Rorschach Test

When Julie Smith-Clementi and Bob Hale first saw their firm’s future home, they were not impressed. “It was stucco, with a pastiche of five different architectural styles and a tile roof,” remembers Smith-Clementi, one of four partners at Rios Clementi Hale Studios (RCH), a multidisciplinary design firm based in Los Angeles. “It was a corner strip mall that wasn’t even on a corner.”A jumble of low-rent offices—small-time talent scouts, budget chiropractors, dodgy computer technicians—stuck together in what looked like an early 1980s condo for barely swinging bachelors, pastel paint and all. Though the site, on the far north end of Larchmont Village—a shopping district in the middle of tony Hancock Park—wasn’t far from the cool, light-filled Melrose Avenue space they were rapidly outgrowing, the existing building was leagues apart in sensibility. But as a designer, Smith-Clementi says, “You find the worst place, then you transform it. If you buy a Neutra, what’s the point?”

The transformation would have to be swift; the goal was to move the 53-person firm in a year, go­ing from concept to completion in a mere dozen months. Despite the speed of execution, the partners were still hoping for an office that reflected their practice’s maturity. RCH has made a name for itself by transforming building types often thought of as dreary, such as government offices and public schools, into brightly colored showstoppers that appear whimsical until their thoughtful program is revealed. It has also started a product division, notNeutral, featuring boldly patterned housewares that have been featured in O, the Oprah Magazine and clearing about $1 million a year in revenue. After years of working in cobbled-together office ­spaces—in the first, employees skateboarded through alleyways to reach rented spaces; in the second, some people, including partner Frank Clementi, ended up crowded into a trailer parked out back—RCH was ready to create a home that gave the com­pany room to change and grow.

A fluid design process grew out of the ramped-up schedule, which also encouraged them to engage in a seat-of-their-pants level of conceptual and material experimentation. Clementi, initially the most skeptical of the new space, was soon persuaded by a bit of demographic research. “We plotted it out on a map,” he says. “We put everyone’s home addresses into Google Maps, and the location that was most central ended up being right here.” Though the partners, who live in the Westside towns of Venice, Bel Air, and Westwood, would have preferred a Cul­ver City location, they realized that many of their employees, especially the newer hires, tended to live in areas on the east side, such as Pasadena, Silver Lake, and Echo Park.

Another digital tool allowed Clementi to become the driving force of the process. “We’ve been mess­ing with a program called SketchUp; it’s like a good chipboard modeling tool” whose simplicity allowed him to do what he does best. “I generate a lot of stuff, but I’m not good at picking things—left alone for eight hours I can generate eight different variations of an idea.” Aided by colleague Michael Martinez, Clementi would sketch “stuff that showed the others what they might feel anxious about” for Friday meetings where Rios and Smith-Clementi could tackle a slew of ideas, often sketching over Clementi’s work and homing in on a specific approach. Hale provided practical guidance. “Bob gave us a baseline for how far to push our outlandish possibilities,” Clementi says. “He worked for Gehry and for Koolhaas—he knows you can push that envelope.”

Six months in, the weekly meetings moved to the job site, and many of the design choices were made concurrently with construction decisions. “We were coming up with solutions on the fly in response to conditions unforeseen,” says Martinez, who has also worked on the firm’s renovation of L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum. The most contentious of these centered on the second-floor ceiling insulation. “I felt strongly about having the foil face outward,” Clementi says. “The other partners were not so psyched,” Martinez recalls, but in the course of conversation, someone brought up the foil on the lunar module, and someone else mentioned the simple foil wrapping of the venerable baked potato. Foil’s honesty was touted, and it became clear that it would help camouflage some of the exposed ducts and provide reflected light to a large space. Even­tually, everyone was talked over to the foil side, a process that Clementi says typifies design discussions in the firm.

“We want to have an office that’s as nonhierarchical as possible, that’s a studio environment,” Mark Rios says. But with a large firm, that can be difficult. Building on lessons learned from its first office, where six-person pods were the best group size to stimulate discussion—“Not so few people that you get bored of each other, not so many that you’re afraid to speak up”—RCH created two different types of studio environments and plans to rotate employees through them so that different mixings happen. Because some employees prefer to work in a larger space, there is also a 19-person “megapod,” with rows of desks arranged under exposed foil ceilings in a now traditional open-office configuration. Most work areas consist of half a dozen employees who are mixed so that differing ages, projects, and disciplines occupy the same space.

