For each site, an insight

Scott JOHNSON has designed high schools, high-rises, loft buildings, corporate parks, state capitols, wineries and three Century City skyscrapers. With showpieces like the recently completed MGM Towerto his credit, one might think he’d favor a grand office. Wrong. Johnson uses a piece of plywood for a desk. It’s decorated with a canister of pencils and a laptop. That’s all.

“I guess I’m kind of a minimalist,” says Johnson, a rangy man in black T-shirt and dress slacks. “It’s nice when you take common things and uncommon things and put ‘em together -- they have a different conversation.

“This is stone that comes out of a mountain,” he says, pointing out a shelf. “That’s plywood that’s been pressed. This carpet is wool off a sheep’s back. It’s kind of basic stuff, but you can do a mountain of things with it -- there’s this universe of possibilities.”

If Frank Gehry has come to embody the L.A. architect-as-auteur, Johnson and business partner Bill Fain have eschewed a signature style to explore their own mountain of possibilities over the last 17 years.

“There’s no set formula, no zeitgeist that we’re trying to spread all over the world,” says Johnson, whose sole concession to clutter is a bulletin board layered with postcards, scraps torn out from magazines and photographs: a quote from Frank Zappa, John Glenn in his space suit, a skeletal Kevin Bacon in the movie “Hollow Man,” Francis Bacon’s chaotic art studio, a Donald Judd chair, X-rays. “We work more at identifying who the project is for and where does it sit and where does the wind blow from and what is the culture behind this building. We’re kind of complicated, reconstructed modernists.”

Fain, a dapper intellectual whose face is framed by a shock of gray hair and trademark bow tie, says from his adjacent glass-walled office, “Scott and I share this urban set of values and this idea that we shouldn’t just be putting a stamp on everything.”

Johnson Fain Partners made its mark in 1988 with Fox Plaza, the octagonal high-rise known to movie fans and tourists as “The ‘Die Hard’ Building” (it’s where Bruce Willis hunted down terrorists after they’d taken office workers hostage). The firm’s penchant for clean lines and understated formal twists earned a raft of design prizes along with lucrative commissions from corporate clients including Warner Bros., Amgen, NBC, Fox, William Morris Agency and DreamWorks. Their most visible commercial work can be seen in Century City, where their MGM Tower , Fox Plaza and SunAmerica Tower are lined up like glittering sentries along Avenue of the Stars.

“Even though a commercial building may be capitalized by private sponsors, it’s, de facto, a public endeavor,” Fain says. “There’s a whole set of issues that are fundamentally the same issues artists face when they do public art.”

To illustrate the point, Fain and Johnson drive from their downtown office to Century City, pulling up at the MGM building. Johnson cranes his neck to scan the curved sides of the edifice, which he describes as sails, “a gesture toward the Pacific Ocean.” “A building like this,” he says, “its profile, its silhouette, its color, its reflectivity, what it does to the sky -- all that has to work for people who are waiting for the bus a block away, or in Beverly Hills a mile away. And then when you’re right here walking into the lobby, the detailing has to be just perfect. One of our friends plays golf at the country club, and every time he’s at the seventh hole, he sees this building. That’s why we say that even a private endeavor like this is public. Everybody shares it.”

Having proven itself in the private sector, Johnson Fain over the past few years has aggressively courted schools, government agencies and other not-for-profit clients. Its biggest coup: being selected this month to submit a proposal for the Grand Avenue Project, developing eight acres adjacent to Walt Disney Concert Hall. The firm, with its project partners the J.H. Snyder Co., the Jerde Partnership and Rios Associates Inc., is one of five finalists being considered.

t Johnson’s general plan of attack? “We’re not going to import Cape Cod here, or do Mission Style -- it’s not about obvious signs and symbols,” he says. “We’re talking about the fact that people are in cars all the time and see things at 30, 40 miles an hour. We’re talking about the weather here so that when you do a tall building, there is very flat, white cloudless light here that illuminates those structures in different ways than if it were in Philadelphia or Baltimore. It’s about grasping those issues and understanding the demographics who will be here.”

He sees the Grand Avenue Project as emblematic of Los Angeles’ larger design challenge. “Here’s a community that’s 500 square miles

Situational sensitivity

George Hargreaves, chairman of the Landscape Architecture Department at Harvard University, observed Johnson Fain in action when he worked with the firm on the Native American Cultural Center and Museum in Oklahoma City. “They’re very attuned to the issues of each site. That’s very different from saying, ‘On the last project I worked with boxes and triangles, so this time I’m going to do odes triangles and rhomboids,’ which is the way [a lot of] architects work.

