Timing Is on His Side at Last

If part of building a career is timing, then few architects have had worse timing than Michele Saee.

After a brief stint working in the office of Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne, Saee struck out on his own in 1985. By the end of the decade, Saee had completed several elegant renovation projects in L.A. and seemed poised on the edge of local stardom. But in 1991, the economy began to founder. Soon, Saee was just another unemployed architect scraping by for work.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that Saee, now 44, began to reemerge. To do so, he first had to escape L.A.: Europe is home to all of his most important projects, including a chain of cafes for Nestle, two of which are now under construction in France; a cinema-restaurant-drugstore complex on Paris’ Champs Elysees that is scheduled to go under construction this fall; and two cultural centers in Italy that are still under design.

Now Saee returns to Los Angeles with his first local commission in years, the renovation of a Cellular Fantasy store in Santa Monica. Designed with partner Brant Gordon, the project’s dreamy, sensual forms are powerful metaphors for Los Angeles’ image as a hedonistic playground and the emerging high-tech Computer Age, and it should instantly establish Saee as an important talent. Standing here, in fact, one wonders how Saee could have struggled unrecognized for so long.

Housed in a former Home Savings building at Wilshire Boulevard and 26th Street, the two-story space is virtually invisible from the street. Saee had hoped to install a gigantic translucent billboard over the building’s travertine-clad facade, which is currently decorated with a dull, 1960s-era mural and an ostentatious gold cornice. But the city’s architectural review board vetoed that plan, citing the building’s historic importance.

Ultimately the decision did not harm Saee’s design. Entering the building, in fact, is a surreal moment, like Alice falling through the looking glass. Rows of futuristic work stations, whose sculpted forms evoke high-tech motorcycle wind screens, cut diagonally across the space. Visually, the work stations recall the paintings of Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni or Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2.” Boccioni, in particular, sought to create a language of motion, one in which layers of overlapping planes are used to express a fluid, dynamic world. Saee’s version, recast in architectural terms, is even more sensuous, as if the forms were reaching out to embrace you.

Individually, however, the work stations are closer in spirit to the work of Carlo Mollino, the 1950s-era Italian architect and furniture designer. Mollino’s tables and chairs look like futuristic animals. Their taut, sinewy lines--usually made of exotic woods and glass--evoke repressed, subliminal fantasies. Saee’s version, made of acrylic plastic and supported on thin metal braces, is also charged with erotic energy.

But the work stations are only one component in a complex hierarchy of public and private zones. A long, curved perforated steel partition runs the length of the main room, splitting it into two zones--one for employees, the other for browsing shoppers. In back, another screen sets off a more private work area.

That sense of flowing space continues up above, where a milky white scrim covers the original stained-glass window that forms what was the bank’s back wall. Seen through the scrim, the mosaic’s strong colors and heavy-handed forms attain a muted, dreamy quality. Opposite, a steel screen serves to partially hide the upper balcony. The screen is suspended from a heavy steel frame that appears to be floating, its vertical members like columns that have been sliced off before they meet the ground.

The effect is as if the forces of gravity have been temporarily suspended; the forms have such an exquisite sense of lightness that at times they seem to have been traced in air.

That sense of a delicately balanced world--between private intimacy and public interaction--continues on the second floor. There, several large private offices are tucked behind another row of work stations. At first glance, the offices seem like conventional glass boxes, their interiors completely exposed to view. But with the flick of a switch the glass turns opaque. The only things visible are the ghostlike silhouettes of the office workers, drifting around inside.

Such themes are not new in architecture. The increasing transparency of private life, for example, is a favorite topic of the contemporary avant-garde, as are the illicit pleasures of the voyeur.

But Saee’s design takes a neutral stance on such issues. It assumes that the traditional barriers that define us have already faded beyond recognition. But rather than resist such realities, Saee seeks to make them explicit. The result is a powerful statement about the contemporary condition. With luck, it is the first of many.