Modern Redux

It is difficult to walk down the aisles of the Santa Monica architecture firm of Marmol Radziner & Associates without being blocked by half-completed pieces of furniture. In one corner is an unfinished chair based on a prototype by Rudolph Schindler, the celebrated Modernist who died in 1953. A few feet away, resting on a drafting table, is an original design by the firm for a teak-topped table mounted on stainless-steel legs, still wet from a recent coat of oil.

If furniture building might seem an odd sideline for an architectural firm, managing principal Leonardo E. Marmol says the work is a logical outgrowth of the firm’s practice in restoring homes by legendary mid-century Modernists such as Schindler, Richard Neutra, Harwell Harris and others.

The furniture represents the latest new line of work for a firm that already juggles restoration, original architectural design and a small construction company. The furniture may also help the firm’s partners accomplish a long-sought goal to increase attention to themselves as designers, rather than simply as restoration architects.

Founded 15 years ago, the firm got its first taste of international attention in 1998 when the two architects restored Neutra’s Kaufmann House, a Palm Springs residence designed in 1947. Since that time, Marmol and partner Ronald M. Radziner have worked on at least 20 other historical projects, including such treasured buildings as the Schindler House in West Hollywood and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Millard House, also known as La Miniatura, in Pasadena. Nevertheless, doing just historical projects is not enough for the pair. “If we only did the restorations, I think we would not feel fulfilled,” Marmol said.

Recent work clearly shows the firm’s designs are influenced by, but not imitative of, the Modernist masters they venerate. Like those mid-century predecessors, Marmol and Radziner are interested in simplified shapes and minimized gestures that convey the basic organization of buildings without superficial flashiness. They like to display the actual construction materials in the facade, and, unlike some Modernists, they hold a high value on a close relationship between buildings and landscape.

In their most personal work they strive for a subtlety intended to reveal itself over time. “Our work does not shout,” Radziner said. Sometimes, however, the work needs to shout a little, as in the new San Francisco offices for TBWA/Chiat/Day, which fills a century-old warehouse with wooden walls that curve in extravagant shapes resembling ship hulls in some places and billowing sails in others.

Less flamboyant, but no less elegant, is their design for the Accelerated School of South Central Los Angeles, which straddles the thin line between being an open and friendly school and a protective fortress. A streamlined exterior wall of translucent panels provides plentiful natural light to the interior, while shielding students inside from being visible from the street.

Outwardly different, these two projects are united by the firm’s preoccupation with construction. As a means of fully controlling the process, the firm has created its own construction firm, which builds about two-thirds of its projects, an unusual commitment to the whole process of designing and building for a mid-sized architectural office of just 60 people; such a full-service practice is far more common among much larger architectural firms.

Yet construction is central to Marmol Radziner’s design concept, they say. As architects, “we are not looking to do some pretty drawings and then stop,” Marmol said. “This office is looking to see a project through to completion.”

“In an age of computer-driven design, [Marmol and Radziner] are old-fashioned craftsmen,” said Sam Hall Kaplan, an architectural critic and television news commentator.

While not literally craftsmen themselves, the architects place a high value on detail. In Chan Luu, a recently completed jewelry shop near Beverly Hills, much of the store consists of display cases, made of steel and sand-blasted wood, that the firm built in its own cabinetry shop.

“The raw feeling of the interior complements the jewelry, which has an organic and earthy feeling,” Radziner said.

“They are perfectionists, but perfectionists who know how to have fun,” said Ranee Katzenstein, a federal prosecutor for whom the firm restored a house in the Pacific Palisades, designed by the late A. Quincy Jones, a Los Angeles architect active in the 1950s and ‘60s.

As in many architectural partnerships, the team of Marmol and Radziner is a study in contrasting but complementary personalities. Marmol, 41, is a nattily dressed bachelor with large, expressive features and a gentle voice ideal for soothing nervous clients. He is clearly the salesman and the rainmaker of the two.

Radziner, also 41, a slender, intense man with straight, shoulder-length hair who is the lead designer, is just as likely to draw as to speak. From early childhood, he said, “I always wanted to be an architect.” Married with one child, he recently moved into a house he designed in Venice.