“They listened to the history of the culture in the way they approached the lands....The powwow, the buildings being integrated into the earthwork -- that all came from listening to the client....They’re very good at working from the ground up and in doing so, that tends to take you in different directions for different projects.”

Fain and Johnson talk about their way of working in terms of “Deep Structure.” The approach, borrowed from linguist Noam Chomsky, probes beneath surface requirements for patterns embedded in the project’s underlying history and culture.

“We draw upon research and try to understand a great deal about a project before we even get near it,” Fain says. “In all our projects we try to understand the ‘Deep Structure’ of what the nature of the problem is. Sometimes it gets expressed in grids, which is a very sensible way of organizing cities.”

That’s precisely how Fain put together his plan for remaking San Francisco’s Mission Bay area. The proposal, which this month won an American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design, will transform 300 oceanfront acres into a retail-university-residential complex. Fain and his team learned that the original street grid, laid out in 1839, relied on the vara, an ancient Spanish unit of measurement equaling 2.75 feet, which they then revived. “The basic DNA, the Deep Structure for San Francisco, is the vara,” says Fain, proud as a professor as he points to a map of the newly configured district.

Doing their “Deep Structure” homework also helped Johnson Fain land three big projects in China over the past two years, one of which, in Beijing, incorporated elements of Hutang, an axial arrangement of courtyards and walkways introduced in the 13th century by Genghis Khan.

Closer to home, Fain devised a greenways plan linking Los Angeles’ slender strands of public space into a network of bikeways and parks. Fain, a diligent numbers man, conducted a study revealing that Los Angeles devotes only 4% of its acreage to public parks, compared with New York (17%), Seattle (13%) and Boston (9%).

“The metaphor for Los Angeles has traditionally been the garden,” Fain says. “You have the little house and you have the private garden. The idea was to take the rivers, the rail right of ways, the flood channels and create a whole different system of open space,” stitching together a “public garden.”

Producing a sheaf of his drawings he explains, “You’d have a series of small houses and retail centers all attached to these greenways so it becomes this kind of net that could becomes the basis for organizing the entire region.”

The road to L.A.

Fain and Johnson have been addressing urban conundrums for most of their professional lives. Both studied architecture at UC Berkeley and graduated in 1975 from the Harvard Graduate School of Design where they were schooled in purist Modernist principles by disciples of International Style guru Le Corbusier. Fain went on to help revive deteriorating downtowns as an urban planner for New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C. Johnson served his apprenticeship in New York with Modernist master Philip Johnson.

In 1980, Fain was recruited by Bill Pereira, the Los Angeles architect/power broker responsible for CBS Television City, Cape Canaveral, LAX and the master-planned Irvine Ranch community. Johnson moved West three years later to become design partner at Pereira Associates.

When Pereira died in 1995, Johnson and Fain took over the company, with Fain as the managing partner in charge of business affairs and as the firm’s master planner, heading urban design projects. Johnson, the design partner, concentrates on buildings.

The pair moved their offices into a former bank building at 800 Wilshire Blvd. in 1996, a time when space downtown was cheap and plentiful. The architects are moving their 85-person office to Chinatown next year but remain bullish on the downtown core. They’re building a public high school at 3rd Street and Bixel (it breaks ground this spring) and have designed Metropolitan Lofts, a 300-unit residence going up across from Staples Center.

Robert Timme, dean of USC School of Architecture, has long admired Johnson and Fain’s city-sensitive aesthetic.

“When you look at their responses to urban issues, that’s what really separates Johnson Fain,” he says. “You can’t just say, ‘Look at these five things, they look the same.’ But they might function very closely in terms of how people are engaged with the spaces in the sense that their buildings become containers of human activity in the way they engage and activate the urban environment.”

At the lofts project, for example, Johnson Fain is collaborating with UCLA digital artist Cameron McNall, who’s developed an interactive carpet that will be inset with LED crystals. Says Johnson: “When you walk through the front door, you’ll walk on a digital carpet and depending on where you step or what you do, it will telescope your patterns [onto the wall of the lobby]. We’re trying to make a connection between the individual on foot on street level and the bigger cityscapes.”

The carpet promises the kind of intangible urban fizz Johnson and Fain try to program into all their projects.

“You can talk about Freud’s id, or Jacques Derrida, who talks about the ‘Joker,’ or the radicalization of beauty according to Dave Hickey,” Johnson muses. “Call it what you will: As an architect,” Johnson says, “you really have to engage the spirit of a person and intrigue them or you really haven’t done your job.”