The Green Team

Six years ago, a group of children, parents, administrators and teachers armed with sugar cubes, toothpicks, golf tees and strong opinions set out to design an elementary school.

They convened each night for a week to discuss their needs and work with the materials, under the guidance of Betsy Olenick Dougherty and her husband, Brian--partners in the Costa Mesa architecture firm Dougherty + Dougherty.

By the final meeting, the group had come up with four different notions of what Ocean Park School in Santa Monica should look like. The Doughertys asked the group to chose their favorite.

This process might sound too playfully pie-in-the-sky to relate to the serious business of education--or architecture. But the new school, which opened last year, not only reflected the group’s consensus but also won a 1998 award for Excellence in Sustainable Design from the Orange County chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

“We didn’t design the school,” said Dougherty, 47, a brisk, motherly woman with a hearty laugh and such a passion for her work that she sometimes leaves one thought unfinished to plunge into the next. “The community did. We just facilitated the process.”

Of course that “facilitating” includes the benefit of more than a decade of designing environmentally friendly community buildings in Southern California.

The firm’s other projects have included the Evelyn Walker and Garfield elementary schools in Santa Ana and a jazzy 6,000-square-foot family and youth center in Tustin carved out of a decrepit strip-mall store.

At Ocean Park, a $5.9-million project, the final design allowed two schools (John Muir Elementary and Santa Monica Alternative School House) to share a modest 2 1/2-acre site without towering over a residential neighborhood or requiring wasteful extras.

Windows actually open (rather than being sealed shut, as in so many public buildings), and electric fans not only circulate the air but also pull moisture off the skin, “which drops your perception of the air temperature by 10 degrees,” Dougherty said.

The school benefited by the Doughertys’ early-’90s efforts in experimental eco-design, when they worked on buildings for the first two phases of the Center for Regenerative Studies at Cal Poly Pomona, a 16-acre “village” for students and faculty developing new ways to live lightly on the land.

One of the couple’s buildings for this project is a riverfront dormitory raised on piers. In lieu of air-conditioning, it is largely cooled by air currents rising from the water.

Dougherty + Dougherty’s move last year from sleek Newport Center to an industrial park near John Wayne Airport was in line with its partners’ can-do philosophy. The $140,000 remodel of a onetime auto-repair shop--which won an honorable mention at the OC/AIA awards this year--has a rugged, stripped-down look, intended to minimize costs and make use of new ecologically sensitive materials.

The recycling began with the property itself, Betsy Dougherty explained last week as she steered a visitor through airy spaces defined by the textures of industrial materials. Students and employees were allowed to cart away cabinets, particleboard dividers and hardware left by the last tenant, an advertising agency.

Rather than polishing or carpeting the concrete slab floor, the Doughertys left it as-is, with just a spray-on coating of acrylic sealer.

“I’m asthmatic myself,” Dougherty said. “I’m highly allergic to a lot of toxins. Not having carpet is heaven for me. It’s hard on everybody’s feet, but for me [carpet] is a place where things can”--her eyes grow wide in mock anxiety--”fester.”

Joking that the pillowy curves of vinyl material on the ceiling resemble a Claes Oldenburg sculpture, Dougherty explained they insulate against moisture, reflect light and avoid the toxic annoyance of “little pieces of fiberglass falling on us.”

A Sensitivity to Materials

Dougherty is adamant that “there’s no such thing as a totally friendly material. [But] we at least try to go through a thoughtful process. Sometimes you try to do the right thing and it’s not possible--frequently because of money, sometimes because of time [constraints] or product availability.”

At Ocean Park, for example, the Doughertys wanted to use wet recycled newspapers as low-cost insulation. But when the partners went to bid on the project, nobody knew how to install the stuff. Wary contractors sent in high bids. So much for that idea.

Happily, technology evolves--even the “green” variety.

