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Interview with James Tyler page 2
V5: What did you learn from working with Craig Ellwood?
JT: What did I learn? I learned a lot on how to deal with people and how to care a lot more about architecture.
He would then go out with the clients, and since they loved to have Craig with them, he was the one they would hire. Craig was impeccable and had tremendous taste. In contrast, the other guy I worked for was down and dirty, he just wanted to see the building get built. It was kickable, and with all those details, that damn thing was going to be held together. But the refinement of the finishing was something he did not care about. Craig was not a decorator, but he was a building designer. Which meant a lot of things in those days. That you could do houses and buildings a certain size, but not larger. One thing they always got involved with was interiors, which Craig was very talented with. I learned a lot about the finishes and materials. As a result, I became sensitive to those things. But in terms of architecture, it is probably unfair to say and a bit tricky, because Jim Tyler has this wonderful position of being able to design these buildings and Craig Ellwood had a name and was able to get very nice projects. As a matter of fact, if Craig were still around, I think he would have the ability to vie for the big time jobs that are given out. I am sure that Craig would have been considered for the Getty Museum, MOCA, the Disney project that Gehry is doing, or any thing else.
Craig was the kind of person who would walk into a room and people would stop what they were doing because he was there. He had charisma. He was not a handsome guy, but he carried himself like one. He was a movie star, because he dressed beautifully. He had beautiful sports cars, much to the discomfort of those in the office, since no one was getting raises, and here comes Craig with a new car. He had Lamborginis and Ferraris at the same time. If there were an architect that any architectural student or architect, who in public wanted to say, "that is the kind of guy I wanted to be," Craig Ellwood would be that man. I mean seriously, he was good looking, beautifully dressed in clothes you wouldn't even believe, and the cars he owned, no one in the United States could compete with a hero architect like Craig Ellwood. The dangerous part of all that was the real reason they had affection for him and wanted to be around him was because of his warm personality. When he went on interviews, he could charm the birds off the trees. The hard part and reason why I eventually left was a kind of glorified thing, that people saw Craig as this really famous designer.
I was there for fourteen years, longer than anyone was, and I wanted to start my own office and be on my own. Craig said, "If you quit, I am closing my office." He said and people say that he quit because of pain and tired of the atmosphere, that architecture was not fun anymore. But, basically, I think he felt like it was all over for the office. We parted on very good terms; Craig and I always had a good relationship. He was very kind to me. Because of the way I grew up as a child, I never cared about whom got the glory for designing a building. I had professors and the guy that I worked for, who would say, "Jim, it does not matter who gets credit for the building, you just make damn sure good architecture gets built." This was indelibly printed in my mind. In turn, all I cared about was to design good buildings. But eventually it started to fester, because he was very well known. There were interviews about the buildings, how good they were, and how the Art Center was a masterpiece. It began to hurt a lot, and even though you say all you wanted was to get these good buildings built, inside the ulcers were welling up.
V5: Are there changes that you would like to see in the profession?
JT: A problem area I see is the demands committees and the public place on architects. I believe architects in the past had it a lot easier. When I worked in Craig's office, we never had an architectural review board or planning departments that questioned you. If we did, a lot of it was because when Craig Ellwood entered a room, people knew who he was, and they were suspect if they would question what they were going to do. It was like Frank Lloyd Wright when he walked into a room. I do not think it was present like it is today, for instance, since opening my office, we would have one committee meeting after another.
V5: Let us lay aside the culture of architecture for a moment, and talk about what affect working in Los Angeles had on your buildings. I am talking in terms of landscape, cityscape, culture, climate, or any other kinds of things.
JT: When I have done buildings in an urban situation, I think I probably was caught up in that time when there had to be a contextual relationship with the building. Although I did not change my design thinking, I most likely did adopt some materials and colors that may have been in the same area as the buildings were in. I once did a building in Santa Monica where they had a brick building next to ours, so I ended up using brick similar in color even though it was a steel building.
If I were to say what influenced me the most, it would have to be nature. It is sometimes hard for nature to have a big effect in an urban situation, unless you incorporate atriums or courtyards that are next to the buildings. You usually end up trying to bring nature into the building. With the houses, and even the buildings I did in Ellwood's studio, I tried to get as much nature into the building as possible. That might sound like a contradiction, considering our buildings are kind of mechanical, high industry type structures. But Art Center was really a nature building. It spanned across a canyon and blended into the site so well, the community could see that it was not going to obliterate the mountain like a housing development would. It was dark, not a foreground building, but a background building. For the most part, I would say Frank Gehry is a foreground architect and I am probably more a background architect. I think mainly because the buildings recede and have very simple shapes, in which I try to involve nature.
