Leadership team at Frederick Fisher and Partners. Photo by Amanda Ortland © Archinect

For nearly 30 years, Frederick Fisher and Partners (FF&P) has occupied an enviable position within contemporary architecture as a design practice that takes on diverse and adventurous clients in realms that include residences, artist studios, universities, and other cultural institutions and foundations.

The Los Angeles and New York City-based practice was founded in 1981 by Frederick Fisher, the son of an architect who initially resisted pursuing a career in design himself but reconsidered after having read Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. After attending architecture graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fisher spent a few years working with Frank Gehry before launching his own practice. With the help of a skilled team, FF&P has developed an evolving architectural perspective that fuses the practicality and comfort of domestic architecture with the raw and malleable nature of artist spaces, bringing material refinement, organizational flexibility, and visual and conceptual interest to projects around the United States. 

With projects that include airy residences in California, the MoMA PS1 renovation, Princeton University’s ORFE Building, the Iovine Young Academy at USC, and the forthcoming Vassar Inn and Institute for the Liberal Arts, the practice has been able to build a broad portfolio of work that has helped the firm successfully weather multiple economic cycles.

EARLY PRACTICE

Archinect: Mr. Fisher you're from the Midwest, correct? Could you talk a little bit about your upbringing and what brought you to Los Angeles?

FF: I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I'm the son of an architect—and I intended to not become an architect—so I went to Oberlin College, just to study art and art history. And then, I read the devil's book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which was at that time, in the late '70s, radical. So much so that when I decided to go to architecture school at UCLA, we had faculty members that actually said they would rather we didn't read it because our minds weren't capable of processing those ideas, which were so undermining of traditional modernist architectural values. But to me, that book opened up the whole world of bringing art and philosophy and all the liberal arts subjects, which I loved, into architecture and to see a way to bring what I saw as a much broader range of ideas into architecture. That was the founding DNA of why I wanted to become an architect, and it was reinforced after I graduated from UCLA in hearing Frank Gehry talk. He was the first architect I talked to—and listened to—who in a very strong way involved art ideas and was literally collaborating with artists and working artists into his practice. I was fortunate to work with him for a few years at a very early point in his practice. When I joined the office there were seven people there. That was during another ebb in the economy. After a short stint there, I was fortunate enough to get a job passed onto me by a friend, which became my first house, the Caplin House. I hadn't even thought that far ahead, but that project kickstarted my career. I said, “Okay, I have one house job. I will start my own office now,” and naively thought that that's all you needed. 

Can you tell us a bit about those first few projects?

FF: I started by practicing in my garage in Venice. At the time, I was doing these collage studies trying to maintain my connection to art-making as well as the making of buildings. The Caplin House itself is really a collage of ideas about a wave-shaped roof, about the ocean nearby, and about being inside the hull of a boat, especially the living room ceiling. One of the owners grew up on a barge on the Seine river. At the time, I was interested in having more storytelling kinds of ideas built into buildings. 

There was also the Elsa Rady studio, again, a friend from the Venice art world. One of my other first jobs was to do her studio in Venice. We've always liked working with artists because there’s a very clarifying effect. I did the Elsa Studio right after I did the Caplin house. I look at the Caplin house with a lot of affection because it was my first project and it got a lot of notoriety. It was in Domus magazine when I was basically a kid. I would say it's symptomatic of an architect's first job in that it has too many ideas in it. And Elsa’s house was really an antidote for that, she's an artist and she does these exquisite, delicate porcelain pots. She was not interested in all that complexity and collage and all those ideas. She wanted a simple, beautiful space to make her art in and to live in. 

Following that, we worked with Roger Herman, whose paintings we have in the studio. Working with artists added this dimension to our outlook, reminding us that architecture is a frame for something else. It's not the subject in and of itself. So while we want to have the buildings carry a message, we realized that the people that live there, the art that's in there, the things that the architecture is meant to accomplish; those are actually the primary subjects. 

Following on, we did the Eli Broad Foundation headquarters and the LA Louver Gallery, two of our very early art world projects where we were learning how to make spaces for art through the eyes of artists and curators. I think that's one of the things that differentiates our approach to art spaces. MoMA PS1 followed on that, which we were connected to by Eric Orr, who was an artist friend in Venice.

What was the motivation for working architecturally in collage?  Is that something that you developed yourself or were you working in that manner at Gehry’s office?

