Region’s Sleek New Looks Get Serious Attention
New York-based furniture designer Dakota Jackson opened an innovative showroom in West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center last year because he liked what he saw.
“Los Angeles always had its own distinctive design culture, but I saw a new strengthening,” said the erudite Jackson, who tapped architect Peter Eisenman to create a cutting-edge architectural sculpture that interacts with the furniture to redefine the concept of “showroom.”
Both men thought Los Angeles offered a good place to stretch their wings, finding it more open than New York to the nontraditional. Jackson, who is introducing a rug collection here this week, says his showroom has been received well on both coasts.
“I am seeing more serious New York critical attention given to design in Los Angeles than in the past, when it was usually approached from a position of eccentricity,” he noted.
Jackson’s observation is echoed in interviews throughout the Southern California design community. Long treasured as the nation’s flamboyant fringe, Los Angeles finds itself being taken seriously--not only for movie and television images, but as a leader in across-the-board design, its traditional open-mindedness and Pacific Rim location increasing assets in a globalized world.
As L.A. Design Week, now underway, puts the design world’s focus on Los Angeles, an unexpected maturity asserts itself. As L.A. interior designer James Magni, whose byword is “global modernism,” recently proclaimed: “You can’t design in a bubble--and we are in the most extraordinary place right now.”
That thought seems to be borne out this week at two events that fall under the L.A. Design Week umbrella: WestWeek 99, a festival of art, architecture and interiors at the Pacific Design Center, and NeoCon West, the giant office furniture exposition at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
A Place With Global Appeal
“L.A. is an incredibly unique place to practice,” said architect Michael Hricak Jr. “We are playing to people who speak 75 languages--a big focus group. I think that accounts for our world appeal.”
The metamorphosis comes as a pleasant shock. After weathering the 1990s’ riots, the economic blow from military downsizing, the Northridge earthquake and a general recession, Los Angeles has emerged, say designers, as the place to be for the next millennium, its new chic status symbolized by the celebrated Getty Center.
“We’ve always had a buoyant spirit, but in the 1990s we went to hell and back,” said architect Michael B. Lehrer, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Noting that the earthquake has shaped urban architecture by producing stricter building codes and massive retrofitting, he said “it seems there is still an optimism but it’s tempered--maybe we are a lot less innocent and a little more serious.”
Lehrer will moderate a West-Week panel Friday on “Reflecting Forward,” focusing on designing what’s comfortable but with a 21st century twist.
“In architecture,” he said, “we’re talking about new materials in buildings with more outdoor spaces becoming true to our beautiful climate, more glass, with microcomputers controlling each room without great expense.”
“New materials” is the defining theme for this year’s WestWeek, which opened Wednesday and continues through Friday.
For the 8,000-plus visiting design professionals from around the country, the sponsors have assembled three days of dialogues, panel discussions and exhibits with an overriding theme of “Form Follows L.A.”
“Los Angeles is taking the lead in the integration of design disciplines, and we wanted to focus on that,” said Elaine Mutchnik, the Pacific Design Center’s vice president of marketing.
Panels Discuss New Materials
Panel discussions are examining the wealth of new materials and how Los Angeles designers use them to affect across-the-board design, in an accelerating crossover from one industry to the next.
Looking beyond the millennium, students at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design have created an “Urban Objects” show of futuristic furniture and lighting for an urban landscape. And in another look at the future, a series of seminars examines the ongoing work of emerging talent, a group organized as New Blood 101 for an exhibit last WestWeek by architect Bernard Zimmerman.
Earlier this week, architect Hricak headed a discussion of “L.A. Unconventional,” which wrapped up history, current experimentation and a preview of new architecture. “We are probably more influential internationally than in America, which considers us the ‘Left Coast,’ ” he said, “whereas Europe and the East have looked to us as the land of possibilities.”
For architects, the city continues to offer the compelling combination of land and people with money to spend, Hricak said.
Not only is he excited about such projects as Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall and the Exposition Park New Coliseum stadium design by NBBJ, a Los Angeles firm, he is also heartened by the surge of interest among young people in restoring the houses they are buying.
“We’re seeing restoration of everything from Craftsman houses to Spanish revival and even postwar modern houses of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Who would have thought people in 1999 would be looking for avocado green stoves? It’s wonderful to see history being kept alive this way.”
Designs for a Technological Age
Between seminar sessions, West-Week visitors will see California’s new look in many of the Pacific Design Center showrooms.
Like many in the design center, Ralph Rudin, a third-generation upholstery manufacturer, has recently enlarged his showroom. “It’s hip-looking limestone, really California,” said Rudin. In Los Angeles, which came out of the recession later than most of the country, a general revitalization is taking place, he said. Hotels are being upgraded and offices redesigned for a technological age.
The economy also dictates interior design trends. “In a downturn, we see more traditional furniture--English, Chippendale, Baker,” Rudin said. “When things are on the up and up, people will take more chances, be more stylized.” At the same time, he said, many new-look fabrics emphasize soft, nubby-surface textures. “It’s about comfort and lifestyle.”
Nothing symbolizes the growth of Los Angeles’ design evolution more vividly than the West Hollywood neighborhood that wraps around the Pacific Design Center, a mix of galleries, showrooms, antiques shops, boutiques and restaurants. Said Ron Kates, who has helped develop the “Avenues of Art and Design” concept for the area: “This is where it’s happening. This is where creativity gets down to business.”
“It’s bustling, bursting!” echoed Sally Sirkin Lewis, who rushed completion of her new J. Robert Scott showroom on Melrose Avenue to greet WestWeek visitors. In 1972, when she went into business on Melrose, the trendy neighborhood was a wasteland, recalled Lewis, whose modernist classic furniture and textiles enjoy international acclaim.
Her new glass showroom with pale woods was designed to capture “the wonderful feeling of light and space,” said Lewis, who is also introducing several new lines this week. “It’s what California represents to those of us who live and work here.”
Office Furniture Expo Expanded
Stepping up the WestWeek vitality several notches this year is the Convention Center’s overflowing design activity, centered around NeoCon, the giant office furniture exposition. When Chicago’s Merchandise Mart Properties Inc., home of NeoCon, decided to expand, said spokesman Mark Falanga, “we started digging around the L.A. market and found astounding support. L.A. was coming out of its economic tailspin.”
The Chicago entity launched “L.A. Design Week” last year and continues to expand the undertaking, setting up shuttles between the Convention Center and West Hollywood. This year’s added shows include Design Show L.A., its lines of contemporary furnishings and textiles another reflection of local creativity.
“We discovered a huge number of small artisans working on the West Coast, doing mainly custom work, but able to produce on a large scale,” said Design Show spokesman David Drury. What they’re producing, he said, is contemporary furniture that combines new technology and new materials in a cleaner, sleeker look.
“Instead of looking to the past for reproductions, we are seeing a new aesthetic, getting rid of the clutter. It’s rooted in modernism but not reproducing what was done in the ‘40s and ‘50s.” Drury mentioned examples such as technologies to bend plywood into furniture, and bed designs with lighting integrated into the frames.
L.A. Design Week, Drury added, was created to pull together all the aspects of design activity in Los Angeles. “It has always been an important center in terms of what we see being produced, but I don’t think it has had any entity to give it the visibility it has deserved.”