Do you follow the work of the others from the LA 12?

Well, obviously some of it you can't help but follow! But there are I guess two or three members who I don't know what they're doing these days. But the rest that are published, obviously I see the work.

Did you feel it was a coherent group at the time?

Well, when Bernard (Zimmerman) put it together it was a group of people who had been producing work over a period of time in Los Angeles. I think it was generally coherent. We were sort of in a similar place at the time. The interesting aspect is how many people surfaced out of that as major players. I think that in itself speaks well. It's like starting a school and choosing the right faculty. When they surface, you know you did a good job, because you hit the right people. In the same way here, I think a lot of them did. But other people became quieter in the process and I don't know what they're doing.

Do you think there's some common influence that comes from working in Los Angeles?

Well, there certainly was in the early years. I think from the fifties through the mid- sixties, everyone was working in similar ways. In the mid-sixties it began to change. First of all there was the influence of Charles Moore and Sea Ranch. Some of the architects began to copy that down here, which began to change some of the mannerisms. The New York Five in 1972 influenced many architects, who began to drop post and beam and steel and started to do plaster massing. That began to change how architecture -- houses, that is -- looked here. It was the same for major buildings. I think for a long time the influences came from the way Craig Ellwood would design, trying to express the way the building was made, and how it was put together. Then Cesar Pelli and Tony Lumsden's influence, the glass skin. But that was universal, not just in LA. It went everywhere. So, therefore, I would say we don't have what you would call a Los Angeles architecture. The next phase was the period in which we had, say, Frank Gehry doing work in Venice (Beach) and the flatlands. It's a different context; we did our work in the hills, out of the city and above looking back at the city, a whole different context. Then, of course, LA became known as this highly experimental place where people could do almost anything they wanted. But my LA, the early LA, was really about trying to extend the ideas that started with Greene & Greene, (Frank Lloyd) Wright, (Irving) Gill, (Richard) Neutra, (Rudolph M.) Schindler, and then the next generation of Gregory Ain, Harwell Harris and (Raphael) Soriano. We were really trying to expand the pavilion-like, post and beam, type of architecture, with as little separation between indoor and outdoor as possible. Trying to express the Los Angeles climate. Buff and Hinsman, Jim Pulliam, Jerrold Lomax, Bernard Zimmerman: they all came out of post and beam, lighter kinds of systems, and moved into more of a plaster massing type of architecture. I've probably stayed the most consistent in my work. I kept doing wood and steel. Once in a while I'd do a plaster job, but it had a very different character than the way others were using plaster. So I wouldn't say that there's a truly LA way. It's like education; one school will do something, and then schools all over the world will be doing similar work.

What do you consider the future to hold for Los Angeles?

It's difficult. I go around with this a lot in my head. Of course the demographics have changed drastically. Hopefully that will be a plus. The downside is, are these different groups going to keep to their own cultures? I hope they will, to see that spirit incorporated into the Los Angeles scene. Or will they just accept what is and adapt and assimilate, which I think would be unfortunate over time. I thought (not that I was ever strongly for it, because I never thought it was correct for Los Angeles) that the Metropolitan Transit System, I thought we were mat city and needed personal transit systems. I thought the stations as major stopping points would bring major changes to Los Angeles. But now, every month, every week, every day the plan is changing, and we don't know where the stations are going to be. The completed stations are in a kind of no-man's land right now, and that looks like an opportunity lost for the moment. We have these north-south boulevards - La Brea, Vermont, Western - which need help, so there's a great amount to do. Another scenario I can see is if you look at Los Angeles overall and see how many incorporated cities we have and how many places have not incorporated yet that have an identity, it's tremendous, about 150. My fear is that as minority populations occupy the major part of central LA, these areas will push toward incorporation and pull themselves out of the city itself. The city would be left to a few minority groups who would probably have inadequate funding to take care of the whole process. So far it's been okay, but we could get a lot more West Hollywoods or Culver Cities where there are small conglomerates of self-governed places that have their own territory. I hope that doesn't happen, but that possibility exists. We have to be concerned with social issues, whether we're just voices, or whether we're really producing any designs which may change things. I don't have a lot of hope for that aspect of it. But I do have hope that we can be players in the decision-making process.

In terms of planning, or in terms of design?

