing a structure that resembles an overgrown toy. Color-mad, rife with angles and curves, its painted wood forms speak of make-believe sailing ships and submarines. Kanner Architects’ “Pop Playhouse” is more like a giant robot made of Swiss cheese. Its brightly colored and angled cubes suggest a walking machine equipped with hiding spots, climbing pegs and slide. On a more serious note, Michael Rotondi and Clark Stevens of ROTO created a nine-foot-tall rectangular stack of wood beams that, with the help of ropes, can be twisted into complex shapes for climbing. Though intended for kids, its dynamic sculpture and shifting volumes should be equally compelling to adults.

All the playhouses displayed were built pro bono by L.A. contractors who also, in many cases, donated materials. Though the structures cost thousands of dollars to build (and bids for them will begin at $3,500 to $5,000), anyone with $1 can compete to win one in an auction-day raffle. (For pre-auction ticket information, call 310-399-9232.)

Meanwhile, Hsin-Ming Fung of Hodgetts + Fung has an explanation for the enthusiasm of participants for a project so far removed from their usual work: “Architects are children at heart.”