An Architect’s Steely Resolve

Los Angeles architect Barton Myers is better known for designing large public buildings than private houses. He is the brain behind the award-winning Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, completed in 1993--a flexible facility with movable floors and seats, which allows for multiple uses, and reconfiguration from a flat exhibition hall into a 1,850-seat arena or theater with 900, 1,450 or 1,963 seats. The work of Barton Myers Associates can also be seen in Beverly Hills, where the firm was responsible for major renovations at 9350 Center Drive and the nearby Ice House office building.

On the other side of the country, Myers designed Newark, N.J.’s $180-million New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which opened its doors in 1997 and serves as home for the New Jersey Symphony.

In 1997, New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp gave the arts center, across the street from Military Park and a block from the Passaic River, a mixed review. He praised the center’s 2,750-seat Prudential Hall, the largest of its two theaters, as “breathtakingly glamorous,” and the 514-seat Victoria Theatre as a “smoky amethyst of a room.” But he trashed the lobby areas, calling their eclectic mix of patterned carpet, glass, wood and copper “a mess.”

Because he’s known primarily for public buildings, Myers, 67, is particularly excited by the opportunity to show a more intimate side of his work in “3 Steel Houses,” an exhibition of drawings, models and photos showcasing three of Myers’ steel-framed residences. Organized by the University Art Museum of UC Santa Barbara to mark the recent donation of the Myers archive to the museum’s Architecture and Design Collection, the show at UCLA’s Perloff Gallery runs through Feb. 8. The exhibition includes his own home and studio in Toro Canyon, Montecito, near Santa Barbara. Myers and his wife, Vicki, moved into the house in 1998. The compound is made up of three pavilions built on a slope, with Myers’ studio at the top, the main residence in the middle, and a guest house and garage at the bottom.

The house is notable for retractable window-walls that can open the rooms to the idyllic Santa Barbara climate, as well as for its equally practical metal panels that can roll down to secure the buildings from the ever-present threat of brush fires.

Also included in the exhibition are two homes in Canada, including another Myers family residence in Yorkville, Toronto--this one not on 40 rustic acres, but with its ultra-contemporary facade sandwiched between square homes of sedate, traditional brick.

A few days before the exhibition was to open, Myers, a professor in UCLA’s department of architecture and urban design, reflected on the reasons a member of the general public might join campus architecture students in discovering a modest display detailing the birth of three houses.

“I think there is no show more interesting to people than houses,” Myers says during a conversation in the firm’s new Westwood Village offices--another recent renovation at 1025 Westwood Blvd., all concrete, glass and steel, with an enormous curved ceiling made of wood, reminiscent of an airplane hangar. “You can see the earliest sketches to the working drawings to how it is actually built.”

In November, the firm moved into the space, which doesn’t look lived-in yet. Before the interview, Myers’ archivist, Kelly Robinson, mentions that to give the ceiling its stressed look, the wood was blasted with walnut shells. Tiny bits of shell continue to surprise the staff by raining down into the cavernous communal working space--most recently, into Robinson’s coffee.

“All of us have a pretty emotional and passionate feeling about the way we want to live,” says Myers, seated at a glass table in the rear of the space; for the moment, no nutshells appear to be falling. “That’s why there are so many shelter magazines. Here is another idea about shelter, another lifestyle that might be different from yours, another way of living.

“In my house [in Montecito], it’s about the way one begins to engage nature,” he continues. “The ability to be able to open and close houses, move in and out, is the California dream, and obviously inspired by the Japanese--but you also have to deal with the question of fire. In the Canadian climate, you live in a more introverted way; you bring light inside and try to think about a way to get through those long, gray months without the California sun.

“And then, I think, it’s also about seeing new technologies, the promise of new technologies in housing. Luckily, when I got started I was doing a lot of very large projects, when a lot of my American contemporaries were doing houses--so I haven’t done a lot of them. I’ve always done them as interesting experiments.”

How does Myers define a “steel house”? “I use the idea that the predominant statement is steel,” he says. “We use a lot of steel in housing, but most of it is hidden, in seismic reinforcing--these are houses in which the major architectural element is steel.

“Glass has been with us a long time, it goes back thousands of years ... but the idea of the glass house, the glass box, is relatively familiar. Steel is relatively new in domestic situations--you are used to seeing it in the commercial world, but not in the domestic world.

“The first really great steel houses only begin in the 1920s; then we had the Case Study houses in the 1950s. There are probably only 200 interesting steel houses in the world, so it is relatively avant-garde.

“Vincent Scully, the great [architecture] historian at Yale, once said that you can’t really talk about houses as architecture unless they do three things. One, they have to have an interesting idea about space. Two, they have to say something about the time they were built in. And three, they have to have prototypical implications. These three steel houses have helped me kind of advance prototypical ideas; we try things out that, hopefully, other people can learn from, and use.”

One of his favorite elements, Myers says, is the use of off-the-shelf materials. “None of these things are made as stock that you can go pick them off the shelf, but most of them are standard pieces that are prefabricated for you,” Myers says. He waves at the back entrance of the company work space: “These aluminum doors behind you are all made up of common parts, but they make those to your dimensions--they can be wider, or higher, and are all made of things that are readily available in the industry. They don’t involve new fabrication or invention.”

Myers is an unlikely champion for the architectural avant-garde. He is originally from Norfolk, Va., an area steeped in architectural tradition. The Myers family occupied the same home, a brick Colonial near the center of town, for six generations, from 1791 to 1932; the home survives today as a museum.

In the 1950s, Myers attended the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., and became a jet pilot in the U.S. Air Force. He later attended the University of Pennsylvania (1964-66), before launching his architectural career in Toronto.

“When I was in Canada, they were always very polite, but I was always an American,” Myers says with a laugh. “And when I came to Los Angeles, all the California architects thought I was Canadian. I think I’m finally being accepted as a Southern California architect.”

Myers is less accepting of Southern California architecture--not the buildings themselves, but the area’s failure to take advantage of the concepts of interconnection and community, ignoring opportunities for renovation and infilling (creating more dense neighborhoods by building between existing structures) as alternatives to sprawling growth. This is particularly true, he says, of such architectural landmarks as Brentwood’s Getty Center, the new Kodak Theatre in Hollywood and the yet-to-be-completed Our Lady of Angels Cathedral and Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles.

“We always seem to repeat the same kinds of mistakes in Los Angeles. I think the cardinal [Roger M. Mahony] made a great mistake; he shouldn’t have abandoned the old cathedral,” he says, referring to St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, several blocks away, which was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The decision was made to build a new cathedral, rather than renovate the old cathedral.

“He abandoned a hugely important cultural and historical piece; he leaves a critical part of Los Angeles that needed a catalytic shot in the arm, and moves to an isolated freeway location that doesn’t benefit the community, doesn’t generate activity around it,” Myers continues. “That’s hundreds of millions of dollars spent that doesn’t leverage hundreds of millions of dollars.

“The Getty is another building with exactly the same issue. They decide they want to be the ‘people’s museum,’ then pick a location at the top of a mountain. Not that the Getty isn’t doing wonderful things, but it could have leveraged a whole lot more. And Disney Hall will be the same; it’s an isolated object. That’s the disappointment of Los Angeles; we haven’t been able to build the connections the way we should have.”

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“3 Steel Houses,” Perloff Gallery, 1318 Perloff Hall, UCLA campus, Westwood. Dates: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Feb. 8. Price: Free; parking, $6, Lot 3 at the Wyton Drive entrance off Hilgard Avenue. Phone: (310) 825-7857.