Right now, two architects, two landscape architects, a graphic designer, and an urban planner, who range in age from 30 to 62 and vary in seniority, all sit together in one studio. None of the six are working on the same project—there’s a child-care center, signage for a civic theater, planning for a corporate campus, and the landscape design for a residential condo tower. “It seems counterproductive, and it is a little inefficient, but the crossbreeding of ideas is invaluable,” Clementi says. “It’s because, although we have an approach, it’s culturally based, it’s historically based, and sort of witty—we like these ­surprises—but it’s not a style. It’s not author-driven, so a lot of the responsibility is on the employees.”

“We’re a little bit of an odd office,” Rios explains. “We’re trying to break some of the standard operation models. My fantasy is that the office is like this design think tank exploring solutions.” The partners talk about the new space as a sort of gleeful laboratory, with them as a band of scientists experimenting on themselves. Sometimes the experiments are a simple departure from an earlier way of doing things: “People would ask me, ‘Why do you guys use so much color?’” Clementi says. “We looked at that as a challenge.” Though some of the earlier schemes for the Larchmont building had a striped roof similar to the one in the California Endowment project (see “Local Color,” January 2007), the decision was eventually made to eliminate hues altogether. “This was an adaptive reuse, so we thought, Let’s use what exists of the building,” Smith-Clementi says. “Besides, when we started, the use of color was more groundbreaking—now it’s everywhere.”

The absence of color isn’t immediately apparent because the mirrored glass wrapping around the building reflects the sky and the surrounding streetscape. For a group of reformed color addicts, who often used different shades to cue elements of the community, it is a neat shift. “It’s one of the ideas we haven’t done for other clients,” Rios says. “It’s very seventies and eighties, but we’re sort of intrigued with it again. It cuts out a lot of heat gain, and it makes for a reflective floating quality. It dematerializes the building.”

Smith-Clementi gives a rapid-fire replay of the exchange that led to the mirrored glass: “What do we do with that surface?” “We could make it black!” “That’s too Darth Vader.” “Could we make it disappear into the sky?” “Let’s go blue.” “But we’ve already done that.” A moment of silence. “Well, no one’s using mirrored glass anymore.” “Is it because it’s automatically bad?” “Is it too retro?” “Could we do do it progressively?” “No one is sure of any of this stuff until it works.” And bingo—a revival is born.

“The building is kind of sleek on the outside,” Martinez says, “but there’s a certain roughness on the inside, which lends itself well to a design office because it gives us an opportunity to try things on ourselves.” Some elements of this new office are an attempt to carry through ideas that have already been proven in past projects—but in novel ways. The mixed seating, for example, “addresses the issue of serendipitous interactions,” Smith-Clementi says, a concept that has been expressed in other buildings with stairwells built as gathering places. Another priority, which promotes a nonhierarchical work space: “The windows belong to everybody,” she says. No one’s desk is placed right along a window, ensuring that a maximum number of employees get to enjoy natural light.

The experimentation didn’t stop with the end of construction. At the moment, employees seated in the larger area are building a ­temporary partition and shelving system to give themselves both privacy and pinup space. And though nobody has had the time to tackle it, remnant wood is waiting for anyone who would like to build benches and other furniture for the office. For phase two of the project, RCH hopes to install a vertical planted wall, an element that has been drawn into its plans for several current commercial projects—including a downtown building near the Staples Center. Those planted walls might span up to three stories, which would mean a series of different microclimates.

While those have yet to go up, on the second-story balcony there are already ten-foot-tall panels of water-jet-cut anodized aluminum. “We wanted to experiment with pattern on a big scale in an architectural way,” Rios says. Inspired by an ornamental piece on a building that the firm is renovating in Chicago, Clementi wondered: Is there a way of getting a face into modern architecture? The result is a stylized water pattern embedded with the face of Triton, son of Poseidon and messenger of the seas. It’s an homage to the site’s original occupant, the Hollywood Swim Arts School, where Esther Williams–era starlets were trained in synchronized swimming. The panels provide shade for the balcony, which the partners extended to five feet, hoping it will function as more of a screened porch. They’re trying to create effective indoor-outdoor space, a place where employees might gather for informal meetings or a head-clearing moment. In keeping with the dedication to cross-pollination, that pattern has also found its way into products for notNeutral, including a set of red-and-black lacquered platters and boxes as well as the company’s new business cards and stationery.

Despite the firm’s attempt to go beyond color in this new project, one playful element crept in: the bright-green fake grass that covers the bathroom walls and creates a cheery strip in the lobby, at the base of the stairs. “It’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to indoor-outdoor space,” Smith-Clementi says. “In our old place, we had a garden. There’s nothing like that in this space, and we’re landscape designers, so we had to have our grass!”