Drafting a Career

“Stand right here,” Michael Maltzan says, steering a reporter to the back of a garbage-strewn subway car rattling along the elevated tracks above Queens, “and lean closer to the window.” Maltzan is directing the writer’s first view of his recently completed design for the Museum of Modern Art’s temporary home in a rundown manufacturing district miles from Manhattan. Right on cue, a series of block letters on the building’s roof slide into focus, forming the letters M-O-M-A before breaking apart into a series of disconnected forms as the train pulls to a stop. Maltzan looks pleased.

And why not? Few architectural careers have been as carefully choreographed as Maltzan’s. Since completing a seven-year stint at the office of the Los Angeles-based Frank O. Gehry, the pensive, soft-spoken architect has become the darling of the art world, a man whose client list includes Hollywood heavyweights and major art institutions. Among his most recent commissions are a design for the new Kidspace Museum in Pasadena, a renovation of the Hammer Museum in Westwood, a house in Beverly Hills for onetime Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz and a major expansion of the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa.

None of these projects, however, carries the expectations of MoMA QNS. The museum’s stature as one of the world’s most venerable art institutions will mean that its opening, scheduled for Saturday, will draw international attention, and, many predict, will launch Maltzan to architectural stardom.

What makes this surprising is Maltzan’s relatively young age. In America, even the most talented architects are unlikely to land such a juicy cultural commission until they are deep into middle age. By comparison, the 42-year-old Maltzan is still a pre-prepubescent--an age when most of his peers are still designing restaurant interiors or scraping together enough money to build their first house.

Such a meteoric rise has brought with it a high degree of scrutiny. To his critics, Maltzan’s career is a model of how to achieve success without risk. They wonder if he is a precocious talent, one of the rising voices of his generation, or simply a smooth operator whose people-pleasing skills outweigh his architectural accomplishments so far.

As his former mentor Gehry puts it: “Michael has the potential to be a great architect. But I wonder if his bedside manner is developing too fast and if his talent can keep up.”

Maltzan was born in suburban Long Island in 1959. It was a landscape of identical tract houses, a place that seemed to sum up the promise of the postwar American dream. But like others of his generation, Maltzan was acutely aware of the psychological cracks concealed by the veneer of progress.

The family struggled to support five children, and eventually began drifting from town to town as Maltzan’s father, William, a medical supply salesman, searched for better-paying jobs. The elder Maltzan tried selling furniture, then real estate and eventually ended up as a welfare fraud investigator for the state of Connecticut, while his wife, Jacqueline, stayed home to raise the children. Maltzan withdrew into a malaise of boredom.

“Michael was really a loner,” says his younger sister Patricia Matthews. “He’d sit in his room and watch a lot of TV. He really didn’t want to be bothered with the fluff of teenage life.”

Architecture became a way of grappling with--and understanding--the world on his own terms. A self-proclaimed third-rate student, Maltzan enrolled in his first drafting course in high school in Hebron, Conn. The class was more about vocational training than high design, but it offered a unique sense of empowerment.

“There was an order to drafting,” Maltzan says. “You had complete control over that piece of paper. And that may have been when I got my first sense that you could actually control your environment.”

The continual moving as a child also helped him hone another skill that would serve him well in later life: “I developed this ability for navigating the social side of things quite quickly. Either you sat in the corner or you found something to offer.”

“Michael’s parents were very social in a ‘50s sort of way,” says his wife, Amy Murphy, who is also an architect. “Lots of parties and cookouts. And his dad had all of the angst and all of the charisma. So Michael’s people skills were incredible.”

Eventually, Maltzan found his way to the Rhode Island School of Design, which in the early 1980s was pulsating with young talents who were struggling to come to terms with a profession that seemed in disarray. The public backlash caused by the big, brutal urban experiments of the 1960s and ‘70s made it a bad time to be a card-carrying Modernist. Postmodernism--a mix of neoclassical references and ironic posturing--seemed like a descent into cynicism. Professors and students were looking for more hopeful, pragmatic models.

It was at the school of design that Maltzan was exposed to his first architectural idols, such as the Portuguese Alvaro Siza, the Spaniard Jose Rafael Moneo, and the Boston-based Argentine team of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti. What distinguished these designers from their American contemporaries was their ability to create modern forms without repudiating the past. Moneo, for example, was at that time working on his National Museum of Roman Art in Merida, Spain, in which he rested the museum’s brooding brick form directly on top of existing Roman ruins. Machado and Silvetti’s works were slightly more precious--historical abstractions cloaked in luxurious surfaces.

But it was Siza’s approach that struck a nerve with Maltzan. In Siza’s hands, the clean white spaces of classical Modernism were twisted and bent, as if reconfigured by the forces of time.

