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LS: One of the things that really inspired me was something Robert Venturi said, "Familiar things seen in an unfamiliar way become both
perceptually old and new at the same time." So when you are able to take things, for example, this (shipping) container, it already has a history or richness already built in it. So to weave in some piece, so to speak, of history or something that someone relates to, it already has a sort of richness to it. Then we transform it into something else. In the case of the (shipping) container, it has a incredible history of housing of goods, being moved from east to west, it has it's own baggage attached to it before you even touch it. Then when you alter it you develop an even richer meaning and story to it.
V5: It is very collage like in that the first reading of it is not a (shipping) container at all, it has been manipulated to a point that it is clearly something quite different.
LS: We are not interested in just taking down things and throwing them into the space.
V5: You have authorship of the design.
LS: Yes. We treat the things pretty seriously and one thing that we have become fairly good at as an office are the pragmatic issues. A lot of architects have a very poor sigma attached to them regarding cost and detailing. When we design a conference room, we make it acoustically sound. We try to treat the budget and program quite seriously when we deal with the project. We take a lot of risks and many times we have to make amends for that, yet we treat it seriously.
Gramercy Group Homes was a project that we did with some SCI-Arc students and this was a sixteen unit rehab for single, teenage mothers, a non-profit group in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles. We did a one-week study and built this project. This was actually one of my student's ideas, Wendy Bone. My client provided them
with a space, since they had no money. SCI-Arc kicked in a few dollars and we were funded.
The furniture for the mothers was built by the students as well. You can see the back of the structure and one of the interiors, a very
small unit, about three hundred square feet each. Jackson, who works in my office, made all the furniture and we did these tables with a storage box on the side, it is a very large table so that they can do homework and dine. It has a little storage component with a door that flips down and this is the little kid's worktable.
Of course, you get a lot of interest at first, but it wound up being a small, dedicated group of
people that really did the work. This non-profit group built all this very inexpensively. I am quite proud of this work.
V5: Did these projects lead to the new residential projects that you are now working on?
LS: Partly. We have done work with the schools here where we have actually worked with the elementary school kids and art teachers where we actually have made tiles and plaques. Now they hang in the school hallways.
Another collaboration based project was the electric vehicle charging station, we did that in conjunction with Tony Louie, and John Engersol. We wrote a grant through a state assembly bill for clean air project securing funding to build this project. Then we went to the City of Santa Monica, saying we have money to build this project, can you provide a site for us, and they did. So we are active in trying to create projects as well as waiting for projects to come to us. The kinds of projects we try to create are one that involve the community and reach out to other people.
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