FF: When I was art-making at Oberlin college—trying to decide “Do I want to be an art historian or an artist?”—collage was the media that I liked to work in. So that came from my personal vernacular. At that time that I worked in Frank's office, his work was pretty collage-like, yes, and some of those early houses—the Spiller house, a number of the unbuilt ones, the Familian house, the Wagner house—resonated with me, but it's something that I had really engaged with before I started working for Frank. But it's one of the things that when I saw Frank's work—with the collage of chain link, plywood, and studs—that really resonated with me.

You mentioned that when you attended UCLA, they didn't want you to read Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and in my mind, USC is better known as a kind of diehard modernist school in LA. What was it like to be an architecture student at UCLA during this time?

FF: It was great. I feel very lucky that I went there because it was a relatively new school at that time. I was in the third complete class to go through. When I was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, trying to figure out where I would go after getting my “useless” bachelor's degree in art and art history, I saw an article about the school in an issue of Progressive Architecture magazine. You always looked at the annual awards issue, and about half the awardees of that time were at UCLA: Coy Howard, Bob Mangurian, Craig Hodgetts, and so on. UCLA, at the time, had this young, very lively faculty, there was no orthodoxy. As you pointed out, USC really had an orthodoxy that was modernist, whereas UCLA, it was a kind of chaos.

I found some kindred souls there, there was a guy Tim Vreeland, he's still around, who worked with Lou Kahn. He was the only guy that I could talk to about history because everybody else was not interested in that. The thing I liked about the school was that there was a little bit of everything. And you could basically find somebody that you could be sympathetic with, rather than either you fit in or you don't fit in. And at that time, interestingly, that was when the internet was invented and the first computer applications were developed at UCLA with people like Bill Mitchell. I remember my computer class at UCLA was, I hate to admit it, on punch tape.

You mentioned being at Frank Gehry’s office.

FF: That was ‘78 to ‘80, yeah.

So you were working there and also moonlighting when you got the Caplin House project?

FF: Yeah. That was a moonlighting job. And then, it was kind of like, do I stay at Frank's office or do I go off on my own? And I, you know, naively thought, “Oh, I have one house job. Why not give up my full-time job and go off on my own?” That's when I left, when that job was done. You can see the influences of Frank, obviously, the exposed plywood and studs and stuff like that. There's an inescapable influence. And that's one of the reasons why I felt like I should leave, because I knew that I loved his work, I loved working for him, and I learned an incredible amount. But, I knew that if I stayed there, I would probably not find my own voice. And I thought that was a moment that I either had to just jump off and try to figure out what that was, or I could become one of his people.

And I, you know, naively thought, “Oh, I have one house job. Why not give up my full-time job and go off on my own?”

Were there people working there who, similarly to you, went off to do their own thing?

FF: Yes, if you look at the roster of people that have worked with Frank Gehry's office, it's like pretty much, you know, 80% of the people in LA worked in that office. It was kind of a rite of passage.

Yeah, that legacy is incredible. I was looking at the MoMA PS1 project preparing for this interview, and it's interesting that you mentioned this connection to making art and being interested in history because it seems like, with that project, you treated it almost archeologically. It seems like there was a lot of removal and highlighting of the old parts of the building.

FF: Part of that was influenced by the fact that we knew that artists loved this thing for what it was. We knew and had worked with people like Eric Orr, David Ireland, James Turell, and Robert Irwin, and their work was about not making objects, but about making experiences; light as an experience rather than the light falling on an object, for example. We tried to take our focus away from the building itself. There's a German art historical term, ding an sich, which means “the thing of itself.” And that term was the driving force of that project, to try to reveal the building as it is and the different textures, the different materials, the different layers of history. The opening show that Alana Heiss curated was called Rooms and she had people, almost like Gordon Matta-Clark, who were physically carving up and scraping things off the walls, painting things on the walls, and drilling holes in the walls. So the artists liked to play rough with it. That was what we wanted to embrace by not making the building too precious. 

Is there a project early on, or at any point, that you would say fundamentally transformed the way that you practiced or the way that you approached your work?

