The Moomba School of Design
Like a doctor checking a patient’s skin for lumps, Hagy Belzberg places his hand flat on a plastered wall and glides it gently over the surface, feeling for irregularities. Amid the cacophony of power drills and jackhammers, he closes his eyes and inhales the musty, sweet smells of a construction site.
It’s the part of building the architect likes best: “I love to smell how it changes from how the earth smells to what the concrete smells like--the steel, the wood after it’s up. It’s so sensual. The most incredible part of architecture is that the senses are stimulated in all these unbelievable ways.”
Even as a young boy, Belzberg couldn’t wait to get out of school and race back to a neighborhood construction site to marvel. Now, at 36, he’s doing the designing. The latest project from the Santa Monica-based Belzberg is Moomba, a renovation of the former LunaPark in West Hollywood, which opens this weekend as the West Coast version of New York’s hip night spot--part restaurant, part club, part live-performance space. Belzberg also recently transformed the tony L.A. restaurant Patina from a bland, cramped space into a sophisticated, airy room with a dimensional facade and designed the exterior entryways and interiors of the Nick & Stef’s chain of upscale steakhouses, also from Patina owner Joachim Splichal.
Belzberg has done residences, too, including ones in Pasadena, Malibu and the flats of Beverly Hills. Still more projects are in the works: In May, construction begins inside the America West Arena in Phoenix, where a segment of sky boxes is being removed to create an executive club. And he’s provided designs for a Las Vegas Conga Room, the first expansion of L.A.’s premier Latin night spot.
It’s a wonder Belzberg finds much time to sleep these days, but then, he hasn’t slept very well, he says, since attending Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He’s most at peace when he’s surfing, when he cannot manipulate his environment and has to give up control, allowing the ocean to take him where it wants.
The interaction between architecture and its environment has fascinated Belzberg since his early childhood in Israel, where he spent much of his time outdoors. Incorporating a blend of indoors and out is a goal, and there are influences in his work of such masters as Frank Lloyd Wright and mid-century Modernist architects, like John Lautner, who incorporated the landscape and organic elements into their work.
Belzberg’s designs strike a balance of angles, platforms and curves, severe lines and soft textures. Spare, sophisticated furnishings are offset by bold architectural details such as awnings, sweeping curved roofs and sturdy beams.
At Moomba, for instance, an asymmetrical, translucent turquoise Lumacite awning extends from a flat facade. Guests walk up a sheltered staircase into the restaurant, a small, spare room with a bar, intimate booths and tables. Down a hallway, a low upholstered banquette sensuously snakes around a corner. Seat backs were purposely made low to encourage conversation and closeness--it’s easy to wrap an arm around a neighboring shoulder. One wall is pierced by a series of framed peepholes that offer glimpses of the kitchen. In the live performance room, a small corner stage is flanked by two open elevated VIP areas. A downstairs game room has a low ceiling, encouraging guests to lounge on low banquettes and bed-like structures (a current hot nightclub design trend) that hug the walls.
Designed With the Customer in Mind
Although Belzberg did not set out to become a restaurant designer, he is becoming known in that arena, following on the heels of architect Josh Schweitzer (Ciudad) and designer Ron Meyer (Atlas Bar & Grill). For Belzberg, a restaurant’s flow and human behavior are key elements of his design. Months were spent observing Patina before he started work there: “People want to be entertained from the moment that door opens, and if you are treated badly from the get-go, what’s the point of going out? So we try to have the architecture accommodate people, and that’s done by creating a space where there’s a formal entry, and a secondary vestibule, like the bar, so you don’t see who’s coming in and being seated. We’re moving away from theme restaurants, so the challenge is creating an environment that’s elegant and sophisticated and lifts the spirits, and we try to do it without ornamentation, so the articulated space becomes the challenge.”
For homes, the challenge is creating a functional, tranquil environment. A Pasadena hillside house completed in 1994 for artist brothers Joe and John Dumbacher is a loft-like space accommodating studios and places to feature art. The angular structure of concrete and steel (favorite building materials) and copious windows offers both a treehouse-level view and privacy from neighbors.
Belzberg also recently completed his own home, which sits atop a Brentwood hill like a bird about to take flight. The architect, who is single, shares it with his rescued golden retriever, Nick, and plans to put his office in his bedroom, facilitating middle-of-the-night brainstorms. The admitted workaholic concedes that he’s “learning now to balance things out, although I’m still accused of having no balance.”
The home’s kitchen, dining room and living room are in one large, open-tiered space. Three walls of floor-to-ceiling windows allow a expansive view of the city. He says he would live outside if he could, but this may be the next best thing. Indeed, the memory of being inside the house is more of being outside.
Belzberg’s string of credits defies the conventional wisdom that most architects don’t hit their stride until their 50s. His Santa Monica firm employees five full-time junior designers, some just out of architecture school. He’s taught at UCLA’s graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and in 1988 he won an AIA design award. A monograph of his work was published last year in Milan, Italy, and he was recently pegged as a designer to watch by Brooke Hodge, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new curator of architecture and design.
