On skid row, a Modernist

As he strides across the brightly colored second-floor terrace of the new James M. Wood Community Center, architect Michael B. Lehrer virtually dances with glee.

“Isn’t this the most delicious urban site?” he says, looking out over the skid row intersection of San Julian and 5th streets, which at this moment is teeming with people -- some sitting curbside smoking and chatting, others in constant motion, wandering up and down the sidewalks and in the middle of the street. Across San Julian, a well-kept pocket park is brimming with men and women playing cards and chess, hanging out and just joking around. Looming just beyond are the layers of downtown L.A.’s ever-evolving business districts, culminating in the high-power skyline of wealthy Bunker Hill -- an image of beauty and a sure sign of just how diverse Los Angeles really is.

“They really get it,” Lehrer says of the future patrons of his latest design, which will be officially unveiled at a public ceremony this morning. “This is a fancy building, and my belief system tells me that makes people happy.”

Indeed, this $1.6-million structure, created as a gathering place for residents of skid row’s single-room-occupancy hotels, recalls many of the great moments in Modernist architecture. There are echoes of Frank Gehry’s use of mesh screens, Richard Meier’s blinding white walls and a Constructivist palette distinguishing a variety of surfaces. And none of those references are by accident. Lehrer, 49, a native of Los Feliz, where he still lives, is a Berkeley- and Harvard-trained architect, a student of Modernist architecture and art, and a former employee of Gehry.

Under the auspices of his firm, Lehrer Architects, he has spent most of his career designing homes for wealthy clients, among them actresses Sally Field and Jamie Lee Curtis. (Curtis’ residence graces the cover of this month’s Architectural Digest.) But he is by nature a social activist as well, and in recent years his career has taken a turn toward public projects, including a drop-in center for indigents, completed in 1999, just down the street from the new community center; a Reform synagogue in Newport Beach, completed last summer; and plans for renovation of the Westside Jewish Community Center on Olympic.

In addition, he and architect Mark Gangi, in partnership with landscape architect Mia Lehrer, Michael’s wife, have developed the designs for two new museums on a single campus in Hemet -- the Southern California Water Education Center, commissioned by a foundation established by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and the Western Center for Archeology and Paleontology, funded by the Western Center Community Foundation. The budget for the project is $66 million; groundbreaking is expected to take place early next year.

Lehrer insists that he uses the same approach in his public and private works. “You depend on the pursuit of truth,” he says in one of many grand statements. “Architecture is fundamentally optimistic -- all you do is look at anything and imagine how it can be beautiful.”

As he walks through the new Wood Center, Lehrer points to the complex perspectives he has created. Views of downtown from the second-floor terrace. Windows onto the street in the large community room downstairs. A small angular outdoor terrace on the ground floor, surrounded by metal mesh painted bright silver, with a floor that is bright red. “It’s a place of dignity and joy,” he says. “There is no condescension. I believe that to the core of my body.”

All of Lehrer’s designs are defined by a reverence for natural light and dissonant geometry. His abundant use of white creates an uplifting feeling. In recent projects he’s included a palette of violet and purple -- which he idiosyncratically insists are really blues -- as well as blood red and forest green. These brilliant colors add a sense of playfulness while enhancing the buildings’ relationship with the natural environment.

The Wood Center’s overt gaiety stands out in a largely monochromatic neighborhood, beckoning people in. And no doubt it will be used -- as a long-needed “community living room,” its sponsors say, a place for neighborhood residents to come for entertainment, classes, meals and meetings.

Need for a gathering place

Located at an intersection once known as “Thieves Corner” for its popularity as a place to fence stolen goods, the project was six years in the making. It was commissioned by the nonprofit SRO Housing Corp. in memory of its founder, labor leader and downtown activist James M. Wood, who died of cancer at age 51 in 1996. Wood was a major force in rehabilitating housing throughout skid row, once one of the darkest corners of the city.

The man behind the center’s creation, Charles “Bud” Hayes, executive director of SRO Housing, says the property was originally slated to become the organization’s administrative home. Looking for a way to pay tribute to Wood, SRO, which provides housing for transients, decided to poll its residents. The desire for a place to gather became obvious, and Hayes says SRO immediately recognized that a community center would be a fitting way to celebrate Wood’s ambitions to improve the lives of the very poor.