FF: MoMA PS1 was very transformational. Joe actually went to New York and lived there for a period of time to pull that off. It was a challenge for us because it's a city-run project. It was a challenge for the city, for the contractor, for us being out here. This is back in the days when your communication was telephone calls and faxes. And yet PS1 is globally recognized as an art space. To work with a visionary like Alana Heiss and to try to figure out this new way of renovating a building that nobody was really used to or comfortable with, that was pretty transformational. Besides Alana, we got to work with the curators, and we would ask every artist friend that she knew for their opinion, so we were engaged with the art world in a totally different way for that project.

INSTITUTIONAL PROJECTS 

It's an interesting juxtaposition with the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum extension that you are doing now. It seems like these two projects are very different conceptually. 

Joe Coriaty: It's interesting because PS1 happened right after we did the Broad Foundation and both of those were going into buildings that were really horrific in what had happened to them after their original use, so we were peeling things back. Whereas the Natural History Museum is actually an addition to a rather big building that's had, I don't know, half a dozen additions and odd things done to it over the years. There is not a lot of significant need for change because it was about the connection to the park and adding a new entry and a multipurpose theater. For us, it was really a matter of how do you create something on this corner that was going to be adjacent to the lovely new Lucas building?

I don't remember if the Olympics had been announced yet at that time, but Expo Park was getting a lot of mojo. It was really in the interview that we developed this idea of another glowy box on the corner, asking how was it gonna wrap around and draw people into that spot and then pull people along to the original entry, which we're still trying to respect. By making the building really reductive and simple, but a nice element that welcomed you in, we got the project. 

Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, we started to do more buildings that were less about an assemblage of things and more about making our own from-scratch loft buildings. And this is maybe the most recent evolution of that because that's what a lot of the spaces in the Natural History Museum are in the newer buildings. 

FF: There was another real key turning point for us when we started working at Princeton around 2005. We had to compete for the job, which, you know, there's some pretty good architects on the East coast, but we won the commission for the Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) building. It became the beginning of a major strain in our practice, which is academic work. We really hadn't done much of it before that point, and the key question in an interview is “how many of these have you done before?” Well, none, but you try to show them how you think, and one of the things we like about working in the academic realm is that they're thinkers and they respond to ideas, but they also have a legacy. And we believe that what we do is a serious long-term contribution to their environments, so working on campuses like Princeton is something we take very seriously and find very rewarding. The powers that be are very receptive to enduring ideas. 

And at the same time, they were building Whitman College by Demetri Porphyrios, which was a fantastically expensive, beautiful Gothic Revival project. And they were building Frank Gehry’s Lewis Library. They asked, "can we possibly do a building around here that isn’t super expensive?" And we did. And the client, at the end of the job, actually said something that I've never heard from another client. He said, “You know, you could have spent a little bit more money,” but I said, you know, “This is our value system. You said what you wanted, and this is what we gave you. So we actually took you seriously.” That kind of rare sophistication and simplicity, I think occurred a couple of times in our practice: with Elsa Rady and her studio at the very beginning, contrasting that with the over-complexity of the Caplin House. And then again, with Princeton, where we asked can we put a building on Princeton's campus that's of Princeton’s stature and quality, and yet is reasonably priced and very flexible and makes a clear statement about the philosophy of that discipline?

JC: I think the point is that none of these projects are just a spot in time, but there's this kind of constant back and forth. Although this was an early collaboration in an interdisciplinary study building, a lot of the elements that would have been in an art studio or were in the renovation for the Broad building or in some early workspaces that ultimately led to that project. And ORFE eventually led to the Caltech Walter and Leonore Annenberg Center for Information Science Technology project. And then those studies in glass and transparency got us onto another whole thing at Colby College where we did a masonry building in 1995, and then the glass building 15 years later. So, it's interesting how the art, the studio, and then the gallery type spaces, which were adaptive reuse, and then the little workspaces and the residential work, how they fit together to make these places that had a kind of simple, raw, light quality to them.

Thinking about the educational buildings, the Iovine Young Academy building at USC, I feel like is really interesting to this conversation because it's super different from your other work. Can you talk about that project? It seems like the inside and the outside of the building, to say the least, contrast one another.

FF: [laughs] I could start with saying two words, “Max Nikias,” the President of USC, had a very firm vision about what USC should be architecturally. He's a scientist, he's not an architectural historian, but he wanted to put USC in the same league as Oxford and Cambridge. And he wanted to give it, in his own words, “an instant 300 years of history.” And so under his regime—as you know, the USC campus has great modernist buildings, Quincy Jones, Killingsworth, Pereira, and so on—but he wanted to dial it back and make it feel like it was in England or in Boston. 

