#517 - Anthony Poon, Founder of Poon Design Inc.

Introduction of Anthony Poon

0:00This is The Second Studio, hosted by the Architecture and Design Office FAME. My name is David Lee, and with me is Marina Bordel-René. This week, our guest is Anthony Poon. Anthony is an architect, an author, and classical musician, and a mixed-media artist. He is the founder of Poon Design, based in Los Angeles. Yes, and with Anthony, we talk about how he got into architecture, and we also, of course, touch on his, I think, three main interests, writing, music, and architecture. How those three interact with each other, how they unfolded in his story, also his approach to architecture and his philosophy about architecture, jazz and architecture.

0:37A very dynamic conversation. And their office has a variety of work, which I think is also very interesting as well. Sponsors. Marina, do you know that the big firms, SOM, Stantec, Big, they have a dedicated materials person, someone whose whole job is knowing what's available, what performs, and what's sustainable. But the thing is, most firms don't have that person, and keeping a material library current is a full-time job. Products get discontinued, certifications change, new stuff drops every week. Acelab's material hub is basically that expert built into a platform.

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Growing up in San Francisco

2:01I was born in San Francisco, in Chinatown, and I think there was something about the density of that community that always struck me. The kind of urbanism, the closeness, the buildings that span both historic to contemporary. What's also interesting architecturally is during my high school years, my family moved to Burlingame, which is one of the largest enclaves of Eichler Homes.

2:33Yeah. And I was surrounded by these wonderful mid-century modern homes. The one that I grew up in was not an Eichler home, but our neighbors were, and all the ones around our house. And then the last piece of sort of, I guess, historical architectural background is my high school, called Mills High School in the city of Millbrae, was one of the first prefab high schools. And it was a large campus, and it claimed that, I don't know if this is true because I never found it out on the Internet,

3:09but that it was on the cover of Time Magazine with the feature quote that you could take apart this entire high school with a single screwdriver. So, I always thought that was pretty interesting. What kind of screwdriver are we talking about? A very big one. It was all prefab steel frame with prefab insulated wall panels. No kidding. So, it was, you know, really a kind of kit of parts. Of course, it was a massive high school.

3:41So, it was a pretty neat environment. And when you go to high school, you're not really looking at the architecture. I doubt my classmates are looking at the details. You know, we're all just going to classes and going to social events, but it's sort of a neat backdrop that I'm sure had something to do with my background as an architect. And so, did you go straight from high school to study architecture afterwards? Was that enough to inform your decision with what you were going to do? Or did you have, like, an uncle who was an architect? Did you know what architecture was, really? Well, the great response to that question is, I do have an uncle who was an architect, a distant relative by the name of I.M. Pei.

4:19Wait, what? He is related through a couple leaps of generation, but yeah, there is a relationship there. I've only met him once. I met his sons a few times, but never really got to know that family because I was on the West Coast growing up and they were in New York City. That's what I was saying before the official interview is that we know you, but I didn't know any of this stuff about you.

4:51This is really interesting. But back to your original part of the question.

Balancing music and architecture

4:57No, I didn't really jump into architecture. My passion was music. And you may know that having been to my studio and seeing the piano, and I often write and talk about music and the relationship of music to architecture. That was my original passion. Of course, with Asian parents, they wanted me to pursue something more of a profession, something that was known to provide security. And being a musician didn't quite work. But architecture just fell in. I like to draw.

5:28I like to make things. I started taking some classes at UC Berkeley while still continuing my music education. So even when I graduated and looked at grad schools, it was still sort of music versus architecture. But I think the decision was clear that I could be an architect, run an architecture studio, and still play piano on the side, write music, even perform here and there, versus being a concert pianist and trying to run an architecture studio on the side.

5:58So I think I made the right decision. Yeah. It sounds like you did. I mean, so the perception of the title architect in that profession was more, provided more stability in your parents' eyes, you think, than being a musician? Well, isn't that the irony, though? Yeah. In my parents' eyes, yes. It provided more stability, more than a musician, or even worse, if I said I just wanted to be an artist or a painter or a sculptor. But as we know, the realities of that kind of security is much less than a number of other industries like law, dentistry, doctor, finance.

6:40But yes, it satisfied at that, those years way back then, it satisfied my parents' view of choosing what is known as a profession. Yeah. And so when you went to Berkeley, was it firstly for music performance? It was for music, composition, and theory, and performance. So it was the whole program. It wasn't a double major. It was called a second emphasis. So it just allowed me to take many music classes while still taking the four-year Bachelor of Arts with an architecture major degree.

7:18Interesting. So then, I guess, in reality, then, was your time split like 50-50 between music and architecture in college? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I would go from architecture design studios to the music building, which happens to be right across the courtyard, and go into one of their practice rooms and work on my music for hours, and then back to the architecture design studio. So it was really a pretty exciting back and forth, different crowds, different communities of classmates, but I really enjoyed it.

7:54And that passion continued even after I graduated, as I mentioned, even all the way up to grad school and trying to decide where I should apply. And I do specifically remember one night looking at both an application for Harvard Graduate School of Design or for Juilliard and trying to figure out which one to go with. And I picked, again, with my parents' voices in my head, I picked Harvard, but even when I was there, my work was still music-related.

