Lorcan O’Herlihy: I’ve always admired Neutra’s work from the late 40’s to the late 50’s, that he worked with a palette of materials that were of a lighter sensibility, which in turn works better with California light.  That has always been an issue with my work.

An example was our experiments with the flooring throughout the Kline Residence. Four by eight sheets of birch plywood were used, which was a cost-effective way of handling it. They assumed at one point they could lay a floor over it.  With three coats of polyurethane to protect it, the floor lasted well for several years.

v5: It is a beautiful material.  I believe many people who are not from Southern California have a hard time picturing the bright, hard light that we have here.  You need a shadowed place to recess back into.  We also get wet, early morning days where the light is much softer.  It is interesting to find an architecture that works well with both of those extremes:  a laser-like shadow and then these soft, diffused mornings along the coast.

LOH: I agree. When you look at the quality of light that comes in these houses that I do, and some commercial projects, having a floor that is maple, birch or ash, absorbs the light so it becomes warmer.  I think one of the issues of residential work  that I seem to always have discussions with clients about is their attraction to modernism, yet their fear for the austerity of its simplicity. So, we work out a resolution. The project has the clean lines of Modernism, and also has the craft materials that deal with the quality of light, the things that make it warmer and livable.

v5: I think that your Kline Residence is a testimonial to that.  Also the quality of the hillside, the way it translates back into the body of the building.  Even though you are inside the building, there is a constant reading of the terraces of the house.

LOH: For me personally, in the conceptual stage of that project the idea was,
how do you get away from a big box?  The approach was to take a reading of the topography and bring that up into the volumes of the architecture. It was done stereo metrically, as the volumes tend to cascade down the hill as the topography did when we first drew inspiration from the site.

v5: Where did you go to school?

LOH: I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.  A number of my colleagues here were in school with me such as Eric Kahn, from Central Office of Architecture.  I graduated in 1981, then went back east to work with Kevin Roche of Roche, Dinkeloo and Associates.  I have always admired modernism, as I’ve mentioned, and Kevin had done a number of great modern buildings.  He took over Eero
Saarinen’s firm and he had designed the John Deere Building and the Ford Foundation Building.

V5: The John Deere building was a transitional building between the two firms.

LOH: It was indeed.  Saarinen did the initial one and then died of a heart attack.  When Kevin took over the firm, Kevin and John Dinkeloo became partners, eventually designing the second John Deere.  I worked two and half years for Kevin and worked on a number of projects, including the additions to the Met in New York.I also worked on a couple of high-rises, which was the nature of his projects.

In 1984 The Louvre Museum became the project that was the hot topic on the East Coast.  I submitted my portfolio and resume to I.M. Pei and got the job.  So I ended up working at I.M. Pei’s  for close to three years.

V5: So you followed the development of the project?

LOH: Yes, I started in 1984 on the Louvre, right at the early stages.  Of course given my age, I was on the lower end of the design team.

V5: How did that work? Wasn’t there a competition to get the project?

LOH: No, I believe he was awarded the project.  This was based on Francois Mitterand having seen the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and a number of other projects such as the Kennedy Library.  My understanding was that he won the project that way. I arrived there a year after he had been given the commission. In the first four months on the project, we worked on a number of drawings and schemes that showed three different solutions for the most important aspect, which was the entry.  We showed a pyramid solution, a rectilinear volume as a hat, and a dome (laughs).  His whole argument as to why he chose the pyramid was because if you take four points and bring it to one, it then takes the least amount of air space, thus obstructing less of the existing Louvre. It was interesting to be there in the early stages.

V5: You went to architecture school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. What was it like when you were there?

LOH: For me it was ideal.

V5: Was this when the canyon building projects were going on?

( At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the program in architecture was very strong in building and engineering. In the mid to early 1970s, several buildings were constructed by the students in a canyon area on a rural part of the campus. The first was a bridge-type building designed by Craig Elwood ( a sort of prototype for Art Center College of Design in Pasadena); others reflected a range of various ideas about building then in circulation, from the first Miesian building to earth-formed concrete structures)

LOH: Yes, Poly Canyon was on going. I had gone to school in Dublin, Ireland until my twelfth grade, so I had a European education which was some what unconventional. It was very different  (laughs). Actually, when I was deciding between architectural programs,I had initially hoped to go to Berkeley, but in the end I decided to go to Cal Poly because I discovered that the students there explored several projects each term.

Also in school, my weaknesses were of a technical aspect, so I felt that Cal Poly (San Luis Obispo) was very good at building a strong foundation in terms of design and engineering, which I feel is critical to architecture.

V5: That was a famous time for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.  They were testing new ideas and the canyon was being built.

LOH: We were very lucky.  In fact, about five years ago I went back to be on a jury to review the projects in the canyon along
with Fay Jones.

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The Kline Residence. Glass walls of the deck area  viewed at night.

The Kline Residence view from the upper bedroom to the Pacific.

The Kline Residence viewed from the street.

Exterior view of Delicatessen R&B from Main Street

Interior view of Delicatessen R&B

Goldhammer Residence. View  toward entry. Pencil on wax paper

Goldhammer Residence. Over all view. Pencil on wax paper

The on site General Contractor for Delicatessen R&B was Berni Lopez