This brief interview with architect Anthony J. Lumsden is the third in a series of posts based on an exhibition that I co-curated at SCI-Arc in 2005. The interview took place at his Koreatown penthouse office. Lumsden passed away a few years later at the age of 83.
The exhibition included a beautiful solid wood model and drawings of the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, designed by Lumsden for Daniel, Mann, Johnson, and Mendenhall. The plant is one of four wastewater treatment plants operated by the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation, two of which were designed by Lumsden while at DMJM. He was also responsible for the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant design near the only built large-scale residential project in LA that I know of by DMJM, the Marina City Club Condo Complex (1971-1975).
Previously I posted an interview I conducted with Cesar Pelli, who worked closely with Lumsden at DMJM, a predecessor of multinational engineering company AECOM. In a few weeks, I will post conversations with fellow Aussie-Angeleno architects Koning Eizenberg.
One early project by Lumsden and Pelli and is the Century City Medical Plaza, designed in a late Miesian style, minus the exposed or expressed vertical structure. A later project by Lumsden and Pelli is the Federal Aviation Administration’s West Coast Headquarters. For that project, they continued their experiments with “glass membrane” architecture. As critic Christopher Hawthorne noted of Lumsden in his obituary, Pelli and Lumsden “…were the first to discover the range of architectural possibilities opened up by turning a building’s mullions – the vertical elements dividing one window from the next -- to face in rather than out. By keeping the mullions virtually flush with the rest of the exterior skin, Pelli and Lumsden were able to entirely smooth over, rather than express, the structural skeleton underneath.”
This small but not insignificant glazing detail reversed what Mies van der Rohe preached about “honest” architectural details. For much of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s, Mies’ corporate tower designing acolytes worshiped at the altar of clear structural expression. Lumsden’s invention, therefore, was a significant artistic and technical breakthrough, shifting his buildings away from more pious attitudes about façade detailing and towards a more showy, sleight-of-hand approach to detailing glass curtain walls. His simple inversion was also economical, and it triggered something of a local boom in lesser quality late-modern smooth, reflective, mirrored, or black glass commercial buildings across suburban Southern California during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1968, after Pelli left for Victor Gruen Associates, Lumsden became the Director of Design at DMJM, where he remained until 1993. If Lumsden was quite prolific over that quarter-century at DMJM, his impact on the LA skyline remains somewhat unknown to the general public. After establishing his own practice in 1994, Lumsden was not able to match the reach he had achieved at DMJM, and never quite reclaimed the scale and ambition of his earlier projects. A small public library in Little Tokyo that he designed near the Caltrans building by Morphosis is certainly worth a visit. Once they are reopened to the public, you can also tour the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant and the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant. Unlike the Pacific Design Center, by his colleague Cesar Pelli, Lumsden’s equally compelling buildings in Los Angeles are undersung. Still, many of Lumsden’s buildings are very well recorded in film and television.1
Until the last decade, there was very little academic research focused on Lumsden’s work. Recently, however, historians Aaron Cayer, Sylvia Lavin, and Daniel Paul significantly enlarged the body of scholarship around Lumsden’s legacy2. Paul gave an excellent lecture in 2018 at the Architectural Association, ‘Smooth Operator: Late-Modern Mirror Glass Architecture, 1970–85,’ highlighting Lumsden’s pioneering work with glass skins.
Anthony J. Lumsden
On the Irregular
How do you define irregular architecture?
Anthony J. Lumsden (AJL): Our buildings are the result of a system of design that processes project-related information on the basis of maximizing benefits to the users of the facility. All of the projects exhibited used a process of analyzing criteria for the building to achieve the most beneficial organization.
Any aesthetic bias which would have distorted the analysis was avoided. The solutions are a posteriori. There is not an imposed a priori aesthetic inhibiting the analysis. The design configuration, section and plan locations, volumes, and adjacencies are user beneficial and the design basis communicable.
