Kanner

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Stephen Kanner

Principal, Kanner Architects

Westwood

Specialty: Retro-futuristic residential and retail projects

Notable project: Village Center Westwood

Stephen Kanner, a third-generation Los Angeles architect, looks to the recent past for his inspiration the playful post-war era of funky coffee shops, drive-ins and bowling alleys. But he doesn’t translate it too literally.

“We don’t want to just replicate a diner,” he said. “We don’t want our buildings to feel themed. Our forms are mined from the past and we put our own personal spin on it.”

Take the streamlined In-N-Out Burger stand in Westwood., which is a prototype for the chain and looks like something straight out of “The Jetsons,” with swooping arches and angles jutting in various directions. The colors are equally arresting mustard-yellow and ketchup-red signs and trim.

Kanner calls his designs “evocatecture.” Metropolis magazine calls them “yesterday’s happier visions of the future.”

Kanner works with his father and partner, architect Charles Kanner, at a firm that was originally founded by his grandfather, Herman Kanner, in 1949. Stephen, 42, joined the firm in 1983, after graduating from UC Berkeley.

The firm designed Robbins Auto Top Co. of Santa Monica in the late ’80s, as well as the Montana Collection in Santa Monica and the award-winning Harvard Apartments in Koreatown, which Kanner describes as a “ham-and-Swiss-cheese sandwich of white bread Modernism with a filling of L.A. funk.”

Developer Ira Smedra said he chose Kanner to design his proposed $110 million Deco-Mediterranean-style Village Center Westwood retail project because Kanner has “a good feel and appreciation of the village,” where Kanner’s firm also happens to be located.

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