V5: What changes would like to see happen in Los Angeles? Do you think architects can have anything to do with that?
JT: I would like to see more nature in Los Angeles, since it is a tough city. Many people look at Los Angeles as a big, architectural community, mainly because of local, well-known architects that have had their work published frequently. That is all well and good, but I think there is a variety that makes Los Angeles fun to practice in, because perhaps someone might not want to do one of my buildings. But by the same token, there can be a lack of harmony, similar to some of the things I spoke of earlier, and that is this rhythmic and kind of lyrical quality that you can see. There are streets I do not even like to drive on. I could never drive down La Cienega again and be happy. It is just horrid. Then you have Korea Town, with massive amounts of signage and thousands of colors, which I guess could make a nice painting, but it is so inhumane to me. What is missing in Los Angeles are beautiful parks and nice streets, there are no tree-lined streets to drive down and nothing to compare to a Park Avenue. Even Chicago has 397 parks. It would be wonderful if Los Angeles could create nice communities with parks and greenery, places where people felt they could go back to nature.
V5: We want to ask you what your thoughts are on the new Getty project and Frank Gehry's project in Bilbao?
JT: Do you really want to hear this? (laughs) Because this will be bad. Okay, which one are we talking about first?
V5: Let's talk about the Getty.
JT: I think Richard Meier is very talented and has put together a beautiful project. I admire his refinement, detailing and commitment to an idea, something you notice when you walk around his buildings. Having said that, now I will attack him. I think he pulled the wool over LA's eyes, because even though he had some of Ellwood's skills, he was not nearly as polished. He had told us his project would be very low profile, that even driving on the freeway, you would not see a thing. He was coy. I do not take that away from him, because I am guilty of the same things, how else would you convince people to do something? You want to do good architecture, but you will not always get the support you want due to various things. He told them of the massiveness of the buildings and about the scale and density, it just got bigger and bigger. They went to one planning meeting after another, building models and so on, but that thing is gargantuan. If you go around and look down from the road, the thing looks like a city. I have always had cliches that I have lived by and one of them I heard as a student at the University of Utah. Frank Lloyd Wright came and spoke to the students. He said, "You have a beautiful valley here, but I know the architects are going to do something catastrophic. And that is, that they will compete with the mountains." He also said, "Never build on top of a mountain, build down into the mountain if you have to." In fact, one guy I once worked for drilled the idea of nature into my mind, and how a building should sit. Frank Lloyd Wright said, "Never compete with the mountains, never build on top of a mountain, do not destroy the integrity of nature." When I look at the Getty, I remember those words, and think that Frank Lloyd Wright had the right idea. I mean, that thing is just terrible the way it sits up there.
I think he was deceptive about the size, but perhaps he is not to blame, for the clients may have continued to demand more square footage. I know the thing is even bigger than it appears, since two stories are buried down in the mountain. All the storage they have to have is down below. If it were up to me, I think I would like the materials to reflect nature more, but anyone with half a brain knows that there is going to be a lot of white, since that is the way Richard Meier does things. I thought it was funny when he was tricky. His client would say, "What materials are you going to use? Because when we hired you, we told you we did not want one of those white, pure buildings that you always do." He convinced them he would not do that. The base of the building is this warm, stone material, I guess it is travertine. So you have all this stone at the base, but when you go around and peek, you can see that you are back to white again. It is so overpowering, it reminds me of what we spoke of earlier, a foreground building. I do not think it was ever intended to be a background building. I think if I was doing that project, I would try to hide it down in the mountain, perhaps terrace it, so you were building more into the hillside. I also would use colors that would blend with the mountain, because even travertine is not going to look like it belongs that much. I think it will end up looking like this thing from outer space that was plunked down on the top of the mountain.
How do you feel about the Disney Concert Hall?
Well, I may have eluded to the fact that there are architects that I respect and that I think are doing a lot for the profession, I just don't understand it. A lot of it has to do with the complexity of the building and the massing of the building, and I think from the outset, any architect would look at it.....
First, I would like to say that I have been offended a lot by the fact that a lot of people were defending Frank Gehry about this. As a matter of fact the AIA was in support of Gehry when they went into financial problems, and I got really irritated because I got faxes from a number of architects saying "please write a letter on behalf of Frank so that we can get the Disney thing done." I think he got himself in hot water and is responsible for a lot of this. A lot of it is because the building was going to be expensive from the beginning, we could tell by the design. I knew what the budget was, and if you start counting dollars and square footage, the forms and the shapes that they're using are expensive. And I do not know why the architects; whether its Dworsky, who is a very good friend of mine, and actually Frank is too.
