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Interview with Michael Maltzan
Michael Maltzan started his Los Angeles architectural career with the office of Frank Gehry by working on the winning submittal for the Disney Concert Hall Competition. While his young studio has worked with some of the the most noted public organizations in Los Angeles, the Getty Museum and the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, it is a noted design of the “single family house” that has included his work in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Editor; Jennifer Minasian
Thanks to Eric Wegerbauer
V5: How long have you been at your studio in Silverlake?
MM: We have been in this studio for almost three years. Before that we were in a small studio in Silverlake attached to my house, which was my
first place we settled into after I left Frank Gehry's office, where I had been for almost eight years. I went from an office of seventy to eighty people which you could plug into on a daily basis, to just
basically myself in one room. It was quite an intense culture shock to suddenly have just a few residential remodel projects, but it was enough to get the office going.
V5: Was there a lull between the time when you started your own firm and when you actually got commissions?
MM: I had to have projects, since I did not have a stockpile of money that I could launch out on (laughs). I needed some sort of project that
would enable me to leave Frank's office. My first project was a small remodel. It didn't get built since the clients ended up moving to New York, but I got through construction drawings and by that point other projects had started to come in. It happened rather quickly in terms of the office growing.
V5: Was it difficult for you not to see that project get built and added to your portfolio?
MM: I can't say it was that close to my heart, but it was still a great thing to happen at the time. I think any time a project doesn't get built you lose a little bit of your heart. If the projects we are working on now were to stop or slow down, that would be a lot tougher. Not only from an emotional standpoint, but also a financial one because it is a lot harder to manage it at our current scale.
V5: How did you move from residential additions to museum additions?
MM: The fact is, we do everything from residential remodels to ground up residential to more institutional work. We were able to move from one
to the other because most of our work is both art and educational related. My undergraduate degree is from an art school (Rhode Island School of Design) and I've stayed involved with it for years. In fact, most of my friends are artists. That is what inspires the work, much more so than other architecture. Our studio has a real, natural affinity to those kinds of projects. Because of that and a variety of other reasons, we have been in a position to at least be looked at for those types of commissions, and we've been fortunate enough to receive some of them. In terms of the work, I don't see an enormous difference between doing a residential remodel for a client who has a very specific interest in the
arts and doing work for a museum director. Actually, whether it is a lighting fixture or a museum, we approach all of our projects in a very
similar way. The difference is in time, scale and materials, but the process is very similar for all of them.
We always tend to bring an issue of public and private to our projects. What does a piece of architecture mean in the public realm and how does it support the public realm? There is a house in Beverly Hills that we are just finishing now that will be in a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called The Un-Private House (July 1- October 5, 1999).
The show is a survey of houses at the end of the twentieth century, which is really about the issues of the changing relationship between the public and the private in the single-family residence. The idea is that you can chart a lot of the social changes in society by looking at the single-family house. Terry Reilly, who is the curator, has been
working on it for a few years.
V5: What other works will be included?
MM: Two Von Berkle houses, one of them the Mobius house and Guthrie + Buresh's workhouse (West Hollywood, California). Steven Holl has one in Napa Valley. There are about twenty houses that have been completed in the last five to ten years. Many, ninety percent, are built projects, and a lot of them are just being finished. All deal with the issue of how that private/public realm has given way to a hybrid configuration.
V5: Compared to residences, do you find institutional work to be more difficult, considering consultants and the collections being accomodated?
MM: On some of these larger houses, especially for clients with a significant art collection, the kind of work we do with the consultants is very similar. The curatorial issues and the lighting issues are exactly the same and we use very similar consultants no matter what. This is a great thing because it allows us to create a kind of team that we work with again and again. You find people who you can really trust and who can start to understand your work. That's the most important thing. It is not about efficiency, but about being able to push it a little bit further than the last time and continue to work through issues and resolve them.
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Hergott/Shepard Residence - View of entry from street, project completion 1999
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Hergott/Shepard Residence- View from street,1/4” scale model, project completion 1999
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Hergott/Shepard Residence - View of back elevation, 1/4” scale model project completion 1999
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Hergott/Shepard Residence- View from park above, 1/4” scale model, project completion 1999
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Hergott/Shepard Residence- View of front, 1/4” scale model, project completion 1999
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The Hergott/Shepard Residence is now being shown online as a part of the MoMa exhibit “The Un-Private House”.