8:25My thesis there was to look at how jazz music is made and see if I could apply those ideas to how architecture is made. Yeah, let's talk about that. And also, you probably know this, but there's some parallels because when I was in college, an undergrad studying architecture, I was also doing a lot of music. Like, I wasn't as serious about it as you, probably not as accomplished either, but your narrative about, you know, being in studio, then going to the practice room at night, and then going back to architecture studio is one that I lived through.

8:58And for me, it was enjoyable, but it was also really weird because, like, to your point, they're completely different groups of people. And there weren't many, there was, I think, only one or two other people in the bands that were architects, but they were not, it was not common. So it was like, it was strange to have kind of, you know, each foot in these two different universes for, well, in my case, six years, especially in a five-year program. But that relationship between music and architecture, yeah, talk about that, because it's something I've thought about, but I've never really been able to put my thumb on it directly or put it into words.

9:35So your thesis, yeah.

Parallels of jazz and design

9:38Well, you're right. It is interesting that it is two different universes. In college, the kind of student that studies architecture is very different than the students that study music. And in my case, it was classical music. But the concepts, there are so many overlaps. You probably know the famous quote from Goethe, which is that architecture is frozen music. And there are all these overlaps of conceptual themes like harmony and rhythm and structure and counterpoint.

10:12These things explain both music and architecture. And my interest was very different. It was more about the process. It wasn't, and we've done this before, of taking buildings and designing them based on music or being inspired by some piece of music, a very abstract way of thinking. My interest was really about process, how music is made and how architecture is made. And that's where my interest in jazz comes into play, because architecture is slow.

10:44It's tedious. There's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of technical aspects countered by creative aspects. There's budgets and schedules. Buildings can take forever. Jazz music is spontaneous. It's organic. It's impromptu. And so those are two different universes that I'm interested in and trying to figure out how they can inspire each other. Now, I'm not a jazz musician. I'm a classical musician, as I said. But to look at jazz and see how these musicians just create music, sometimes on the spot, and whether that can make architecture a little looser in its creative process, maybe generate different design solutions.

11:26So what shape did the thesis project take? I'm like, no, invest. I want to know more about this project. Was it programmatically? What was it? Yeah. Well, it started as a large written document, a dissertation, studying all these themes, looking at jazz musicians, reading jazz philosophy, applying that to architectural theory. It then led to the work of Carlos Scarpa, who I found to be a kind of architect that I defined as jazz-like.

12:00His work, you probably know well, had a lot of components of how I envisioned architecture would be if it had a kind of jazz-like approach. The ultimate project was I chose a site in San Francisco, Fort Mason, a former military fort that now serves as a cultural center. Interestingly, it wasn't back then, and my program was to turn it into a cultural center.

12:26And yes, like 25, 30 years later, it actually became a cultural center. And it took on the – it was a real project that I designed using some of the theories and testing those ideas. It's a bit abstract. It's a bit lengthy, but that's sort of the gist of it. Was part of the, I guess, critique of architecture is that it's – in general, it's too stagnant, like physically stagnant? Gotcha. Well, the process is, as I said, it's sort of slow.

12:59It's clunky. And you're sort of asking maybe even another aspect, that physically, yes, buildings are stagnant. Usually buildings are static objects. Yes, there's moving parts, like a garage door or an elevator. But one doesn't usually think of architecture as being a form of kinetic art where buildings are actually moving. And there are some great examples of things. Taking, for example, a football stadium where the roof retracts or converts to a soccer field or a baseball field, something like that.

13:30But in my case, it was sort of less about that, but more about how stagnant the process is and how that should – at least the creative aspects – should be a little looser, a little freer, a little more organic. I mean, this might be a little bit of a departure from your thesis, what we're talking about. But sometimes I do feel – you know, like what we do is quite serious, too, right? And like there's liability.

14:00And if we're doing public structures, you have to think about the public. It's not art, which is another point of conversation we can have, because it serves a very functional purpose. And sometimes I feel like because of that, that it maybe in a negative way allows – it causes the process that we as architects employ to become more and more rigid and more restrained almost because of that. Or maybe because we feel like we don't have enough time to be creative or whatever else.

14:33Well, hopefully it's not a matter of time, because a jazz musician can compose an entire piece on the spot. And he doesn't – he or she doesn't need to work on it for months in advance. I think it really is just our training. In grad school, the word rigor was used throughout all our presentations and classes and professors. And I was thinking, yes, it's a great word. You're right.

15:03It's – architecture is a discipline. We have liability. We have responsibility to the users and the visitors of our buildings. But can we loosen that creative process up while still keeping an overall umbrella of rigor? And that's sort of what I'm interested in. And I worked in large corporate firms in the past, and you get a new project, and you see people initially right away grabbing their scale and figuring out square footages and drawing little program blocks.

15:33And everyone's already analyzing the technical aspects of the site or the budget, how it breaks down per square feet, per material, per division. And it already is locked into these kind of formulaic rules. And there's nothing wrong with them, but there must be some other approach, some other layer we can apply to all this to make things, again, more improvisational. So do you – so how do you guys approach in your office, you know, project?

16:05Do you try and ignore all of those more, like, you know, logistical constraints and start from a, I don't know, like a more free approach, more sensible approach to understanding what the project wants to be before you dive into those technicalities? Well, there's sort of no way of ignoring them, because we know they are part of the project. No matter how we start, those things will come back to influence what we do or maybe even haunt what we do. But I think the beginning can start sort of anywhere.

