Thinking outside the cocoon

Honda’s new Advanced Design Center, in Pasadena, is a kind of architectural version of a concept car. Designed by George Yu, a 42-year-old Los Angeles architect, it holds desk space for 10 of Honda’s top car designers, along with a conference room and a small, sleek kitchen along one wall.

The center occupies a 6,000-square-foot storefront space in the 1904 Boston Centennial Building in Pasadena’s Old Town, at the corner of Raymond and Union and within walking distance of the Cheesecake Factory, an Apple Store and H&M.; But except for the occasional reception or cocktail party, it isn’t open to the public. The location has more to do with Honda’s interest in marketing itself as a forward-looking company to the students at nearby Art Center College, whose car-design program is among the best in the world. (Most of the designers who work in the new space, in fact, are Art Center graduates.) As much as the Honda center is an office, it is an advertisement, however unusual or oblique, for Honda.

At the same time, Honda, like all carmakers, is obsessive about secrecy and security when it comes to its future models. That meant Yu faced the challenge of taking a storefront space and turning it into a studio that would promote Honda’s design work -- and at street level, no less -- even as it kept its details hidden from public view.

His solution didn’t begin to emerge until he toured Honda’s main North American design center in Torrance. Yu knew he wanted to create what he calls a “cocoon” of office space that he could drop into the Pasadena location, sealing the designers away from the eyes of pedestrians on the sidewalk outside, but he wasn’t sure exactly how. Noticing the collection of milling machines that Honda designers in Torrance use to create models for new car parts out of high-density foam, the architect asked if he could use them after-hours, when they normally sit idle, to produce the walls of the new office. His plan was to take sheets of translucent acrylic and shape them into curving panels that would form the exterior of the cocoon.

Honda agreed, but that was only the beginning of what turned out to be a struggle to adopt technology meant for creating cars for the purpose of making architecture. There has been lots of talk in recent years, of course, about the digital revolution in architecture, and nearly every firm now uses powerful computer software of one kind or another.

But there is still a significant gap between the design process and the actual, physical stuff of architecture. Firms rely on digital design tools to produce plans and models that still have to be executed with steel, glass and wood by contractors working largely by hand.

While a number of young architects are experimenting with ways to close that gap, mostly by fabricating their own building materials or by developing modular house designs, so far the results look clumsy compared with the way that carmakers have smoothly integrated computing power into their factories over the last two decades. The biggest problem for architects interested in new technology -- particularly those in small firms like Yu’s -- is that most of their designs are for custom “one-off” buildings.

Carmakers, meanwhile, are free to dream up models whose upfront costs can easily be earned back thanks to mass production and sales volume. They have a powerful incentive to invest in digital research and development and new equipment -- including the kind of rapid prototyping equipment Yu noticed so enviously in Torrance -- that can take instructions directly from design software.

The result is that car design has become a democratic art form (love or hate the Chrysler Spitfire) that mutates constantly in response to consumer demand, while architecture, for all its surging popularity, remains to a large extent a detached and rarefied field.

Yu set out to borrow a carmaker’s approach and see, given his access to Honda’s high-powered equipment and vendors, if he could make it work for this single, admittedly small architectural project. He bought acrylic panels for the walls of the cocoon from a German manufacturer. Opaque enough to maintain the designers’ privacy, they are also translucent enough to bring some light into the workspace.

The first problem he encountered was one of scale. The biggest panel in any car is one that forms the roof, so the architect decided to use that size -- roughly 4 feet by 8 feet -- as his basic building block. Using the same Rhinoceros software program -- Rhino for short -- that Honda designers use, he produced a scheme for the Pasadena offices that includes nine shapes and 99 panels.

To create those nine shapes, he and members of his 14-person firm hooked up a computer running Rhino to a milling machine, which then spit out top and bottom molds made of special foam that is nearly as dense as wood. Then each flat sheet of acrylic was placed between the molds and heated to a temperature of more than 300 degrees, melting the sheet so that it conformed to the mold.

In some ways, Yu had a good deal more freedom in this project than a typical car designer. As he was creating the cocoon, he didn’t have to worry about aerodynamics, vibration or how his design would fare in a head-on collision at 70 mph. But he also faced some challenges car designers don’t. For one, car panels are visible on only one side, while Yu’s cocoon would be open on the front and back. That meant all of the joints connecting the panels would be exposed. And while Yu’s clients at Honda were willing to support his unusual architectural project, they also expected the office to look entirely professional, with smooth finishes and a degree of polish.

In the end, Yu found the process of producing the cocoon surprisingly hands-on and labor-intensive. Far from representing some brave, blobby new world for architecture, it actually reminded him of the earliest years of his career, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when he worked on a series of highly wrought projects with Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi in the Santa Monica firm Morphosis. Rather than snapping right into place, the panels required as much -- or more -- on-site tweaking than custom projects his firm has completed for Sony, Max Studio and other commercial clients.

As a result, the Honda project has left Yu pessimistic about the architecture profession’s readiness to move headlong into the kind of high-tech design process that automakers now take for granted. Only because Honda was willing to fund what was essentially an experimental project, Yu says, was he able to produce even this modest result.

“I’ve become very, very skeptical about whether architecture is ready to make this kind of leap,” he said. “Even in 20 years I can’t imagine that the economies will change enough to make this sort of design practical.”

At the same time, though, the Advanced Design Center is an advertisement for the singular appeal of architecture, not to mention an indication of Yu’s significant talent. Approaching it on foot, you catch a glimpse of a serpentine form hiding behind the conservative facade of a typical Old Town Pasadena building. When you walk through the front doors, you find yourself in a kind of interstitial space between the regular geometry of the older building and the curving, shimmering shapes of the cocoon.

The panels that make it up are vaguely reminiscent of a car exterior, but they are more powerfully suggestive of human scale and, with their aggressive folds and curves, more sculptural than any car body could ever afford to be. When you walk inside the cocoon itself, the scale of the space shifts again, enveloping you completely, and only the light filtering softly through the panels gives you a sense of the outside world. No car interior ever designed can match that kind of effect.

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com