Building in flexibility

On a shady corner of Venice, Steven Ehrlich is building a house for a rare client, one with whom he agrees completely: himself.

The Culver City architect is building his own “family compound,” as he calls it, and he’s turning out to be the sort of client who would normally drive him nuts. Fortunately, when this client turns on a dime, Ehrlich is spinning along with him.

“I always challenge myself,” he says. “I go over every decision multiple times, and I’m very passionate about my own house. I get to explore details that are more experimental.”

Ehrlich is standing across the quiet street from his home under construction, and although he won’t move into the concrete-and-Corten-steel structure until the summer, he already seems like the mayor of the intersection. Ten minutes don’t go by without a motorist calling out to him from a passing car. One stops to apologize for missing his daughter’s graduation party.

“Oh, you missed a good party,” Ehrlich shoots back brightly. “It rocked.”

The woman turns out to be the daughter of sculptor Guy Dill, a friend, client, collaborator and prominent figure in Venice’s art community. It’s a world the 56-year-old Ehrlich knows well, having arrived in Venice in 1977. There he found himself working and playing with some of its brightest art stars, among them Ed Moses and John Okulick. Ehrlich later built a home in the Santa Monica Canyon to raise his young family, but his marriage ended four years ago and now he’s ready to build a new house and a new life.

“I wanted to express myself artistically, and I have the will to build,” he says. “That’s what I do. That’s who I am.”

All the while, projects designed with and for artists have remained a constant throughout his body of work, from the barn-like studio Ehrlich designed for Moses 15 years ago to their collaboration on the whale-like Shatto Recreation Center that opened in Koreatown in 1990 to the year-old UCLA Kinross Staging Building for studio art and dance. In the fall of 2004, the curtain is scheduled to go up on Ehrlich’s Kirk Douglas Theatre, the Center Theatre Group’s 360-seat venue in the historic, 1947 Culver Theater building.

“What’s great about Steve is he’s a really flexible guy,” Moses says. “I hate design. Most architects think design and proportion are the thing. What you want to do is flop around like a fool until something comes up that knocks your socks off. Steve is willing to do that.”

Such harmonious blends of architecture and clients’ needs helped earn Ehrlich Architects the 2003 Firm Achievement Award from the American Institute of Architects California Council. The professional organization gave the 27-person practice the highest honor it bestows on an architectural firm at an awards ceremony in San Diego this month. The award recognizes a sustained pattern of excellent design -- at least 10 years -- as well as programs for mentoring staff.

The group’s president, Bob Newsom, says that Ehrlich has made an unusually successful transition from residential design to a practice incorporating institutional work as well.

“Steve has done a good job of bringing his view of the richness of architecture to university campuses and schools around California,” Newsom says. “Steve has established a practice of work that is very emotive and evocative. It breaks from some of the more rigid modernist traditions. It’s work that’s very soulful.”

Innovation begins at home

Ehrlich’s romance with innovation begins at home, a project he can continue designing long after the structure is finished because he’s built in an unusual degree of flexibility. Massive glass doors that slide open take California modernism a step further by eliminating the barrier between indoors and outdoors, not merely suggesting it. One end of a narrow swimming pool abuts the heated concrete floor of the living room, where sun worshippers can work on their tans.

“I’m extending ideas that were pioneered by Neutra and Schindler, but I’m using technologies that are pushing the limits, which were probably not available to them,” Ehrlich says.

Bedrooms for his three daughters, ages 16 to 25, who come and go are loft-like “sleeping pods” with built-in “bunk- ettes” on a balcony overlooking the living room. When the kids aren’t home, the rooms can be transformed into a library or study. Rust-colored awnings move up, down and across to modulate the light and provide privacy.

“A lot of the house is about transformation,” Ehrlich says. “The house can really change its whole mood and the way it feels depending on the time of day, time of year, weather, mood.”

It’s also about being part of a community. Ehrlich is planning to hold Sunday pool parties for neighborhood kids and to entertain family and friends in the bamboo-lined courtyard dividing the main building from a pavilion -- a garage cum yoga studio and rec room.

The idea of community is key to Ehrlich’s larger projects as well. The $85-million mock Italian village he designed for DreamWorks Animation Studios in Glendale includes a central gathering place for filmmakers. So does the 100,000-square-foot Sony Music Entertainment West Coast headquarters in Santa Monica, which spills occupants of its three low-rise office buildings into a landscaped plaza anchored by a cafe.