16:36It could be a group discussion of everyone just throwing out ideas and drawing together, bringing in favorite projects. Maybe someone's inspired by a reading or a piece of music. Everything in the beginning has some value to the creative process. It doesn't have to start with someone running calculations. It could be a piece of wood that has inspired us, a certain walnut plank that we have.

17:06Maybe the grain pattern becomes something that inspires the section diagram of a building. It's sort of saying that inspiration can come from everywhere, and we should constantly be aware of it so that we can grab at it when it hits us. I think of a jazz concert I went to at Cover City many years ago at the jazz bakery, now unfortunately closed down, where the musicians asked the audience to yell out numbers from one to seven, which are representing the keys of a piano.

17:43You know, the eight-note octave. People did, there was a sequence of random numbers, which then the pianist plucked out on the keyboard, these random half-dozen numbers, and kept repeating it. And soon the other musicians jumped in, harmony was added, a chord structure was added, and this piece of music that lasted ten minutes was a true full-blown jazz original piece of genius that was based on just audience yelling out numbers. And I thought that was pretty amazing, capturing sort of a classical jazz improvisational process.

18:18It's pretty cool, so you can ask clients at the first meeting to just throw out a bunch of... But it's kind of... But it is, no, it is interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar. The information we get from clients on the site is not, you know, as random, let's say, as an audience member throwing out the number three, but you are hit with a bunch of information, and you have to synthesize and work with it to create something, hopefully, that's poetic. But, yeah, it is really easy to get trapped. I've been in big offices, too, and I've seen that, exactly what you're describing.

18:50Like, there's people with their calculators and their scales or their Revit file, and they just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And then suddenly it's like, oh, I guess we're 80% done with SD. Is that what we just did?

19:01Yeah, exactly. Okay, so then you go to grad school. After grad school, did you stay on the East Coast?

Moving to Los Angeles

19:12Yes. Well, I was on the East Coast between undergrad and grad school, and then stayed only for a tiny bit before I moved to Los Angeles. And primarily, I think it was probably the weather that drove me to come back to California, East Coast, particularly going to grad school. As a student with very little money and riding a bike in a snowstorm with a windchill of 50 below is pretty brutal. Yeah.

19:42So it's interesting. So, you know, as people might or might not know, there is kind of like a NorCal and a SoCal camp, right? You're from Northern California, but you decided to move back, but to L.A., so what was the reason? I think it was, I don't know if there was that much thought. I think it had to do with being in California, near friends and family, but not being in the same town. You know, having enough distance to establish myself as a young adult who has finished college and grad school

20:13and not having to feel the commitments of a local family joining barbecues and dinners and choosing when we connect so there was enough of a distance but still being in the same, sort of same state, I guess. Do you still have family in the peninsula and the city, San Francisco? Yeah, many of my friends and family. My brother still lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter, so I am there often visiting.

20:46And I could see myself moving back there, but I'm pretty much been settled here in Los Angeles for quite some time. San Francisco is a pretty small, sometimes it feels like a really small town. And I would not be surprised if actually my family knows your family by probably one degree of separation. I almost guarantee it. Probably. Because my dad's side, they, I think he grew up mostly in Sunnyvale, but they spent a lot of time in Chinatown. So I'm sure that they all knew each other somehow.

21:19Or your mom grew up in San Francisco. That's true. She went to school. Yeah. I'm going to ask around my family right after this, my extended family. Do you know the Poon family? It's likely. I mean, you're right. It is a, it's a city and it is a global city, but there is a provincial quality to it. And particularly the Chinese community that stems from Chinatown is pretty tightly knit. So, yeah, we probably have overlaps one degree, or you and I might be, might be cousins even, or who knows, who knows. That means I'm sort of related to R&P.

21:52Yes, yes. A couple more degrees. Yeah. Yeah, sure. If I'm four degrees, then you're five or six. Yeah, yeah. So you moved to LA, right? Wait, actually, I was going to ask real quick. So the gap years between undergrad and grad, you were working at offices during that time, or what was happening? I was working in New York City. Oh. Two very influential jobs. This is, you know, I was in my early 20s, just graduated and working in the field, and it was great.

22:25The first office was M. Paul Friedberg. Not a name that everyone may know, but that was an urban planner and landscape architect, very prominent in the 60s and 70s. And he's no longer alive. The office still continues, which is great. But he did a lot of great urban public works for New York City.

Working at Robert Stern

22:46The other office that I worked in is quite interesting. It was Robert A.M. Stern. Oh. And I am an architect that loves modernism and contemporary works. Robert Stern is one of the leading postmodernist architects, and it was great to work for him because at the time when I was in school, postmodernism was at its height. This was in the mid-late 80s, and there were multiple leaders of that movement that was being taught at Berkeley.

23:22You know, there's Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Robert Stern, Charles Jenks, the writer, Stanley Tigerman, all these people. So for me to get a job at Robert Stern's office back in the 80s was an incredible accomplishment for me. And I love the work. I love the culture. These days, it's not work that I would do. A lot of his work is historically based. Postmodernism is still, it's less of a trend in his work and portfolio, but still there.

23:53Robert Stern passed away recently, but the office is thriving, which is great. So, back then, did you know that your personal preference in the type of architecture was modern and contemporary or not? Because I'm wondering, like, if you take the average architect who's a staunch believer in modernism or contemporary architecture, and you drop them into a, let's say, postmodernist office or an office that does more traditional vernacular work like Robert A.M.

