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v5: The material base in all the projects seems extraordinarily rich, how do you create that palette for yourself?
RS: I think we try to react to one project at a time and listen to the client and try to be astutely aware and observe what's in the environment. To use it in a different way and surprise them in an unexpected way. That is certainly one of the lessons that I learned while I was working with Frank Gehry. Frank has an acute awareness of what you are seeing in everyday life and how to bring that into your project.
v5: How did you come to work at Frank Gehry's studio?
RS: I actually was getting my master degree at Rice University and there was a contingent of West Coast instructors there. As you are probably aware, Lars Lerup is now heading the school there. Prior to Lars coming out, Albert Pope was there along with several others who had done the California circuit, teaching at such schools as Sci-Arc or had worked at Frank Gehry's office. Some connections had developed there and I had done a four-year stint at SOM in Houston, and gained a lot of high rise experience. Frank got a high rise commission at the beginning of the the Disney Concert Hall project. There was
a thirty story Ritz-Carlton on the site. (laughs) There was this sort of huge development aspect of the Disney Concert Hall at that point.
v5: Which everyone has forgotten about now. (laughs)
RS: Completely forgotten now! (laughs) Frank needed someone with a reasonable design sensibility and with high-rise experience. I fit the bill.
v5: So you went from SOM to Frank Gehry?
RS: Yes, which is a very strange combination in a sense, but it's also a perfectly logical one. I tell all the younger people that work with me that it takes so many years to get your arms around this
profession and the body of knowledge that has to be gained. I went to SOM because I knew that they were one of the best technical firms in the country and there were some very knowledgeable and skillful architects there in the Houston office. I learned a tremendous amount there but I also knew when it was time to go. I knew when it was time to break down the design education that was instilled there and make my own move, which Rice University helped me to do in a big way and prepared me to be a designer in the Gehry environment.
v5: How long were you with him?
RS: Seven and half years.
v5: That is a good period of time. What were some of the major projects there at the time?
RS: For four years I worked on most of the projects that he dealt with in Germany which included a headquarters building for a German utility company. I did a funky little bus stop with Frank in Hanover and the Venice Biennale Exhibit design and installation in 1991 when he and Peter Eisenman were the two American representatives. That was a lot of fun and I got to live in Venice for five weeks. Philip Johnson - curating the American Pavillion in 1991 - told Frank to do one project and it had to be the Disney Concert Hall. He told Peter to do the Cincinnati Architecture School. That was a great period for me both in terms of travel and getting a lot more responsibility handed to me in Frank's office. It was actually shortly after the Biennale experience that I was promoted to senior associate and then really was able to step into a more of a lead role on the German projects after that beginning with the Goldstein Housing Project in Frankfurt.
Prior to that I did a variety of things including being the project designer for the Broad residence and project architect for the Toledo Visual Arts Center.
v5: Is the design methodology from the Gehry office something that you feel comfortable with?
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RS: The process was immensely influential. I would say that there is more visual evidence of Frank’s influence in the process than in the product. I think working at Frank's office, there was a lot of positive creative tension in the methodology, the intensive modeling and the sophistication of the computer software that is used there. All of those things add life to the projects that somehow is more than one person can do on their own and more than one person can preconceive in ones mind. There is a life that each project has that comes out of the process and I tried very hard to keep that going when I started my own practice. It is a difficult thing for a young architect to go on your own and still have this intensity about the input of work. One of the reasons Frank can do what he does is because his fees support it. I chose in the beginning to struggle with the financial side of the business so that I could be satisfied with the results.
v5: How did you move from Gehry's office to your own studio? How did that decision take place?
RS: While I was at Frank's I was introduced to Alan Landau, who was a director of Cognito Films, a film company in Santa Monica. He and I hit it off and that became my first project here in Los Angeles. It was a tenant built out for a sixty-four hundred square foot space. Since then we have also done a project for Blair Graphics, which is a big reprographics firm on the West side (of Los Angeles ). Blair is going to be opening at the end of May; we are quite excited about that.
v5: It must be very scary for repro graphic people these days seeing all these changes in graphic reproduction.
RS: You are right about that. Blair made a big financial commitment to keeping up with evolving digital technology. We dismantled their conventional black and white photo lab and replaced it with a digital color lab. We greatly expanded their computer facilities including customer interfacing. For all the public spaces in the building we did a major renovation. The building facade, which contained a conglomeration of various decorative attempts, was stripped. We removed canopies and sandblasted old paint jobs and got it down to the raw, red brick warehouse. Then we did this metal object or inhabitant which originates deep in the space at the customer review area and it sort of explodes up through the front lobby and turns into this very tall and broad metal canopy as an entry way to the building. We are very excited since the interior is finished and the exterior steel work should be going up in the next week or two.
v5: That is exciting. You sort of have two portfolios going, the Southern California portfolio and your overseas portfolio.
RS: There is actually a third portfolio which includes master planning of sites and space planning for museum expansions along with Marcy Goodwin of Goodwin Associates, who is a museum programming and planning consultant.
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