When Ocean Park was built, it was impossible to get formaldehyde-free insulation and particleboard. (Formaldehyde emits a toxic gas not only during its manufacture but throughout the life of the product.) Just a few years later, when the Doughertys were working on their office project, a major manufacturer had begun to make formaldehyde-free products that were no more expensive or harder to get than the standard kind.

Even the birch-faced plywood cabinets in the firm’s office were made with an eco-friendly technology.

Betraying her relish for the technical side of her profession, Dougherty launched into a vivacious description, complete with sound effects, of the difference between typical wood veneers (made by slicing the tree, leaving an unusable knotty core) and the rotary method.

“You put the wood on a spindle and you go”--her voice rises to a saw’s high pitch--”bzzzzzzz. And you get this long thing. You get the whole tree until there’s just a toothpick left in the middle. If there’s a knot, nobody cares.”

Some might shudder at cabinets that aren’t quite smooth and have odd variations, such as seams and knotholes (the biggest ones are hidden inside the cabinets). But as someone who wears her gray hair in a short, no-fuss do and whose sole concessions to vanity are clear-polished short nails, Dougherty seems far too absorbed with larger issues to fuss over cosmetic details.

Showing a visitor the cardboard architectural model for Ocean Park School, she casually pointed out the place where she had to hack it into two pieces to fit into her Chevy Suburban.

Home With Purple, Pink Made a Mark

Ever since the Doughertys’ undergraduate and graduate days at UC Berkeley in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s--where they were intellectual soul mates who discussed opening an office together before they even dated--their abiding passion has been environmentally responsive design.

The daughter of an eye surgeon and a nurse, Betsy Dougherty happened to grow up in a radically modern ‘50s home in San Bernardino. It was a total fluke: Her parents had blindly selected an architect (Clare Day) without understanding his aesthetic.

The house had a purple exposed concrete block interior with pink concrete floors and floor-to-ceiling windows on the northern side. Sheltered clerestory windows on the southern side provided natural ventilation. The roof was perfectly flat--and persistently leaky.

“People would walk in and say, ‘Ewww, how can you live here? It’s so cold!’ ” Dougherty said. “My parents had this saying, ‘Home is where you hang your architect.’ But I loved the house. I loved being different. . . . I have dreams about it because it was poorly remodeled by subsequent owners.”

Years later, when Dougherty met Day in the course of her administrative work for the AIA, she told him how much the environmental sensitivity of his design had influenced her choice of career.

In the 1960s, however, architecture was more of a man’s world. Dougherty was barred from high school drafting classes because she was a girl.

“I had to take homemaking,” she recalled. “To this day, I don’t know how many cups are in a quart, nor do I care.”

Enrolled as an art major at UC Berkeley, she envied the students in the School of Environmental Design next door. While she was passively studying individual works of art, they got to integrate elements of building design she found utterly compelling: technology, science, sociology, psychology and aesthetics.

Paging through issues of the Italian design magazine Abitare, she would pause at the photographs of “some crumbled masonry structure with exposed bricks--the real thing, not the fake Italian restaurant [style]--and in the middle would be a very contemporary piece of furniture. I just felt, Wow! The textures!”

Even though she lacked the requisite portfolio of drawings--because she’d never been allowed to take a drafting course--Dougherty petitioned to be admitted to the architecture program, where she made straight A’s.

“I said, ‘This is it! This is for me.’ And I never looked back.”

Dougherty’s passion for architecture as a social responsibility carries over to the upbringing of her two children, 18-year-old Princeton-bound Gray and 12-year-old Megan.

“Do something with your life to make a difference--they’ve been given this [message] since they were born,” Dougherty said.

Her strong belief in the nurturing potential of public buildings inspires her enthusiastic attention to such practical details as providing enough separately locking storage areas at an elementary school to accommodate all the projects made by children in after-school activity clubs.

A positive thinker--”There’s nothing on this planet that’s totally wrong . . . except nuclear war”--she said she enjoys the often combative public process of making buildings happen.

“Because really everybody has something to contribute. Even if there’s someone who’s the naysayer of the bunch, they become the conscience. They make us reconsider whether what we’re doing is right.”