Architectural Twist

Last year, the architectural firm known as Graft was best known to the public for designing AMMO, a tiny yet hip Minimalist restaurant in Hollywood with a dining area less than half the size of its kitchen. Then along came “Beau Monde,” a group art exhibition in Santa Fe that has raised the bar for what such shows can be. For the show, the five young architects transformed a box-shaped exhibition space of neutral white walls and gray concrete floors into an exuberant explosion of curves and clever sightlines. The show got raves in the national press and so did the architects’ installation. Graft is now on the map.

Next month, “Seeing,” a new interactive art show for children, opens in the gallery known as LACMALab at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Graft created the overall exhibition design along with a work of art for the entry.

If the mission statement for “Seeing”--to challenge viewers’ “expectations, perception, and viewpoint”--is any indication, the project would seem to be a perfect match for Graft’s tendency to create hybrid environments that instill narrative and decorative elements into existing building types in ways that blur the usual boundaries between art and architecture. On a parallel track to their work as an architectural studio, Graft often functions as research lab for ideas, putting as much emphasis on conceptual projects as on built environments, including a recent competition for a German publication for a design for a house of the future.

Eschewing the notion of star designer, the group of five German architects, all in their early 30s, live and work together as a collaborative. They often pass a project from member to member during their design process, striving for an accretion of differences rather than a homogeneous signature style. For the sake of their clients, one member will often serve as the point person for a project, though they are quick to note that that does not necessarily mean that that person is the lead designer on the project.

The five met and became friends a decade ago as students at Braunschweig Technical University, where they got what they describe as a “Bauhaus education--raw concrete, glass and steel.” As part of the eight-year degree program, they were encouraged to study abroad as a way of broadening their vocabulary. Several members of the group chose Los Angeles because it represented “an anti-example of utopian architecture,” says Wolfram Putz, 33, one of the members. Los Angeles, he says, “is elastic enough to allow for experimentation. We wanted also to use flocked walls, to be freed from the corset.”

Christoph Korner, 32, was the first to move to Los Angeles, enrolling at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 1992. Putz and Lars Krckeberg, 34, followed, and after completing their studies the three friends formed Graft in a two-bedroom apartment that doubled as their studio. Gregor Hoheisel, 33, arrived a year later, and Thomas Willemeit, 33, joined them last year, after working with the renowned German architect Daniel Liebeskind on the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

In 1999, the group moved home and studio to a small clapboard house on a steep hill in Silver Lake that art critic and “Beau Monde” curator Dave Hickey refers to as “a hippie pad, very un-modern architecture.” To familiarize themselves with their new hometown, the group set off on a self-prescribed “Walk of Pain,” a two-day trek from Long Beach to Silver Lake. Almost immediately, the neophytes found themselves unwelcome intruders in a gang-infested neighborhood, a situation they overcame by singing German folk songs as if lost on the way to the Schwarzwald. A high point of their tour was Lakewood, a grid-patterned neighborhood built in the 1940s at the rate of 100 houses a day that was the subject of D.J. Waldie’s “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.” They spent the night in a little motel and marched home the next day, stopping for a picnic on a bridge spanning the L.A. River.

Graft’s first major project came in 1998 as the kind of happy accident most architects only dream about. Fort Hill, contractors who specialize in high-end residences, hired Graft to do drafting for a client who was acting as his own designer. The client turned out to be Brad Pitt, and Graft’s role quickly grew from draftsmen to collaborators on a compact office space and bathroom.

After the Pitt house, Graft worked with production designer J.P. Flack on interiors for the Marina del Rey offices of a German commercial and music video production company, Neue Sentimental Film. Because of the company’s need for flexibility, Graft designed office spaces in prefabricated industrial storage units and two-story office blocks mounted on casters for ease of movement around the enormous warehouse space. The wheels were nixed by the building codes, but the idea of the gray storage units was retained, with two units pushed together to form a square conference room upholstered with white Naugahyde padded walls and an artificial garden planned for the roof.