We had some soul searching when we found out we got this project. Can we work in this environment? We felt that this building was going to be built by somebody and that we could do a better job on it as a collaborative maker-space that would somehow demonstrate the values that Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre had better than anybody else, but also, we knew it was going to be made out of brick.

Marisa Kurtzman: I think what really appealed to us about this project is not so much what's going on outside, but what was going to be happening inside, which was this fledgling academy that was highly interdisciplinary, combining students interested in business, design, art, and communications. Essentially, they call this a degree in disruption. This is a highly curated group of roughly 25 students per year, essentially, they're training baby Steve Jobs's to change the world in ways that hadn't even been invented yet. So that, to us, was really exciting. We went through a fairly extensive visioning, programming, and planning process that involved not only Dean Erica Muhl, but also faculty and students. 

This is a highly curated group of roughly 25 students per year, essentially, they're training baby Steve Jobs's to change the world in ways that hadn't even been invented yet

We try to create projects that are really by, for, and about our clients, so the end result is really what's happening inside this building, which is, again, this very raw factory-like space where, much like artists could play rough with PS1, students can play rough with the interior. They are encouraged to write on the walls in this type of environment, the space is highly flexible and full of different kinds of maker spaces ranging from traditional kinds of wood and metal shops to digital, virtual, and all of that. The client was also trying to create an incubator space for young alumni who wanted to come back. 

FF: There was an interesting duality about the idea of a Collegiate Gothic factory. A lot of the 19th-century Victorian industrial buildings were Gothic style. That inspired us to do something that in spirit had a maker-y, industrial DNA to it, while still feeling like it belonged to Max Nikias’s vision of the campus and yet when you're in it, felt like a downtown loft. That idea is what resonated with Erica, and when we interviewed for the project, the thing that struck them was PS1. They looked at that, looked at some of the renovations we had done, and they loved the idea of “one of those brick warehouses downtown.” So that's basically what we gave them. You walk in the front door and you're in an industrial space: Full-on exposed concrete floors, exposed structure, ductwork everywhere. It immediately feels like a building that you can play rough with and it has a spirit of throwing off the preciousness of academia and having a space where you can really roll up your sleeves and be disruptive in, as they say. 

Joe Coriaty: It's really a nice diagram. The main part of the building, which is wedged between Exposition Boulevard and the USC School of Architecture next door, also has a boxy, loft-like Albert Kahn building vibe. We were referencing that, and then there’s a piece containing the entry that follows Exposition Boulevard that we decorated and made the most Gothic part of the complex. We can say now that we worked in a way that got everybody what they wanted. I think President Nikias saw just enough and worked through Jon Soffa, the university architect, to be happy with it. We went back and forth. It worked out to be a really nice balance.

And how did your team approach designing the envelope of the building? Was it really that USC just told you what it had to be, or did you do a lot of studies to figure that out with the client team? 

FF: We teamed with HED, the firm that had done The USC Village because there is a designer at HED, Michael Bulander, who basically invented the Max Nikias-approved version of Collegiate Gothic for the USC Village project; He’s a very good designer and really great to work with. And we thought, if we're going to stand a chance of doing this, we're going to have to find our way into this DNA, so we collaborated with him. Michael and I were sort of the exterior designers and we worked together;  It was a real collaboration. I think the successful collaborations are when you can't separate who did what. I was a kind of clarifying and editing voice, trying to make it more industrial and more kind of strict “Albert Kahn” and then he would add the Gothic elements of it that we all knew what we would need for a gateway building.

You must often work with university architects on your educational projects; Can you share a little bit about that relationship? Is it that they're more like an executive architect and you're the design architect, or how does that division break down in terms of the project roles?

JC: I hate to cop-out, but they're all different. There are some universities that have very strong campus architects, like Jon Soffa at USC or Ron McCoy at Princeton. They are deeply aware of the legacy of their campuses and yet they are also appreciative of the fact that you can do a Frank Gehry building at Princeton and it can fit in and its own way. Or you can do an Anthony Hopkins science building, they're very sophisticated people and they are a real pleasure to work with because they wouldn't hire you if they didn't want what you do. And I always felt like it was a kind of co-learning: we learned by working with them, and they were clearly curious and interested in our outlook, which is very different than other firms. We bring an outlook and yet they have their values too, and it's a dialogue at its best and we just value the time that we can spend with them. 

