This interview with architects Julie Eizenberg and Hank Koning is the fifth interview in a series of posts based on an exhibition I co-curated at SCI-Arc in 2005.
A few weeks ago, I posted a conversation with former SCI-Arc Director Michael Rotondi and an essay about LA by the late Michael Sorkin.
This fall, I will be posting further interviews recorded in the spring of 2005, more LA writings by Sir Peter Cook and Charles Jencks, and the original exhibition catalog essays with a new epilogue.
I have lightly edited this interview and added a tribute at the end that I wrote for the duo to honor them on the occasion of being awarded the Australian Institute of Architecture’s Gold Medal in 2019.
You can read other tributes to Koning Eizenberg collected by Architecture Australia here and a great interview with Julie about the critical role of architecture as a social medium here.
Prologue: LAX>MEL>LAX>MEL…
Julie and Hank are probably the only two other architects on the planet who have moved back-and-forth between Melbourne, Australia, and Los Angeles, California, as much or more than I have.
Julie and Hank are possibly the only other people in Los Angeles who know where the hell the little Melbourne suburb of Carnegie is, and why in God’s name my Dad’s family ended up buying a house there, on Miller Street, after landing in rural Echuca, in a refugee camp full of fellow Eastern Europeans, picking fruit and digging ditches for a summer or two until they could save enough money to move down Melbourne.
So, if what I’m about to write here makes absolutely no sense to anybody other than them, assume that I’ve written this just for Julie and Hank, and you are just along for the ride.
Cities of Suburbs
When I was a student in Australia in the late eighties and early nineties, to soften the shock of the newness of moving to another continent at such young age, I sought out (or invented) all sorts of physical, cultural, and social connections between Melbourne, Australia, and Los Angeles, California.
Perhaps this was because I was trying to make sense of living in two places at once. Or perhaps it’s because I always felt uncomfortable in both cities. Whenever I was in Melbourne, I was longing for California, and when I was here, I missed Australia.
I think all that shuttling back-and-forth between California and Victoria during my summer and winter breaks made me pay great attention to all the mundane differences and none of the major ones. As a result, whenever I was in one place or the other, I spent a good deal of time describing similarities and likenesses to myself rather than focusing on the more glaring differences, which might have been the simpler thing to do. I thought then, as I do now, that pointing out obvious dissimilarities (language, food, and the weather) was quite a dumb way to think about cities and their cultures. So I've always preferred to try to dig around for less evident connections as a way to understand things more deeply or maybe to feel more at ease with other people, in general.
Certainly, there are many real differences between Marvellous Melbourne and La-La Land that might make them seem totally antithetical. Melbourne is a city made out of red brick and bluestone situated at the edge of the Southern Ocean. Melbourne is subjected to all sorts of violent weather systems. Los Angeles is made out of stucco and asphalt, sitting between a desert and the Pacific, making it climatically more like Barcelona than London. Melbourne has one of the most well-integrated public transit systems globally. Southern California probably has the least integrated public transportation system in North America. I read somewhere that to get from downtown Irvine to downtown Los Angeles by public transit takes nine ridiculous hours, to travel 40 miles, which is exactly about as long as I used to spend at the Esplanade (an infamous pub near the St. Kilda foreshore) on a drizzly Saturday, catching a band or four, drinking a beer or twelve and hoping to spot Nick Cave in the backroom billiards area, before moving onto dinner or a club.
Other things: Melbourne is famously a city of the mind, and LA is famously body-centric. LA is an entertainment industry town, Melbourne's largest employers are in education, scientific research, and technical services.
I could go on and on, but, on the other hand, there are many similarities too.
For instance, I have always thought that both cities sprawled so quickly in the 1950s that they produced parallel low-rise, mostly horizontal and polycentric environments. As a result, Melbourne’s suburbs, like LA’s, are often so perfectly indistinct, tacky, dull, monotonous, and repetitive that they are effortless to customize and adapt for new uses and new communities.
This is a good thing, and it is why I have a theory that new-world cities like Melbourne and Los Angeles, unlike old-world cities like Paris or Rome, are so much better suited to embracing new immigrant communities. Something about the generic nature of large chunks of both cities makes them suitable for upgrading the ordinary into the specific, making them both exemplary multicultural cities.
Los Angeles spent a good deal of its youth as a second city, always looking elsewhere for inspiration, mostly to New York, while being looked down on by San Francisco. Likewise, Melbourne has suffered from poor relationism with Sydney, another harbor city to the north, while pining for faraway London.
Furthermore, each city has a real, vital, and compelling physical ugliness, particularly in the vast peripheries around the Victorian capital and across the Southland. This rawness requires a special way of looking at buildings to find any beauty in the ordinary. At the heart of Melbourne’s thriving architecture scene is something that drives the best work in Los Angeles, too; an ability to see in the dull sublimity of the suburbs a good chance to mine the exceptional from the most mundane circumstances. This ability to transmute shit into gold, so to speak, is a trait that I think the best architects in both cities possess. If LA has Frank Gehry to thank for giving meaning to the Californian quotidian, Victoria has Peter Corrigan to look to for giving meaning to Melbourne’s notoriously Australian Ugliness.
