Bowl role: Craig Hodgetts and Hsin-Ming Fung redesigned one of the city's most recognizable landmarks, addressing the site's performance problems.

WHEN the husband-and-wife architectural team of Craig Hodgetts and Hsin-Ming Fung started work on the renovation of the Hollywood Bowl in 1998, it seemed a straightforward project. But it turned into a major undertaking, given the bowl's acoustic and physical limitations. In the end, the 1928 clamshell was replaced--but only after a two-year hiatus, while lawsuits from preservationists were resolved. This week, the shell makes its official debut with the start of the summer concert season on the 25th.

Hodgetts began his career as an automotive engineer but was drawn to architecture and film production. He spent 15 years at his own firm, before teaming up with Fung in the early 1980s. Both share a love of film, and bring to their projects the collaborative spirit of filmmaking. Previous assignments include the Egyptian Theater, the Sylmar Branch Librao', Brooklyn Park Performing Arts Center, the Minneapolis Orchestra Amphitheater and UCLA's temporary Towell Library building (since moved to the Otis College of Art + Design).

Question: For years, musicians at the Hollywood Bowl complained about not being able to hear themselves when they performed. How difficult was this project?

Hodgetts: It was a closely guarded secret that the musicians could not hear the conductor. Basically the conductor would say "louder" and a guy on a recording mixing board turned up the volume on the French horns or whatever instrument, so the audience was getting a second-hand interpretation. We spent a couple of years when the project was in development talking with musicians and stagehands about the various aspects of what worked and what didn't work. There were lots of conflicting opinions and lots of private agendas.

Fung: We didn't know they had these problems when we came in. We interviewed the people who set the stage, who were instrumental in making the bowl work, and then we'd talk with the sound engineers. We created a chart that we called "A Day in the Life of the Bowl," and we mapped it from 7 a.m. until midnight, drawing in various stages what was going on.

Q: And what was a day like?

Hodgetts: It made Disneyland look pale by comparison because a road show might load in and the concert would be over. Finally you blow all of the people out. Then you have to literally hose the place down because it's a disaster. At the same time, you've got to clear all their sets out and set up the stage in a pristine fashion for the orchestra.

Fung: Then when the orchestra comes to rehearse at 10 in the morning, they have to set up a sunscreen because the sun is beating down on the orchestra during the rehearsal.

Q: Sounds like a lot of work.

Hodgetts: It's dramatic. It's like a whole choreography. There can be upwards of 100 to 150 people behind the scenes. So it was an awesome immersion for us in the complexity of this thing. The bowl had to operate like a finely tuned machine, otherwise it wouldn't work.

Q: How was it perceived by the performers?

Fung: There would be many performers that would not want to come to the Hollywood Bowl because it wasn't a first-rate facility. When it was built, it was built as a temporary structure. They didn't anticipate they were going to be so successful.

Hodgetts: The dressing rooms were shabby. Small, improvised, not built for the load they were getting. Actually the crew has been doing a superhuman effort at making this thing work.

Q: Give me an example.

Fung: When the bowl added fireworks, it was just another thing piled on that added to the complexity behind the scenes. When the audience was there it looked seamless. Nobody knew that the fireworks would set off fires that burned the paint off the cars.

Hodgetts: They had to go out and cover the cars with fireproof covering so sparks didn't fall on the BMWs. Really.

Q: What was the most difficult design problem?

Hodgetts: No one was willing to sacrifice one parking place because they're incredibly valuable.

Fung: There was a limitation to how far we could build. The parking space set that line. We couldn't go over it. Parking has always been a problem at the bowl. The mandate was how to improve the bowl without affecting the neighborhood and the community.

Q: How did you approach this task?

Hodgetts: We really carried the torch for the behind-the-stage issues. We had sound engineers who were carting in models and hiring their own consultants to plead their case because they were passionate about it. Basically, there were parameters that had to be considered: the neighborhood's needs, the issue of parking, the orchestra's needs because they were cramped on the stage, and then there was the requirement for the road shows and the whole catering thing, which put a squeeze on everything. After that there was the issue of acoustical needs.

Q: Where were the biggest conflicts?

Hodgetts: It turned out that the road show requirements directly conflicted with the acoustical needs because road shows are miked--they're not acoustic performances--and the lighting requirements are utterly different from a classical, symphonic performance. We had lift trucks bearing big lighting trucks, and they were driving through the place where the instrumentalists were storing their Stradivarius.

Q: What did you think of lawsuits filed by Hollywood Heritage Inc. to preserve the original shell structure?

Hodgetts: There were a lot of people who felt they were frivolous. I don't think we did. We had worked with the Egyptian Theater and had worked in sensitive areas like the Westwood Gateway project for UCLA. On the other hand, we had gone through an enormous amount of work to try to preserve the shell. And we had come to the conclusion, in the most conscientious possible framework, it would not be practical and reasonable to save it. Having worked with historians, we knew how precious the "historic fabric" is and that Los Angeles has dealt poorly with things like this in the past. It seemed like the best thing to do was let it be resolved in the courts.