“Back then, we always talked about this [Ludwig] Wittgenstein quote, ‘What’s torn is torn’--that you accept the reality, the world is a fractured place,” recalls Murphy, who met Maltzan at Rhode Island School of Design. “Michael was always interested in the connection between things more than in the individual parts--the glue that holds things together. So Siza was a big influence.”

Maltzan also found inspiration in artists like Richard Serra, whose “Tilted Arc,” a massive, curved, steel-plate sculpture set in a public plaza in downtown Manhattan, was then causing a public outcry. “ ‘Tilted Arc’ meant a lot to me,” Maltzan says. “It seemed to be a more critical position than what some of the architects were taking, and with minimal means. It represented a way out of the morass of Postmodernism.”

From Rhode Island, Maltzan went on to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and in 1988, he and Murphy married. The couple soon began casting around for a way to escape the provincialism of Boston and, more important, an East Coast recession that was in full swing. L.A. seemed the ideal destination--a city with a reputation as a thriving architectural laboratory, brimming with opportunities for ambitious young talents.

They arrived flat broke--to pay for a meal at McDonald’s, Murphy remembers counting out the change in the ashtray of their Ford pickup--and crashed at the West Hollywood apartment of a friend who was working as an architect by day and playing in a punk rock band by night. Still, for Maltzan, it was a return of sorts, a chance to explore the suburban landscape of his childhood.

At the time, Gehry had just entered the 1987 competition for the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and his office was suddenly booming. Maltzan was hired to work on the competition. When Gehry’s plan was selected, Maltzan stayed on to see the project through to the completion of the design.

“When we won the competition, it was a shock. The next day Frank walked through the office and congratulated everyone. At the end, he turned to me and said, ‘If all the seats fit, you did an OK job.’ It put me in my place. I realized that it was his moment of ascension, and it was going to be a one-person elevator.”

Weary of the pitfalls that can ensnare young architects who cling too closely to their role models, Maltzan began quietly mapping out a blueprint for his escape. He determined that to be successful, he would have to establish his own practice by age 35; get his work published in the kind of glossy magazines that would get him noticed; and steer clear of residential commissions that could pigeonhole him. Having studied Gehry’s rise, he saw the art world as a point of entry to big-scale, public commissions.

But escaping the long shadow of Gehry meant more than setting up shop on his own. It meant finding his own voice as an architect, a much more daunting task. His first solo project, the small, nonprofit Inner City Arts complex for children, completed in 1995 in downtown’s decrepit warehouse district, included a bulging, tower-like ceramics studio that echoed Gehry’s earlier sculptural compositions.

Maltzan’s next project, the Feldman/Horn Center for the Arts at the exclusive Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood, harked back to earlier influences, in particular Siza and the Viennese Minimalist Adolf Loos. A delicate composition of line and form, the various studio and gallery buildings wrap around a central court that is punctuated at one end by a sculpted stair tower.

What both projects reveal is a young talent closely studying the methods of earlier masters. It is an almost classical view of an architectural education--the equivalent of a 19th century Beaux Arts student traveling to Rome to study classical temples. The work also signaled an architect with a remarkably developed eye, someone whose ability to compose space and form was mature beyond his years.

As Maltzan struggled to hone a more personal vision, meanwhile, his career began to soar. His relationship with Gehry remained intense but distant--they traveled in similar circles but now tended to avoid each other.

In 1996, Stuart Regen, a local art dealer with connections to a number of wealthy collectors, introduced Maltzan to entertainment lawyer Alan Hergott. Hergott was impressed by the young architect’s maturity, and he offered him his first major residential commission: a $2-million house in Beverly Hills on a site overlooking Los Angeles.

Maltzan’s design broke no new ground. Its sleek, abstract surfaces cloaked an interior that was more elegant than earth-shattering. But the project opened a door into the kind of cultural salons that could earn him high-profile commissions. Maltzan became a regular at the Hergott home. Hergott and his partner, Curt Shepard introduced the architect to local magnates like Ovitz and David Geffen, as well as cultural power brokers like Museum of Modern Art architecture curator Terry Riley, its director, Glenn Lowry, and Hammer director Ann Philbin.

In 1998, Philbin selected Maltzan to design a major renovation of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood. That same year, Riley included Maltzan in the “Un-private House” show at MoMA. By then, Maltzan was at work on the redesign of the Kidspace Children’s Museum, which is scheduled to break ground this fall. And on Thursday, the Sonoma County Museum selected him to design its $30-million facility in Santa Rosa.

