Architecture's 2010 Hot Shop Wins A Billionaire Patron

Plenty of architecture’s biggest names have been laid low by the Great Recession, as I wrote recently in Bloomberg Businessweek. One partnership has never had it better, however: New York-based Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

On Monday, the 60-person shop was named chief architect of billionaire Eli Broad’s $80 million-plus art museum in downtown Los Angeles, beating out a collaboration by starchitects Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry. The commission came just two months after the boutique was chosen to design an arts and film center for the University of California in Berkeley.

DS+R had a dizzying 2009 as well, completing two high-profile projects in New York: the High Line elevated park, which was created from a long-abandoned railway line, and the redesign of Alice Tully Hall in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

The studio’s partners—Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, who founded it in 1979, and Charles Renfro, who joined in 1997—may busy again in 2011. DS+R, which got its first big assignment with the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, which opened in 2006, is completing a museum on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach and a media studio in Abu Dhabi. It is also in the running for three projects, including a factory in China. (Yes, that’s right, a factory.)

The firm’s payroll has grown from 25 six years ago, with plans to expand at least another 15 percent next year. Revenue should surge 150% this year. “We have to wonder that if there wasn’t a building bust, would we be winning even more?” Renfro says. “We’re thankful that we are bucking the trend. We’re not getting rich, nor are we starving.”

I caught up with Renfro, 46, as he took a train from his office on Tuesday. Here’s an edited transcript of what else he had to say:

Q: How do you explain your winning streak?

A: The obvious answer is that we finally created several major commissions and people have heard of us and they hadn’t before. Not until the last four years have we worked on complex jobs and proven that we could pull them off.

Q: The firm has been around more than 30 years, though. Is this an example of perseverance? Or is it just good luck?

A: I wish I could provide you with a silver-bullet answer, but I think it’s a combination of all that. I also think our approach toward building and design is much more sympathetic to the economy. It’s no longer the go-go ’90s or even the 2000s. We’re operating at the crossroads of making an icon and a very thoughtful response to clients’ problems.

Q: Is it harder to do architecture in 2010?

A: It’s probably harder for some people. There are many architects who are used to working on high-profile jobs, making iconic architecture. I think you will find them getting fewer commissions in this day and age. Maybe we’re reaping the benefit of the downturn in this way. It’s not harder for us.

Q: How would you describe the firm’s design philosophy?

A: We take our inspiration from the context of the project. Having said that, we’re very interested in pushing the limit of technology, of form-making, of structure.

Q: Has it become a challenge to manage the firm as it has grown so fast?

A: It goes without saying that anytime there’s a quick jump in the staff of any business, there will be growing pains. We operate like a family. I think we’re going to continue to operate on a similar manner.

Q: What would advice would you give to a student who is thinking of becoming an architect?

A: Go into law.

Q: And if he doesn’t listen?

A: There are many other kinds of outlets that have become available to architects, from making shows to getting into museum and exhibit design to getting into writing online. Hope is not lost. The money is down, however. We were never a well-paid profession, much to a lot of other people’s surprise. Definitely, there’s less money out there to build buidlings. So we all have to be more creative.

The Designer Behind Top Chef Izard's New Room

Over her 10 years as vice president of design at 555 International, Karen Herold has produced interiors for nightclubs in Las Vegas for Playboy and N9NE as well as retail space for Chanel, Valentino, Armani, and the Dallas Cowboys. She’s proud of every one of them, of course, but she notes that they’re really the taste of her clients, especially the flashy casino venues. Now Herold says she finally has a room of her own.

Actually, the new place, a Chicago restaurant called Girl and the Goat, will be identified with Stephanie Izard, the 2008 winner of television’s Top Chef, who’ll be managing the kitchen when it opens shortly after the Fourth of July weekend. And financially and legally, Girl and the Goat belongs to Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz, a duo who already own three other restaurants in Chicago. But the interior design is Herold’s throughout.

“This is exactly how I wanted it,” Herold says. “I wish I could buy a house right now. I would make it the Goat house. Everything I would have in my house.”

