Basic Instincts

It was a world of frenzied creation and radical experimentation. Clustered around the genius of Frank Gehry in the early ‘80s, a group of talented young designers turned architecture on its head. Conventional bungalows were twisted and reconfigured. Modernist boxes became pop sculpture. For the second time in a century, Los Angeles became the great laboratory of domestic architecture.

Then, in the summer of ‘90, recession hit Southern California. Projects were shut down midway. Employees were let go. Offices shrank. Gehry launched off into international stardom, far above issues of local economics. A second tier of established architects--those already on the rise--emptied out their Santa Monica offices and retreated to the shelter of academia. And for a third group, those young architects fresh out of school, the world abruptly stopped. Many desperately tried to find teaching jobs. Others sought work in the more lucrative world of multimedia. Some just disappeared.

“You walked in one Monday morning and the world had changed. Everyone just closed their shutters up as quickly as possible,” says Michael Maltzan, a low-key, boyish-looking architect who worked for Gehry during the crash. Maltzan is standing in front of his latest creation, a bungalow he is renovating under the shadow of the Hollywood sign. “It was a big pause. And we had a lot of time to reflect on the work being done in this city. During a time of flux, you look back at history again.

There was not only a financial sense that you couldn’t do big expressionist work, there was a need for something slightly quieter.”

That was seven years ago. In 1995, Maltzan opened an architecture office in Silver Lake. Others--holed up in big offices or lucky enough to find teaching jobs--began to build again. But the perspective had changed. The catastrophe that hit architecture did more than just weed out the weak and the lazy in some awful Darwinian game. It caused architecture in Los Angeles to go through a reappraisal. And the result was a rejection of much of ‘80s self-indulgence in favor of a longer view of modernist history. Catastrophe may have been good for architecture after all.

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Anything that modernism had to say about domestic life it said at one point or another in Los Angeles. During the ‘20s and ‘30s, emigres--many who had passed through Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin workshop--formed a tight-knit community of modernist architects. Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler and Gregory Ain in Los Angeles, Alfred Frey in Palm Springs--all were part of a cohesive, radically creative community.

The work they produced here was equal to any in the fertile history of 20th century architecture. Presented with a wild, open landscape and a handful of open-minded clients, architects were free to fashion many of the city’s great residential landmarks: Neutra’s sleek, glass-and-steel-framed Lovell Health house, Schindler’s bohemian King’s Road house and Wright’s concrete-block houses. These works and others stand as both enduring social experiments and great architecture.

A half-century later, soon after the completion of his Santa Monica home in 1979, Frank Gehry reinvented the architectural landscape of Los Angeles. His innovation was twofold: He broke apart the box-like rooms of a conventional house into distinct sculptural elements, and he tilted and twisted walls and flaunted the usually ignored building materials--chain link was used as a decorative element and stud framing was exposed--as part of an exotic composition that celebrated the everyday.

Equally important, Gehry attracted new talent to Los Angeles. Students and younger architects flocked west to decipher his architecture. That pull was enormous: Even today, Gehry remains the great inventor; others measure their work, sometimes bitterly, against his success.

Four architects--now in their 50s--expanded on that legacy. They became known as “Frank’s kids”: Michael Rotondi, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss and Frank Israel. As Gehry’s international stature grew, each developed a style of his own. Of the four, Israel, who died at age 50 of AIDS last year, was the closest to Gehry in sensibility, though he used richer materials and more elaborate forms. Mayne and Rotondi, who were partners, celebrated a more raw, dynamic and industrial aesthetic, while Moss was the most overtly baroque of the group.

They fostered a climate of invention with a pragmatic bent. The idea was to build rather than discuss architectural theory: Unlike the East Coast scene that orbited around the close-knit community of schools like Harvard and Columbia, there was no clear theoretical center here. Nonetheless, the L.A. nexus rivaled the much-admired group of European architects--Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid--that had taught at London’s Architectural Assn. in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. That group dissolved by the mid-’80s, and Los Angeles was suddenly the center of the architectural map.

Inevitably, the excesses of the ‘80s caught up with the work. Clients, with more and more money, were suddenly asking for refined versions of what had been meant as low-budget, unpretentious houses. The materials became more expensive. Chain link and wood studs were replaced by zinc panels and copper cladding. The houses became pristine sculptural objects.

Gehry, always inspired by the raw and the edgy, was able to translate these changes into some of his best work. The success of his Santa Monica firm meant that the size of his projects was constantly growing, from humble houses to museums and concert halls. Eventually, he reached a point where budgets were seemingly limitless--and the sculptural freedom of his work became its most radical feature.

But others began to spin off into more self-indulgent experiments, with fussy details and overwrought designs. Moss, in particular, tends toward a dizzying expressionism, where structures are radically twisted, windows extend over blank partitions and trusses support nothing.

