Next Stop: Wonderland
On a recent warm summer evening, a crowd of hip, mostly young architects and designers poured out of a river of cars and through the front door of a nondescript apartment building on Little Santa Monica Boulevard, just west of Beverly Glen. They’d come for an open house at the home of Michael Kreski, a graphic designer and urban planner who works in the Santa Monica offices of Gensler, a large international firm specializing in architecture, design and planning. At a time when less-is-more has become far less doctrinaire than it used to be, these young architects love Kreski because his interests are wide-ranging--anything from cosmonauts to Japanese restaurants might be his daily touch points--and his creativity takes in both the incidental and the big picture. At Gensler, Kreski represents a bridge between the expected and the extraordinary, a player who is neither famous for his work nor seeking the limelight yet who often provides the creative spark that enriches a corporate organization day by day.
“On projects where we have the baseline expectations met, he adds the jewelry and the magic,” says Rick Abelson, a fellow designer at Gensler. But if that essence is hard to track in the final product of an architectural process, the heart of Kreski’s vision can be seen in the artful world he’s created in his tiny home, a place uniquely reflective of his all-consuming appetite for new ideas.
On this evening, the first sign of Kreski’s presence comes in the form of a toy train that races out the small apartment’s front door on a track suspended about 6 feet above ground. At regular intervals of about five to 10 minutes, the train crashes into a barrier about 3 feet from the doorway, then reverses for a return trip back inside. Occasionally, it falls off the track, but mostly it is purposeful in its migrations--out into the real world, back into Kreski’s.
Inside, Kreski welcomes his guests into his wonderland. He lives in a one-bedroom, with a kitchen and bath, that amounts to only about 600 square feet. But you would never know how big--or little--the space is when you enter, because it has been transformed into a series of narrow, tunnel-like hallways and tiny living-working spaces, all lined with bookcases and filled with highly organized clutter. An interweaving network of eight train lines runs overhead, each one traveling past innumerable vignettes of tiny toys and found and fabricated objects--artworks and throwaways that crowd the place beyond imagination.
The shelves that support the structure for this otherworldly web are filled with books on everything from art, architecture, design and urban planning to history, philosophy and you-name-it. It is a sophisticated mix that underlines the intellectual underpinning of Kreski’s environment. No ordinary playground, Kreski’s world is a cross between a child’s innocent toyland and the imaginings of a futuristic visionary inventor. It’s also very fun.
On this night, a couple of dozen visitors step lightly through the maze, pausing at every turn to examine a new discovery. Many bring gifts to add to the collection. Serving refreshments while squeezing past his guests to point out some new acquisition, Kreski happily explains his treasures to anyone who has a question, intermittently interrupting himself to restart on his TV a series of minute-long videos about the space that are his latest contribution to his project. He explains that he made the fast-paced travelogue films by placing a mini video camera on the front of a running toy train. As the camera flies around corners, it records fleeting images of looming plastic cats and miniature primitive tribes, windmills and dancing skeletons. With each dizzying turn, his friends roar with laughter and dismay.
There are only a couple of places to sit down in Kreski’s apartment, among them two chairs in a nook of the tiny living room. Some might find this environment claustrophobic, but as might be guessed, Kreski, 51, lives alone here (no one else could really fit), and the place has just enough to keep this man happy. Seemingly without cynicism or guile, he points out that there’s a fully outfitted kitchen, a table to eat at, a reading chair, and sleeping quarters in the back, although the mattress is so scrunched that in order to lie down, Kreski has to fit his head into a hole in the bookshelves.
Just above his head (he’s 5 feet 9), every inch is taken over by the ... whatever-you-want-to-call-it--art installation, fantasy world or, as Kreski has dubbed it, “Railroad Consortium, Blue Cat.” Ask about the name, and, of course, there’s a story. It is an hommage to all his collaborators: “The railroad part of the name is obvious,” he says in his wry, matter-of-fact way. “Consortium refers to the idea that anyone can contribute--people who come to the open houses are part of the consortium.” And the blue cat refers not only to the numerous plastic, stuffed and ceramic felines that pop up everywhere alongside the train tracks, but also to a favorite Japanese comic book about Mafia members who are also cat lovers. Trains are not the point, however, Kreski is quick to point out. The tracks are just an excuse for his “artificial landscapes.”
Kreski began the project about six years ago, as a way to animate his living space and as a motivation for having friends over to enjoy it. He now holds open houses a couple of times a year. “I’m not that much of a social person,” he says. “I wouldn’t usually give parties or even go to them, but what’s nice about this is when people come here, I have to spend so much time making sure the trains are running that there’s always something for me to do.”
