Digital to Ecological

Edie Cohen -- Interior Design, 11/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

John Friedman and Alice Kimm think big: A $65 million garage for the Los Angeles Police Department. The 34,000-square-foot graduate-level aeronautical labs at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Mira, a 2,000,000-square-foot Chinese trade center under development in Santa Ana, California.

The husband-wife architects also know how to think small: A 4,000-square-foot L.A. house that's stunningly sustainable. The 2,000-square-foot restaurant Lucky Devils, featuring graphics and branding as prominent parts of the mix.

"We enjoy a challenge," Kimm says. All projects by John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects are "design problems," Friedman chimes in. "Ideas and materials from our small projects inform larger ones and vice versa." Polycarbonate wall panels from the nightclub Sugar, for example, reappeared for large-scale use at the LA Design Center. A Lucky Devils wall covering, abstracted from a photograph of a freeway, inspired the one that will be punched up to billboard proportions at Mira, where the skin of the building will integrate electronics.

JFAK likes technology. "Digital fabrication can explore a whole range of forms and ideas," Friedman says. But there's another issue, Kimm adds: "How do these things get built, affordably? Our office has always been concerned with the nuts and bolts of how things get put together."

Friedman and Kimm founded JFAK in 1996, after meeting at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Where do they see themselves in 10 years? "We seem to be on a path to larger, more complex institutional projects," Friedman offers. From the current staff of 11, that could mean doubling in size.

From top: Alice Kimm and John Friedman pose at Chichén Itzá in Mexico. A computer rendering of the Chinese trade center Mira in Santa Ana, California, shows a steel-framed glass escalator tunnel swooping through the atrium; pink areas are placeholders for LED advertising. Mira's skin was designed as an electronic billboard, with advertising visible from both outside and in.

Clockwise from top left: At Lucky Devils, a Los Angeles restaurant, a walnut counter runs alongside quartz-topped tables. Wrapped in vinyl wall covering, an aeronautical lab at Pasadena's California Institute of Technology received an AIA/LA Next LA Award. A koi pond surrounds the living area of an eco-friendly L.A. house that won an AIA/LA Decade Award. Polycarbonate panels, sized to accept photovoltaic inserts, front the LA Design Center, winner of an AIA National Institute Honor Award.