L.A. Architect Summons Tallit’s Warmth, Spirituality in Redesign of JCCs

Michael Lehrer in his Los Angeles Studio. Photo courtesy Lehrer Architects

Ever thought about putting on a prayer shawl as an architectural experience? Michael Lehrer has some ideas on the matter.

“The tallis is essentially the most rudimentary form of architectural shelter — envelopment,” the architect said. “It does wonderful things with texture and light, especially in nice old muslin tallises. I’m happy when I’m wrapped in my tallis.”

Lehrer — who says if he hadn’t become an architect, he might have become a rabbi — considers his work to be “fundamentally a spiritual exercise,” and he finds architectural themes all over Judaism. Sukkot, for Lehrer, is less a harvest festival than an architectural holiday. The Mah Tovu prayer — “How good are your tents, people of Jacob” — is about dwelling. And then there’s the mezuzah.

“What could be more architectural than a mezuzah?” Lehrer said, standing in the middle of his Silver Lake studio. He spoke quietly, but with energy. “What a beautiful thing! I’m coming into a new space” — he reached out for an invisible mezuzah, then kissed his hand — “thank you, God!”

For the last 10 years, Lehrer’s engagement with Judaism and architecture also has been more concrete, as Jewish communities across greater Los Angeles have hired his firm, LehrerArchitects LA, to build — or in many cases, rebuild — their facilities.

The firm’s newest client is the Silverlake Independent Jewish Community Center, which just announced that Lehrer Architects will develop a master plan for the renovation of its 1951 building. The two-story red-brick JCC hides just off of Sunset Boulevard, crowded into a gully between a boarded-up motel and a brand-new apartment complex. What was the front door now looks more like a fire exit, and the main entrance from the parking lot around back is uninspiring.

The job takes Lehrer — a self-described “Los Feliz blueblood” — back to very familiar ground. His children attended the center’s preschool, his wife once served as a member of its board and, a generation earlier, Michael attended the preschool there himself.

Lehrer was attracted to architecture at a very early age, and by the time he was 12, he was copying the drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright. He went on to study architecture, first at UC Berkeley and then at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Upon graduating, he worked with Frank Gehry for a “short but incredibly powerful” 13 months. “There were 15 people at the practice at the time,” Lehrer said, and he worked directly with the architect. Gehry’s influence is apparent in a number of Lehrer’s buildings — even in projects completed years after he left the firm.

At 56, Lehrer’s hair has a touch more pepper than salt, and he continues to reach new heights professionally. He served as president of the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1999, spent five years as vice chairman of LAUSD’s School Construction Bond Oversight Committee (helping the school district and the taxpayer get the most bang for their bucks), and has been a member of the Hollywood Design Review Committee for City Council District 13 since 1991. And all the while, he’s been assembling an impressive portfolio of award-winning projects.

The façade of the Silverlake JCC building, meanwhile, has seen better days. “We can all agree on what’s not wonderful about a place,” Lehrer said, “but that’s just not interesting to me.”

Lehrer instead has focused on the many parts of the building that do work — the courtyard, for instance. Hugged by the JCC complex on three sides, this patch of concrete comes to life on Friday mornings when preschoolers sit with their parents on multicolored strips of fabric and sing to welcome Shabbat. It was Lehrer’s appreciation for what was already there, along with his personal connection to the JCC, that sold the center’s leaders on working with him. “One thing that was really exciting is that he loves the original bones of the building,” Kaile Shilling, the project’s capital campaign chair, said. “It wasn’t about tearing down or redoing anything dramatically.”

Back in Lehrer’s office — less than a mile away from the JCC — the architect put it more philosophically. “Architects exist in the present future,” he said. Seeing buildings not just as they are, but also as they might be is hugely important, since Lehrer often works with existing structures. “As architects, we look at things and just think, ‘Oh, magnificent!’ ” Lehrer waved his hand, gesturing to an imaginary building. It had imaginary flaws: “ ‘Let a little light in there, open that wall ...’ ”

Opening a wall is just what his firm did in a project completed last year at the Shalom Institute, a camp and conference center in Malibu. The dining hall, Lehrer recalled, “was a dank, 50-year-old building” that was “completely disconnected” from the outdoors. For just $1 million, Lehrer installed a skylight and replaced one of the walls with a row of glass doors. The hall’s interior is still mostly used for meals, but the new deck outdoors now hosts all kinds of programs, such as like Israeli dance. “It was a real triumph,” Lehrer said, “and I’m very proud of this project.”

Last summer, the Westside Jewish Community Center’s aquatic center, a part of the 1950s Olympic Boulevard facility, reopened after an overhaul by Lehrer Architects. Now sunlight streams in through new glass panes in the ceiling — as well as through the transparent panels of the massive retractable garage doors that replaced two walls that used to enclose the space.

Making buildings energy efficient by using natural resources is also important to Lehrer; on a cloudy afternoon in February, Brian Greene, the Westside JCC’s executive director, explained that Lehrer’s design has also reduced the aquatic facilities’ energy usage. The old design, Greene said, “was a dark room. You wouldn’t come in here without turning on lights. [Now] we’ve got enough natural light that they’re not on at all. Even the pool lights aren’t on.”

Solar panels have been installed on the roof, too.

Lehrer’s commitment to working green is not new; his firm built a facility for the Western Center for Archeology and Paleontology and the Center for Water Education in Hemet that in 2008 was recognized by the U.S. Green Building Council; it achieved the highest level of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification — the first museum building in the country to do so.

But while many accolades have come to him for his work, none of his projects has received more attention than his home base, the Lehrer Architects office, once an ordinary warehouse, which he transformed into an all-white space, with a large white-metal bookshelf, a series of long, thin, white desks and a new white epoxy floor, with a single red stripe. Again, the signature windowed wall of a garage-style door allows him to open one side of the building onto a small garden patio, providing light and a connection to nature.

It’s a great place to work — and an even better marketing tool.

“I saw a picture [of the office] and was not sure that I would like it,” Silverlake JCC Executive Director Ruthie Shavit said. “But when I came in [to visit], I was surprised at how relaxed, calm and well-lit it was — not a fishbowl — and I’m not quite sure how it works.”

Lehrer has a few explanations, but ultimately, he said, it’s the “simple stuff” that makes it special: “Massive natural light, extremely generous work surfaces, and a powerful connection to the landscape and to the context.”

When the wall-sized door is open, sound flows in, along with fresh air. Birds chirping hold pretty universal appeal, but Lehrer also appreciates the sounds of children playing at the day-care center next door, as well as that of cars humming out front along the busy Hyperion Avenue.

The office is open in another sense, as well. It functions, Lehrer said, “as a quasi public place, as a place of community.” He hosts parties, fundraisers and lectures there, and he even invites architects to attend occasional life-drawing sessions.

But the allure of light, fresh air and a view are secondary to what the architect calls “the pleasure of community.” People who visit his Jewish Community Centers should be able to “look across the facility and see this person exercising, see the old folks there, the Russians there, the Hebrew school there.” And at his office, Lehrer wants visitors to recognize that they are entering a place dedicated to “the beauty of making and the community of makers.” In both cases, he said, he hopes they walk in and say “Wow — community in operation.”

That Lehrer’s buildings draw more attention to how they work and what they contain than to the architecture itself is intentional. And it isn’t because his buildings are overly spare or minimal. It’s because he’s aggressively trying to make spaces that will make people happy. Which is just the way he feels inside his tallit.