The resultant irregular massing required the development of potential aesthetic systems that could be synthesized with other analysis criteria.
On Membrane Enclosures in LA:
How did you develop your interest in glass membranes?
AJL: We have over the years developed the application of an exterior enclosure that has a variety of configurations. These membrane enclosures were physically, rationally, and architecturally radically different from the façade systems of most Los Angeles buildings.
At the time we first introduced the membrane alternative, most Los Angeles buildings followed a pseudo-bearing wall aesthetic with punched whole fenestration in masonry surfaces. 'Membrane' in this context is a surface that modifies the transition from inside to outside. Historical construction required bearing walls or columns with the surfaces occurring at such frequency that the opacity of the wall was fundamental.
Modern structure has potentially minimal visual opacity. The enclosure as a membrane, relieved of primary structural responsibility and possessing tensile properties, allows the membrane enclosure to develop a wide range of non-gravitational variations.
The Beverly Hills Hotel, Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, and Best Products projects illustrate applications of this idea.
Essence is More:
What do you mean by ‘Essence is More?’
Several of the projects introduced aesthetic systems and variations related to membrane enclosures.
Several variations on the prototype of the repetitive curved surface are exhibited here. Many of our buildings—the Beverly Hills Hotel, Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, Manufacturer's Bank, and Best presented this aesthetic in the early 1970s.
The membrane aesthetic was developed as a result of the phenomenal properties of curved reflective surfaces—an aesthetic that is so fashionable today.
The word 'phenomenal' is used in architectural terms to clarify the property of an entity that is essential to its identity.
Mies van der Rohe's statement 'less is more" can be related to phenomenal properties.
My preferred interpretation of "less is more" is "essence is more."
The communication of the essence of something is important.
Phenomenal means the essence of a distinct type.
It can be applied to the qualities of primary form, a flat plane, a curved surface, material, light or water, etc.
Architecture combining the realization of various phenomenal properties has great potential.
Some of the architectural insights identified with our designs are: repetitive curvilinear surfaces; multiple extrusion organizations; combinations of different geometries (all illustrated by the Beverly Hills Hotel); combinations of different surface geometries such as flat planes, curved planes in plan and section, and stepped surfaces (explored in Best Products); extruded organization; and repetitive curved surfaces in metal and glass (demonstrated in the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant).
An important variation in our work is the introduction of intersecting geometries on sliced surfaces expressing the sectional configuration of the surface in elevation (also developed in Best Products)
On Performance:
How do you achieve better “building performance?”
AJL: In most cases, better performance is achieved by a combination of metal and glass as used at Tillman or metal only.
'Membrane surfaces' does not mean glass alone. We used glass in some instances because its cost at that time was $4.00/sq.ft. in place. Membrane means lightweight non-gravitational enclosure.
The functional, constructional and visual implication of this lightweight enclosure indicates a radical departure for architecture. The analogy is to skin.
In Los Angeles, punched hole-bearing wall aesthetic masonry exterior surfaces have poor performance characteristics. The weight of the material adds to the structural cost, and the seismic penalties are substantial. Stone has very negative heat transmission properties.
An insulated lightweight membrane surface positively solves masonry surface deficiencies allowing for varied extrusion related to required changes in the sectional volume of a building and varied elevational massing and character.
This notion is the opposite of the idea of a building as being 'all one thing.' It is a very important architectural concept.
Historical buildings varied their elevations and massing related to function and built adjacencies allowing each elevation of the building to contribute to the public space it enclosed with other contextual structures.
Notes
Various sci-fi movies and TV shows featured Lumsden’s wastewater treatment plants, including Bio-Dome, Star Trek, The Next Generation (Donald Tillman Water Treatment Plant), and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and The Terminator (Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant.)
For further reading:
Aaron Cayer, Shaping an Urban Practice: AECOM and the Rise of Multinational Architecture Conglomerates
Sylvia Lavin, Reclaiming Plant Architecture
Daniel Paul, Westward Transitions