Building Around Subtle Reminders

Whatever happened to Frederick Fisher? A rising star in the office of Frank Gehry in the late 1970s, Fisher set out to launch his own firm in 1980. His first important work, a house for artist Roger Herman, completed in 1986, was built for a modest budget of $150,000 and seemed to sum up the ethos of Los Angeles at that time. It was unpretentious, intentionally crude, clad in sheets of raw plywood, and its power stemmed from the conviction that beauty could be found amid the simple realities of everyday life. It announced the arrival of a genuine architectural talent.

Fisher went on to design a variety of local projects, including the 1989 Eli Broad Foundation building in Santa Monica and the 1994 L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice. Both of them are respectable works. But his architecture never caught the attention of a broader public. Instead, Fisher dropped out of the small circle of talked-about designers, lost somewhere between an older generation of established stars and a younger generation that is only now beginning to make its mark.

So the completion of Fisher’s Long Beach Museum of Art commission should be cause for celebration. His most significant Southern California commission to date, the $3.5-million project--which includes the renovation of the existing Arts and Crafts museum as well as a new building--stands on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Long Beach’s industrial port. The new building contains 10,000 square feet of gallery space, while the original museum, once a private residence, now houses a gift shop, cafe and administrative offices.

The problem is the design’s restraint. As in much of Fisher’s architecture, the new gallery building is shaped by a reverence for its context. The long, gabled structure, clad in somber cedar shingles, is meant to echo its 1912 neighbor, and it does so with remarkable deftness. But the building fuses with its context so seamlessly, it embraces the simplicity of the Arts and Crafts ethos with such conviction, that the architecture becomes almost invisible. You’re inevitably left thirsting for more.

Not all the fault lies with Fisher. The architect initially proposed a more Modernist design, but it was scrapped when local advocates and museum officials objected to the scheme because it contrasted too sharply with the existing building. Depending on your point of view, that decision shows either surprising integrity or a total lack of courage. Museum directors are more apt now than ever to demand high-profile, photogenic designs whose chief aim is to put their institutions on the cultural map. That’s a self-serving agenda, but one that has been a breath of fresh air for architects, who have been freer than ever to treat their craft as an art.

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At Long Beach, the agenda was to not disturb the past. In that regard, Fisher’s most aggressive decision was to move an existing carriage house from its original location on the lot’s western edge, tucking it behind the former residence where it now serves as an education center. The old structures and the new building face each other across an elegant lawn that stretches from the street to the bluff’s edge, creating a cozy internal complex.

Seen from the old museum across the lawn, the new gallery building has an appealing clarity. The long, wide bands of its facade mimic the brick and shingle cladding of the original structures. Near the street, a glass-enclosed lobby breaks this horizontal rhythm, its windows supported on a grid of slender steel mullions. At the building’s opposite end, a stair is cut into the facade leading up to a second-story balcony that wraps around the back of the building. The effect is a surprisingly abstract composition, a Cubist take on folk themes.

Much of the beauty here is in the simplicity of the details. A thin I-beam frames the exterior corner of the lobby window--an obvious reference to Mies van der Rohe. Inside, the lobby’s steel columns--encased in wood paneling--have been pulled away from the building’s exterior envelope, another old Modernist trick that gives the facade an additional lightness, allowing it to read as a clean, unbroken plain.

It is the flow of movement through the building that ties such details into a cohesive whole. Once you follow the main entry stair up to the second floor, for instance, you pass through a sequence of simple galleries that offer carefully orchestrated views of the surrounding context. In one of the second-floor galleries at the front of the building, a tall, narrow window--proportioned to the scale of a human body--allows visitors to momentarily gaze down at the quiet streetscape below.

Another gallery--which will also be used for occasional social events--opens onto the main balcony in back and a sweeping view of the ocean. From there, you follow the exterior stair down to the lawn outside and back to the bookstore and cafe. In effect, the various museum buildings form part of a single, unbroken sequence of experiences.

But context is a slippery notion. Which context do you choose? The original museum building may have been a model of Arts and Crafts design. But the city offers a broader context as well. It is one of the world’s great industrial ports, with its enormous cranes looming over the distant horizon. Turn inland and you confront a world of increasing social friction and urban energy. To engage these realities would have imbued the building with a very different--and perhaps more powerful--meaning.

And there is an even larger context to keep in mind. Architecture is at risk of being crushed between two worlds: the heroic scale of the Industrial Age and the rapid-fire, visual overload of the Information Age. In that context, the new Long Beach Museum of Art looks remarkably quaint. It makes you long for the ecstatic energy of the Italian Baroque--with its erotic play of light and form--or the giant 1960s-era structural frames of British architect Cedric Price-- architectural fantasies meant to act as a setting for anarchic play.

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Fisher is no stranger to such visual games. In his design for the renovation of P.S. 1, an experimental art space completed two years ago in Queens, N.Y., Fisher used a powerful mix of aesthetic strategies. In some galleries he stripped away layers of plaster to expose the original brick structure and vaulted tile ceilings, while in others he left the peeling paint intact. Outside, low concrete partitions frame a series of open-air galleries in what was once a playground. The effect is haunting. The clean lines of the raw concrete play off the more elaborate, institutional brick architecture of the school. What’s more, the building works wonderfully as a museum, offering a spectacular range of spaces in which to show art, both inside and out.

Of course, many clients secretly dream of an invisible architecture. To them, the best design functions as a neutral stage, a blank backdrop for their lives, their art, or their egos. But such an attitude has rarely produced great architecture, which is never neutral. And the fear is that Fisher will now be marked as a man who can be trusted to keep quiet--the city’s great, invisible designer. If that were to happen, it would be a terrible disservice to his talent.

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The Art Inside

* Christopher Knight reviews Long Beach’s “Rooms With a View.” F6