Architect Pfeiffer reflects on adorning L.A. landmarks.

Architect Pfeiffer reflects on adorning L.A. landmarks For a man who has been living in Los Angeles just three months, architect Norman H. Pfeiffer has certainly made a tremendous impact on local history. More accurately, perhaps, he is remaking a lot of it.

A partner in the New York-based

firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Pfeiffer has led his company west to land three of Los Angeles' most prized public works projects in recent memory, namely: the $127 million Central Library expansion, masterplanning the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, including the new $35.3 million Robert O. Anderson Building, and the restoration of Los Angeles' landmark City Hall.

"We're watching the transformation of a major, major city," Pfeiffer says. "To be a practicing architect here, I've been given an opportunity to be a real part of it. I feel tremendously fortunate to be here in Los Angeles at this point in my career."

Though Pfeiffer has only recently moved from New York to Los Angeles, he is by no means unfamiliar with our city. His first foray into the Los Angeles market came during an unsuccessful 1980 campaign to plan and design the entire Bunker Hill redevelopment project downtown. Since then, Pfeiffer has found himself a frequent visitor to Los Angeles. The County Museum contract, awarded in 1981, forced him to be here almost two weeks out of every month. And now that his firm has begun in earnest on the Central Library and City Hall, Pfeiffer and his wife, Patricia Zohn -- a respected film producer in her own right -- have decided to make Los Angeles, specifically Brentwood, home for their family of four.

"This is a city with tremendous incentives for young people," the handsome 46-year-old remarks. "Any lawyer, banker or other professional who's truly interested in the dynamics of their profession would immediately see the advantages to being here, as opposed to having some caretaker job for some foundation in Connecticut. In my lifetime I have the opportunity to watch the results of our endeavors."

Born and raised in a small community just outside Seattle, Pfeiffer says his interest in architecture blossomed at the impressionable age of 12. While other boys his age were pounding baseball mits and tossing footballs, Pfeiffer was tagging along with his grandfather, a building contractor. "It was a wonderful rural experience and I lived there until finishing college," he recalls. "But after graduating, I wanted to get away, and having the choice between Harvard graduate school or Columbia, I chose Columbia because I wanted to be in New York so much. I was less interested in graduate school than I was in New York."

He stayed 25 years. It is somehow ironic that a man with such an affinity for the Big Apple has now come to Los Angeles.

"It would be a terrible mistake to imply that Los Angeles wanted to become Manhattan, or that Manhattan was the model," Pfeiffer says. "Downtown Los Angeles will probably never have anywhere near the number of people packed as closely together, simply because downtown L.A. doesn't have to. We're piling new office towers on top of old buildings in Manhattan today; there's simply no real estate left. Even though Los Angeles is developed as far as the eye can see one story up, there's still an awful lot of real estate (available)."

Though development is his professional life's blood, Pfeiffer is well aware of the political and social struggle over growth that the entire Southern California region is struggling with today. "I couldn't even begin to address how to deal with these issues," the architect offers. "Becoming a world force in the marketplace, I don't think Los Angeles can afford to have a no-growth policy or slow-growth policy. I think it's got to be the reverse.

"Is the question being posed that the city shouldn't grow any further because we cannot handle our traffic problems?" he asks. "It doesn't seem to me that this is a very logical direction to go. It's my feeling that both traffic and growth issues must be handled simultaneously."

Pfeiffer says his firm has every intention of entering the lucrative business of designing skyscrapers here in Los Angeles, but he points out that renovation of existing buildings is an important alternative to mass-scale redevelopment. His firm, in fact, is famous for its many successful renovation projects -- notably, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Copper-Hewitt Museum of New york and the Exeter Assembly Hall in Exeter, N.H.

"We began practicing architecture on existing buildings at a time when most of America was going through its urban renewal and ripping old buildings down," he explains in a soft voice. "Architects were just as guilty as everyone else for running across the country and blitzing the landscape, saying things were going to be made better by new construction. It was right at the beginning of my career and curiously enough we were doing the opposite."

