Teaching the Art Center to Play

Few architects relish the temporary, the makeshift and the ephemeral as Craig Hodgetts and Hsin-Ming Fung do. Since founding their Culver City-based firm in 1984, the two have been celebrated for their ability to pump out fast, cheap, ingenious structures that capture Los Angeles’ image as a paradise for pop culture.

Among their most memorable works are the installation of suspended corrugated metal panels they designed for the 1989 “Blueprints for Modern Living” show at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary, a futuristic renovation of Hollywood’s landmark Egyptian Theater completed in 1999 and a sensitive restoration plan for the Hollywood Bowl, scheduled for completion in 2003. Such projects make up a significant body of work.

Yet the firm’s reputation rests almost entirely on one project: the Temporary Powell Library they designed for UCLA in 1992. The library’s playful geometric forms--clad in yellow, blue and white fabric--offered a stark counterpoint to the button-down formality of UCLA’s traditional brick-and-mortar campus. It quickly became one of the campus’ most beloved landmarks.

So last year, when Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design hired the firm to design its new Sinclaire Pavilion, the parallels seemed obvious. Both projects are compact, low-cost structures. Both were conceived as architectural sideshows. UCLA dismantled the Powell in 1997, soon after the reopening of its more imposing brick counterpart.

The 3,000-square-foot pavilion, meanwhile, is only a first minor stage of a much bigger plan to expand the Art Center campus, one that will include a 67,000-square-foot technical skills center by Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza and a 50,000-square-foot Frank Gehry-designed library building.

What Art Center got, however, was one of Hodgetts and Fung’s boldest designs yet. Unveiled last Friday, the pavilion is conceived as part of the long, daily procession back and forth across the campus. Tucked underneath a dramatic corrugated metal roof, the building stands at a bend in a narrow ramp that leads from student parking to the Craig Ellwood-designed Art Center building, a landmark of late Modernist design built in 1976.

As seen from the parking lot, the roof’s sculpted form rests lightly on the landscape, a gaping mechanized shed propped up on slender steel columns.

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Inside, the pavilion is barely a building. Open to the surrounding landscape on three sides, the structure rests on a concrete plinth that steps down the side of a gently sloping hill. A large plywood cabinet that houses an espresso bar stands at the center of the space. At one end, concrete and galvanized metal benches are set along a covered terrace lounge; at the other, a covered outdoor amphitheater faces a stunning view of the San Gabriel Mountains.

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A series of mechanical gadgets add to the structure’s machine-like aura. The facade of the espresso bar, for example, tips down to form a counter top. A 12-foot-long pivoting plywood wall separates the covered terrace from the gallery. And a large window projects over the entry ramp at one end of the terrace. Supported on a heavy steel strut, it can be cranked open or shut to regulate airflow into the building.

The notion of “architecture as machine” is not new. When the great Modernist master Le Corbusier declared in 1923 that “the house is a machine for living,” he foresaw an age when life would be organized with the efficiency of the assembly line. In the 1960s, British firms like Archigram fantasized about whole movable cities that were intended as escape pods from the class-obsessed bourgeois values of London society.

Hodgetts and Fung have long been sympathetic to such technological themes. And like Archigram, they see architecture as a vehicle for social change as well as visual pleasure.

But only as one begins to move through the building does one glean the design’s deeper message. Descending the ramp, one sees two carefully framed views, first of the Ellwood building, then of students mingling on the terrace below. From there, one passes through a sliding-glass door onto the covered terrace before slipping around the espresso bar and emerging again at the amphitheater. The amphitheater is equipped with a large, retractable video screen. When it drops into place, it only partially blocks the view, so you are faced with two overlapping images: one real, the other manufactured.

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The strategy recalls the famous scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film “Blowup,” in which a young fashion photographer returns again and again to photos of a possible murder, unable to distinguish between what is real and what he imagines.

Here, the entire building becomes a viewing device, one that tinkers with our visual perceptions. The world is presented as an elaborate cinematic narrative, a sequence of seemingly unrelated images, one coming rapidly after the other.

The point, clearly, is to re-sensitize us to our physical surroundings. But the design is also a witty play on L.A.’s pop culture scene. Los Angeles, after all, is also a vast chaotic machine. Its film companies continue to churn out a mind-numbing number of escapist fantasies.

Its sprawling freeways have long been emblems of mobility, freedom and impermanence. Most often, we perceive the city as a series of flickering images seen through a car windshield.

Hodgetts and Fung’s design is a quick, impulsive sketch of that city.

What the design sacrifices in terms of refinement, it gains in its ability to convey a sense of immediacy. As such, it is a perfect foil to the original Ellwood building.

The pavilion not only holds its own against Ellwood’s masterpiece, it adds an element of spontaneity and play that, it is now clear, the original building always lacked.