24:32Stern, they might not have a good time there, right, because it might make them feel weird. But you were okay at that time. Is it because you didn't know what you wanted or? Yeah, I really didn't know. I mean, we're talking just graduating, moving to a city, being in your early 20s, and your education, all your professors were pronouncing postmodernism as the direction of the future. So, it just kind of made sense. But here's the interesting thing. When I got into grad school and I talked to Robert Stern on my way out, he said that, he said specifically, when you go to Harvard, you will look back at the years at Robert Stern's office and realize that that wasn't for you.

25:15Because he knew there was going to be a philosophical juncture that breaks from postmodernism to basically a Gropius and Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier education. The last thing he also said, which was quite funny, he said, you will not learn anything at Harvard other than to dress properly.

25:35And I look back, it didn't make sense to me then, other than I thought maybe he just thought the Californians didn't really know how to dress because we would wear jeans with a sport coat. Everyone in that office was wearing beautiful tailored suits and bow ties and ties. But I also realized, recently reading his memoir, Robert Stern's memoir, he was always upset that he did not get into Harvard. He hated that institution, what it stood for. He ended up going to the competitor, as you know, Yale, and became the dean there for decades.

26:09So, at the time, I didn't know there was this whole back story of Robert Stern versus Harvard. So, he probably was upset that, as one of his promising designers, I left his office to go to his enemy, his enemy institution.

26:24That's real funny. So, then after you finished your time at Harvard, though, there was no, you were briefly on the East Coast for a little bit, and then you came back to L.A. When, I don't know when the timeline of this occurs, but when did writing become such a key part of what you do?

Pursuing a writing practice

26:48I think it goes in sort of spurts. I think when I landed in Los Angeles, I would write, mainly because I had time. It was the early 90s. It was a recession. There were very few jobs. And I view it, of the many recessions I've been through, I view that as probably the hardest one, the most difficult one, where I couldn't even get phone calls returned. I couldn't get any interviews.

27:18There were no jobs to be had. If I reached someone in an office, they would tell me that his job is gone and they're closing down in two months. It was hard. So, being young, being creative, L.A. was kind of a place where you could sort of do whatever. I started doing things like painting, selling paintings, writing, pretending to write poetry, playing music, just sort of making ends meet. I think I was 27, 28.

27:50But it wasn't until more recently, maybe within the past 10 years, that I started really diving into writing, whether it is industry articles, personal essays, publishing books. But, yeah, it's become a big part of what I enjoy doing. It can tie together any aspect of my life, art, music, architecture. And it's just a way of getting my voice out there in some form of, hopefully, some form of legacy.

28:27It's interesting because, I mean, there are a good number of architects who have written things, but there's a lot who don't. And maybe in part because the work of being an architect takes so much time, you know, unto itself that I'm sure there's some architects listening. Like, how do you have time to write or to use it? I'm just going to ask, when do you find the time to play, to work, to write?

28:50That's a good question. I'm often asked that, but I think I don't look at them as separate entities. You know, architecture, music, writing, art, painting. To me, it's all just sort of one moving creative force that's propelling me every day. And so if it's not distinct things, I'm not going from work to the piano. It's, you know, I have a piano here. It's just sort of, for me, all one big kind of momentum that I enjoy doing.

29:26And I think, you know, if you're passionate about something, you find the time. And I get the same rewards whether I'm designing a Buddhist temple or an elementary school versus writing an essay or an article or playing or composing a piece of music. To me, it's all part of an artistic journey for me. How does it, I don't know, what was my question?

29:57Well, I do want to jump back to one thing you mentioned about architects writing. A lot of architects do write. A lot of that writing falls into a kind of academic or intellectual kind of thing. A lot of architect books aren't really literature because they're monographs and they become beautiful coffee table books. I was inspired, my most sort of recent big project, not really recent, at least 10 years ago, but I was inspired by the book Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, the chef.

30:33You know, he wrote an incredible book. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. He wrote about the underbelly of the restaurant world. And I thought, why couldn't I write about the behind the scenes of the architecture world? You know, we go through not just the designing of buildings, but all these incredible antics with office and consultants and clients and city presentations. There's a lot of stories there. And I just thought, why not put that together? And that's what started my interest in really taking writing more seriously.

31:06And also thinking, how many architects have written about being an architect? And there's really not that many that write just true sort of biographical. A lot of them are very prompted and curated interviews, you know, or again, essays or critiques of buildings or of movements or, like I said, intellectual discourses. But what about just writing what happens in an architecture office or what an architect does and write for a mainstream audience, which is what Kitchen Confidential was.

31:41It wasn't written for restaurant developers and chefs. It was written for the rest of the world to kind of get an understanding of what goes on behind all the closed doors of a restaurant.

31:53Interesting. Interesting. Do you find that of the three, the writing, the music, and the architecture, like one of them, some of them are more satisfying in certain ways when others are less satisfying in that way? Oh, certainly. I think architecture, as most of our colleagues would say, can be very frustrating. When you submit a project for agency approvals, that process can just be horrific.

32:28And then I compare that to sitting down at my piano, opening up a piece of music to try, say Mozart, you know, or Beethoven, just playing. And also, there are no frustrations. But the rewards in architecture after getting through all these trials and tribulations are so rewarding because you've earned it, because you've gone through such a path. It's kind of like when I lived in New York and I bought groceries in the middle of winter.

