Designs on the Future : Through the Legacy Left by Her Father, Gail Kennard Madyun Hopes to Build a Better L.A. for the Next Generation

At the noisy construction site of the new 77th Street Regional Police Facility in South-Central Los Angeles, Gail Kennard Madyun is surrounded by welders fusing the beams and columns of a steel skeleton. Her slight figure, capped by a yellow hard hat, is dwarfed by the scale of the $37-million project. Once again, she recalls how she came to be part of this scene.

Her thoughts drift back to the day, 10 years earlier, when her father, architect Robert Kennard, called her in Atlanta. “ ‘Come home,’ he urged. ‘We need help at the firm.’ I complied immediately,” Madyun recalls. “I adored my dad, and I knew the firm was vitally important to him, and to Los Angeles.”

So she left her job as a reporter for the now-defunct United Press International news service to help him survive the deep recession then developing in the local construction industry.

The firm was, and is, atypical. Located in a mid-Wilshire high-rise, the Kennard Design Group is the oldest continuously operating African American architectural practice in the western United States. Started in 1957, it has survived almost four decades in choppy social and economic waters that have tested the mettle of bigger firms. It has also survived the death last year of Robert Kennard. In a field where having five or more professionals on staff is equated with success, KDG employs 20.

Robert Kennard was widely respected. His courteous manner belied a deep determination to transcend racial barriers. And he was known as a friend to other minority firms; in its 38-year history KDG has spun off seven designers who have started their own offices.

“When my father called me back from Atlanta, the firm was really having a hard time,” Madyun says, picking her way through the debris of the construction site. “The recession had begun to hit us badly, as it had all architects. But what concerned my father most was the problem of succession. . . . Considering the struggle black architects have in getting established in the first place, very few manage to survive into the next generation.”

None of Kennard’s three children had grown up to become architects. Lydia Kennard, the younger daughter, is an attorney specializing in real estate development law; she runs KDG Development, which sponsors projects in minority communities. William Kennard is general counsel to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington. But her father thought that Gail, a Stanford and UC Berkeley grad who once taught journalism at UCLA, had the marketing and communications skills to see the firm through a sharp drop in commissions caused by the recession.

Now 44, Madyun favors long skirts, elegantly tailored jackets and colorful head scarves. She can be serious when discussing architects’ social responsibility to the community and wryly amused when she considers her unique position as the only African American woman in the state to head an architects office. And when talking about her father, Madyun’s expressive face is suffused with fondness. “Despite his long struggle against a hostile, frankly racist, environment, my dad was completely without rancor,” she says. “He had an extraordinary, quiet dignity which disarmed everyone, even the prejudiced.”

In a 1987 interview with The Times, Robert Kennard recalled living in segregated Monrovia as a child. “Each day my mother would pack my lunch box and send me off to Wildrose School. Each day the school would turn me away, and next day my mother would send me back. ‘Hang in there,’ she told me, and I did.” Eventually, school officials relented, allowing Robert in.

As a USC architecture student, Kennard was inspired by the example of Paul Williams, a black architect who designed fashionable houses in Brentwood, Beverly Hills and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, plus Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard and the Los Angles County Courthouse downtown. Another influence was Modernist master Richard Neutra. Kennard would go on to work with Neutra’s sometime partner, Robert Alexander, after graduating in the mid-1940s.

A decade later, Kennard boldly decided to set out on his own. Encouraged and supported by his wife, Helen, a high school teacher, he began to garner commissions for the public buildings that make up most of KDG’s distinguished portfolio. These include Carson City Hall and Civic Center, the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Watts, several schools and three parking structures at Los Angeles International Airport. More recently, KDG collaborated on the five-year renovation of the Los Angeles Central Library.

When Kennard died of cancer at age 75 last March, the encomiums from colleagues and former associates were lavish.

George Hasslein, founding dean of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Cal State San Luis Obispo, recalled sending a disadvantaged student with a tough background to Kennard for guidance. The architect took the student into his home and showed him around his office. The young man came away deeply moved by Kennard’s gentleness and concern, Hasslein said. “Bob opened many doors and cared for many people, and made you believe in a good world.”

That encouragement of the next generation of African American and other minority designers is still widely appreciated in the community. One beneficiary is Escudero/Fribourg, the first architects office in the city run by Latinos; Daniel Escudero and Arturo Fribourg were Kennard associates before setting up on their own.

“Bob was generous to us, even when we later competed on projects with KDG,” Fribourg says. “That only strengthened our conviction of the greatness and unselfishness of this beautiful human being.”

“Bob was my mentor,” says Roland Wiley, principal of RAW Architects, one of the handful of African American practices in Los Angeles. “He was a great example of how to succeed as a black designer. He had integrity and a reputation for absolute reliability. To put it simply, he set the standard and showed us how it could be done.”

Aspiring black architects still face enormous obstacles. Partly because of affirmative action policies, they have had more success in getting work from public agencies than in the private sector, where social contacts often lead to commissions.

