Bravura New World

One can sometimes detect a whiff of envy when architects talk about the coming computer age. They can feel the culture speeding forward on all sides, while their own offices remain mired in a clunky past.

The reasons are obvious enough: Squeezed by harsh economic realities and clients that are typically wary of experimental design, architects rarely have the budget to use cutting-edge technologies either in their own offices or in their work. But a more complex reason is that the links between the computer culture and the forming of space are hard to locate. Where, after all, is the point where cyberspace and real space meet? How does one express the ephemerality of the Web in architectural form? In what ways are the boundaries that divide us being permanently reshaped?

The answers are elusive. Yet increasingly a younger generation of architects is evoking images of impermanence in their work as a way of coming to grips with the slipperiness of the new computer age. Skeletal frames. Translucent skins. Raw materials. All are emblematic of the desire to create a culture that is less fixed, more fluid. The result is an architecture that seems particularly well-suited to Los Angeles, a city marked by its sprawling ephemerality.

Located at 1914 Main St. at the corner of Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, a low-budget renovation project crystallizes many of those issues in one neat package. The project includes two related designs: Daly, Genik architects’ renovation of the building’s exterior facade and Shubin + Donaldson Architects Inc.’s design for Fuel, a video and production firm that occupies the corner portion of the one-story building. Together, both designs make up a cohesive architectural vision of what the future holds.

As part of a contemporary landscape cluttered with advertisement and marketing campaigns, the building’s facade is strikingly opaque. A broad strip of translucent glass--11 feet tall--wraps around the building’s parapet, propped up on a series of vertical bow trusses. The glass surface--an obvious advertising opportunity--is left eerily blank, as if somebody didn’t want to reveal what is going on inside. Below, horizontal slats of galvanized metal, tilted at a slight angle, cover the rest of the facade and function as both a brise soleil to block out harsh daylight and at the same time control views to the interior like a mechanical metal skin.

Yet up close, the fragility of the barrier becomes apparent. The narrow slats mask large floor-to-ceiling windows that open up to the offices inside, only a few feet away from a bus stop. In the original proposal, a low concrete plinth extended along the base of the building, creating a built-in bench for local bus riders. (City officials objected to it because it extended over the sidewalk, so it was never built.) With or without the bench, the building’s facade is a sophisticated expression of the inherent intertwinings of urban life, of the fragile membrane that separates inside and out, office and street life, order and chaos.

The architects’ use of everyday industrial materials reinforce the sense of fragile impermanence: The metal slats are actually the stair treads found in any industrial building. The thin bow trusses that support the glass panels are a reworking of a clumsy steel-angle structure that was built several years ago to stop the building’s eroding parapet from falling on passing pedestrians. These found objects, relics of an urban landscape, create a sense that the building could just as quickly be taken apart again and refashioned for some other use.

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Shubin + Donaldson’s 8,000-square-foot interior mirrors those same themes. A long circulation spine--dubbed the “info bar”--twists and turns down the length of the space, cleaving it in two. Computer networking systems, electrical systems and phone lines are all supported above this corridor on a series of lightweight wood trusses. The offices are arranged on either side: Designers work in hermetic little cubicles made of varnished Homosote--a thick, cardboard-like material--while production staff work in larger glass-and-plywood enclosed offices that face out toward the street.

Various communal areas serve to break up the enfilade of offices. The “info bar” culminates in a large open space where overworked hackers can play half-court basketball. Above, an attic-like TV room is tucked alongside editing rooms, with views to the bustle down below cut through its walls. These spaces are vaguely reminiscent of the “social condensers” found in the work of the Soviet Constructivists of the 1920s, which were meant to coerce workers into more communal living habits, but here they are more playful, more quirky. The idea is to introduce an element of random--even chaotic--play as a release from the solitude of life in front of a flickering screen.

Architecturally, the tension between total isolation and urban contact is strongest in Fuel’s director’s corner office alongside Pico Boulevard and Main Street. The office seems like an architectural diagram of levels of psychological withdrawal. A narrow strip of soil planted with low, lush Sansevieria plants--as if a sliver of courtyard has slipped into the space--runs along the base of the windows. Step over the garden, slide back a glass wall, and one is standing inside a tiny one-man terrace, able to spy on passersby through the facade’s metal slats. At the other side of the room, the computer work station is set in a box-like enclosure. From there, a harried employee can crawl up a wood ladder into a womb-like sleeping loft, safe from the world outside.

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There is a sense here that the whole apparatus could be dismantled overnight and disappear, like some nomadic colony, an obvious bow to the shifts and sudden changes in the computer design field. And at $30-per-square-foot, the project’s budget is laughable by the standards of “designer” offices. Yet why spend more if the world could change tomorrow?

These are not completely new ideas. Frank Gehry’s earliest works were similar in seeking a more informal, democratic architecture that could be located in everyday life. And architectural historian Margaret Crawford has noted a growing curiosity among younger architects about the informal works of Rudolph Schindler, whose own brand of Modernism in mid-century Los Angeles stood in sharp contrast to more hard-core contemporaries such as Richard Neutra. All of these experiments represent a turning away from a more rigid notion of order.

But buildings such as 1914 Main St. reflect a continuing shift in architecture’s aesthetic and social priorities. Mainstream Modernists adored the images of the machine age. Grinding gears. Whirring propellers. Cruise ship cabins. These were all images that were used to promote an architecture of efficiency, one that shaped structure, movement and light with the rationality of Henry Ford’s famous plants. But architects entering the profession today find such images less and less relevant. They more often revel in the ready-made, the idiosyncratic solution, than the elegant precision of the machine. They are not hung up on Utopia. They simply want to slip easily from one world into another.