À LOHA
As the wind breezed between the buildings during the last hours of daylight on Friday, April 3, 2009, a lively group of about two hundred people gathered on the patio connecting the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum to Steinberg Hall on the Washington University campus. Sipping on cocktails and munching on crudités, the mostly twenty- and thirty-something crowd bubbled with conversation as jazzy music wafted through the early evening air. A current of excitement seemed to pulse through the whole scene, as this was no ordinary reception before no ordinary lecture at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. Instead, this gathering celebrated the admission of one hundred graduate students to the prestigious art and architecture school. But this party on the patio was simply a prelude. The real treat for these acceptees lay ahead in the lecture to be delivered by Lorcan O’Herlihy, a well-established California architect and head of the LOHA firm, who was invited not only to discuss his successful projects but also to inspire those about to embark on their own architectural journeys. And inspire he did.
His buzzing enthusiasm mirroring that filling the plaza before the lecture began, O’Herlihy spent ninety passion-filled minutes describing not merely the appearance and construction of his creations but also the source from which those external components, as well as his pride, derived: the concepts behind the designs. Whether speaking about his own home or a housing community for hundreds, O’Herlihy proved that all his works go beyond simply putting a roof over people’s heads to also change the way people think. Because he always strives to compose his buildings as the material embodiments of a core idea, O’Herlihy creates structures that engage with their communities both physically and intellectually, proving to the hungry upstarts in his audience the power of art to directly impact how people live.
While O’Herlihy reviewed multiple projects during his lecture, his 11-unit multi-family housing complex entitled “Formosa 1140” in West Hollywood, California exhibited most forcefully his capability to render residential vessels more meaningful by infusing them with innovative ideas. Painted in a red so bright as to have caused traffic accidents and sheathed in a skin of interlocking planes of metal, this set of buildings immediately surpasses identification as just another box-like Bauhaus knock-off. Instead of simply mimicking an already established visual style, O’Herlihy forged his own style here by grounding every part of his design in a key concept: the interconnection between public and private. First, the red paint ties the complex to the Formosa Restaurant, a famous landmark of the area, so that this set of houses acknowledges the history of its specific neighborhood. With that surface link to the community in place, O’Herlihy then deepened the connection through his inventive inclusion of a “pocket park” along the front of the buildings. Rather than build a sidewalk to mark the edge between Formosa 1140 and the rest of the world, O’Herlihy placed a communal space, usually reserved for an interior courtyard, out on that frontal edge, thereby breaking down the boundary between the residents and the greater population. Thus, just as the Tetris-like panels of the complex’s façade fit together into one cohesive whole, the aesthetic and structural elements of Formosa 1140 combine to meld personal living space with the society at large until the two become one interwoven, symbiotic unit. Because he collapsed the division between public and private, because he recognized the importance of both historical and spatial context, O’Herlihy fostered, through architecture, an interaction between people that otherwise might not have taken place, thereby altering the life of a whole community by simply building his ideas.
And O’Herlihy refuses to stop at just the West Hollywood populace. He remarked that in constructing this complex, he sought to present his notion of the overlap of domestic and communal spaces not just to those in the immediate area but to everyone. Through “contingent patterning” in which the success of a new idea at one location allows that concept to spread to other locations and thus form a web of innovation, O’Herlihy hoped that Formosa 1140 would transform its own community on its way to transforming the whole world. While we must wait for the web to branch out to other continents, to other countries, even to other states, it has certainly stretched through California, and, thanks to this lecture, has begun to reach St. Louis, Missouri. In O’Herlihy’s promise, and proof, that ideas can empower architecture to change people’s lives, the accepted graduate students of Washington University could not have asked for better motivation on the launch of their own architectural careers. At the dinner following the lecture, they must have toasted “À LOHA!” indeed.