Ehrlich’s new 300,000-square-foot Kendall Square Biotech Building in Cambridge, Mass., houses genetic research labs and incorporates “living rooms in the sky” -- gathering areas on each floor of offices and laboratories surrounding an atrium. For the Art Center of Orange Coast College, a commission for which he beat out Michael Graves and Richard Meier, Ehrlich laced the building with public spaces so students in different disciplines could intermingle. And at the Paul Cummins Library that Ehrlich designed for Santa Monica’s Crossroads School, a glass cube on the building’s front serves as a periodicals lounge abutting a parking lot lined with tables. The combination encourages teenagers to do what they do best -- hang out.

“I really believe in the chance encounter, in synergy,” Ehrlich says. “I believe in community, in people enriching each other’s lives, stimulating each other. Hopefully, that’s what a university is about, where an engineer might talk to a musician and hopefully something happens. In the arts, clearly that can happen. In a theater, when people go into the lobby or where the lobby spills out onto the street, those are important interactive areas. Where people meet and greet and talk about what they’re seeing, it becomes part of our culture. I just don’t think we want to be isolated. We want to be interactive.”

African courtyards

Isolation is a particular hazard of the computer age, and it’s perhaps fitting that Ehrlich’s architectural solutions for the ills of high-tech society were inspired in part by the years he spent in nonindustrial Africa early in his career. After his 1969 graduation from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture, Ehrlich spent half a dozen years in Africa working for the Peace Corps in Morocco, traveling, and teaching at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. During his stint as the Peace Corps’ first architect in Morocco, Ehrlich became fascinated with African courtyards.

“Over the centuries, Moroccans have refined the urban residential courtyard as a ‘green’ solution to North Africa’s fierce sun and to the challenge of finding quietude in crowded cities,” Ehrlich wrote in the 1998 monograph “Steven Ehrlich architects,” published by Rizzoli. “There is a deeper meaning to the Moroccan courtyard as well: Islamic tradition holds that each man’s private space must be cultivated to resemble Paradise. The courtyard represents a symbolic Garden of Eden, linking residents to God and nature. I realized I had found an antidote to what I call ‘the crust of civilization’ -- the rapid growth of urbanism with its sensory overload and information glut.”

Working in Africa, Ehrlich developed an approach to design he calls “architectural anthropology” -- studying his clients’ culture and tailoring his architecture to their surroundings.

“I learned about the wisdom of architecture without architects, and how people lived in delicate balance with the land,” he says. “They know what to do because they understand their own environment, their own culture, their own building materials. They don’t have a bunch of muscle to overpower it like we have.”

Sustainable buildings -- which don’t deplete non-replenishable sources and don’t require much energy to heat or cool -- may be hot in architectural circles today, but they’ve long been a staple of the African landscape.

“If you look at cultures that have very little means, they’re completely sustainable because they can’t do anything else, so they use materials that are dug up from the ground. In fact, the most sustainable building I’ll ever achieve is the mud theater I designed at Ahmadu Bello University.”

Photos of the thatched-roof mud theater Ehrlich designed a quarter-century ago join pictures of more recent projects that line a wall of his atelier. The mud theater first sparked his interest in integrating art in architecture when he recruited a local artist to design bas-reliefs on its exterior. Years later, he recruited Moses to create abstract patterns for the Shatto Recreation Center’s concrete block wall.

“I wanted to do something where kids would be able to do graffiti over what I did, but that wasn’t encouraged by the city fathers,” Moses says. “Instead he came up with the idea of having a computer transfer the graffiti-like drawings I did into a brick pattern.”

Their collaboration points to one of the architect’s strengths, his unusual degree of openness to the needs of his clients, collaborators and environment. For Ehrlich and Moses, it was a recipe for serendipitous inspiration.

“The best things are when you have two foreign elements that come together with the right catalyst and something happens,” Moses says. “That’s me being a painter working freehand and him being an architect working with straight lines. He’s not imposing his will and his idea of design on their society. He gets to know the society and then reacts to that.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A Steven Ehrlich sampler

The Culver City architect is known for making a successful transition from residential design to a practice that incorporates institutional work.

What: Art Center of Orange Coast College Where: Costa Mesa Year completed: 2002

What: Paul Cummins Library, Crossroads School Where: Santa Monica Year completed: 1996

What: Kendall Square Biotech Building Where: Cambridge, Mass. To be completed: Early 2004