Too often architects are planners, but we are not policy makers, or we are this but we are not that. A good case for that is what happened with our firm and why we finally closed down the partnership in 1981. During the seventies, a lot of projects were planning and urban design, per se. By 1981 implementation was the name of the game. Everyone felt that planning wasn't working; they had done enough of that, but the plans weren't being implemented. Now what happens is that the developer becomes the key player, but he is really only a negotiator. Architects should be negotiators, but we're not. We consider ourselves managers, but we should be in on the negotiating. We shouldn't always need somebody else to come up with the funds. Why aren't we smart enough to know how to put together funds? So now what happens? The developer puts together a team and negotiates with a community development agency, or whatever agencies there are. They make the best deal they can and they put something up. The city bends over backwards giving them this, that, and the other thing. That became the way cities expected to operate. I was involved with that once when we were considering moving SCI-Arc downtown. The (Broadway) Arcade building was a good potential building for the school. So I went in to negotiate with the CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) and they said, we won't negotiate with you unless you're a developer. I said, "we're the developer." They said, "You can't be the developer." And they wouldn't do it. It was a really strange affair. But it was typical. It's unfortunate in terms of the architect's role. I think it would be better if we were in more of those political positions, but we opt out of the decision-making because we love what we do too much. It's more fun to do the parts we like. And I understand that because I started as a developer. My first building and my third buildings were as a developer. But I had to put together the finances, I had to put together the package, I built the package, I leased the package. And in the meantime, I became busy with work that's more fun. So I did the same thing; it's more enjoyable to do the normal architectural services than to do the whole package. When you're trying to do all those things by yourself, it takes a lot of time and energy. If you operate small, it's hard to do. Anyway, I think the architect's role should be expanded. If it could be, more people would get into these other areas. But they don't come to architecture school to do that, and they don't graduate to do that.

What do you consider to be a solution to the problem of low income housing?

There's really no solution. I've spent a lot of time trying to develop systems that can be repetitive, but now we know better than that. We might be able to cut a buck or two off the building process, five dollars off the price per square foot, but that's not the solution. It's really a dedication to providing housing through the subsidy process. It has to be government sponsored. Private enterprise won't do it unless there's something coming back in, so it's a negotiating process. "So okay, sure, I'll build your homes for you. You give me the land. Give me the subsidies. I'll put these up. And then I'll make my money and walk away."

But that's not low income, or low price housing. It's low on the market, but you can only build so cheap. Nor do I think that most people want the solution of mass housing. Perhaps in small pieces. We only did one project like that, in 1969 to 1970, a moderate income housing project in Pasadena. What we found was that the minorities we were doing it for really don't want that kind of housing, so none of the projects worked. Even though I was opposed to it at that time, the Republican government cut those projects off very quickly and started doing what we call small "turn keys" very quickly. As architects, we found that was unfortunate because it removed that kind of mass housing project. But the people were much happier with those types of solutions. With our attitude in general you're going to see less and less low-income housing. The attempt is to put people to work so they can afford to be able to move into society in a reasonable, step-by-step fashion. I don't think the idea of a welfare state has moved many people along very well. We're spending too much money on prisons and not enough money to give people work skills and education.

You said in the earlier interview that "form and function are one," which seems to imply that if you understand the function, the form is self-evident.

I think it's a question of which way you want to approach the project. One might criticize much of my work in terms of function, depending on what criteria one sets up as "function." If you think you should design a house so the kitchen is in the closest place to the garage so you don't have to move the groceries very far, I'm a anti-functionalist (laughs). I think many people feel strongly that form is more important, that the object is more important. And within any form, we can provide whatever functions are necessary. I think there's a lot of truth in that. My feeling about function, to use that term, is that I really call it program solution. I mean, you really have to talk a client into a whole different way of thinking if you're going to start with form first; that is not where most people come from. They come in with a kind of program that has to do with how they live, where there kitchen's going to be and what it's going to be like, what the bathrooms are going to be like, how much storage will be built for their clothing. They really want to talk about plan-functional elements, normally. From there, the architect can go anywhere they want to. I think it's obvious that architects can talk people into all kinds of things, or we wouldn't see the work we see. When I started out, I couldn't believe that somebody could sell people the types of work that some architects are selling their clients. I'm not saying it's good or bad; it's fantastic that there are people like that, because that is not the way a client usually comes to you at all. But there are clients at the house level, and on a larger scale of building too, who want to support the artist as such. Well, I never thought of myself as an artist; in my mind, I'm a problem solver. If there's any artistry in the work, it's intuitive. But I don't approach it like I'm going to do an art piece. I do it will the intention of solving a problem. I think of the whole project totally at one time, but I never think of what it's going to look like as a volume. I think of how it's going to look like in the way it's made and put together, and then there it is. Okay, I may tweak it a bit, but I don't really sit down to make forms. I had a client one time who was so concerned about how few moves he should make in the kitchen that we never ended up with a kitchen in the house. I designed two or three kitchens for him and he finally moved in with a few orange crates and a piece of old equipment. He was trying to develop the most efficient possible place, but who cares if you take one more step or a few more steps? If you worry about functional efficiency and you get out and run around the block for two hours, what's the sense of it? Here, you can exercise in the house! But at one time there was that kind of mentality about architecture. Architects almost became efficiency experts. If it helps you to plan efficiently, and develop plans and sections and construction systems as your way of doing architecture, that's fine. Or if you develop volumes first and function or structure later, that's fine. I think students can go either way, as long as they understand the whole thing. But I had students last summer in Europe who would design projects that were form-oriented. For the life of me, I couldn't get them to tell me what was in those spaces. I would ask them what was happening and they couldn't draw me a plan or a section. And these are fourth-year, upper level students. Then I started to wonder, what's going on? It's impossible for them to envision more than external form. I don't understand that. I would think that any architect would be asking, "What's being contained? What's on the inside?