33:00Now, if you're in Los Angeles, you drive your car, it's 75 degrees, you put the groceries in your trunk, you drive home, park your car, and put your groceries in the kitchen. In New York, it's snowing. It's a blizzard. There's 12 inches of snow on the street. You don't have a car when you're in your 20s. You put on 10 layers of clothes with a hat, scarf, and gloves, and you hike to your local grocery store. And you can only carry so many bags.

33:31With your car, you can put, you know, 10 bags if you want. You're buying two bags. By the time you make it home, those dozen eggs are so worthwhile. You're so excited that you've made it home. And unfortunately, that amount of food will only last you a few days, and you have to do it again. So the point is, similarly with architecture, there's so many challenges that you have to accomplish and be successful at that when all done, it's a pretty impressive result, and one should be pretty proud of themselves for having achieved that.

34:06Yeah. You know, one of the things that became clear to me the more I practiced is the amount of respect I have for any practicing architect who gets a building done. I'm like, you won, in my view. Assuming it's not total crap, but you won. Like, this is an incredible accomplishment for any architect to do one building that's decent. Because there are so many hurdles, and there are a lot of things actually outside of our control as architects that hit the project or can kill the project. If you get it through, it's kind of, sometimes it feels like a miracle.

34:39And so, yeah. But do you find, between the three different pursuits, that sometimes when you're working in one mode, that will unlock something in another? Like, I don't know, when you're working on music or writing, does that unlock something about a design problem you've been wrestling with or vice versa? Yeah, for certain. I mean, that goes back to these activities not being distinct and separate.

35:12That I could be sketching for a project, for a building, music playing in the background, but somehow I'm so tuned into that music that that music starts inspiring the sketching process. I could be researching, I could be writing an essay or critique and studying projects, studying other architects, and all of a sudden those ideas just fuse right into what I'm sketching two hours later at my desk. So, yes, I think it's all intended to have overlaps and influence each other.

35:48And it's sort of every aspect of anything I do that's creative. It could be just, it could be cooking, it could be landscape work, I could be doing, I don't know, macrame, tie-dye, scrapbooking. All these things are just part of this creative effort that I try to keep passionate and alive every day. And now a quick break to thank the sponsors who support their second studio. Dear architects, design leaders, and founders redefining the industry, if you want to shape not only buildings, but the business behind them, this is your moment.

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37:32Experience the difference with Programma, software built for interior design workflows. My question is, I'm wondering, have you ever attempted to use how you work with these three things and other things as a way to market yourself? And I say this because you and I, we've spoken about the idea of branding and marketing and whatever else, and some architects are more conscious about it. They actually try really hard, almost too hard, superficially, to find something that puts a stamp on them, that makes them different from everyone else.

38:04You know, I do, what's something that people say, biophilic architecture, and that's like their thing. Has there ever been a thought that the music and even the writing would be like your thing, your approach to architecture as a way to communicate to non-architects your expertise or your particular way of doing architecture? Well, I think for certain the writing does. The music may be less so. If I talk to a client about how music inspires the work, for some it sounds exciting and it sounds great.

38:39For others it's very abstract. And they're just saying, look, I just want my project to look like these images on my Pinterest page. But the writing certainly helps in positioning who we are. It establishes a presence, establishes an expertise. It's similar to your series of podcasts. It establishes a certain presence in the industry that others may not have. They might say, well, let's hire this guy because he's published several books on architecture.

39:14He teaches at UCLA and he's writing constantly industry articles. He must be an expert of X, Y, and Z compared to the other three or four architects they're interviewing who are all just bragging about how beautiful their portfolio is. Everyone has beautiful portfolios. So, you know, everyone has good references. Everyone went to great schools. It's really about what's going to stand out. And expertise and having a broader profile, I think, has always helped us, even if it's someone that doesn't read anything I write, to be able to, at the end of an interview, hand over a copy or two of one of my books that have been signed to them is great.

39:56It's a great building of a relationship. And, yes, partly excellent marketing technique. So, you have to keep a stash of your books in the office ready for distribution? Yes, yes. I mean, people can hand out in the old days business cards.

40:15But for me, those business cards were replaced by books.

Launching an independent practice

40:22So, how and when did you decide to start your own practice? Like, was it, you know, because of the recession when you moved to L.A.? Or was it after you worked for a few other offices and you're like, you know what, like, I want to do my own thing? When I moved to L.A., I immediately attempted to start my own practice with a classmate from grad school. So, we did a few projects, but we learned very quickly that we didn't know what we were doing. You know, it sounds great. It's everyone's dream.

40:54In grad school, you're in studio and you're like, I'm just going to be a great architect. You graduate. You establish a name.

41:03You're busy. Obviously, you have phone calls coming in. There's a client starting to call you and you're too busy on the podcast. I'm too busy. So, we did it for maybe two years and it didn't really go anywhere. We both ended up getting jobs, some of them corporate jobs, some at the same firm. And it wasn't until much later, maybe around, I think, 2001, that I tried again, this time armed with experience, some client references. And it was then I was able to launch more successfully.

41:39And that's the studio that we currently have today. So, you guys, it might not be surprising to people based on this conversation that you enjoy doing different types of work.