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Mandeville Canyon Residence- View of front from above, 1/4” scale model , project completion 2000
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Kidspace Museum - View of project from above,1/16” scale model, project completion 2001
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Kidspace Museum - View of project from above,1/16” scale model. (photo by:Joshua White)
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Kidspace Museum - Plan view of project ,1/16” scale model. (photo by:Joshua White)
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Kidspace Museum - Detail view of theater and cafe,1/4” scale model. (photo by:Joshua White)
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Brent wood Residence Addition- View of final model, 1/2” scale model, project completion 2000
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Hergott /Shepard Residence
General Contractor: McCoy Construction
Surveyor:
M & M & Co.
Soils Engineer:
The J. Byer Group
Soils Shoring Engineer: Cefali & Associates
Stuctural Engineer: William K. Koh & Associates
Mechanical Engineer: Innovative Engineering Group (IEG)
Civil Engineer: Bob Newsom & Assoc.
Electrical Engineer: Nikolakopoulos & Associates
Landscape Architect: Jay Griffith Inc.
Lighting Consultant: LAM Partners Inc.
Interior Decorator: Furniture Co.
Kitchen Consultant: Bulthaup (LA) Inc.
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Kidspace Museum
Project Manager: Renaissance Partners
General Contracor: McCarthy Construction
Exhibit Designer: The Portico Group
Exhibit Designer: Aldrich Pears Associates, Ltd.
Historical Preservation Consultant: Historic Resources Group 1728 Whitley Avenue Hollywood, CA 90028
Communications Consultant: Inteliant
Landscape Architect: Nancy Goslee Power & Associates
Soils Engineer: Dames & Moore
Structural Engineer: Entertainment Engineering, Inc.
Mechanical Engineer: Innovative Engineering Group (IEG)
Electrical Engineer: Kocher & Schirra
Hardware Consultant: Finish Hardware Technology
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I think we have a team that's up to the challenge. Very often we throw significant challenges at them to try to create something both technically and architecturally that works together. But very often the technology is not necessarily there for what we want to do or we have stepped too far, which we do on fairly consistent occasions. To a certain extent that is part of our job here, to not push things just to
say you pushed them, but to actually exercise and expand the capabilities of the studio. That is something that I am very conscious of here, that we are taking the long view of the studio and the work. It's not just about the building we are working on today, but is really about how we can create a studio that everyone walks into and feels like anything is possible.
V5: How do you develop projects in your studio?
MM: Our process is evolving. We work primary with models as a design tool, which is probably much more normal out here on the West
Coast than it was on the East Coast, where I am originally from and where I went to school. There, it was much more geared to two- dimensional drawings. But generally a project comes in and I will start to do a series of sketches simultaneously with the building of the site model. Then very quickly we will take the program of the project and
convert that into a three dimensional diagram and block the models. Then we try to get the gestures of what the project can be on the site with relationship to the context in about the right form. That, along with the sketches, starts to be the first kind of benchmark and flag in the sand of what we are trying to do.
Each project has one job captain who is primarily in charge of it, no matter what size the project is, and that is the person who for the most part works with me consistently on that project. Then as the project develops, a team gets developed. On some of the institutional projects there is a much more hard core team, but on the smaller projects it is a
little bit looser, and depending on where we are in the process, more people come in. It is a fairly consistent back and forth between the design, the program and the models.
V5: When you say models, are these the physical cardboard or basswood models?
MM: Absolutely, three-dimensional models.
V5: Do you parallel that with Form Z or other computer programs?
MM: We do very little three-dimensional computer works, although all the projects are drawn and presented on the computer and the drawings are
produced that way. We have not been doing a lot of representational work on the computer, primarily because I am still very interested in the tactility of a three-dimensional model. Inevitably I find that the
clients really respond to the three dimensional model, contrary to what a lot of people feel about Form Z and three dimensional walk-throughs.
It is something tangible that they can really understand.
V5: These are large scaled models.
MM: This is a half scale model of a house in Mandeville Canyon, which we are just finishing construction drawings on and I am working through
some minor details as we are finishing construction drawings, still on that model. That started as a series of very small, sixteenth scale block models, then went from quarter scale to half scale, where we can really see the interiors. Those models sometimes get larger, up to an inch, and then we also end up doing a lot of pieces of full scale mock
ups, most of those end up going to the site so that the contractors can see them. That modeling process happens throughout and one of the
reasons we need to find new studio space, we are running out of room, or should I say there's no more room for people. (laughs)
V5: So all the ideas are tested through models?
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