Concrete Bond : Award-winning Santa Ana architect Ralph Allen cements the marriage of unadorned modernism and sculptural design.

Virtually all architects have to compromise their ideas to satisfy clients.

Ralph Allen, a canny 65-year-old Nebraskan, has figured out how to get around this: work for public school districts.

“The architect?” Allen said, giving his low-key, cracker-barrel voice the brisk intonation of a school superintendent. “He’s going to do the best he can. I’m not going to tell him how to do it because I have no background in it.”

Allen’s strategy paid off handsomely this year when his little-known Santa Ana office--which specializes in concrete buildings--was named architectural firm of the year by the California chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Previous winners include Los Angeles legend Frank O. Gehry (1987), the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (1988) and Leason Pomeroy Associates in Irvine (1990).

Sigrid Miller Pollin, a member of the 1998 jury and dean of architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, said Allen’s firm was honored for its “consistent search for meaning and form.”

The jury, she said, enjoyed the opportunity to select a firm that doesn’t belong to architecture’s “in crowd” and lacked the usual long list of awards and publications.

Pollin singled out the way the firm added a “sculptural quality” to its designs for schools, despite typically tight budgets and long lists of requirements. She also remarked on the difficulty of working with a building material that isn’t popular in Orange County.

Allen--whose designs include the Orange County Law Library, Century High School and Fremont Elementary School, all in Santa Ana--learned long ago how to cope with people’s often hostile perceptions of his ideas.

“A lot of times I think we deal in opposites,” he said. “We think one thing is true, and its opposite is.”

Concrete sounds cold and forbidding to many. A building that extends underground, as does Fremont Elementary, conjures up images of claustrophobic bomb shelters. And classrooms without windows? How heartless can you be?

“The typical underground building has less building,” Allen said recently, leaning back in a chair in his firm’s conference room. “You have grass and trees. If you have the choice between nature and building, always go with nature because you have the winner.”

Allen, whose wife is a retired elementary-school teacher, said the concept of an underground classroom “doesn’t matter” to children and isn’t a negative factor for teachers.

“What does a teacher want in a classroom?” he asked rhetorically. “A space to teach. A space that’s quiet.”

Allen recalled hearing teachers complain in a town meeting about the problems they had in classrooms with windows: kids passing by would distract their fellow students.

One of his solutions--seen in 4-year-old Murietta Valley High School in Murietta--is a series of clerestory windows, set high on the wall in the middle of the classroom to let in light. The only views are of the sky.

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A decade ago, Allen’s firm proposed to the Office of Public School Construction in Sacramento two schemes for Santa Ana’s Century High.

One was an ordinary-looking brick structure with a parking lot on the side.

The other was a concrete building with rooftop parking--freeing up on the 25-acre lot three acres that could be used instead to beef up the sports field.

Because of the urban setting and something known as the urban adjustment factor, this space-saving design would add 24% more to the building budget, bringing it up to $22 million--enough to add some individual touches, like the zigzagging ramp where students hang out in the interior courtyard.

Santa Ana Unified School District board members weren’t so sure they wanted a concrete school with 300 cars on top.

“The kids will run off and kill themselves!” Allen said, mimicking the voice of a worried school-board member.

“You’ve got a concrete wall,” he explained. “You’d have to go 40 miles an hour to break through that thing. But the perception is, ‘Gee, that’s dangerous!’ ”

The school, which has a sweeping curved facade, in 1993 won an Honor Award for its innovative design from the Orange County chapter of the AIA.

The interior courtyard is shaded by concrete canopies resembling coffered ceilings, except that some of the recessed panels are open to the sky, creating a play of solids and voids. A similar ceiling covers the adjacent library and extends into the courtyard, zipping seamlessly past a glass wall angled to deflect the sun’s rays.

Allen is so proud of this project that he rigged a puckish display outside his office. Next to a museum poster proclaiming famous French architect Le Corbusier “Architect of the Century,” he hung an enlarged snapshot of himself smoking a cigar, emblazoned with the words “Architect of Century.”

When the project went over budget, and the ramp and canopies were slated to be axed, Allen’s fabled persistence came to the fore.

Learning that only one of the five board members wanted these features, Allen applied the screws (“How come one board member got their way that other time?”).

He grimaced. “I got the reputation of being a bad guy who goes [clandestinely] to board members. I got some scars on that.”

A few things have escaped his control.

Although he begged the principal not to paint the elegantly curved bulk of the facade, a later administration added a garish rendering of Century’s centurion mascot and the school’s name, complete with cartoon-like sparkle rays painted on.

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Ralph Allen & Partners has a split personality. It subscribes to a less-is-more aesthetic of unadorned modernism, yet the office itself is pragmatic, homey and decidedly unstylish, much like its owner.

Allen thriftily designed the firm’s mirrored building on Main Street to accommodate rent-paying tenants: The lower level is occupied by Clinica Prenatale de Santa Ana and a dentist’s office. A plaque in the nondescript reception area honors Allen as Santa Ana’s 1994 businessman of the year.

Visitors can browse through a folksy album of snapshots of most of the employees of the multicultural, 25-member firm. There’s not a single sleek Barcelona chair in sight.

In fact, Allen almost didn’t become an architect.

He had, he said, “terrible study habits” while majoring in architecture at the University of Nebraska and working nights at Tastee Freeze for 60 cents an hour. A bout of pneumonia gave him an excuse to drop out of school.

Then came the Korean War--Allen served in the Navy--and a stint working in a dairy. Finally, it seemed time to go back to college, this time as a business administration major.

His guidance counselor wouldn’t let him switch. So he stuck it out, listening to the wisdom of European-educated professors preaching the Bauhaus doctrine of simple, functional forms.

“I think in school you’re not there long enough to be taught design,” he said. “But you’re there long enough to learn what good design is.”

Resettled in California, where he’d been stationed during the war, Allen worked for architect Gates Burrows, becoming a partner in the early ‘60s.

In 1972, five years after winning a Merit award from the Orange County chapter of the AIA for the boldly sculptural Santa Ana Fire Training Building, Allen designed the Orange County Law Library as a grouping of massive concrete volumes.

After entering the library model in the AIA’s annual contest, he decided to visit the association office. His wasn’t on display with the others.

“Was it so bad they didn’t display it?” he wondered gloomily.

He had doubted his design skills ever since professors criticized his work in college.

“But then it won the [highest-ranking] Honor award. So it gave me confidence. ‘You’re all right!’ ”

In 1978, when Burrows was semiretired, Allen gave the firm its present name. His projects have included 15 schools or school buildings, six libraries, a church and other diverse structures in Southern California--among them an art and design center for Cal State Northridge. He yearns to add a museum to that list.

Meanwhile, he clearly relishes being the little guy who walked off with the big prize: “I always say that if my success causes you pain, you’re gonna be in agony.”