Plenty of L.A. style, without a signature

In an era of “starchitects” who jet off to design attention-getting international projects, each a variation on the same theme, it’s difficult to describe a corporate design chief whose key contribution was working with clients and leading design teams.

Albert C. Martin Jr., who died last week at 92, never settled into a signature style. The one thing most architectural observers agree on -- besides the beauty of the Department of Water and Power building, to some the most successful and unconventional structure in downtown Los Angeles before Walt Disney Concert Hall -- was his role as a citizen architect.

As a young man Martin stepped into the firm his father, Albert C. Martin Sr., had founded in 1906, now called A.C. Martin Partners Inc. Educated at USC, “Al” served as chief architect from the early ‘40s through the early ‘80s.

“The firm did not have a one-and-only signature,” says Thomas Hines, a professor of history and architecture at UCLA, who met Martin a few times and recently read transcripts of his interviews with the university’s oral history archive. “[Ludwig] Mies [van der Rohe’s] stamp in his own large firm, or Frank Gehry’s stamp, is pretty obvious. But I think the Martins took [Eero] Saarinen as a model: His term was ‘the style for the job.’ You’re not going to do one single thing, you’re going to respond to the client and the project’s needs.”

The younger Martin’s buildings, Hines says, range from a rationalist International Style to more Expressionist works. And even though Martin once said he preferred Frank Lloyd Wright to Van der Rohe, his style was generally more Miesian, with a rational, austere character and tendency to large buildings.Michael Webb, an L.A. based writer of such books as “Modernism Reborn,” calls Martin “one of the establishment figures who bridged the gap between the mundane and the adventurous, which is L.A.’s great contribution.”

Martin’s heyday coincided with years in which the city was dominated by the large corporate firms of Welton Becket, Victor Gruen, William Pereira and Charles Luckman. Even by the sometimes impersonal standards of those architects, Martin’s fingerprints are hard to discern.

“One of the differences with Martin and these other guys,” says Hines, “is that they created their own firms and identities. They didn’t have the blessing and curse of being born into a great family firm, of being under a father’s guidance and perhaps his shadow. Because of that, you can’t see the early buildings he did before stepping into the big firm.”

Martin’s son David, A.C. Martin’s current design partner, says his father was proudest of four buildings, on none of which he served as lead designer. Instead, says David, his father served as a conduit between the client and the design team, and a kind of internal critic of the team’s work. It meant that he was, in David’s words, “involved to the smallest detail.”

The four structures are the much-celebrated DWP, the Riley office building in Whittier -- which David describes as “a little jewel” in a Case Study House style -- St. Basil’s Church on Wilshire Boulevard near Western, and the TRW space park in Redondo Beach. (Martin did a number of aerospace design and research campuses that his son values for the way they capture an era’s optimism.)

One influence, David says, was the Bauhaus school, and Martin saw its work while traveling in Germany in the ‘30s. “That integration of architecture and structural engineering, which was part of our firm’s point of view, was important to Dad.”

And though his father’s role in designing was often indirect, David says, he enjoyed sketching and drawing out plans, a remnant of the Beaux Arts education at USC just before the school switched to a Modern point of view. “He always said they switched to Modern architecture too soon,” David recalls.

But the firm, under Martin Jr., became an exemplar of American Modernism. “He was practicing at a very important time in the formation of international corporate Modernism in Los Angeles,” says Kenneth Breisch, a professor of architecture and preservation at USC. “A.C. Martin took a leading role in creating a new image for the corporation, an image of American efficiency and of the ascendancy of science and technology.

“We see in the postwar era a shift from the historicism of the ‘20s and ‘30s, looking back to old European models for respectability, to a new era where architects looked forward. In the immediate postwar era there was a real suspicion of this kind of Modernism, which was associated with leftist politics and workers housing. But Martin, along with firms like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, reinvented it as a symbol of American ascendancy and self-confidence.”

And then there are the buildings. Many are fond of 1940’s May Co. building, now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s LACMA West.

“The May Co. was the last great department store on Wilshire Boulevard,” says Hines. “After that, department stores were usually suburban. It’s an excellent merging of Streamline Moderne and International Style, with that amazing cylinder, an ornamental feature that helps the building turn the corner.” Hines also admires the 1972 Arco Towers, which he calls a feat of proportion with a “Miesian rigor and order.”

1968’s Union Bank, which historian Robert Winter described as downtown L.A.’s first skyscraper since the 1920s, is also architecturally striking.

John English, of the L.A. Conservancy’s Modern Committee, met Martin during the group’s tour of the firm’s offices in the early ‘90s, and remembers him as “humble and gracious and decidedly unpretentious, an old-school gentleman.”

English is excited by a number of Martin’s buildings, including St. Basil’s, one of dozens of Catholic churches the firm designed during the reign of the first two Martins. “The firm is thought of as being somewhat conservative,” English says. “But this is incredible, an amazing abstraction of concrete and light. It’s very refreshing.”

English also loves the DWP building, which he calls “totally uninhibited” and praises its horizontal quality and “long projecting floor plates,” which make it “a monument in the middle of a flat, horizontal pool of water.”

Martin’s admirers agree that not every structure he designed was groundbreaking, and they wouldn’t have it otherwise.

“It’s tremendously important to have buildings like that to create a context,” says Webb. “I’m an admirer of Frank Gehry’s, but a world full of those buildings would wear out their welcome very quickly. I think one can argue that the impact of Disney Hall and Caltrans comes from playing off buildings” like those designed by Martin and his firm.

“In corporate architecture he kept high standards of quality and solidity; his buildings weren’t all glamorous or exciting, but those are important things.”

There was another important role in Martin’s life. “As he became less involved in the firm,” David says, “he became more involved in civic life and community activities.”

Hines says his role in the firm led him to that civic role. “Once you’re established, and you have people working with you and under you, you can devote more time to being a good citizen. As a person, those achievements are easier to distinguish than the exact role he had in this or that design project. He would have said that was the upside of being in a big firm.”