A house recently completed by Rotondi bizarrely blends the vestiges of ‘80s opulence with a harsh industrial theme. The project is a collaboration of sorts between the contractor client, the welder who built it and Rotondi, a small, sharp-eyed man who designs his own modernist clothes. Built on a post-industrial wasteland wedged between the railroad tracks and the Los Angeles River, it is a fascinating study of Piranesian madness and the client’s own ego and id: Elevated metal walkways run along the outside of the house, while the owners’ Doberman growls up at you from below. A lap pool made of a giant steel storage tank split lengthwise is suspended 16 feet over the garden. Inside, a three-story carved steel cylinder pierces the roof and turns into a rooftop viewing deck. It is a powerful work of architecture. Yet many of the best views can only be experienced from walkways that lead to nowhere or sculptural follies that are hard to get to. The house becomes less about life than about gratuitous expressionism.

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Today, confronted with tight budgets and even fewer options, emerging architects rarely have the opportunity to indulge in such excess. Architecture had to be rethought, the work reduced to its essentials: light, material, scale. “Everything is embedded in the architecture,” says Paul Lubowicki, another emerging voice who worked for Gehry from 1977 to 1984 and disappeared after the crash. “There’s nothing extraneous. The building becomes the detail.”

Lubowicki is sitting on a plastic chair in the courtyard of his most recent creation. His glasses are held together with masking tape. His hair is ruffled and thinning. His shirt is beige. He is neither bitter nor outraged by the changes the economy has wrought. “It was important to break away,” he says, “because Frank was so strong and so good. At some point you have to deal with it on your own to grow.”

When Gehry met Lubowicki at a student review at New York’s Cooper Union school in the late ‘70s, the legendary architect was so excited with Lubowicki’s work that he asked him to show it to his staff. During his tenure at Gehry’s office, Lubowicki was more than a draftsman, he was a catalyst for much of the work then going on. “He was probably the most talented guy to come through here,” Gehry says now. Yet Lubowicki has struggled for commissions since leaving the firm.

Watching Lubowicki walk around his latest design, you have the impression of a tough, shy man, slightly awkward when he is not at work. “I grew up lower middle class, where you are not taught to be aggressive on your own,” he says. “Give me something to make and I’m happy.”

In fact, Lubowicki and his partner, Susan Lanier, barely survived despite the help of Gehry, who threw smaller projects their way whenever he could. “Our phone didn’t ring once in 1995,” Lanier says. Lacking the self-promotional savvy so necessary in today’s architectural world, Lubowicki is happy just to be working.

The small house they are completing is actually a three-room addition to a dumpy Spanish-style bungalow on a nondescript, tree-lined West Hollywood street. The addition is anchored by the bathroom: a concrete-block cube with its roof popped up eight feet to create a giant glass lantern. Both the bedroom and living area lock into the corners of the bathroom in an L-shaped pattern that encloses a small courtyard.

In all of the rooms, views are shaped to protect the family’s privacy on the tight lot, while light streams in from clerestories above. The three distinct elements of the addition--bathroom, bedroom, living room--are used to shape outside spaces. Views are precious; everything is shaped by a sensitivity to the immediate environment. It is as if all of the frustrations of urban life have been transformed by a kind of gentle idealism. Congestion becomes intimacy. The everyday becomes poetic. There is a moving silence about the work. It has a seductive purity that is attractive after the structural contortions of the ‘80s.

Lubowicki and Lanier looked back to Gehry’s earlier experiments--when he had been restricted by tighter budgets--for a cruder, less-refined language more suited to the harsher economic climate. But they also studied the abstraction of early Los Angeles modernists like Irving Gill, whose stripped-down aesthetic is echoed here.

That restraint has its potential costs. For architects trying to establish themselves, these early houses are their sole marketing tools and restraint doesn’t always sell. It is a familiar but often corrupt cycle: The more convoluted the architecture, the more likely it is to be noticed. And that is one of the few ways to attract new clients. It takes sincerity and courage to resist that pull.

But restraint is a theme shared by the strongest voices emerging today. Few could be further in sensibility from Lubowicki’s working-class roots than Denel Guthrie and Tom Buresh. Both are academics. Both are well-versed in the theoretical jargon of architecture. But their strategies, when it comes to the actual work, are remarkably similar to Lubowicki’s.

Without free-spending clients knocking at their door, the duo did what aspiring architects have done for ages: They designed a house for themselves. “We decided to do something for ourselves that we could use as a marketing tool,” Buresh says. Like Lubowicki and Lanier, Guthrie and Buresh had to contend with the awkwardness of a seemingly leftover space--the only one they could afford--a lot tucked behind a dilapidated bungalow in West Hollywood. The site itself was an opportunity to examine how architecture could deal with everyday conditions.

