Outdoor Classroom

As teachers at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray have become cult figures in the city’s design scene. Espousing a grass-roots architecture, they have been especially popular among socially conscious students. As architects, however, they have never produced a significant body of built work.

Now, with two new projects--one under construction, the other under design--they are about to test those ideals in the real world.

In January 2000, the Pilibos School, a private school in Hollywood that serves the surrounding Armenian community, hired Mangurian and Ray to design a $2-million library and gymnasium addition. And in January of this year, the Los Angeles Unified School District awarded the team, along with the Jerde Partnership, a commission to design a new $39-million high school on a 14-acre site in Central Los Angeles, in a mostly Latino neighborhood in the shadow the 10 Freeway.

Both designs address philosophical issues that the firm has long been grappling with: How can architecture be used to shape a communal identity? What is the boundary between the individual and the collective or, by extension, between an institution and the surrounding community?

The responses, in both cases, are breakthrough designs for the firm: a blend of poetic imagery and social idealism that should broaden the scope of architectural discourse in the city. Their playful, childlike forms crystallize the firm’s faith in the imagination’s potential as a tool for communal bonding.

Mangurian’s social idealism goes back to the 1960s, when he founded Studio Works with a group of graphic artists and industrial designers in New York City. The firm was modeled as a new kind of creative commune--one that would pool a wide range of design sensibilities and encourage a more open creative discourse.

But Mangurian’s future, at least for the time being, seemed to lie in the world of academia. In 1980, he came to Los Angeles, first to teach at UCLA and then to run SCI-Arc’s graduate studies program. Many of his design classes focused on cross-disciplinary issues: the relationship between architecture and film, for instance, or architecture and fashion. They became wildly popular with students, in part because they seemed to expand on conventional notions of what architects do.

Translating those ideas into concrete forms, however, proved to be a problem. In 1984, the architect collaborated with artist James Turrell on a competition for the design of the Clos Pegase Winery building in Napa Valley. But that design--a series of light chambers embedded in a mountainside--lost out to a Postmodern design by architect Michael Graves.

A year later, record executive Gilbert Friesen hired Mangurian to design a spectacular 5,000-square-foot house in the Hollywood Hills. But that project--a collage of linear structures that seemed to slip across the steeply sloping site--was never built. That same year, Santa Monica-based Thom Mayne beat out Mangurian for a commission to design an 8,000-square-foot house in Santa Barbara--a project that eventually helped launch Mayne’s national reputation.

It is impossible to say with certainty how landing one of those three commissions would have affected Mangurian’s career. What is certain is that architects cannot develop their ideas without rigorously testing them on a human scale.

In 1987, Ray joined the firm, and things slowly began to pick up. The team completed its first major Los Angeles commission in 1994, the “Raise-Up” house in Santa Monica, in which the existing house was lifted off the ground so that a loft-like space could be built underneath. The stacked house, while conceptually interesting, turned out to look like a rather ordinary two-story structure. A more compelling project was the small Montessori School in Milwaukee, Wis., that the couple completed in 1998 on a tight budget of $1.4 million. The school’s interior was entirely sheathed in plywood, like a gigantic toy box, a model of low-cost efficiency.

None of those earlier projects, however, packs the architectural punch of the team’s current school designs. In both scale and substance, the school projects are more ambitious than any of the works the couple has completed. More important, the conceptual sophistication and artistic power of the designs make them a pivotal turning point in the firm’s creative development.

Of the two, the design for the addition to the Pilibos School is the most overtly romantic. The school’s one-acre lot, on Alexandria Avenue in Hollywood, is currently occupied by two simple, concrete-block buildings that house the classrooms. The new gym will be built at the site’s northern edge, forming the third side of a new interior courtyard. The new library will stand at the back of the courtyard, a bow-shaped form raised up on slender columns that evokes a boat in dry dock.

The effect is magical. The boat acts as a powerful metaphor for the unsteady condition of immigrant life in America. Seen from the courtyard, it is a ghostlike apparition, an alien vessel stocked with the vestiges of Armenian culture. Upon entering the library, however, a series of windows will offer carefully framed views of surrounding landmarks--the white dome of the Griffith Park Observatory, the top of Hollyhock Hill. The effect is to create a palpable tension between inner and outer worlds, between the immigrant community’s urge to protect its cultural identity and its desire to forge links with the outside world.

