Members of LPA Design Team Are True Architects of Change

Dan Heinfeld, president of the Orange County office of LPA Inc., likes to quote his firm’s motto: “We build places and spaces for people.”

That’s places and spaces, he emphasizes. “Design doesn’t stop at the front door. It goes on to landscape, graphics, environment and how you look at the world.”

The “for people” part counts too. Heinfeld tries to make his clients active participants in the design team--including the group of parents and business leaders behind Sage Hill, a $25-million private high school scheduled to open next year in Newport Beach.

“We’ll have the user group come in and sit around the table,” said the tall, quietly affable Heinfeld. “We’ll draw stuff and put it up on the wall and bounce off ideas. A lot of that happens in the very early stages of the program. For us, it’s not [just] quantitative information, but qualitative information.”

It was in just such a meeting--to discuss the design for San Marcos City Hall council chambers--that the mayor casually mentioned his dislike of sitting more than 90 feet from anybody in a public meeting. Bingo. There was the scale of the room.

Similarly, when the dean of the college of business and information services at Cal State San Bernardino mused that “real education happens outside the classroom,” Heinfeld immediately envisioned a building with courtyards fostering impromptu discussions between students and teachers.

“If he hadn’t said that, and we hadn’t been there to hear that, the building would have taken on a whole different life,” said Heinfeld, whose low-key manner encourages such exchanges.

One of Sage Hill’s key operating rules, LPA learned, was that teachers won’t necessarily have their own classrooms, in order to encourage different class sizes and structures. Project architects set to work dreaming up alternative workstations.

“So often people say, ‘Well, what’s it going to look like?’ They want to rush to that decision. We tell them, ‘We’re going to discover that through this process.’ What we do [as architects] is like the last cuts on a haircut.”

Named after founder Leason Pomeroy, LPA opened its first office in 1965 and thrived on speculative office projects for developers. Seeking a more diverse practice, the firm branched out in the mid-1980s to independent projects--which turned out to be a saving grace when the developers’ market dried up in the recession of the early 1990s.

During the past decade, the 95-member Irvine office has designed a wide range of buildings, from San Marcos Town Center, a 10-acre civic, retail, office and recreational complex (1992) to an interim sanctuary for Saddleback Valley Community Church (1994).

Schools increasingly have become part of the mix.

Two years ago, LPA developed a set of standard blueprints for public schools to speed the building process and thereby decrease costs. The kit--which LPA first used in 1997 for Canyon Rim Elementary School in Anaheim--allows California state standards for classroom, libraries, multipurpose rooms and others to be easily adapted to specific sites.

At the other extreme, LPA also works on highly customized projects, winning top honors twice--in 1996 and 1998--from the Orange County chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for Tarbut V’Torah Day School in Irvine.

“The simplicity of the vocabulary resonates as both ancient and new,” the jurors wrote in 1996. In response to the teachers’ desire to re-create the feeling of being in Israel, the campus was designed to evoke aspects of biblical and contemporary Jerusalem.

“With private schools, you can be more resourceful and look at what the school is trying to teach,” Heinfeld said.