He does not think of this as art: “It’s not really disciplined enough to be an artwork,” he says. “It’s more just an accumulation of stuff.” Although some would argue there’s really nothing casual about the presentation, it is a manifestation of Kreski’s taste and eclectic thought processes.
“Everybody wants to create a world of some kind,” he says. “People grow gardens out of the impulse to re-create paradise--a first step toward making the world better. This is a little like gardening--you put something in, take something else out. You discover a corner you didn’t know you had that you can fill. It’s not like you just stare at it, you’re always changing things.”
Every object is filled with stories, many of them hard to decipher, all of them filled with humor. Kreski still owns things his mother saved from his grade-school art projects, and a few of these have become part of the piece, although there’s nothing precious about any of it. Something beloved may well sit next to an object bought yesterday from a Michaels art supply store, and objects come and go all the time, he points out.
The joy of it is all in the placement--and the sense of wonder. Kreski has created a world where everyday objects turned upside-down become other than what they were intended to be. It is a place where, for the first time, you might notice the lovely star pattern piercing a kitchen colander because the object, turned over, now serves the role of lampshade.
A cast-iron cat, probably once an incense burner, is flanked by a pair of metal eggbeaters with a wire wok drain floating above like a TV antenna. Kreski explains: “This is definitely a Santa Barbara thrift shop special. They had a bin full of kitchenware, where there was only half of what you needed. Things that once had a function have become separated from that function, and they’re looking around for something better to do. The cat is a Renaissance Faire item. He’s supposed to stand up, but he’s fit into a wire grill and so are the eggbeaters. He’s like the first cat in space.”
With every aspect of his home a display, it is not surprising to learn that Kreski is a lover of World’s Fairs and has been to nearly every one of them he since he went as a child to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Much as Olympic ceremonies unite the world today, the vision of the future and of new architecture displayed at World’s Fairs once transfixed huge audiences, and indeed continue to, outside the United States.
Although the U.S. has long since stopped serious participation in such events, Kreski never lost interest, and much of his personal travel has been spent visiting these expositions, from Seoul to Lisbon. He has also collected a whole wall of books on the fairs and can talk for hours about them. “One of the fun things about World’s Fairs is they plan the thing overall, but nobody can be exactly sure what’s going to be on any given plot of land,” Kreski says. “And especially the one in New York. [Organizer] Robert Moses said, ‘I’m just going to lease the space to whoever wants it,’ so whatever showed up showed up. They had these things next to each other that all just kind of made crazy sense.”
It’s that kind of “crazy sense” that Kreski cultivates in his work at home and at the office. Born and raised in New Jersey, he got interested in design in high school and went to the prestigious and highly innovative Rhode Island School of Design.
After graduation, Kreski did a brief stint as a graphic designer for the U.S. Bicentennial planning commission for the state of Rhode Island, designing the logo and some publications. Not much later, he moved to Atlanta to work on another Bicentennial project and stayed until the late 1970s, when a childhood friend persuaded him to move to Los Angeles. “We always thought we should write screenplays,” Kreski laughs now. So in 1978, he moved to L.A.
The screenplay idea didn’t pan out, but Kreski quickly landed a job at Gruen Associates, a large architecture firm, by answering an ad in the newspaper. He stayed awhile, then decided he needed to go to graduate school. Accepted at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Kreski moved back East but didn’t stay long: “It was not a pleasant experience,” he says. “It was pretty severe; I lasted about a year.” The theoretical study of architecture did not agree with him, he admits when pressed.
After returning to L.A. in 1986, Kreski moved to Gensler and has been there ever since. He has worked on a variety of projects, and, as is often the case in architecture, many of them involved proposals for big ideas that never came to fruition. He’s currently involved, among a variety of projects, in developing a monorail planned to connect Las Vegas’ casinos--Kreski’s job is to help come up with ideas for the stations and connecting areas between the hotels, creating attractions that might amuse visitors along the way.
Somehow it all fits perfectly with the “Railroad Consortium” in his home, a seamless interlocking of real world and fantasy that helps inspire his co-workers. “The reason I sit next to him is I try to infuse what he does into the work we do,” says Abelson, a fellow senior associate at Gensler and a design director in the areas of master planning and cultural attractions.
“There’s no such thing as obscure when you have Mike around,” adds Mike Niemann, an architectural designer at Gensler. “Any time you’re looking for something out of the ordinary, Kreski has a whole book on it. You come up with an idea, and he may know someone in Antarctica that may have done something related in the 1930s. There is a sublime, whimsical genius there.”