It seems like universities are continually expanding, do you take that perspective into consideration when you're designing on campuses? Do you design these buildings to potentially be expanded or gut renovated in 20 or 30 years? 

JC: I think the thing that's been really interesting is we've always considered trying not to design ourselves into a corner. At Colby College, where we added three buildings, and we made sure that we planned really carefully. The building at Caltech was very similar. They had actually asked us to put in a building with a basement, and we figured out a way of doing it on three stories in order to preserve more of the site. At USC, instead of using up the whole site, we made it one story taller, preserving a spot for the next building.

The Princeton and the Caltech buildings, they're simple, dumb boxes meant to be almost like a spec office building that could change while keeping the circulation and the restrooms and flexible spots, and the for rest of it, they can come in and make some renovation in the future. We were conscious about that in both of those projects, which had to be built at such low budgets, so Marisa and the programming team here figured out how to make it work so there would be future flexibility. 

FF: It's a sustainable principle from Ten Shades of Green by Peter Buchanan, where one of the principles of sustainability is flexibility. They call it “long life, loose fit.” So, rather than designing buildings that are so highly customized that they can't change efficiently, you design something that’s like a pair of overalls. It's going to have a lifetime fit. It's going to be comfortable. You're going to be able to change it and move around in it. And that's kind of our philosophy about the building, that we know and live it. We know that they're going to have their life through generations, and particularly academic buildings, they build for the long run. We have really embraced that, and we build in for change and we consider that a sustainable principle. 

It's going to have a lifetime fit. It's going to be comfortable. You're going to be able to change it and move around in it

You mentioned that programming has become a bigger part of your business. What does that mean and how does it impact the practice?

MK: Even in my tenure as an architect of about 15 years, we've noticed that just about every institutional project that comes through our office, whether it's a straight-up master plan or a building, requires some kind of visioning, programming, and planning process. That is something that I've always been very interested in. Like Fred, I came out of a liberal arts background. So the idea of critical and analytical thinking very much defines my approach to architecture. I love working with our clients at the beginning of the process because they often have some sense of what they would like, but it's very difficult for them to articulate the specifics of that. I will help lead a series of workshops where we get together and conduct mostly interactive activities that help them articulate not just what they want in terms of space, but who they are as an institution with a specific identity, a mission, and goals.

And then we work together to help define the set of spaces that are going to help them support their mission and goals. For example, if you're going to teach science, like at our project at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, science education at the high school level usually includes some kind of seminar-based discussion, but also labs. If you choose to separate those facilities, then that's going to create one kind of pedagogy and teaching style versus if you combine them. I'm always really interested in looking for those moments of overlap where a lot of, especially in academic work but really more and more almost every institutional project, the idea of that collaboration, that interdisciplinarity, that spontaneous encounter that everybody really wants to help encourage comes up. Where those kinds of spaces occur a lot of times is not in the highfalutin spaces, it's in the break rooms, it's in the hallways, it's in those kinds of spaces that we really try to take a more creative qualitative look at so that the conversation is not just, “this is what it is, and this is how much square footage it needs to be.”

Then, I will work with our designers, sometimes Taka being one of them, to really help understand what is the big concept for all of us once we've kind of figured out the specifics from the inside out and the outside in and how can we synthesize those things into a concept that really has legs for the long term, that can be a guiding North star for design decisions as they go from that very big picture perspective through schematic design, design development, and down to detailing. I would hope that those kinds of design decisions all along the way can harken back to those big ideas. I find it really gratifying. It's funny, I'm not on projects for all that long. I tend to work on a project maybe for six months, but I'll come back, you know, two or three years later for the opening and I know an awful lot has gone on, but it's amazing how often I will go and see like, “Oh yeah, that's how we envisioned it back then,” and I feel like that's a very gratifying moment for me that feels like we've done our job right.

And who are the people that you're meeting with at the beginning stage? Is it like the people teaching there? Is it like the janitor? 

MK: Both. It can really range. We've done working groups with as few as four people who aren't more than the leadership level up to 40 people, including a mix of faculty, students, and staff, the janitor, to get that overall, coherent user perspective. I think the more people we can talk to, frankly, the better it is, because then we can give everybody what they need. Part of the challenge of a lot of these projects is building consensus among those different users who may come at it from very different spatial needs. Part of our work together is creating that dialogue so that people hear each other. They listen to each other, start to understand that, yes, you may have to give up some aspect of your laundry list of things that you want, but you're going to get about 90% of what you want as well as a building that creates harmony within your community

And has the programming focus gone beyond your educational projects?

