In the NoHo Arts District, ‘I’ stands for Isermann

The wild pop of color and pattern is difficult to miss, blazing from the exterior of a new apartment building where balconies frame geometric designs in interlocking red, black, ochre and white tiles. In the building’s lobby, visible through glass, the design repeats, floor to ceiling.

The effect is as unexpected on the quiet North Hollywood street as is its source: Jim Isermann, a Palm Springs-based artist with an international reputation as an innovator who blurs the distinctions between fine art and contemporary design.

Isermann is known for decorative, bold-patterned domestic designs, work that includes furniture, wall coverings, rugs, paintings and fabric-covered sculptures. In addition to solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, he has designed site-specific installations for a number of public spaces.

His geometric tile design for the just-completed mixed-used Ticino building in the NoHo Arts District came about as a result of the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency’s requirement that developers earmark 1% of project costs for public art.

The six-story building on McCormick Street was designed by DE Architects of Santa Monica and built by JSM Construction, which now occupies the building’s ground-floor commercial space. Ten of its 103 residential units are reserved for low-income tenants.

The building’s clean-lined design, reminiscent of midcentury modern architecture, “is very bold, graphic,” said arts consultant Kathy Lucoff, who was hired by JSM and brought Isermann to the attention of the developers, architect Don Empakeris and the redevelopment agency’s board.

Isermann said his interest was sparked by the fact that his artwork was envisioned as part of the building’s architectural design, not as an afterthought.

“I think public art works best,” he said, “when it’s just integrated into a building and becomes identifiable for the people living there as a kind of everyday experience. They’re not knocked over the head with it being art; the more time they spend with it, the more they understand it and start to see the kind of repeating patterns in things that I’m drawn to.”

Originally, only the building’s 10 iron-mesh balconies were to feature Isermann’s tiles, but the artist suggested that the design be carried over into the lobby, to give residents “a close, intimate experience, in addition to seeing the tiles from much farther away.”

Isermann found inspiration for his “I”-shaped tiles -- more than 1,400 of them -- in the building’s roof-level exposed I-beams and in the work of David Hicks, the late interior designer.

“One of his famous patterns was this interlocking ‘H’ pattern, ‘H’ for Hicks,” Isermann said. “So, I was kind of playing around with this idea of interlocking I’s, for Isermann.”

He credits DE Architects’ project manager, Russell Rocker, with making it possible to realize the design by rescaling the balconies.

“He and I worked together to resize them so they were perfect,” Isermann said, “and that was critical to how the [tile] pattern repeats. We actually adjusted the height and the width of every balcony.”

The building’s “color palette was tweaked” too, Isermann said, to match the tile colors.

The opportunity to work with Heath Ceramics to create the tiles was another plus. “I’ve been wanting to work with Heath for years, so I was really happy that finally happened,” he said.

Heath, a Sausalito-based manufacturer of handcrafted dinnerware and architectural tiles, developed a tool to cut Isermann’s I-beam pieces. The bowed edges and the light-catching surface undulations created in firing give each tile Heath’s trademark handcrafted look, as does the depth of the colors.

“When you do an interlocking shape,” Isermann said, “there’s a decision you have to make about whether the tile is cut before or after it’s fired. When you cut it before it’s fired, the shape can distort when it’s heated. So that was the big thing to work out.

“But the distortion reflects the process. It’s very hard to notice on the balconies, but that’s one of the things that I love about the lobby. You actually get to see that distortion. I think it’s very beautiful the way the top and the bottom of the beam of the ‘I’ is kind of curved, so you get this irregular grout pattern, which is one of the beautiful things about the tile.

“And nobody but Heath Tile can do saturated colors like that, so I was thrilled about working with them.”

Heath’s co-owner, Robin Petavic, was equally enthusiastic. “We love it when people like Jim come to us with a custom design that challenges us to do something creative, not just pump out tile,” he said.

Empakeris, the architect, also praised the collaboration. “The whole area of North Hollywood is sort of a hybrid,” he said. “It was very industrial and now it’s become very urban, so we wanted to create a building that felt like a loft in a sense, picking up on the industrial warehouse nature of that area and then dressing it up a bit and giving it a residential feel. If you just get an artist who wants to put something in without having a feel for that style of building, it can be a disaster.”

Isermann’s work doesn’t fit neatly in any one category, and that’s the way he likes it. He was part of the 2003 “LAPD: Los Angeles Pattern & Decoration” exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, but he says he identifies much less with P&D; than with Pop artists and Abstract Classicists such as John McLaughlin.

“Staying in L.A. after I got out of grad school, one of the things I benefited from was not having to be classified,” he said. “I was able to make work out here that got a lot of attention without being really pigeonholed, and the work kind of developed on its own.”

An assistant professor of art at UC Riverside, Isermann, 49, was the subject of a retrospective, “Fifteen: Jim Isermann Survey,” that originated at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and traveled to the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1999.

Recent installations include abstract vinyl decal wall coverings at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, decorative motifs in glass at the Metro Blue Line’s 5th Street Station in Long Beach, an interior sculpture wall at l.a.Eyeworks on Beverly Boulevard and a 40-foot, five-pendant chandelier at UC San Francisco.

Another public project is also in the works: a commission from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Metro Arts for Transit program, which puts art in subway and rail stations. Isermann will create an exterior design for the MTA’s soon-to-be refurbished customer service center at Wilshire Boulevard and La Brea Avenue.

“It’s going to be, if you can imagine, a folded metal sunscreen that will wrap around the entire building to kind of camouflage” it.

So, just what is the value of public art? “That’s a tricky one,” Isermann said.

“I worked on a project a couple of years ago where people were moving this office into a new space. I went and talked to some of the people in the old building, a beautiful old building that was being torn down. The things that they were interested in and attached to were these incredible old stainless steel front doors, or the tile that had been used in the bathroom -- not the first things you’d think of as art.

“But it’s these things that people who have an everyday experience with a building really grow to appreciate. That’s the effect that I would like my work to have on people who live with it.”