Embracing diverse project types

41:50Is that fair to say? Different types of projects? Oh, yeah. Yeah. We, by choice, do not want to be defined by a project type. And it's actually a difficult position because clients want to hire experts. They want to hire the expert in restaurant design or healthcare or someone that always does single family residences. We intentionally choose, try to choose very different projects of all diverse natures because it's kind of like if you're an actor in Hollywood, you don't want to be typecast.

42:27You may be successful as a comedian, as a comic actor. But I bet you after five or six of those movies, that person is dying to do sci-fi or dying to do a romantic comedy or drama. We're the same way. We, of course, we started as a young firm doing homes. But after a while, we're like, let's do something else. Let's get into education, get in the K-12 or higher ed and then branching into religious projects. It's by choice. It makes it harder to pitch when someone wants you to explain why you're the expert of this type of project and we're more broad.

43:06But that goes back to our roots where our expertise is in design and not a specific building type. And as I look at the architects, I like and admire, say, any of the Pritzker Prize architects, they don't just do one type of architecture. I mean, Frank Gehry does homes, he does museums, he does university buildings, all kinds of things. So that's been our goal and it's worked well so far, not without some challenges, but we're proud to have a very diverse portfolio.

43:38Have you found that it's become more and more difficult to land different types of projects without that massive resume of, oh, you've done 15 libraries and you can do a library. Have you found over the years that it's become more difficult, like clients in general becoming more fixated on that resume of project type? I think it depends on what arena you're participating in. When we go after RFP work with community college district or, you know, the UC system, that RFP process requires you to list your extensive experience.

44:20You have to list, let's say I'm going after a high school for LAUSD, you have to list your, your last five built works within the last five years. Wow. Wow. And meaning that, that if it takes four to five years to build one high school, you have to have several of these in the pipeline, at least three of these in your plate, on your plate at one time. So yes, in that arena, it's trickier, but if we're going after education and it's the private arena, they don't necessarily have that kind of RFP procedure.

44:56It's more based on referrals, references, or just getting an interview and being able to talk intelligently about the project, about design. And we even have conversations of why expertise of that level isn't good for a project, you know, that, that it might produce cookie cutter ideas, you know, formulaic solutions. You know, I would say, why, why hire that firm? They've done 20 of these, you know, you think yours is going to be so special, you know, those kinds of conversations help us in a, in a situation stand out.

45:32And then they see the diversity of portfolio, we like to talk about how doing a church project might inspire how we design an art gallery. But what we learn about doing a house might inspire how we'll design a preschool. It's that cross-pollination, I think, that, that makes our approach and ideas interesting to a client over someone that says, how many of these have you done? And if that really is their fixation, then they may not be the right client for us. Yep. I think the analogy to acting is very good because at some point there is kind of a confusion between who, like, who the actor really is and what is their talent, right?

46:13Like, I don't know, if you cast Johnny Depp for any movie, is it going to actually play the character that was written for that specific movie or is it just going to be Johnny Depp? You know what I mean? Like, you know, like, it's kind of like, like you said, like you're getting cookie cutter and actually you're hiring, you know, a firm who's done that. Are you calling Johnny Depp cookie cutter? Well, you know what I mean? Yeah, because he's more of a celebrity than an actor. Yeah. And if we're talking about just talent, there are actors that are so talented that they just get absorbed into the character they play.

46:47Comparing that to architecture, you could also have the same complaint about signature style architects that you hire Frank, Gary, Zaha, Deed, Richard Meyer, any of these big names. You kind of know what you're going to get and you're hiring more a celebrity than an architect versus an architect that might start from ground zero and really develop some unique and original ideas. So that's an interesting comparison between Johnny Depp and Frank, Gary, but on that note, are you conscious?

47:23Do you want to have a quote style? I know architects shiver at the word style, but I'm going to use it. I don't know what else to use. Do you are you are you hunting for that? Are you conscious of that? Are you just doing what you feel natural and then, you know, you look back and then find patterns of what you've you've done? Because some architects are really they want to have a brand and they want to have actually not just a brand. They want to have branded work and they're they're very aware of it. Right. I think it's it's really the the latter. We do what we do.

47:54And and through a body of work over the years, there are some themes that that rise. We don't we don't stick themes into our agenda right off the bat. But of course, we all have personal preferences of what we like or don't like. A lot of it's client driven. If our interest and the most often is modernist architecture, but a client comes with us with a Spanish revival home that they want to do in addition to. That's a great client. We'll work with them.

48:26And we may not automatically be jumping into the modernist agenda because it's a it's a different context. I think that's that's all kind of just an organic growth. We'll see where we end up with each project. And we like to surprise ourselves and and say, wow, how did how did this form or this shape of this space arrives? And how is that different than the previous one with the same program? What have been some of the themes that you've seen over the years kind of reoccur throughout the work?

48:57And I'm also curious if they occur across different types of buildings, different building types. The theme is primarily in, again, the process, not the product that we want to approach all our projects with a certain free flowing, organic approach. So that may be the consistent theme, not not what the building looks like in the end. And if you look at the work, I think a lot of our work is contemporary, it's modernist.

49:32There are playful themes, use of color, of rhythm. That's where some of the music comes in. Some of our restaurant work is sort of intentionally witty and humorous. Humor is something that is often lost in architecture because architects and architecture sometimes take themselves take themselves too seriously. So we want to inject something a little different. And maybe that's from my postmodernist education, the play with themes and and kind of twist them, put them on the on their head.

