By JEFF SCHNAUFER
Contributing Reporter
Los Angeles is about to get its first high-rise in a decade, with the City Council last week giving final approval to the “ultra-premium” 40-story tower being developed by JMB Realty Corp. in Century City.
Who’s the designer? Who else? Scott Johnson, the same architect who designed two other renowned Century City towers, Fox Plaza and SunAmerica Center. Asked how he felt moments after the council vote, Johnson said, “Feels great. I’m ready. Now we can begin the detail design in earnest.”
Johnson says his other two towers are the only “ultra-premium” buildings in Century City, and they are essentially full, with occupancy rates of more than 96 percent. So he’s confident the new tower will lease up quickly, especially with the Westside office market in the midst of a dramatic upswing.
When it comes to institutional office high-rises in L.A., Johnson is king. Even Donald Trump picked Johnson to design the 145-story tower Trump had proposed to build on the Ambassador Hotel site.
But as Johnson himself admits, being known as the corporate skyscraper king is a double-edged sword.
“It’s true, we’ve probably done more of that kind of building consistently than any other designers in the past 10 years. It’s both a wonderful blessing and a curse,” he said. “We have 75 professionals who are very broadly based. We enjoy working on premier corporate environments, but we do lots of other things. It’s one tip of our iceberg. So when someone from our firm walks in to do a presentation for a hotel or a master plan, they need to work from behind the starting line.”
Truth be told, Johnson and his firm have a diverse body of work.
“I could show you a winery, a house, a high-rise and a master plan that would be completely state-of-the-art, completely different from what had been done before,” he said. “If (a client seeking an avant-garde design) could get past the collar on my shirt, we would have a marriage.”
Said Michael B. Lehrer, president-elect of the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects: “Johnson has a very rich body of work,” he said. “They are one of the leading corporate design firms in the city, yet Johnson does a delicacy of scale with intimate institutions like wineries.”
It is the Byron Winery in the Santa Maria Valley that Johnson points to as his favorite. That project won the American Institute of Architects’ 1997 Gold Nugget Award for best public-private special use facility.
“It grows up out of the ground, is very fitted into its site. It is extraordinarily modern while still being natural,” Johnson said of his winery design.
“He always creates a structure that is a signature statement,” said Byron “Ken” Brown, founder of the Byron Winery. “Scott is very good at making presentations. Combine that with his skill as a design artist, and that is a classic combination most architects don’t have.”
Examples of 47-year-old Johnson’s vision are scattered from corners of Glendale to the far corners of the globe. Tens of millions of square feet have been inked on blueprints at his firm, Johnson Fain Partners.
Locally, Johnson has become noted for the 1980s-style trophy projects of corporate America, including the Nestle USA headquarters building in Glendale, which was described by Aaron Betsky, curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as “a bundle of shooting stalks of glass and stone veneer.” Other projects include the 38-story 1999 Avenue of the Stars in Century City; Amgen’s corporate campus in Thousand Oaks; and even the studio where Jay Leno tapes “The Tonight Show.”
Johnson himself describes his designs as “extremely modern work.”
“It might be called contextual modern work,” he said. “We have no house style. We like every project to be unique to each client.”
The uniqueness that marks Johnson’s work parallels his own rise as an architect. The son of a plant geneticist who grew up in Monterey County, Johnson says he has always been interested in art. “Since I could hold up a pencil, I did a lot of drawing and painting,” he recalls.
Attending Burlingame High School in the Bay Area, he took a modern history class that allowed him to select any book he wanted to study. He chose Frank Lloyd Wright’s “The Natural” and found himself enraptured by the Prairie House and the Mile High Design.
After attending Stanford and Harvard, Johnson set out for New York, where he went to work as an understudy to Philip Johnson (no relation), who helped lead the postmodernist movement in skyscrapers with designs of such buildings as the AT & T; headquarters in Manhattan.
“That was an amazing experience,” Johnson says. “I was a young architect doing huge buildings all over the country. The work we were doing was so new.”
New enough, in fact, that Johnson recalls drawing the ire of his fellow architects for work on buildings that were considered dangerous in their aesthetics.
“My first project was the Dade County Cultural Center in Miami,” he recalls. “When I got down there, I found out that the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects had filed suit to stop the building I was working on.”
The chapter lost the suit. And now, Johnson says with a laugh, “buildings like that are all over the area.”
His five-year stint in New York led to a 1983 offer to be design director of William Pereira’s firm in Los Angeles. After Pereira died, Johnson and one of his Harvard classmates, William Fain, an urban design expert, took over the firm.
Johnson Fain Partners’ design of Fox Plaza where such high-profile tenants as Ronald Reagan and Marvin Davis have their offices, and which was featured in the Bruce Willis film “Die Hard” helped launch Johnson into the architectural limelight.
The success nearly caught Johnson, then in his 30s, by surprise. “I was very na & #271;ve,” he recalls of forming his own company. “I thought I would just design stuff. I thought I would draw all the time. But there was a whole other side. Everything from budgets to worrying about the carpeting.”
Having weathered years of economic recession, his firm now boasts some 70 employees handling everything from architecture to interior design to urban planning.
Said Jim Backer, senior vice president at Valencia Co., which is developing the low-rise Valencia Town Center Office Building: “If you look at a lot of Scott’s work, like the high-rise Nestle building, you might think that coming down to our scale would be difficult. But he gave us what we were looking for.”
“Most architectural firms specialize in one building type,” Johnson said. “We do everything from entertainment facilities to public buildings.”
Indeed, his firm’s designs include DreamWorks SKG’s proposed studio facilities in Playa Vista and a state-commissioned, 1.5 million-square-foot public building in Sacramento, the largest of its kind in decades.
As a result, Johnson says, “I find myself working all the time. In the shower, driving down the road, during dinner. I’m always thinking of the buildings I’m designing.”
To relax, Johnson says, he and his wife Meg take their two children to the family’s 60-acre vineyard in Napa, where he rides mountain bikes and, literally, enjoys the fruits of his labors.
“Sometimes,” he says, “I just look at the grapes.”