To some, Maltzan’s ascent would not have gone so smoothly if the work had been more challenging--and less conservative. They compare him to other emerging talents of his generation--Neil Denari, Wes Jones and the team of Kevin Daly and Chris Genik, to name a few--whose explorations of new computer technologies have produced a more flamboyant and distinctive design aesthetic.

“Maltzan is a perfect fit for the art world,” says Sylvia Lavin, director of the UCLA school of architecture. “It is a world that doesn’t want to seem bourgeois and middle class, but really wants to play it safe. Maltzan’s work satisfies that desire. Whether it’s actually provocative or opening up any new territory, I’m not actually convinced by that.”

To others, however, Maltzan was beginning to articulate a language whose subtlety was sometimes lost in a culture of visual overload, where the temptation is often to ratchet up the “wow” quotient to attain a modicum of recognition.

“One of the things that has changed in the last 10 years is that the terrain got so crowded,” says Bruce Mau, a graphic designer who has collaborated with many celebrated architects, including Maltzan. “Michael’s architecture is very broad. It’s about collaboration, context. The work is quite subtle; at times it almost disappears. And I think this is his way to find a clear tone within this cacophony.”

For Maltzan, each new commission is an opportunity to stretch his architectural muscles. On a recent day in his office, for example, strewn across various tables are a number of crude, unfinished models, among them his design for the Kidspace Museum. The model depicts the long, sinuous form of a building, its walls peeling apart or coming together at various points to adapt to the surrounding context.

The delicate layering of the forms gives the model a rich psychological texture, and hints at a new direction in his work. It is an architecture of subliminal messages, which is composed of an almost cinematic sequence of images. One expects that Maltzan will expand on these ideas, especially as he begins to explore issues of material and surface more fully.

But if Kidspace is proof that Maltzan’s work is still evolving, MoMA QNS resonates with deeper symbolic meanings. Nearly 20 years ago, Gehry created a temporary museum building in Los Angeles--the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary in Little Tokyo. That project was considered a breakthrough--a raw, informal warehouse space that served as a battering ram against the wall that once separated high art from the harsh realities of everyday life.

Maltzan’s version lacks Gehry’s raw, aggressive edge. Instead, it suggests a more elusive, fragmented architectural narrative. The blocky rooftop letters of MoMA QNS are an ephemeral pop image--an expression of the project’s lack of permanence. Inside, a compact sequence of stairs and ramps weaves back and forth through the space before depositing visitors inside the galleries, a gesture that seems measured to draw visitors farther away from the gritty world outside and into a vault-like sanctuary.

The contrast between the two designs, along with the irony of Maltzan, a Gehry protege, designing a similar space for MoMA, was not lost on Riley. But the museum official also sensed another reason the commission might tap into Maltzan’s particular sensibility.

“What’s interesting about this place is that it is where the dense, high-rise city runs right into suburban sprawl, the junction between East Coast urban tradition and the kind of landscape epitomized by L.A. It seemed a perfect notion for someone born into one condition and who matured in the other.”

The design’s elaborate entry sequence suggests other metaphors as well--a bridge, for example, between the shaky suburban ground of his youth and the world of high art culture in which Maltzan has since immersed himself.

Whatever its meaning, MoMA QNS has placed Maltzan in the spotlight. To survive it, he will have to find a way to navigate that increased scrutiny while maintaining the psychological space that would allow him to further articulate his personal vision.

“I think it’s the same as with an artist,” the Hammer’s Philbin says. “I think it is really perilous when they get so much attention so young, because they can crash and burn. It happens a lot in the art world. But I also think you can tell when someone has the maturity to handle that pressure, and I think that Michael does.”

The question, however, may be what kind of architect Maltzan wants to become. Although Gehry is the architect with whom Maltzan is most often compared, other career paths would be far more attainable. No American since Frank Lloyd Wright, after all, has revolutionized the language of architecture as profoundly as Gehry, and few living architects have tapped into the public imagination with such force.

A more likely scenario, by comparison, would be the career of Frank Israel, who was a major star of Los Angeles’ architectural scene until his death from AIDS in 1996. Israel’s designs--mostly houses, often for Hollywood clients--took the fragmented forms invented by Gehry and gave them a hedonistic twist. They were less revolutionary than evocative of a certain time and place--elegant creations that captured L.A.’s ephemeral nature.

“I think success can be dangerous,” Gehry says. “You have to find a language that is personal and has its own integrity. So far, there’s a politeness to Michael’s work that seems to take the edge off of it. But only he knows if he’s pulling punches.”

Indeed, there are few things as mysterious as the birth of a great talent. Under the circumstances, only a fool would write Maltzan off so soon.

“I’m only 42,” Maltzan points out with a slight testiness. “Give me a chance.”

Nicolai Ouroussoff is The Times’ architecture critic.