Granted, most of his clients were large institutions who had impressive older structures which they wanted to enlarge. But today, with real estate values skyrocketting in places like Manhattan, expansion and renovation have become more and more common.

"Downtown Los Angeles has got to retain a fair amount of these historic buildings in order to give it the architectural variety that great cities have," he remarks from his offices inside the landmark Fine Arts Building on historic Seventh Street, downtown. "The real moving force is still economics, however. If there isn't the economic incentive to restore and maintain, individual owners are going to be hard pressed to do so."

As one of the country's premier restoration architects, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer was not a surprise selection to design the County Art Museum expansion or the Central Library project. What was something of a surprise, at least to Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, was the rather unfriendly reception both his designs received by some local architects.

A 115,200-square-foot structure merged between three existing buildings, the Robert O. Anderson Building took mild criticism for its bulk and "overbearing" design when it opened last year. While the original County Museum buildings were never considered aesthetically successful themselves, the Central Library built in 1926 by Bertram Goodhue is widely accepted as one of the premier buildings in all of Los Angeles. Hardy Holzman's library expansion design, therefore, not only received more thorough scrutiny from the local architectural community, but it also had to overcome the stigma of the Anderson Building.

"It could be that HHPA simply isn't up to measuring its talents with the Central Library's original designer's," wrote Leon Whiteson, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, in March after Pfeiffer unveiled his plan publicly for the first time.

"If that's so, and if we don't want a half-baked addition to our lovely Central Library, we should choose another architect," wrote Whiteson.

The critic went on to lead a summer-long cause celebre to get Pfeiffer's firm to redraw its design. Despite the fact that three of the four city agencies overseeing the library project liked the plans and granted their approval, local architects convinced the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission to reject the designs. For months, the library project languished while debate ensued, and the cost for altering the plans grew.

"The fiasco of the County Art Museum put Pfeiffer in a very bad position," says John Pastier, the architecture critic for the L.A. Weekly newspaper. "I've heard people say that he was wounded by that building, and that people though they could go after him on the library. I'm not sure I agree completely with that, but certainly there was a degree of guilt by association," says Pastier.

After numerous meetings and even a quiet mayoral intervention, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer has recently resubmitted a design which finally achieved a consensus. The entire project is awaiting final approval by the Los angeles City Council.

While critics couched their disapproval in subjective opinions, some observers have since suggested that the real objection was the fact that a New York firm -- and not one based in here -- was engaged to handle a long list of coveted Los Angeles projects.

"I fail to believe that those conflicts of interests motivated anyone," Pfeiffer says. "What brought these professionals (critics) together is the fact that there was no voice from the architectural community that can have some influence over the quality of development in Los Angeles. This is something that's been lacking here a long time."

Out of that new dialogue, Pfeiffer's design was scaled back. The proposed east wing added some 200,000 square feet to the library's existing 160,000 square feet of space, and it was felt the design and the scale tended to compete too much with the original Goodhew building.

"What is at stake here is an architectural problem that every major city with an important older building is going through: How do you accept the merits of an historic building -- that was never intended to get any bigger -- to allow it to live into the future?" Pfeiffer asks. "From my perspective, the original design we submitted was absolutely the right one. Does that mean that it's the only one? No. We've got the very clear indication that people would prefer we do anything to make the building appear smaller, and all we have done in re-evaluating the building is look at ways of reducing its volume."

In the end only a few changes were made. The new wing's peaked roof has been flatened out, the facade to the Grand Avenue entrance redesigned, and some of the materials to be used on the outer walls have been replaced.

That is not much, given the degree of protest. But, as Pfeiffer says, it is important that Los Angeles have a strong and active architectural community -- particularly now as the city surges into the 21st century.

Welcome to Los Angeles, Mr. Pfeiffer.