50:08But I don't know if we have a signature style. I think of the architects I like. Herzog de Miron is a great firm. We all know their work. I don't know if they have a signature style. I think we can almost always recognize a work of theirs, but each one is very different. Same same with with Zoom tour or Rem Koolhaas, the other favorites of mine and probably of most architects. And these are architects favorites of architects.

50:38The buildings aren't like the category we're just talking about, Frank Gehry, for example, or Richard Meyer. Those signature styles are known and easily recognizable, even even confusing. I did a lecture once at Modernism Week putting up multiple images of Frank Gehry buildings, the ones that use the the metallic skins. And people couldn't tell whether it was the same building or five different buildings because they were that similar. Go back to Herzog de Miron, I can't think of two projects that look the same, but I can think of how they're similar in their intelligence, in their detailing, in their use of materials, in their conceptual thinking.

51:21But the result, whether they're using sand, stone, glass, wood, every project is quite different. I think it's much harder to achieve, you know, than repeating the same, you know, architectural language. Because I feel like you don't really challenge yourself after a while. You're just kind of like perfecting, you know, the brush strokes a little bit more in every project, but you're not trying new ones. I think it's much harder to do what we're trying to do and what those firms that I listed try to do because they're starting every project from the beginning with basically, I would imagine, a blank canvas, new ideas versus some of these other firms.

52:07I mean, Richard Meyer is probably one of the most formulaic architects. I love the work and I visited the projects, they are so exquisite, sophisticated, very well refined. But when it gets time to choosing paint colors, for example, it's not much of a struggle. They know they're using white. But there is a zillion type of white. Exactly. There's a hundred whites in the Dunn Edwards catalog and that's their exercise. They know the result is one of these whites.

52:38If you're starting from scratch, you're not just talking whites. You could be talking pastels or earth tones or primary colors and we're just talking painkiller. So there's so much work there. And then you get into, I don't know, window proportions or, you know, door material or type of stone. So there is a lot more work in this kind of approach. Similarly, again, going back to Johnny Depp or the actor, is there that much more work for, I'm sure Johnny Depp would disagree, but is there that much more work in getting into character when you're always going to be playing Johnny Depp versus, I don't know, Daniel Day-Lewis.

53:19Who is playing so many different characters. Each time he's doing a movie, there's a completely different background, study, you know, just talking to people. Maybe you're playing a policeman one day, another time you're playing a psychologist and you're going to play those roles as if you were swallowed up by that character. And I think there are architects that embrace this signature style. It's great for marketing. If it is a award-winning style, people want that.

53:51They almost want to collect that like it's part of your art collection. And then there are architects who just sort of do what they do. And out of that over the decades, some themes emerge. I don't know if we have that. I think some people recognize our work. We do a lot of restaurants. Some people recognize the kind of work we do there. But we're happy to say just as we have a diverse portfolio of building types, we have a diverse portfolio of aesthetic and spatial results.

54:27How does a client impact all of this kind of thinking?

Managing client relationships

54:31Or another way to talk about clients is like what would make the ideal client for you? That made me think of one of your earlier comments of clients that come to you with ideas. A lot of times they come with pictures of things they research. You know, again, the Pinterest page. You know, these are my favorite kitchens. I like the stone. Our job is to take all that in and edit and curate and try to pull themes out, kind of create a hierarchy and say, you know, we've looked at your hundreds of photos and this is what we think suits you.

55:14Because you can't literally take the ideas from all those photos. You have to kind of decipher them and say, why is she showing us this image? And it may be a picture of a master bathroom. And they're showing it not because of the style of sync, but maybe because of the way the light is coming in. And that is our sort of curation process to pull that out. They might not even know why they included this picture other than they're attracted to it. Our job is to kind of go through that and establish the themes behind this project going forward.

55:49There might be two or three themes that drive every decision we make. The fewer, the better. And every material we pick, every detail we draw will be inspired by these themes that we established at the beginning of the project with the client. Interesting. Is that harder to do when the client is a, I don't know, like a board or an organization or a company versus an individual or couples? I'm thinking of houses versus the other things you do. You're certainly right.

56:20It is usually more, it's usually easier with, with a board or a group. Really? The, the individuals, they're more, I think the difference is they're more emotionally invested. If, if you're doing a house, a family owned restaurant, I mean, there, there's all these emotions behind it. For a house, it, it might be the wife saying, you know, she always grew up, you know, ever since she was five sitting by, imagining that she would sit by a window bay reading and a sunlight coming in and all these memories.

56:54They're very powerful. And, and, you know, you put together a hundred of these, it, it's complicated to come up with a result, an architectural success story that they're looking for. You compare that to the board, which has a more professional approach to decision-making, usually not the emotions behind it. They haven't, if it's a, a university building, this board member has not been dreaming of this building since they were five years old. They have a position, they have a responsibility.

57:29If it's a good group, they know how to make decisions together. That's not always the case. Certain church groups are made up so many different personalities from professionals to, to non-professionals. That makes it a little tricky. But, but usually these larger groups, even though it's hard to make a decision, they understand their role of shepherding a project forward. And, and many of them are professionals and have been through this process, our process of design agency approvals and construction.

