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Barton Myers

Principal, Barton Myers Associates

Beverly Hills

Specialty: Public, private, entertainment and institutional work

Notable project: Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts

“Architects are in many ways like film directors,” says Barton Myers. “Good architects need not only a really talented staff and associates, but are also very dependent on other input to make these things work.”

Since founding his architectural and planning firm in Toronto in 1975, then his L.A. office in the early ’80s, Myers has personally directed each design project his firm has undertaken. As a result, his stamp has been put on such dissimilar projects as the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts and the 120-acre Cerritos Town Center master plan, the Wang Tower, UCLA’s Commons Building and Student Residences, and Ivan Reitman Productions’ studio on the Universal Studios lot.

Myers is now designing a new post-production facility for Reitman in Carpenteria, which he says will be among the first of several new entertainment facilities in the Santa Barbara area.

Outside L.A., his design of the $90 million New Jersey Performing Arts Center last October earned him several awards, including one from the Business Journal. Of that project he says, “It was the mother of all miracles to pull this off in New Jersey, and the first time in history that a West Coast architect and all-West Coast design team has ever won a cultural project in the New York area.”

So what is Myers up to now?

“The hot stuff for us, which is a lot of fun, is recycling old buildings,” he says.

In 1994, Myers transformed a circa-1925 industrial building known as the Beverly Hills Ice House into an elegant, modern office building. It now houses Myers’ offices, as well as those of Madonna’s Maverick Records. Last May, he renovated both the core and shell of the 10-story office building at 1801 Century Park West. He’s now designing a similar overhaul of the four-story office building at 1940 Century Park East.

Myers attributes his firm’s success to teamwork, saying, “You sit around a table and you’ve got all these superstars, all this great talent, and like a director, you have to figure out how you take advantage of that.”

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