“This center is an answer to tremendous need,” Hayes says. With 18-foot-high ceilings on the ground floor, abundant natural light, brightly colored walls and staircases and plenty of outdoor spaces, it is also an unusual answer, Hayes believes, a reflection of Lehrer’s distinctive vision. “Michael doesn’t have a box to think out of. Michael’s thinking is out of the box already,” he says.

“Is that a risk to work with? Well, yes,” Hayes adds. “But the greater the risk, the greater the opportunity for return. We got amazing return with this building. I’m absolutely in love with it.”

Lehrer was hired as project architect because of the success of his design for the nearby Downtown Drop-In Center, also built by SRO, just two blocks south on San Julian. That earlier building, which provides temporary shelter, showers and resources to the “service-resistant homeless” -- people who choose to live on the streets -- won Lehrer an Honor Award for Architecture in 2001 from the American Institute of Architects. It now accommodates about 700 to 800 people in the course of a day, with a typical occupancy of about 40 to 50, except at evening peak hours, when its clients number about 200, according to Jim Howat, director of homeless services for Volunteers of America, Los Angeles, operator of the facility.

The Drop-In Center was a pet project of then-Mayor Richard Riordan, and Lehrer and Hayes say that despite its success, they still regret compromises in the building’s colors that were made for political reasons. They believe they’ve recaptured some of what they lost in the creation of the new Wood Center.

The Drop-In Center nevertheless illustrates Lehrer’s taste for beauty -- in its trellises covered with bougainvillea, and its mix of colonnades and open spaces that avoid the monotony of most institutional design. Open to the street, it stands as an invitation to escape from a harsh neighborhood, says Howat, a haven in which to relax and regroup.

A big-picture man

Many architects pride themselves as much on the precision of their personal presentation as in the clean lines of their work. Michael Lehrer, by contrast, comes across as somewhat eccentric, a mensch whose pockets are as like as not to be turned inside out, whose thoughts are going in a million directions, and who spouts Yiddishisms with the fluency of a child of immigrants. It’s not that he’s not interested in details -- his care for the painted stripes on the terrace floor at the Wood Center demonstrates his focus -- but his demeanor quickly shows he’s a big-picture man, with a lot going on in his head.

A proud homeboy, Lehrer offers a resume listing some unusual information, including his graduation from the Los Feliz Jewish Community Center nursery school in 1958. It is a pride of place that he is revealing; he is an inveterate Angeleno who lives and works in a 1930s house just blocks from where he grew up.

He is also active in local policymaking. He is vice chairman of the School Construction Bond Citizens Oversight Committee, which monitors repair of 700 existing schools and construction of 85 to 150 new ones for the Los Angeles Unified School District (projected to cost between $6 billion and $8 billion). He served as president of the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1999 and has also been a longtime adjunct professor of architecture at USC.

But he is as likely to spend his time talking about his family -- his wife and frequent collaborator, Mia, and his three children -- as he is about his civic accomplishments. Last summer his younger son, Raphael, had his bar mitzvah in the chapel Lehrer designed for Temple Bat Yahm in Newport Beach, the first ceremony conducted in the then-not-quite-finished sanctuary, and Lehrer beams when he repeatedly refers to the occasion.

Like the downtown centers he designed, Temple Bat Yahm displays Lehrer’s signature mix of natural light and color, but at the synagogue these elements evoke a sensual spirituality. Above the heart of the new chapel, a sculptural form of large metal open frames wrapped in mesh serves as metaphorical steps toward the sky. Lehrer calls this “Jacob’s Ladder,” referring to the passage in Genesis in which Jacob dreams of angels traveling on a ladder between God and Earth.

“I took the theme of light and spirit very seriously,” Lehrer says. “The stripes of the ladder are primal images, with references to everything from Don Judd’s sculpture, on the one hand, to the stripes on a tallit,” the Jewish prayer shawl.

As he drives to Orange County to visit Temple Bat Yahm, Lehrer talks about how, soon after he finished the graduate architecture program at Harvard in 1978, he came to the county to work on a house. He has worked steadily since, building about 100 projects in his 24 years in practice, currently with eight architects working alongside him in his office, although the number has ranged from two to 15.

Whether his design is for the wealthy or the poor, he says, the guiding principle is always the same. You have to pay attention to every aspect of the job, to be almost “paranoid” about the end result. Only the architect can ensure that the vision is realized.

“My ambition has always been very simple,” Lehrer says. “No problem is too banal or mundane for an architect to solve. We are deeply grounded in the everyday, but what I am doing is using art and an understanding of technology to give form to peoples’ needs and aspirations.”