“We like a kind of storyboard architecture,” Putz says. “Las Vegas is the classic example of this--where you sequence events and construct a visual experience the way you would in a film.” Hickey, who first met the architects when he served as an advisor on Putz’s thesis at SCI-Arc, calls Graft “more of a rock ‘n’ roll band than an architectural firm,” which he means as a compliment. “They are five distinct people with different virtues and sensibilities linked together in their willingness to tolerate the weirdness of their colleagues. They don’t worry about authority, about ‘what will architects think?”’ Hickey says.

In a meeting at their offices, the group laughs at Hickey’s description, yet they agree that the “jam session” is the model for how their ideas originate. “We’re all architects. It’s very important for us not to have some kind of hierarchy,” says Korner. They find their sources in unusual places: The phyloxera--a tiny insect that nearly decimated European wine production in the 19th century--was the inspiration for the group’s name. Hoheisel explains that at the time, “the only way to save the old European vines was to graft them onto the roots of new American vines that were resistant to this insect.” Putz finishes the thought: “This is a concept of the refined European sensibility being saved by American hardiness.”

“Graft is a method of thinking and finding solutions for new problems,” adds Krckeberg, participating in the conversation by phone from the group’s Berlin office. “We try not to limit where we start and where we end,” adds Willemeit, also in Berlin.

For “Beau Monde,” Hickey says he gave Graft the task of “designing a peripatetic space” that would be a pleasurable series of destination and invitations. “I told them that when you walk through the front door, I want to see through the building. I want to go down to something and up to something,” Hickey says. “I wanted a palazzo with salons and drawing rooms, chapels and a grand hall, a Palladian building.”

For the architects, “the idea was an English landscape garden,” Korner says. The space “seems big, but it is not. It’s just that you can’t walk along the view line, you have to walk around it.” Using the circle as a central motif, Graft took out a wall at the entry to make room for a semicircular barrel vault where video artist Jennifer Steincamp projects abstract 3-D patterns onto a 3-D surface. The circular shape of the wall repeats on another wall across the galleries, creating a view corridor that finishes in a curved chapel-like space housing a bright cartoony piece by Takashi Murakami.

Putz explains, “we wanted an ambience that interacts with the art.” And, indeed, their work seems very much a part of the exhibition, from the unusual shapes to occasional electric green and pink walls, as well as mirrors and flocked wallpaper. Outside, the group even created a processional entryway by “planting” rows of blue and yellow fake flowers that broadcast taped applause as visitors enter the exhibition. Hickey finds all this to be “very beau monde.”

For “Seeing,” the children’s show, LACMALab director Robert L. Sain asked Graft to create “a social space in an encyclopedic museum” that would appeal to an audience of both adults and children, keeping in mind their different attention spans and physical realities. Over the course of several months, Graft worked with the nine other artists in the exhibition while they developed works that would address pieces from the permanent collection. Hoheisel describes the time-consuming process as “a complicated chess game” where art and design evolved together.

To explore the many aspects of perception, Graft has created a 90-foot-long entry wall with 12 peepholes of varying heights. Behind each is a diorama embedded in the wall with a small sculpture that uses optical devices such as forced perspective, lenses and mirrors to alter the way the viewer perceives the object in space.

Graft’s conceptual work is as important to them as the projects they build. For example, the “knot house,” designed for an invitational competition held by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung in June, is a house of the future on a 50-foot-by-100-foot lot. Graft proposed thinking of “the lawn as a surface that can be used for building a house,” says Putz. The lawn could be cut into strips, which are then twisted and knotted together; therefore, the landscape elements would become the framework for glass walls turning the house into “a walkable garden.” The architects believe that their integration of indoor and outdoor spaces would eliminate the no-win conflict that inevitably arises when trying to fit a building onto a small lot.

Last February, Graft exported some of their American experiences back to Berlin, opening a second office there to facilitate work on German offices and living spaces for L.A. based Zeal Pictures. To continue the collaborative structure at the core of their working philosophy, members of the group will commute between the two offices, forcing them to grapple not just theoretically but also literally with the motto that floats across their Web site:

“Reverse the continental drift.’

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A Swiss Army Office for a Celebrity Client

When architecture enthusiast and actor Brad Pitt hired Graft to do drawings for a project in his home, the firm’s role quickly grew from draftsmen to collaborators on a multifunctional wall based on the concept of a Swiss Army knife, with concealed pockets and drawers, a drop-down light table and a 1934 Rietveld Zig-Zag chair.