MK: Yeah, we've done visioning programming and planning for the Natural History Museum, which started a programming project. We did it for Colby College. We did it for the Santa Monica City Hall East, Crossroads, the Beach House, the Iovine and Young Academy, the Otis College campus expansion, Princeton University Firestone Library, Caltech, the Annenberg Center, and for the Vassar Institute. And also for 72 & Sunny, our creative workspace in New York. So we’re really starting to touch on a whole range of genres. I think it's a universal process figuring out who you are, what you want, what makes you tick, and how your working environment or your living environment or your playing environment can support that. It’s something that I think just makes the project’s ultimate design that much richer.

Definitely. And like with the Natural History Museum, are there other instances where you are hired to do the programming and then it turns out that they need a building or maybe they hire you to do a building and it turns out they don't need a building. They just need to reprogram, etc? 

MK: Yeah, we offer it as an independent service sometimes, with the Princeton Art Museum, for example, which is obviously being designed by David Adjaye, but we hope that he took our bones. We’ll see if our ideas stuck. So yes, we do that service independently on occasion.

JC: Speaking of programming, a lot of what we do references the residential work. So we use the word “domesticity” a lot,  as I sit here and look at Caltech, Princeton, every one of these projects, the signature collaboration spaces, they, to me, they look like, the Kobena could be in one of those spaces or Looker's living room or, you know, Rob McGuire's house. It's interesting, the boundaries and how blurry they are., 

FF: I think it’s because it is, in a way, where I started and it's still an important part of the practice. In terms of refreshing our connection to, first of all, the intimate relationships of a domestic project, and often, the ability to fine-tune it as an object to a higher degree than an institutional building and those values, those of intimacy and of everyday life. 

DR: I would agree with what Fred and Joe just said, when I started here many, many years ago, the projects were smaller and more intimate, and there's a couple that I was thinking about that changed my life and how I practice. One was a loft that we did, called the Vena-Mondt loft, with the artist Eric Orr. And that whole exercise and the process of making that building really opened another chapter in my life. How can we see the world and how people might live? And that was in the early eighties when the idea of living in a loft was kind of unique in Los Angeles. It opened my eyes to how someone could possibly live. 

And then Roger Herman's house, he came to us and said, I want 5,000 square feet, but I only have $150,000. We built a house at $30 a square foot. When I think about how that was done, it's kind of remarkable; It's still one of my favorite houses. It's cheap space, great light, and great volume. I do think that domesticity is something that influences all our work. When we do a workspace, it's this idea of imagining working from home and not just going to the office and having a job. We try to integrate that idea of home in a lot of the things that we do, whether it's within materials, within the context of this site, within size. 

We did a 320-square-foot house up in Occidental, California for an artist; she was a person for whom we had done years previously a 5,000-square-foot loft. And she said, “For the next chapter in my life, I want to go from 5,000 square feet to 300 square feet.” And we thought she was crazy. But it turns out it's a wonderful house, and it's on 20 acres. The loft was only 5,000 square feet with no land. So that duality, you know, is powerful. And clients who come back, we learn from each other constantly, I would say. I do a lot of the residences and I love that, the intimacy of it, the listening that one has to do, and some really personal listening to a client, it's helped me to listen. I think that's what we do here: we listen and we provide what others really want.

SURVIVING RECESSIONS 

Your practice has been around for over 30 years, and you talked a little bit in the beginning about how when you started at Gehry’s office, it was during a downturn in the economy. And this office, you said, is designed to absorb different economic conditions-- Can you share about how you've made it through the different cycles and what it's been like to live through and work through different economic cycles?

FF: I think the diversity of our work has been something that has sustained us during those times. There have been times when the institutional world collapsed or the commercial world collapsed, the residential world collapsed. The fact that we are doing all of those kinds of works meant that at every time, even when there were really bad times, we had certain kinds of work that were sustaining us. That was, in a way, an unintended consequence of our desire and our interest to work in a variety of project typologies. We are explicitly not specialists. If anything, we've done quite a number of art spaces. We're very good at it, but we are always curious about doing new things but we've had some great opportunities. 