Herold, a 38-year-old Dutch native, showed me around the 150-seat dining room the other evening, as workers were still installing light fixtures. It is purposely anti-Las Vegas—Izard, whose previous restaurant, Scylla, was often described as cozy, and her backers had made “no glitz” a hiring condition. But the space does have some dazzle, which I’ll get to in a moment. (Sorry, no photos yet.)

Girl and the Goat is made to feel comfortably worn, lived in. It is Old World heavy and dark, from the 10-seat communal tables made of thick, weathered oak planks and lit by clear incandescent bulbs in antique glass fixtures to the back bar, which is made of 14 iron fireplace grills from the early 1900s that were sandblasted and fitted in a two-row span. Colors are muted. The seat cushions on the steel-brushed oak chairs are so deep green they look black.

The fireplace grills, which will be backlit when everything is up and running, are one of Herold’s three big statements in her design. Another is a brightlly colored, boozy painting of a girl and a goat that measures 7x7 feet and commands an exterior wall. Izard (the wild-haired girl in the painting) personally commissioned Quang Hong to do the work, based on a smaller one he had done for Scylla.

The other is a pitch-black screen in the center of the room. It’s what’s left of the supporting wall that had bisected the 116-year-old structure. Rather than leave the exposed bricks, Herold decided to encase them with cedar boards—after setting them on fire in a big parking lot to char them and then coating them with resin. Herold says Japanese builders have used this technique for ages, though she had never done it anywhere before.

“It is very bold without being loud,” she says. “I wanted to make strong statements without being in your face about it.”

Until now, neither Herold nor 555 International has had much of a profile in Chicago, though the design and custom-furniture firm has been based in the city since 1988, when it was founded by industrial designer James Geier. Herold, an interior-design graduate from the Institute of Fashion and Design in Amsterdam, hired on in 2000.

In all, Boehm and Katz have spent $1.6 million to create Girl and the Goat. Boehm says it was well worth it. “I always expected it to be really cool and really authentic, but I didn’t expect it to be sexy.”

Steelcase Takes a Desk in the Classroom

I’m sitting next to a desk that could have been mine in elementary school. Yours was probably like this, too: a hard-backed wooden chair on steel legs with a small writing tray bolted to a steel pipe. The one I’m sitting in could hardly be more different, starting with its bright green plastic seat that swivels, and has elbow perches that double as backpack hooks and gives a little when I lean back.

“There just hasn’t been any significant innovation in classroom furniture in I can’t remember when,” says Sean Corcorran, director of product development and marketing for the education solutions group at Steelcase, which designed and made the desk I’m test-sitting. “We see 50-year-old chairs in classrooms today. I think there’s pentup demand.”

Still, I wonder whether the desk will enable Steelcase to break out of the office market and into classrooms. With a laptop-friendly work surface, the node, as it’s called, lists for $599. By comparison, basic desks by market-leader KI start as low as $169. What’s more, I haven’t heard of a school anywhere that’s got extra cash these days. Many, in fact, can’t even pay all their teachers or afford new books.

At a Neocon event in Chicago, Corcorran tells me that in four months of pre-sales, the company has received orders for 50% of the first year’s production. Yet in better times—say, seven years ago when Steelcase decided to branch out into the education market—the order rate probably would have been higher, concedes his boss, Steelcase Group President James Keane.

Schools are mostly submitting try-out orders, buying desks for a classroom or two rather outfitting the entire building. “There’s probably less across-the-board opportunities in this sort of economy,” he tells me. “But we’ve been very happy with the success so far.”

The node is so unusual because, as a newcomer to the market, Steelcase looked not at how classrooms are generally equipped, but at how teaching has evolved. Used to be that teachers stood in the front and drilled rows of students much like a sergeant would address the troops. Today students are just as likely to be learning from one another in groups. Students also need a place for their backpacks and, at the college level for sure, a work surface with room for a laptop and a book.