What's going on in there?" I don't know how you can think about architecture without doing that. On the other hand, my way of working is to actually conceive a scheme. There aren't too many pure accidents coming out of the process. And then maybe you make adjustments, or things may happen during the process that were not originally part of the thinking.

Do your projects ever surprise you, though?

What surprises me are things like reflections in glass, the way light may come in. I couldn't possibly know all the ways. How it looks when the sun shines its brightest, how it looks through the course of the day. It's pretty hard to predict that. Those are the kind of fun things, when you get darkness and when you get light. I think most people don't know glass that well. So this is the fun thing; when you design, you're thinking about view and site relationships the normal things we see through the glass. But you don't think about all the layers that you get, you don't work that out at all. I get a lot of pleasure from the way shadows play and what nature does. That's the next level. Nature works at that unpredictable level. It's predictable in a sense, but it grows and it changes over time. So those are the changing processes of life. If you shut all of that out, or if you're so precious about that you only allow a certain view, well, then you're going to lose that. You'll always have your piece and it will always look good. On the other hand, my piece gets lost (in nature) but I don't care. I came out of the era of Neutra. Yes, you're building a place, but that place is secondary to what it's all about. It's contrary to the idea of many buildings, which are wonderful buildings, which you can always go back to where there's a clearing forever where you can see the object in space and the view. And you can take this wonderful 35mm photograph. Someone thought about that enough to know that this piece would always be like that. And that's fine; the object is really important. The object is never really important to me. It can dissolve, as far as I am concerned. So it's really a different way of thinking. And it's harder to communicate, especially through photographs. This is pretty hard to do if you're working in model form. I think it evolves as you draw. Your ideas will come out of a different thinking process. I was trained just to draw. Every five weeks, we turned in a project: plans, sections, perspectives, and elevations on one big board. That was the exercise. We did a lot of those exercises. Model making is a different process. If you are putting it together as volumetric pieces, now you're looking at a form and you're not thinking about it from the inside. You're not even concerned about the site so much. Usually they are done in the abstract, often with no notion of what's really happening. Trees aren't introduced. Landscape is not introduced. You're just looking there at the object. If you don't have any love for nature, if you don't have any love for landscape or for any of that, it's pretty hard to incorporate it. So some architecture doesn't. But that's okay; it's just a different way, and they communicate it differently. A non-landscape is a landscape too, where you're cutting away to form a building. (Le Corbusier's monastery) La Tourette, for instance, or (Le Corbusier's chapel at) Ronchamp, any of those are pieces that are meant to be always viewed. But also felt. My attitude is that you should you grow it all into the building. It may be questionable, but I like it when it becomes intertwined with the building. Where you're almost fighting to keep it out.

What advice would you give someone entering the field of architecture today?

Everybody's goal is to come in as a designer and wants to be able to build buildings and see them up. But they have to recognize that not too many, percentage-wise, are successful at doing that. They may end up in a another whole part of the field. I think a young architect today has to really know where they want to go when they're getting out of school. In order to build a practice today, you have to have a focus. In the past, we could be generalists. Today you might as well forget about being a generalist, unless you're a superstar or you know how to make other kinds of connections. It's very hard. You can't walk in and get a commission for a hospital unless you've already done a hospital. You can't get gymnasiums unless you've done a gymnasium. You can do a house, or a house remodel. If someone wants their practice to stay small, they have to realize what that takes. If they want to become big, they are going to have to focus on what it takes to become a large operation. So I think they have to have some sense of what they want to be within the profession.

Your sons are now practicing architects. How do you feel about their work? What do they share with you, and what new paths do you see them developing?