The roles of the two architects are different but overlapping. “We both are involved in all of our projects, we both design and both of us generally like to be at client meetings,” Radziner said. Radziner sketches out initial concepts and then passes the drawings to Marmol to critique them. This process continues until both men are satisfied with the design concept.

“Ron can take a very large number of issues and coalesce them down to a clear goal and a clear vision,” Marmol said. His own role, he added, was to manage the construction process.

Radziner claimed the men have had few ego clashes, primarily because they agree about the firm’s basic values. “We both are so interested in work that is conceptually clear ... from the earliest concept to the time we hand the building over to the client,” he said. “That is why we build so much of our own work ourselves and why we want that much control,” he said.

One possible source of kinship is that both men’s parents were refugees. Radziner is the child of Dutch Jews who hid from the Nazis during World War II and emigrated to America shortly after. Marmol’s parents were foreign students from Cuba studying in the U.S. when Castro came to power, and chose not to return.

The two met in the mid-1980s as architecture undergraduates at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and became friends. Marmol took seven years to finish his five-year bachelor’s degree in architecture, in part because he was working part time to support himself and in part because of his diverse interests, including philosophy and theater. “I always saw [the extra studies] as part of architecture,” Marmol said.

After finishing graduate studies--Marmol at Cal Poly and Radziner at the University of Colorado at Boulder--the future partners worked briefly in other offices before forming their own office while still in their 20s. The move was unusual in a profession in which young architects typically serve long apprenticeships prior to going out on their own.

The big break came in 1993 with the commission from Brent and Beth Harris, owners of Neutra’s Kaufmann House, to meticulously restore the residence, which had been severely damaged through neglect and by the intense heat of the Coachella Valley. The project was particularly challenging because Neutra’s original plans no longer existed; the only surviving documentation of the original project was a list of materials and letters between the architect, his contractors and his clients. With an undisclosed budget said to run into millions of dollars, the multi-year project eventually won a fistful of design awards, and led eventually for commissions for further historic work.

The leading academic expert on Neutra, Thomas Hines of UCLA, pronounced the restoration work on both the Kaufmann House and the recently completed Elliot House, an early work by Schindler in Los Feliz, as “excellent.”

However he expressed reservations about other restoration projects by the firm.

“At times,” said Hines, who declined to name specific cases, “I wonder whether they had not over-restored and renovated too much of the texture of the old buildings,” which sometimes end up “looking like new buildings, built de novo.”

In Hines’ view, older buildings “should be allowed to look old.”

Radziner said the firm tries to preserve original materials whenever possible, and when new work is combined with the old, “I like to express the difference.” New concrete flooring in the Kaufmann House, for example, is distinct in color from the original concrete floors that survive elsewhere in the house. Notwithstanding, the firm made some purists raise their eyebrows when they added structural reinforcements to portions of the sagging, leaking roof of the Kaufmann residence.

Radziner defended the practice of reinforcing or otherwise altering the original construction details of projects, “if that allows the building to survive.”

“If buildings cannot adapt to change,” Marmol added, “they either become museums or get demolished.”

Although Marmol Radziner has shown itself capable of free-flowing inventiveness, as in the TBWA/Chiat/Day interior, Radziner said the firm’s best projects are often those that are outwardly simple.

His personal favorite is a small, two-level house in Rustic Canyon that consists of a redwood cube that rests atop and slightly askew to a concrete block cube serving as the ground floor. The simple form is in fact a complex solution to create a small house of 1,400 square feet on a hillside that combines a garage and living space on the first floor, a home studio on the second and a rooftop deck above them both. The skewed angle of the second level maximizes the view from the studio of the backyard garden.

Upon first seeing the design, “it felt like, ‘Aha! You solved a difficult problem!’ ” said the home’s owner, Santa Monica businessman Michael Guttentag.

Radziner said the project is at odds with the prevailing fashion in architecture for attention-grabbing buildings. “A lot of recent architecture already looks old,” he said.

He expressed admiration for “timeless architecture” such as a group of houses designed in the 1950s by architect Ray Kappe in Rustic Canyon. “Those houses were done maybe 50 years ago,” he said, “but they still have something to say today.”