Frank was very supportive too one time at Art Center College. We were doing a new wing and Ellwood came to town and he wanted to do it, so this ended up being really embarrassing, but Art Center was very supportive and they did not want Craig to do it because of the faculty and all the Art Center people said, "why should we do that, why do we not we hire the one who designed it." And Craig was very upset, and that is another story. To make it worse there were some letters written by the AIA, of which I have a copy of every one. I would say about seventy-five letters to Art Center saying that they were embarrassed that they were not using Craig Ellwood to do the new addition. And the obvious reasons are there, it is kind of like why would you hire someone to remodel the Sistine Chapel, why not hire Michaelengelo. But Craig was part of it, he had asked people to write letters that would support him. Art Center, because of the circumstances, said Ellwood does not have an office and he would have to start up an office here. We had gone over this with the Art Center board and they had said they wanted to go with Tyler because he was the original designer. Those that wrote letters did not know who was the architect that Art Center selected, since the only information released was that they were not using Ellwood. So the president of the Art Center wrote a letter back (to the AIA) through his attorney, which stated that although Craig was considered for the job, we believed Jim Tyler was responsible for the design. When it came out that Jim Tyler was doing the addition, I received a whole bunch of phone calls from people saying, "Holy, moly, if we had known you were doing it?" They thought they were going to hire I.M. Pei or Robert Venturi or someone from Philadelphia. Frank Gehry called, very nice and apologetic, saying, "Jim, I did not know you were the architect. I thought they were hiring someone else." He then wrote a letter back to the Art Center, and that is why I feel it is awkward, I guess I should be more in support of him.
But I have to say this, considering the cost, they should be responsible, and I think Dworsky and Gehry are kind of sidestepping it. Perhaps it is because I have worked on so many budget buildings in my life, that when we start out, we make design decisions based on that budget. We also have to consider products and materials that are related to the budget. I think the design started out in trouble, since you could tell that it was a complex building, there were going to be problems. It is multi-functional, with many things going on. Frank knows this and so do I, it is nothing new. But I have never believed that architecture should be sculpture, and that is where Frank and I run into trouble. Now the building he just finished in Spain, the Bilbao, is not very different from the Disney building, with the masses in them and the configuration. As a matter of fact, if you were not too bright, you would think this is virtually the same building. The finishes and materials are different, but the form in and of itself is the same. Frank loves art and visualizes himself as an artist. He wants to be respected as an artist. I think that is great, yet I do not agree with it. For myself, architecture can be sculptural, but it is only through the process that it ended up that way, resulting from the intrinsic nature of everything that is happening in the building. You do not start by cutting up a cantaloupe and then say, "This is going to be the auditorium." I do not think that is how you do things, since there are so many other things involved that get to the point where the cantaloupe may not be anything close to what you should have been doing initially. The nature of a building is evolutionary, and there is a developmental process that comes up. By the end you have this configuration or silhouette of a building, a result of all these things that are going on. It is impossible for me to believe that they started out with all the functions and acoustics and ended up with this.
It is hard to criticize architects, since they are all different and come from different theories and philosophies. I am not criticizing Frank, it is just I do not agree with what he is doing. When these kinds of buildings come out, I feel someone should take some responsibility. This was drummed into my head early on, that you need to be completely responsible for the design, detailing and function of the building and of course, the budget, which is very, very important. Someone once asked Frank Lloyd Wright, "Would you like to have a project with no budget?" He replied, " No, that is part of limitations the architect has." One of the chief things we used to say when we would present projects at Ellwood's office was that we were never over budget, and we never were.
The budget for the Art Center was thirty dollars a square foot; they could not spend any more than that. What it ended up to be was twenty-eight dollars a square foot. The new wing, to show the difference, was hundred dollars a square foot and we built it for ninety-eight a square foot. This is when other college buildings are averaging one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty dollars a square foot. So before he says, "We need more money." Frank needs to finish this building. I personally do not understand this design philosophy, and it is not my place to criticize his design philosophy. Education in architecture has always been that it is a result, it is never a goal. I am the first to say that an architect is an artist, so when I say that Frank is an artist, I believe he really is one. Anyone that loves architecture is an artist. Even someone who says he is just a draftsman can be an artist; it is all in how you draw the details and such. I can remember people in Ellwood's office that could draw like angels, and I picked up on that and learned from them. Of course, they did not go around wearing a beret and telling everyone they were artists, but they were because they cared so much about what they did.
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