Maybe none of that makes much sense, especially if you haven’t spent time in both cities thinking about this sort of obscure nonsense. Maybe I will return to some of these topics at another point and try to sharpen my points about these cities. In the meantime, I think it’s fair to say that there might be only two architects on the entire planet who might know what the hell I'm talking/carrying on about here anyway: Julie Eizenberg and Hank Koning.
So, without further ado, here is their interview.
On the Work
What is unique about the work you did together in the 1980s?
Koning Eizenberg (KE): Well, when you are in it, you don't know that you are doing anything clever. You just do what you do. In retrospect, the kind of stuff that we learned in the environment we were in included learning how to make casual spaces, how to work without systems—and we really became interested in the idea of the architect as builder. But we found that we couldn't balance that. We weren't prepared to play architect and developer. Many of the projects that we did back then were about finding the space between buildings, like OP12, which was two buildings on a regular lot. Even though in its mythology, Santa Monica is supposed to be all Craftsman and Spanish, it's not. It has this fabulous 5os, tacky legacy. But more importantly, everyone was trying to use the regulations easily—no one seemed to max out anything. So there are a lot of beautiful side yard spaces and in-between spaces—that's what interested us.
Arriving in LA, UCLA, and Post-Modernism
What was the transition from Melbourne to Los Angeles like?
KE: We arrived in LA in 1979, went to school at UCLA, and expected to do urban design. But we discovered that we were already well-prepared to talk about cities, having lived in Melbourne, and we didn't need to look to UCLA for that piece. The most influential design person must have been Charles Moore. We actually worked on the Bunker Hill project—as colorists. We did another competition with Charles through Urban Innovations Group. You know somebody that you can't overlook for this show is Perloff. Harvey Perloff organized that team. He had a real belief in planning. If you go back to what they were talking about for Bunker Hill, it is really a Post-Modern philosophy that was seeking urban vitality—cities as they actually grew, not as they were planned. They started to talk about simulations of casualness and collection. The ornament thing gets in the way for everybody, but it is not the key. At that point, it was actually necessary to play with it—if you added ornament, you were actually making a political statement against thoughtless Modernism.
How did Charles Jencks influence you?
KE: The other person that shouldn't be forgotten when talking about the 198os is Charles Jencks. That little book he did on California vernacular houses was really powerful—it was a witty little book [Daydream Houses of Los Angeles, 1978.] It was important because it suggested that that stuff that is important isn't just the stuff that is designed by a cadre of people who are acknowledged as designers. In every other discipline except architecture, you can trace—starting with Warhol—how the generic has been legitimized. Maybe Koolhaas does this—he gets popular culture.
LA as Context
How does your work fit into LA?
KE: LA has made it possible for us to understand that an environment doesn't have to be pretty. You start to love the empty aspects of LA—the things Ed Ruscha captured. There is a poignancy here—about neglect, about lack of ornament, lack of desire, lack of beauty. You find those places, and you drive through them, and you realize it is not what you'd call a pretty city, but it is vibrant. We love a lot about that, or we came to love it. But you know it's a very inhospitable place for someone from a more European-style city (Melbourne). When we arrived in LA, we couldn't find a store; we couldn't find people.
Practice
Tell me about the evolution of your practice.
KE: Certainly, most of our early projects were focused on dealing with the space between buildings. Many of our projects involved taking a site and treating it a little differently than what you would expect. The Hollywood Duplex was about considering the spaces between two mini-towers—our riff on Century City. They dance around each other. What we have learned, most of all is knowing what to let go of—what counts and what doesn't count. You can let go of fussy details, but you hang on to the inside-outside factor. You fight for good outdoor spaces. The biggest thing about outdoor space is that people use it in a more relaxed way than they use indoor space. You can spill things...the rule in LA is that every outdoor space starts with the car. So it's a redefinition of what a social space is. It is not defined via an ornamentation system but by what actually happens in it socially. The Standard Hotel rooftop —for instance—breaks all the rules.
Epilogue: Excelsior Koning Eizenberg Architecture!
Julie and Hank, Hank and Julie.
Together and apart, LA’s original homegrown Aussies are forceful as a team and yet uniquely matched in their compelling and effective individual approaches to changing the urban fabric, one groundbreaking project at a time.
Known for their charming outspokenness and take-no-prisoners approach to forwarding their architectural ambitions, there is no co-dependent relationship here: they are somehow inseparable and yet somehow mutually independent.
Our city is all the better for their unfailing commitment to their unique and innovative brand of architecture and urbanism.