“We started to strip stuff away to save money,” Guthrie says, sitting in the loft-like space that serves as their office in the new house. “And then we had to give ourselves a set of rules. We had to redirect the focus from the formal language to materials and light. There was no room for funny angles.”

Soon, the project became a study of how to make these tiny leftover lots not only habitable, but desirable. The key was privacy. “We were trying to create different kinds of social exchange,” Buresh says, “to use outdoor spaces that are usually throwaways. Instead of pressing the house up against the building next door, we saw these [back lots] as more communal spaces.”

The house, a long narrow box that looms forward up over the carport, is designed as two distinct spaces. Below, the house is more fortress-like: a concrete shell with large doors that open up to a garden wrapping around the back and along one side. Above, the structure is almost completely translucent with polycarbonate plastic along both sides and large glass windows in front and back.

Inside, spaces overlap visually, to increase the sense of scale and openness. Standing at the top of the stairs leading to the third-floor bedroom, you can peer down through the house and across the studio to the view of the sunset. That feeling of transparency is strengthened by the walls of polycarbonate, a material usually used for atrium skylights. In the midafternoon light, the whole house is infused with a pale glow.

Interior partitions are made of rough plywood or exposed two-by-four studs; the result looks as if the skin has been stripped off the building’s insides. The one sculptural element is a slight deformation on the second floor, where the facade is bent to make room for the massive branch of an enormous avocado tree. Although the house is a tremendously restrained box, it has a surreal quality. What makes it radical is the ways in which the essential elements of the house--rather than the forms--are manipulated. The house is basically a rectangle, but one bared to reveal its insides, distorted by light and pried apart to reveal long diagonal views.

Unlike Guthrie and Buresh’s house, Maltzan’s latest project has none of the problems associated with a constrained site. The Hollywood Hills home he’s renovating is all drama, sandwiched between the looming Hollywood sign and an endless view of the city below. Of the three homes, it is the least overtly radical.

One strong gesture animates the house: a concrete walkway that runs from the street to the pool in back, cutting the house in two. It makes the perfect setting for a Hockney painting: an open car door, a strip of discarded clothes along the walkway, two legs disappearing into the blue water. A remarkably elegant gesture.

By dividing the house lengthwise along that path, Maltzan is able to separate public and private, inside and out, in a dramatic way. The living and dining rooms can be opened up to the pool garden, creating a sort of open pavilion. Light flickers everywhere, reflecting off the white walls and the open ceiling. Meanwhile, the other half becomes a smaller, more secluded, bungalow-like space that contains the bedroom and study. It is a small house with a graceful flexibility.

All of the architectural elements here are deftly mastered: light, scale, circulation, material. And there is an obvious grasp of modern history. Remember the oft-quoted words of the father of modernism, Le Corbusier: “I confess to having had only one master--the past; and only one discipline--the study of the past.”

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Looking back at the work of the ‘80s now--the work that drew so many to Los Angeles--there are questions about its durability. The frenzied energy of the work--fed by the building boom--is often forced and overwrought. As Gehry himself points out about the work of some of his so-called kids, “I always was less fussy than that. But some of these guys are more like [Italian architect Carlo] Scarpa than like me. They’re obsessed with these finicky details.” That fetish with detail seems dated and worn now.

The allure of the ornate still has its admirers. The designs of Alejandro Ortiz, for example, a young architect who worked for both Gehry and Mayne and who is building himself a house in Santa Monica Canyon, seem to more closely reflect the work of that time. The house is a careful composition of three largely independent elements--public, private and work. In some ways, it is reminiscent of Gehry’s early work. The relation of the forms is adroitly handled and it is less cluttered with ornament than the worst work of the ‘80s.

But it has many of the problems that arise when you design a building as sculpture. Along the facade facing the street, one corner is carved out as a plausible formal entry. But the main entry is from the garage, in the back, where you are forced to meander onto the deck and through a standard sliding glass door into the living room. The feeling of discovery, of unfolding mystery, is never explored until you are deep inside the house.

It is not a new problem. Even approaching one of Frank Israel’s best designs, the Dan House in Malibu, visitors are momentarily disoriented. The house presents a closed wall to the street. Visitors pull into the driveway and snake along a tiny path, and then switch back suddenly to the main entrance. Bang--clumsily--you are inside. Compare either to Wright’s best creations, where the drawn-out entry sequence is a crucial part of the experience of the house.

Some are doing just that--looking further back in time, and feeling more uneasy about the giddiness of the ‘80s. The brutality of the recession gave these architects plenty of time to ponder the past, and that has only added depth to their work. In a city considered fleeting and transitory, it is, with some irony, the light veil of history that is causing architects to rethink the value of these projects.

“Gehry didn’t come out of the schools or the theory,” Maltzan says. “He came from practice. And that first generation--Schindler, Neutra--came here for a similar reason. This was a place where you could get things built.”