Q: Ultimately the issue boiled down to the material itself?

Fung: The shell was built in 1929 and one of the biggest surprises for us was when we went to visit. When you walk up to the shell and look at it, it basically was a shack, it was really shabby. It was like things were bound together, taped together. We couldn't believe it.

Hodgetts: Oh yeah, a lot of masking tape. In a certain way, I thought it was an incredible structure. It was built of very thin sheeting, in a lacey way, like an airplane. There were thousands of small steel tubes that were all rusted, so you could not practically restore the steel structure. Then the asbestos cement board, when they set off the fireworks, it would shard off in little pieces.

Q: How did you come up with the canopy or halo that hangs over the orchestra?

Fung: The canopy was designed to resolve the acoustics but the halo is also a catwalk, so you can walk up there and do the lights. We wanted to have the shell look as pristine as possible and the halo would be the only other element so we would not have to clutter up that shape with temporary lighting or other fixtures.

Hodgetts: The halo functions as a lighting element, an acoustic element and we have wheels on there for mike cable so it also functions as a load-carrying element for road shows. Now it looks obvious, but when we were making these drawings, the circle was diagrammatic; it was not our plan to build a circle. When the circle appeared in our drawings, we realized we had found a shape which was comfortable within the confines of the shell--and we thought it felt graceful. We were also trying to reach out to the audience. We realized from the musicians' point of view, it unites the stage with the seating.

Fung: It created a physical relationship and a connection to the audience, which you didn't have before. (Pasadena architect) Myron Hunt's seating was really beautiful and there are 18,000 seats, and it really feels more like 12,000. The idea, from a spatial connection, was to pull the people all the way in the back and make them feel part of this outdoor experience.

Q: You've been together professionally and personally for 20 years. How did you meet?

Fung: Craig had left the architectural field and wanted to become a screenwriter and work in the film industry. I was working for Charles Kober Associates and I brought Craig in to work with me on a competition. We started on a small project, then we got a project to work on the design of a house. Then I left the firm and we formed a small office. Basically we started working out of a garage. We worked on film commercials and production design for a couple of years, but then we started getting architectural projects, which made it very difficult to be on location. It had to be a choice, either film or architecture.

Q: Film production clearly has a role in your work.

Hodgetts: It hits absolutely inspired us. That's the driving force behind our whole studio. That way of working creatively is so much more productive than the traditional segregated role. We always refer to it and we always try to embrace these people and bring them in a way that will fuse their particular creative energy with ours.

Q: Isn't that fairly rare in architecture?

Hodgetts: Our personal models are (designers) Charles and Ray Eames and I think they came to it the same way. We didn't know that until we did the Eames show for the Library of Congress. (Charles) designed the Spirit of St. Louis movie before they became chair designers and I think that career path is very inspiring.

Q: One of your projects is a library under construction in Hyde Park.

Fung: The community wanted to kick us out when they first saw our vision of the library for Hyde Park. It was really tough.

Q: How was that project different from the library branch you did in Sylmar?

Hodgetts: Our dialogue with each is very intense on design issues. In Sylmar, I had in mind low-riders and the industrial chic of the neighborhood. There's the Hispanic and Latino color spectrum.

Fung: When we went to Hyde Park, which was a very dense urban area, I wanted something more formal, tougher, more self-contained. So we did a project that used classy materials, glass and metals, something institutional. I made a presentation to the community and they looked at it and were really shocked. They didn't like it at all short of throwing us out of the room. One person thought it reminded her of going to visit her brother.

Q: In prison?

Fung: Yes, in prison. It was gray and boxy.

Hodgetts: We realized that the terms of the culture we are normally in were an entirely different value system from theirs. Something very sleek and modern was something they hated. And they started saying things like, the city always gives them short shrift and they didn't want a box for a library.

Q: What did you do?

Fung: We went back and realized we needed a different aesthetic, something more aggressive.

Hodgetts: We started looking at hip-hop magazines to understand the culture.

Q: Where did this take you, design-wise?

Fung: We did this study internally and we looked at African sculptures and colors and we came to understand that the community wanted things that are very bulky, weavings of fabric that have very bright earthy colors. And we began to develop a vocabulary, a whole palette, and our second design to the community, they loved it because they could relate to it.

Hodgetts: It was a great adventure.

INTERVIEW

Craig Hodgetts and Hsin-Ming Fung

Titles: Principals, Co-Founders

Company: Hodgetts + Fung Design and Architecture

Born: Cincinnati, 1937; Hanoi, Vietnam, 1953

Education: Hodgetts: B.A., theater arts, Oberlin College; automotive design, General Motors Institute; M.A., architecture Yale University. Fung: B.A., Cal State Dominguez Hills; M.A., architecture, UCLA.

Career Turning Point: Forming their own firm in 1984

Most Admired People: Leonardo da Vinci and Miles Davis (Hodgetts); none (Fung)

Personal: Married, one dog

Hobbies: Watching the TV show "Prime Suspect" (both), gardening (Fung)