While still in his 30s, architect Scott Johnson designed some of the most prestigious high-rise buildings in California, including the 34-story Fox Plaza building in Century City, used for the movie “Die Hard.”
But when the real estate market crashed in the early 1990s, so did Johnson’s practice. He and partner, Bill Fain, had to lay off half their staff and move their office from fancy digs to cheap space in downtown Los Angeles.
Now, Johnson’s practice is booming again, but only because he has broadened it to encompass much more than just high-rise work. For example, he helped to design three wineries for Robert Mondavi Corp. and sketched a resort house in the Napa Valley with a steel roof for class-action attorney Robert Lieff.
A few weeks ago, he was picked to design the biggest office project commissioned by the state of California in decades: a 1.5-million-square-foot low-rise complex near the historic capitol building in Sacramento.
A willowy 47-year-old with slicked-back blond hair, Johnson is a symbol of how dramatically the world has changed for architects. For decades, the top architects designed showy office towers and let developers worry about filling them with tenants.
But with the exception of Asia–prior to the current currency collapse–there has been little demand for 1980s-style trophy properties in the latest real estate boom. Instead, architects are doing some of their most provocative work in places like civic buildings, hospitals and churches.
Even the country’s best-known architects have proved flexible. Philip Johnson, who helped to father the postmodernist movement in skyscrapers, recently designed a 2,700-seat church in Dallas, for a gay and lesbian congregation, which will have twisted walls of steel and colored concrete.
“A high-rise is just a block,” explains the 91-year-old architect, who is no relation to Scott Johnson. “I could work on this church for another 20 years. It’s much more interesting.”
Scott Johnson grew up in California, the son of a plant geneticist at a sugar company. After working as an understudy to Philip Johnson in New York, he moved to Los Angeles in 1983 to become design director of a prominent architectural firm that he and Fain eventually took over.
Scott Johnson had plenty of high-rise work at first. He designed Century City’s 38-story SunAmerica Center, considered one of the most valuable buildings in Southern California. He was the lead designer for a huge mixed use redevelopment project in San Francisco called Rincon Center.
But even then, Johnson was beginning his transformation. Mondavi picked him to design an avant-garde winery in the Napa Valley for the new high-priced wine, Opus One, that it was bottling with the Rothschild family of France. Johnson eventually drew up a bold oval-shaped winery that looked like a limestone spaceship coming out of the ground.
The distinctive building was critical in helping position the Opus One brand, which sells for $95 to $100 a bottle, at the upper end of the market, says Michael Mondavi, president of the wine maker.
“We sell two things in the wine industry,” Mondavi says. “We sell the quality of the liquid and the quality of the image. And architecture helps complement the quality of the image.”
For several years now, Johnson has designed buildings for the entertainment industry, including the studio used by Jay Leno for the Tonight Show.
He’s doing a corporate campus in Thousand Oaks, Calif., for Amgen Inc., the biotechnology company.