“The trouble is, our private client base is thin,” Wiley explains. “African Americans who are successful, particularly athletes and entertainers, tend to be managed by whites, who naturally hand commissions to their white friends and associates. In this sense, Paul Williams, whose clients were mostly Anglo, was unusual. Today, the whole architectural pie, private or public, has shrunk and our slice has shrunken even further.”

The movement toward rolling back affirmative action policies greatly troubles Madyun. “It’s still far from a level playing field, especially for younger professionals,” she says.

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Today, the KDG succession Kennard so much desired is assured. As chief executive officer in charge of development and marketing, Madyun works closely with two architects born in Iran and educated in Tehran and the United States: Mahmoud Gharachedaghi, the firm’s principal designer, and Mohammad Kashani-Jou, who oversees operations and project management. The ethnically diverse firm also includes other African Americans, Latinos and Filipinos.

They are busy with the 77th Street police station, a splendid new building with courtyards and fountains that replaces the ramshackle old complex on Broadway in South-Central. It will be the largest detention facility built in Los Angeles in decades, with 140 beds in temporary holding cells and a staff of 600, when it opens next spring.

The structure, as designed by Kennard, features a symmetrical layout and simplified classical facades. It marks an evolution from the architect’s strict mainstream Modernism, which incorporated strong, asymmetrical geometric shapes, clean lines and no-nonsense detailing. Perhaps the best example of that style is the Carson City Hall and Civic Center; 30 years after its completion, the complex still seems fresh and unfussy.

For Madyun, KDG’s involvement in the 77th Street project is bittersweet. “The building replaces what was, in the 1965 Watts riots, one of the most racist police stations in Los Angeles,” she says. “Also, I know that every male member of my family, including my father, my husband, my brother and my son, have at various times been stopped and questioned by police officers solely on account of their pigmentation. In fact, when my father put in his proposal to design the facility back in 1985, he was troubled by the LAPD’s racist reputation.”

Madyun hastens to add that she believes the new station will be far more friendly to the neighboring community, both in its design and in the more enlightened attitudes of a new generation of officers.

Los Angeles city architect William Holland, a member of the panel that chose KDG for the 77th Street project, says he’s been impressed by the small number of change orders on the construction site. “Most of the changes we’ve made originated with the evolving police program,” not because of the architect, he says. “That’s a very unusual situation.”

Indeed, KDG’s reputation has been built upon a record of finishing projects on time and on budget. “It’s easy to be fancy when a private client opens his pockets,” says chief designer Gharachedaghi. “It’s not so easy when a public agency is tightening the screws at every turn, but I feel we’ve generally overcome such limitations.”

Despite such constraints, he says the firm tries hard to ensure that a building fits in with its neighbors. “We’re less interested in trumpeting our egos than in serving the community.”

That concern is echoed in Madyun’s activities outside the office. At the Utah Street School in the Eastside Pico Aliso housing project, she helps out tutoring children. “One-on-one instruction by someone like Gail can make all the difference to a kid lost in a class of 30 or 40,” says Stephen Brown, a teacher at the school. Madyun set up the volunteer tutoring program, sponsored by the nonprofit Los Angeles Headquarters City Assn.

“Our children are vital to the future health of our society, and many of them face hard times,” she says. “The challenge exists across the board, for disadvantaged kids and for privileged kids, like my own. We have to hand on the succession in a way that encourages them and makes sense to them. You can say we’re trying to make it through to the next generation.”

Madyun’s daughters, Haneef, 19, and Jihan, 11, and son, Aaliyah, 17, live with her and their 70-year-old maternal grandmother in a Kennard-designed house in Beachwood Canyon. She is separated from husband Julian Madyun, who works for Prosource, a wholesale food firm.

Even with the demands of home and office, plus her community activities, Gail Madyun finds time to write the occasional freelance article, just to keep in touch with her past profession. “It’s been tough at times,” she says, “but I feel it’s important to show my children--especially the girls--that it’s possible to have a family and a career.”

So far, none of Robert Kennard’s grandchildren wants to be an architect. “They see that it’s a tough, poorly paid profession,” Madyun says ruefully. “I tell them their choices should be about passion and commitment, not money, but their generation has fewer opportunities than mine did, and a more uncertain economic climate. My generation rode on the coattails of the struggles fought by people like my father, but those coattails are shorter in these more complex times.”

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Gail Kennard Madyun

Age: 44.

Background: Born in Los Angeles; lives in a house designed by her father in Beachwood Canyon.

Family: She and her husband, Julian Madyun, have three children--daughters Haneef, 19, and Jihan, 11, and son Aaliyah, 17.

Passions: Tutoring children, writing.

On the dearth of established architecture practices run by African Americans: “Considering the struggle black architects have in getting established in the first place, very few manage to survive into the next generation.”

On the movement toward rollbacks in affirmative action: “It’s still far from a level playing field, especially for younger professionals.”

On passing on a legacy to young people: “Our children are vital to the future health of our society, and many of them face hard times. . . . We have to hand on the succession in a way that encourages them and makes sense to them.”