On a more subtle level, the design creates a number of overlapping communal zones. A row of enormous pivoting doors, for example, leads from the courtyard into the gym. The gym floor is set below ground level, so students will be able to walk from the outdoor space directly to the top of the bleachers. When the doors are closed, their translucent surfaces will glow with the activity taking place inside.

The underbelly of the raised library, meanwhile, will provide shelter from the courtyard on scorching summer afternoons. From there, an exterior stair leads to the interior of the library, whose curved walls are entirely clad in plywood panels, creating the aura of a remote sanctuary floating above the landscape. An exterior bridge connects the library to the classrooms, while a door opens onto a small rooftop garden above the gym. The idea is to create a hierarchy of public zones, to allow students to drift back and forth among a variety of communal experiences.

The same themes are explored on a much bigger scale in the design for Los Angeles Central High School No. 2. Designed in collaboration with the Jerde Partnership, the school, which is being built to accommodate an overflow of students in surrounding communities, will stand at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and Vermont Avenue. Along with 110,000 square feet of classrooms, the 3,000-student school will include an outdoor amphitheater, auditorium, playing fields, two gyms, a swimming pool and a cafeteria--all packed onto a 14-acre lot.

Like the smaller Pilibos School, Central High School’s social makeup reflects the changing demographics of L.A. Its student body is culled from a range of ethnic neighborhoods, including the largely Latino neighborhood of Pico-Union, the smaller African American/Latino community of West Adams, and Koreatown. In addition, the school probably will provide a range of community services, such as offering after-school programs and opening up athletic facilities to the public.

As in the Pilibos design, Mangurian and Ray conceived the school as a social condenser. The buildings are arranged in a series of conceptual zones, with classrooms, library and arts and science labs set along Washington, and the two gyms, swimming pool and a performance space facing Vermont. Together, the buildings will form an L that encloses a track and soccer field at the center of the site.

But the seeming simplicity of the plan masks a complex arrangement of social spaces. Students will enter the school through two passageways that cut through the classroom building and lead into a narrow internal court. From there, a grand stair leads to the library, while other passageways lead out to the playing fields in back. A large amphitheater is carved out of one end of the courtyard, facing the grand stair at the other.

Mangurian and Ray claim these outdoor spaces were inspired by the faux Roman sets used by Federico Fellini in his 1969 dreamlike study of Roman decadence, “Satyricon.” And the drawings, at least, evoke the haunting silence of an empty stage set, waiting to be occupied. The grand stairs could double as an informal stage. The angular, faceted form of the outdoor amphitheater is a place for students to hang out.

But such vaguely defined, communal spaces also evoke the ideas of another Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. The postwar Communist sought to create “enclaves of resistance,” sanctuaries of intellectual freedom that would provide the spark for revolution. Here, the idea is to create zones free from the stifling regimentation of traditional academic rigor--places where the imagination can run wild. The idea is to liberate the unconscious, to give students a sense of creative empowerment.

Those internal enclaves are woven into a rich grid of interlocking activities. The swimming pool for example, will overlook the playing fields across a softly sloping grass berm, turning an otherwise banal space into an informal gathering area. Gigantic doors open to the indoor performance hall and the outdoor amphitheater. A greenhouse will anchor one end of the soccer field. Finally, an enormous video screen is set at the corner of the site in full view of the nearby freeway. The screen will project images of the students at work and play to passing motorists.

The plan is to simultaneously reinforce distinct identities and to weave them back into a functioning community. Jocks, academics, outcasts, ethnic cliques--all are equally valued, all come together in one vibrant melting pot. Idealistic? Perhaps. But what prevents both of these designs from becoming Utopian fantasies is the architects’ deep empathy for the realities of life as a student. In each, the student’s psychological and emotional life takes center stage.

Increasingly, such themes are becoming part of the architectural mainstream. Order, systemization, control were the old catch phrases that came to dominate 20th century Modernism. In their place, Mangurian and Ray offer imagination, the unconscious and play. What they hope to inspire is the creative and emotional freedom that are the lifeblood of any creative existence.