58:01And so they've been through that before, so they, they know how to discuss that, where a lot of times a residential, a residential client, a homeowner, is probably their, their first home that's a custom building. And maybe their only home that they would be custom building, unless they're an affluent client that's doing multiple homes. So it's a learning process for them. We're part of the education process. And I just find that it's often much more time consuming. And, and, and in terms of time, I mean, we have a client right now for a Chinese restaurant that emails or calls us at least two dozen times a day.

58:40And we have a client that we're doing a music building for, for Los Angeles City College that calls me maybe once a month to check in on the project. So just do the math there. And, and we're talking a hundred times more time handholding this restaurant client versus the big project, which is a, which is a community college building. So it really, I think that kind of, that kind of working for a board or a foundation or a C-suite is, is, is, is usually more effective, more efficient.

59:19Interesting. That's super, super interesting. Um, is there a type of project you haven't done yet that you want to?

Aspirations to design museums

59:28I think a lot of architects would say this, and I, I agree. I would love to do a museum. We've done gallery like spaces or homes with, with galleries, but, but never a museum. And, and I would think that's one of the pinnacles the architects choose. I mean, only the biggest names in our industry get to work on, on LACMA or, or the Academy Museum or any of those big names. Those are, those are big projects. Um, I don't think having a small studio necessarily takes away that opportunity.

1:00:02There are a lot of small studios, well, zoom tour for one is a very small studio and you guys know he did. He did, he recently opened up the, the new LACMA. So, yeah, that would be a great project. I don't know if it's in our future, in our near future, maybe someday. But to think about a museum as, to me, it's sort of like pure architecture. Programmatically, it's a big space. I mean, yes, there's offices, there's bathrooms, there's a shop, maybe a cafe, but the majority of it's a big space that you're shaping.

1:00:34And it's a space that contains art and light, similar to a church. You know, that, that's pretty, uh, a pretty amazing thing versus when we do a classroom building, an elementary school, a high school, and you're dealing with 40 classrooms and, and hundreds of bathrooms and a gymnasium and a cafeteria and admin wing. You know, there's all these pieces that the purity of architectural design sometimes gets a little clouded by all these programmatic requirements. That's where the museum is sort of, uh, a desirable target for a lot of architects.

1:01:09Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that is a good point. Um, oh, what was my question?

1:01:16Oh, uh, what do you think of LACMA? I, I love it. I am both impressed and disappointed because if you were part of, if you saw the iterations where the project started, the original presentation at LACMA, his original lectures, it was, it was a very different project. And, and, and, you know, the concrete was black. It was inspired by the tar pits, all the, all the roof lines, floor plates, and glass was curved.

1:01:48It was a very powerful statement. Zoom tour has talked about all the budget cuts, how he doesn't like working in America. He even said he'll never do another American building again. Oh, God. Cause it's so frustrating. We ruined it. Good job, Los Angeles. But still the result, let's say I didn't know the past and didn't follow all the iterations. The result's fantastic. It is a museum experience, unlike any, to just pop into the front door and be swallowed in art with no sense of direction or organization and just sort of meandering.

1:02:21Maybe this goes back to the, the jazz process of improvisation. You're just walking around and you're running into the 15th century Mexican pottery next to modern photography from a New York photographer. It's, it's great. And the architecture, just, even if you take out the art is amazing. You know, these weird giant cubes of space of solid concrete that have been colored floating in this amoebic shape that's the size of three football fields. It's an impressive feat of design and engineering.

1:02:54Credit goes to SOM for being the architect of record. Yeah, for sure. Well, we're already coming up on the hour. So our tradition is the final question is what is your favorite building? That's like asking your favorite child. I know. For you, it was easy because, and I'm asking favorite ice cream flavor or favorite band.

1:03:22Yeah, I, I guess if I had to pick one at the top of my head would be Mies van der Rohe's German pavilion in Barcelona. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I, I think because not just because it's an icon of minimalism, but with so few moves, he established so much, you know, with a few planes, vertical, horizontal, he was able to create the richest of space. Um, not long ago, I visited the, uh, the Farnsworth, uh, house, I mean, that, which carries on those ideas, the next level, cause it's actually someone's house.

1:04:02Yeah. They're, they're impressive structures. So I would, don't know if those are my favorite, but they would, they would be in my top 10 or top 20. Um, yeah, there's so many favorites, you know, I love to see it. Blackwood is, is fantastic. Busy concert halls. I mean, you know, that there are just so many, again, it's like picking your, your favorite pop song, you know, that could, that could go on and on. Awesome.

1:04:34Um, Anthony, this was a lot of fun. Uh, we'll, we'll probably, the, the conversation will continue for sure, but, um, this was a pleasure. It learned a lot about you actually, which was surprising. Um, really appreciate it. Sure. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thanks everyone for listening to this week's episode. If you liked what you heard, no, thanks everyone for listening to this week's episode. If you like what we're doing, then please support the show by leaving a review of us in the Apple podcast app. You can also find the show on Spotify and YouTube. So please do scribe, subscribe, comment, follow, like, rate, whatever goes on in those places.

1:05:10And, uh, we're on Instagram as well. The handle is second studio pod and that's our website, second studio pod.com. So give us a follow DM us on there, or you can send us a text message or voicemail at 213-222-6950. Uh, shoot us a text. If you have any ideas for topics or guest suggestions, we're always welcome. Much more to come soon. Thanks for listening and talk soon. Bye. Bye.