“His architecture doesn’t burden the viewer,” says friend and fellow architect Wendy Kohn of Wendy Kohn Design in Westwood. “He’s not asking you to interpret or read his forms; they’re very natural architectural spaces. You may like them or not like them, but I think it’s pretty recognizable that the architectural intentions are quite pure.”
Gaining notice has also meant taking the brunt of criticism, which Belzberg willingly accepts.
“The building seems to say nothing of importance architecturally or impress in any way!” read one comment about the Dumbacher home posted on the Web zine DesignArchitecture.com. Belzberg admits even his friends and colleagues aren’t always fans of his work--one calls his style “that blender crap” for its lack of focus (the term has become an ongoing joke).
Asked to define his own aesthetic, Belzberg admits to a contemporary bent but says, “I don’t associate terms or titles with it. I still feel far, far away from [defining] my aesthetic. I feel like we’re still experimenting.”
Moomba owner Jeff Gossett says it was Belzberg’s energy as much as his approach to modern design that won him over after seeing only his portfolio (Gossett and designer Jacqueline Schnabel also had input in the design). Asked what he thinks is Belzberg’s biggest strength as an architect, Gossett replies, “His knowledge of the [building] codes and the politics of planning and development. It’s a very important piece of the process.” Belzberg laughs at hearing that and accepts the compliment.
Here Today, Perhaps Gone Tomorrow
He’s in his hunter green Range Rover heading to Moomba. He shrugs off the inch-along L.A. traffic; it affords him more time to look around. He loves the city’s temporal nature, the way buildings suddenly spring up, only to morph into something else mere months later.
The transience he praises, however, has affected his own work. Pagani restaurant, completed in 1998, closed just two years later. Belzberg sheds no tears.
“I love it! It’s part of the evolution. It’s the way it goes. When I do [a public building] on a street corner I can never be the entire author. I have the street, I have the noise, the neighbors, the car, the patrons. There are so many influences on the design that it feels right for that evolution to take place.”
After visiting Moomba, he heads to Beverly Hills, where he’s in the midst of a renovation of a 1970s-era home, to which he has added an indoor-outdoor living room fireplace, a curved staircase, an upper deck outside one of the children’s rooms and an infinity pool. He’s trying to sell the homeowners on one detail--rust-colored metal horizontal slats that wrap completely around the house. One section has gone up, but the contractor informs him the owner isn’t sure about adding more.
“Really?” Belzberg says, looking crestfallen. The news is “heart-wrenching,” he says, placing his hand on his chest for emphasis. But there is no tantrum, no blow-up, typical of his polite, almost shy demeanor. Compromise is part of the process, he acknowledges.
The rejection hurts, but it never dampens his enthusiasm for architecture, which has riveted him since childhood. When his mother took him to museums, he’d look at the rooms instead of the art. “I was always amazed by space,” he says. “Courtrooms. I loved giant courtrooms. And staircases drove me wild.”
Born in Tel Aviv, he moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 6. They lived in the Fairfax district before moving to dingbat apartments in Beverly Hills so he and his two sisters could go to better schools. He says that from his father, an electrical engineer, and his mother, an artist, there was no steady push to succeed; rather, he recalls their constant reminders of treating others with kindness and respect. It seems to have sunk in; on his construction sites the bricklayer and the building owner are treated the same.
After graduating from Beverly Hills High he majored in architecture at Arizona State University, then went to Harvard, where he graduated in 1991 with a Masters of Architecture With Distinction.
He toyed with the idea of finding employment in New York, but the slim job market forced him back to L.A., where he got a job with Frank Gehry’s firm. He was there a few months before landing a contract to do a custom home in Pasadena for the Dumbachers. He left the firm and never looked back.
At the time, he had only his school portfolio to show his clients. “I wouldn’t say that that [lack of experience] didn’t pass our minds,” Joseph Dumbacher recalls. “But he made up for it with his enthusiasm. We had a hillside property, and some architects didn’t want to do it. We were looking for someone who had some vision because we were looking to do something innovative, something artistic.”
Belzberg designed an angular, loft-like house nestled in the trees with an open floor plan and copious windows, offering both a stunning view and privacy from neighbors.
“The flexibility of the house has been fantastic,” Dumbacher says. “We can put different art up on the walls. One of the major surprises is how open the house is but still how private it feels. He uses common materials, such as steel and concrete, which are not typical residential materials.”
“It seems that you’re given this gift of an incredible place to live here, and staying indoors is a little odd,” Belzberg says. “That’s why all of our designs try to create this indoor-outdoor relationship constantly. We don’t have to feel fortified. We have the opportunity to live in this semi-public, semi-private zone, so why not take advantage of it? It’s very much a part of the architectural history of L.A., from Greene and Greene to [Rudolph] Schindler and [Richard] Neutra as well.”
Though residences, restaurants and clubs are taking up most of his time these days, Belzberg’s ambitions don’t end there. He says he’d like to design a civic institution--library, museum, even a bus station. “It’s about responding to a larger group of people,” he explains. “It’s the way I was brought up, building something for the community. I’m starting to feel that I need a larger cultural involvement. But right now I’m just in training.”