Steelcase began developing its desk with help from design shop IDEO about a year and a half ago, Corcorran says. The early prototypes, on display at the event at the Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, were assembled from crudely cut plywood and old plastic chair seats. Nonethless, they look basically like the final product.

The node comes on wheels, making it easier for students or teachers to roll them into new arrangements. The concave base, made of aluminum, provides an out-of-the-aisle space for backpacks or other gear. Not only does the plastic-molded seat swivel; the work tray does, too. And the 22x12-inch plastic surface can easily accommodate a laptop with space to spare.

One of the bigger changes was to make the seat bigger. Corcorran says Steelcase added an an inch and a half to the width so that today’s heftier students can squeeze in. The desk, which weighs 32 pounds, can support up to 300 pounds. The American classroom has changed.

Architect Gehry on LEED Buildings: Humbug

Frank Gehry has never designed a structure that’s achieved LEED certification, and I’d wager that he never will, based on his gruff remarks during a public Q&A on April 6 in Chicago. The 81-year-old also jabbed a thumb, somewhat in jest, in the eye of fellow architect Renzo Piano and museum directors in general, and he described the early stages of creating a design.

Gehry, whose most famous work is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, was interviewed in the Harold Washington Library by Thomas Pritzker, chairman of the Pritzker Foundation, which awards the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize, and Hyatt Hotels Corp. His family also wrote the check for the Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park. (Hyatt itself recently won a LEED silver designation for a new hotel in Seattle.)

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and was created by the U.S. Green Building Council to promote the construction of buildings that are healthier for the earth as well as occupants inside. Developers seems to be tripping over one another to win LEED status these days.

What would you think, Pritzker asked him as they sat in hard-backed chairs on an auditorium stage, if a client said he wanted a LEED-certified building? “Oh, great,” Gehry answered in a high, mock-excited voice, as the audience laughed. Then, back in his regular voice, he dismissed environmental concerns as largely political concerns. “A lot of LEEDs are given for bogus stuff. A lot of the things they do really don’t save energy.”

He also said the expense of building to LEED standards often outweighs the benefits. On smaller projects, he said, “the costs of incorporating those kind of things don’t pay back in your lifetime.”

He seemed eager to resume another fight when the conversation turned to Millennium Park, whose new neighbors include the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing, designed by Piano and opened last year largely to acclaim.

Gehry recalled daring Piano to relocate the addition so it would directly face Millennium Park and the Pritzker Pavilion. “Renzo, come get me, baby,” Gehry said he told him. Piano did move the annex, which is now linked by a pedestrian bridge to the park. So how do you think it turned out? Pritzker asked.

Gehry replied that from inside the Modern Wing galleries, visitors can’t help but see the stainless-steel ribbons that adorn his pavilion. “He’s gotten better,” he faint-praised Piano, again to laughter. “You know the sibling rivalry between architects. We love each other, but we’re insanely competitive. Even at 81, I still do it. I can’t help myself.”

He suggested that something bold, like his Bilbao museum, would have been a better. But he said right after that building opened, the world’s top museum directors got together in London and, according to a friend who was there, voted never to commission another like it. “I think museum curators and directors like the predictable, so it’s all easy,” Gehry said. “A little bit of laziness, maybe.”

Pritzker recalled being a family vacation with Gehry in India and watched him sketch plans for a new building. Pritzker said the drawings looked like “scribbling.” Gehry said there’s more to building design than that, though he confessed: “I’ve always wanted to figure out to just do the sketch, get paid, and get out of there.”

He said his first step is to build a site model of roughly 10 blocks around the site, to see how his new building night fit in. Then he does a bigger-scale model of two or three blocks. He also walks around the area to understand the community. “It’s a pretty well-informed mind that starts to sketch,” he said. “I maybe do 20 or 30 of these drawings that look like scribbles. But when the buildings are finished and you look at the drawings, a lot of them look like the buildings.”

Gehry said he’s kept these sketches over his career and now has a file cabinet with perhaps 4,000 drawings. I’m sure even one of those stick-in-the-mud museum curators would love to put them on display.