Well, we worked together for five years and each of them was doing their own work within the firm, somewhat within my manner but not exactly. And each one would explore, like I would think any young person might. If they wanted to give someone their respect, they would try the way they worked to see how it fit with them. I am a strong believer in doing what feels right. So I think that each of them did that, to a degree. And then, because we were only getting houses, we weren't able to short list on any larger projects. I thought it would be better if they went into their own practices so that they could begin to do their own thing, as I had done as a young person. So we split the work up between them and they both started their own practices at that time. Over time, they are developing their own way of working. There are some similarities, and some very strong dissimilarities. The majority of my work is orthogonally oriented, with a certain amount of rotations at times to orient to the sun or to the views. I'm sure they'll explore more with things they see being done today. They don't have to be stuck in my world. They should have the right to explore their work and do what they think feels good to them. And if it's better, I hope it will be. If it's less, then that's the way it is. Each of them has to decide for himself. If you've seen their work published, you can see that it's not like mine.

Is that exciting as a father?

Oh yes, of course.

Were they holding their breath when you walked through their buildings?

(Laughs) I don't think so, but I don't know. I'm not too heavy, I try to be supportive. I always try to give them as much space as possible. They are confident enough in themselves to be able to do it.

In retrospect, do you think that Post Modernism, as it came into the educational setting, was difficult for many of the faculty?

Some of them really liked it, I guess. It was difficult for me. That's why I stepped out of education. There were a bunch of people who, because they bought in to that, now are trying to come back the other way, and it's crazy. I don't know what it is, I guess there's not enough conviction there -- to say, well, I believe in this and I don't care if I ever do another job. I'm going to do what I believe. Helmut Schulitz went on to do great work - he never compromised one bit and is a major player. Peter DeBretville is now a non-player. There are other people who like Stephanos Polyzoides who did a flip flop and their practice has grown from that. And I guess he believes in that. For me, Morphosis and Frank Gehry are not Post Modernists. They're are an extension of Modernism, which was always this mixed bag anyway, combinations of Classicism, Expressionism, and God knows what. But I think anyone destroys themselves, in a way, if they try to flip flop with the times. Those architects must ask themselves what they believe. At least Robert Stern, even though I don't like his work, he does what he does, and he doesn't keep jumping back and forth. They really can't return, honestly. Can they play the (Phillip) Johnson game, and play whatever's up? I don't see how they can do that. I certainly didn't, and I was hurt by it. I was short listed on projects and in there very close, and then the Post Modern thing happened and the last project I had done that would show the bigger scale was the Bus Administration building in Santa Monica. That was death for me. That building killed me. So what did the big firms do? Many compromised in order to get the work, and they started doing Post Modernist types of designs. But I didn't want to. I could still get my houses and could do what I wanted to. Had I been a big firm, either I would have had to compromise or I would have gone out of business. There was nothing there for me.

When a firm like AC Martin brings in a Tim Vreeland and they do a series of Post Modern high rises, is A.C. Martin intellectually insulating themselves to allow for that interchange of style in their architectural product? So that the mother firm continues and the designer changes out with each new style?

It is difficult when you're in their position. You have this big structure that you've built and all these people that are working for you, and you do care about them. You're trying to keep this whole package together, and the only way you can do it is by compromising.

Do you think that larger firms are less damaged by this, since it's not one person's integrity carrying the reputation of the firm?

Yes, they can turn back again. SOM has turned back. A. C. Martin has gone through this stuff, and they just get a new design head. What does a Cesar Pelli do exactly? He has based a big firm on what he is doing, and he is willing to do all of these style things, which we are not. I can not imagine that it came naturally to him. But he was able to build a huge firm by this degree of compromise. Maybe he did not feel it was compromise. Some people, I guess, think of architecture as a stylist, "I can do this, and I can do that." Well, all of us are capable of doing that. Anybody can copy anything if you have some design talent and you can see. But if you don't believe in it, why would you do it? So I guess if in my life I never had beliefs in anything I would be doing the same thing. I think you have to do what you believe in. That is really all you can ask for.

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References:

1. Slert, Charles; 12 Los Angeles Architects. Graphics Communications Department, Cal Poly Pomona. 1978.

2. The Architecture of Frank Gehry. Rizzoli International, New York. 1986.

3. McCoy, Esther; Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys. Arts + Architecture Press, Santa Monica, CA. 1979.

4. Kamerling, Bruce; Irving J. Gill, Architect. San Diego Historical Society, San Diego, CA. 1993.

5. Drexler/Hines; The Architecture of Richard Neutra. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1982.