The fact that we are doing all of those kinds of works meant that at every time, even when there were really bad times, we had certain kinds of work that were sustaining us

When we interviewed for the Princeton Firestone Library, they asked us, “How many libraries have you done?” Well, none. We worked on a planning project in China for a wholesale produce market: “How many wholesale produce markets have you done?” Well, including this one, one. So, we have great curiosity and we think that bringing in that outsider's mentality of “No, we haven't done one before, but we have a way of thinking that can add something to it,” has given us room to breathe intellectually and creatively, and design-wise in that we're always attacking new problems, but in a way as a mercenary strategy, it's actually worked out pretty well.

What got you through the Great Recession? What was going on in the office then and how did you make it through that difficult period?

JC: We had a couple of pretty solid projects. We were probably at about 24 people, I think we did contract a little bit in late 2008 and then early 2009. Many of those people we stayed in touch with and they came back within the year. At that time, we weren't doing any developer commercial work, but we were super steady and efficient. I think we had a couple of good residences at that time as well.

FF: We've had a very long and strong relationship with the Annenberg Foundation and those kinds of client relationships—Princeton, the Annenberg foundation—they're going to do their work whatever's going on. So some of those institutional relationships have sustained us at times when other sectors of the economy really were marginalized. 

NEW PARTNERS

FF&P is entering a different phase of its growth with the new partners you’ve elevated, where is your practice going over the next five years? 

FF: I think the conscious decision was do we just practice until we're tired and we quit and turn the lights out, or have we built something that has a value as a legacy? We thought the latter, and we thought carefully about the people that had been working with us and their contributions, and the different contributions to have yet to make. And we thought that there could be chemistry among those people, like the chemistry between Joe, David, and me. We created something that has value and it has created things that have enduring value. As a practice that strives to build projects that have a legacy to us, it made sense that we should build a legacy for ourselves. 

As a practice that strives to build projects that have a legacy to us, it made sense that we should build a legacy for ourselves

Takashige Ikawa: Each of us is very different, we have been here over 10 years, and we share the same values that Fred, Joe, and David established, we all believe in that. I think the four of us kind of sustain and develop from there.

Marisa Kurtzman: There are four new, “next-generation” partners: myself, Taka, Nathan Prevendar, and Matt Kelley, who is our partner in New York. Early on in this process, I attended an AIA|LA seminar about 20th versus 21st-century leadership, which still resonates with me. It talked about the idea that the 20th-century leader of an architecture firm was a type of Superman and it was a singular person, and yes, it was a man and they knew all, could do it all, were all and everything for the project, for the firm. Whereas a 21st-century leader, they described as a network, a circle with different people contributing different ideas, perspectives, and skills. Maybe singularly, they aren't going to be able to sustain full office leadership, but in totality, they could really create an enriched and cohesive perspective. Taka, Matt, Nathan, and I have worked together on many projects over the years, with Taka and Matt leading design efforts, myself handling visioning, programming, and planning, and Nathan and Matt seeing projects through from the first phases into design and through construction. We each have different sets of skills and values that we bring, but I think we all work together really well. And, you know, we like each other too, but I think also seeing our senior leadership, Fred, Joe, and David, and how unique they are as individuals and as architects and designers and how they've managed to form that partnership has been a model for us. The seven of us, I think, share those values, and we hope to both continue those values into the future, but also to add our own spin on things as we move forward.

The seven of us, I think, share those values, and we hope to both continue those values into the future, but also to add our own spin on things as we move forward

And how do you approach that? It’s one thing to build something up from the beginning, while your task is one of stewarding, keeping it going. How do you approach that role? 

MK: We're still in the early stages of our transition. I feel incredibly lucky because I didn't have to do what Fred did, which is just kind of go off on my own and try to hack it by myself. Frankly, that's what most people do when they start their firm. And, you know, maybe they're lucky to design a closet somewhere.

So not only do we get to work on really incredible projects and have access to that kind of work relatively early on in our career. Collectively, we've all started to think about how this practice is going to be run now and in the future. Together we have divided our practice into really six practice areas, design; marketing, business development, and PR; human resource; operations and IT; project management; and finance. Each of us is responsible for two of those, so we get to overlap a lot. For example, I'm with Fred handling marketing and Business Development and PR, but I'm also with David handling HR. David is handling design with Taka and Matt, you see how it goes. We are just starting to develop this interconnected management process of running this firm. It's been really illuminating to see how all of these different aspects of running a practice connect.

