Designing California
Joe Deegan Day ’85 says his interest in architecture likely dates to drawings of custom vans
and skate ramps in grade school, but it sharpened into a hunger at Cate, where faculty member Patrick Collins gave him Tom Wolfe’s From Our House to Bauhaus for summer reading and humored his “glacially slow” tracing of Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotunda for an art class. Day says he started to find the hidden ratios in that design, but also had the luxury of imagining a life of drawing and building, rather than selling or trading or arguing over things.
After Cate he headed to Yale and studied architecture and political science. Desperate to get
back to Los Angeles, Day chose the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) for
grad school. Day calls SCI-Arc a vanguard, independent alternative to the Ivies and UCs. that
“design-wise runs circles around the more established schools.” He finished his Masters
degree in 1995 and since then has taught there as well as brief stints at Yale, UCLA and Otis.
While in school and just after, Day worked for several architects and firms. Some were pretty
cutting-edge, including Frank Israel and Dagmar Richter but he also worked for historicists
like Robert Stern and Marc Appleton, who recently rebuilt the San Ysidro Ranch and the
Biltmore in Montecito. From the latter he learned to appreciate the indoor/outdoor genius of
Mediterranean architecture – but also concluded, “emphatically”, that period architecture
would not be Day's calling.
Day also joined some friends in a design collective called HEDGE, and started to write “more
than I ever planned to” – essays on urbanism, art and architecture, an introduction to Reyner
Banham’s seminal Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies, and his own book,
Corrections & Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime (Routledge, 2012), on museums
and prisons. The heart of his work though is houses and other projects by his practice,
deegan-day design, located in Silverlake neighborhood of LA. He answered several questions
about Californian architecture for the Bulletin, though he warned us he might be “a hostile
witness” at times because he thinks Californians spend too much time “basking in the golden
past, when the strength of the state has always been its orientation toward the future.”
Even for a relatively “young” state, California is home a huge range of architectural styles. Consider everything from an L.A. ranch house, to a San Francisco Victorian, to a Santa Barbara’s Spanish colonial style. Is there any one thing that defines California architecture?
California’s architectural history is easiest to grasp as a meeting of West and East, with some
important inflections from the south. On the one hand, California hosts a culmination of many European styles – Victorian and Mediterranean, for sure, but also the Modern. Most of the earliest and best modernist homes
in the US, by Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and (especially) Rudolph Schindler, were
built in L.A. decades before MoMA devoted shows Europe’s new “International Style,” billed
then as “soon to reach our shores.” The western march of progress had already happened -
and bypassed New England. This century-old conceit is still not commonly acknowledged at
eastern schools.
But the more provocative and dynamic influence on California architecture – largely because
it involves so much more misunderstanding and extrapolation — is Asian, especially
Japanese building traditions. I co-curated a show of 40 recent houses by LA and Tokyo
architects a few years ago, and friends and colleagues begged to be included. It turned out
nearly every designer I know in LA has specific, carefully considered interests in Japanese
architecture and culture, historical or contemporary.
Do you have a favorite style, and if so why?
Architects tend to bristle at the idea of style – everybody would prefer to think they instead
have a “voice” or point of view and look for that in the work of others. I am, however, a fan of
what I’d term California’s “Empire Style.”
Between 1925 and 1975, California pioneered mid-century Modernism, which has broad and
general echoes everywhere – LA was in that half-century the city of the future. I’m interested
in the more banal, local manifestations of that prowess: the banks and towers, the airports
and schools, even the tract developments, that have become templates for the good, fast life
the world over. Many are ugly and overbearing, or kitsch – the Theme Building at LAX, for
example – but this muscular style is the residue of epic, maybe even delusional, optimism.
The world still needs more of that.
Should seeing Hearst Castle be on everyone’s bucket list?
It’s still on mine… I’d go more to see a major project by Julia Morgan, an amazingly early,
gifted and prolific woman in a boy’s club of a profession, than for the architectural novelty of
the place, though I’d also look for the walk-in fireplace where Orson Wells shot the “Rosebud”
scene in Citizen Kane.
If you had to pick one California Mission to see, which would you recommend?
The Voyager Mission, imagined, built and monitored from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory just
west of Pasadena. I’m not a fan of the historical missions. They feel like adobe plantations to
me, with an overlay of Catholic mysticism and coercion that reminds me uncomfortably of my
Italian-Irish roots. (Cate saved me from the Jesuits – my mother hoped I’d go to Loyola…)
Actually, there is some good religious architecture in California, even for Catholics. The
cathedrals in San Francisco and Los Angeles are both well-wrought concrete structures,
especially the former, in which square walls rise and inflect to a 100’ cruciform vault… worth a
visit after one to the nearby de Young Museum by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron.
Even more to my taste is Wright’s Wayfarer Chapel in Palos Verdes and James Hubbell’s
tiny, snail-like one in Sea Ranch, both light but bold experiments in meditative space.
Is there a “famous” California building you hate?
The Los Angeles County Jail and Pelican Bay State Prison – the gaping mouth and darkest
corner, respectively, of our state’s gargantuan ecosystem of punishment.
Is there an underappreciated California architect or style you think we should know about?
My generation, especially my most digitally renegade contemporaries: Hernan Diaz-Alonso,
Marcelo Spina, Florencia Pita, Jason Payne and Greg Lynn, a mentor to all of those. These
designers came of age after drafting boards had become screens, and after the fixities of
Euclidian geometry gave way to saddles and parabolic surfaces borrowed from aerospace
design and Pixar.
Between 1995 and 2015 a revolution overturned my discipline, but the new design methods
enabled by advanced computation are just beginning to revamp the profession. That divide,
between discourse and practice, has seldom yawned as wide as it did through the early years
of digital exploration, but now the gap between visualization and realization is closing. I feel
lucky to have entered my field when I did – it’s been a fireworks show since the ‘90s.
What do people want to see in architectural design now?
People want to see more ecologically-attuned and more expeditious (cheaper, faster)
buildings, as illustrated in dwell and similar magazines. Which is great, in so far as it has
made a general public more aware of environmental issues and more open to contemporary
design, but it’s also proved limiting in its emphasis on “better boxes.” There’s far more
evocative, daring work going on, but those projects require risk-taking that few clients, or
even patrons, have mustered yet. (I’m a fan of The Broad, for example, a new museum in LA
enshrouded in a sponge-like Veil of precast concrete vortices, but for some of my more
radical colleagues, it’s too orthogonal and thus “static” overall to be truly daring, especially
seated next to Frank Gehry’s gyroscopic Disney Concert Hall.)
I think there’s a fascinating, even useful gap between what people want from architecture
right now, and what’s being explored at the horizons of the field. As with so many of the
avant-garde movements that Patrick Collins introduced me to in his art history class, what’s
uncomfortably new today will likely be commonplace in a decade or two.