And are you all licensed architects?

MK: Not yet. Matt and I are both licensed and Nathan and Taka are both working on it.

I was just curious because other firms—BIG, for example, where Bjarke Ingels is the “creative director,” but the firm is led by a CEO, Sheela Maini Søgaard—have taken on alternative management structures, so I wasn't sure if you were adopting that kind of system.

MK: Recently, Joe has taken on the role of Managing Partner. 

JC: As we've grown a little bit and now have the office in New York, this ownership transition came up. We started to think about maybe being a little bit less organic and be a little bit more organized. So, the six practice areas grew out of that. Nathan and I attended a design colloquium that Mark Cameron runs in San Francisco last year, and this issue of “what does a 21st-century design firm look like?” came up. It's less pyramidal and trying to think about how we might create in a way that it's more of a committee with a voice. And I'd say we're right in the middle of doing that right now.

We spent a significant amount of resources last year thinking about what we're calling “employee success” instead of HR, and what it means in this day and age to give everybody else that works in the office a voice and some authorship, so they are vested. We are trying to figure that out, but thinking about what doing business within these institutional clients entails, It's less about a new corporate regime that makes us go in a certain way. I think, for the most part, the evolution has been pretty healthy.

You’ve said that the three of you—Fred, David, and Joe—have very different personalities and “styles of work.” How have those complementary approaches informed your decisions to elevate the new partners?

FF: David was basically the first employee I had. I was interviewing people and it's one of these situations where there was, to me, this intangible chemistry immediately, I felt really comfortable. I could see his design skills and the way I thought, the way he made me comfortable is the way I felt like I wanted to try to make the people that work with me feel comfortable. At that time I was mostly doing residential work and that's essential in that field: being able to build and maintain relationships with often very challenging people and couples. You know, I think it's one of the most difficult parts of architecture. David has an amazing ability with people. I couldn't have built a practice beyond being the sole practitioner without David having been a real architect, he had more experience as an architect than I did. And at the same time, being able to work with people and his own skillset as a designer. As we started to doing larger work and working with tougher, larger institutional clients, we met Joe, who came from a background of bigger work, and we knew that we needed that kind of horsepower in terms of construction management and the ability to be in the face of some very tough people and stand our ground, and yet know enough to back it up. Yet at the same time, David and Joe and I are all Midwesterners, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. I think we also shared a very fundamental straightforwardness and practicality and sense of honor in this profession, and that I think where are the similarities that made us very comfortable working together. 

DR: I think part of our success is we really respect one another and we trust one another and we're really honest with one another. People ask me sometimes like, “how have you guys been together forever? How does that happen?” In any relationship, those things I just mentioned are important, and I think we apply them to ourselves. I often tell the story of Fred. One day I came to him, this was like 15, 20 years ago, and I said, “I'm really mad at you.” And he looks at me and he goes, “I'm mad at you!” And then, we laughed. I don't even remember what I was mad at, but we talked about it, and that idea of communicating with one another and being honest and being transparent, that is just really, really important.

It really is about communicating and loving one another. I love these guys. And I think for the next-gen, it was the same thing: We trust them, they're talented, they're honest, they're humorous. In a way, you don't want to pick yourself, but there are qualities that these people have that make us just trust them, you know? And when Fred says he wants a legacy firm, how do you do that? I would say that goes beyond us here and everyone out there, and includes all our clients, it's that same relationship with them that I think contributes to our success.

JC: Four or five months ago, I was down in Long Beach where I was giving a talk for work we had done at the Long Beach Museum of Art and somebody asked me who my favorite architect was, and it was like I was possessed, I said, “Fred Fisher.” [Laugher] And I thought later as I'm driving home, “Well, that's kind of a weird answer because that's where you work…” And then that made me think, the references to the domestic work, and how David has this sensibility and softness that is perfect for those projects. In the years since 1987, I've only worked on three residences because I just don't have it in me to do that, so for me, it’s David’s sensitivity, the ideas that Fred brings in, and the fact that Los Angeles is such a changing environment, those are the things that made me say that. The question now is “how do we stay young?” And that's the whole point of, I think, the other four partners, it’s what I'm getting from them, to learn at a different level than I otherwise wouldn't be exposed to.