The new restraint.

Two distinct trends stand out in Southern Californian architecture today. One deals with the issues and constraints which have led to a quality of formal restraint, pushing architecture to a keener intelligence. The other trend is not site specific, that is, it is a larger, global issue: the architect's role in society.

Architecture in Balance, a recent exhibition held at the Amory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, highlighted the residential work of some of the younger practitioners. At first glance, the formal sensibilities of this rather loose aggregate of seven(1) firms would seem to indicate an abrupt break from those of their big-budget, high-profile, expressionistic predecessors (and in many cases mentors): aesthetically, a more subtle palette of materials, a simpler vocabulary of forms. As the title of the show suggests, form is one tool among many in calibrating a canvas for human experience. Light, space and attention to the site are being investigated again, gladly, as poignant architectonic elements. They lead to 'transformative' architecture, curator Richard Corsini wrote in the exhibition's catalogue, to '... enrich life in daily ways'.

Then, the work is not a break with the patriarchy of Frank Gehry et al so much as a selective absorption of the lessons of his early work, which demystified construction by peeling away surfaces and critiqued the banality of wood stick/stud construction. As critic Aaron Betsky observes in an essay he wrote for the catalogue, Gehry '... sought to make an architecture out of simple, readily available building materials so that the resulting construction drank in those same forces into enigmatic and abstract, but highly allusive, forms'. To this mix, these younger architects (most of the firms represented have worked for Gehry or others in the L.A. School such as Frank Israel and Morphosis) are inspired by the ideas of early Modernists, particularly Rudolph Schindler but also others such as Gregory Ain and Irving Gill and their contemporaries in landscape architecture, including Garrett Eckbo, who extended a building's planes and lines from interior to exterior, linking the building irrevocably to its site. 'Here [on the West Coast] there has been a greater degree of faith in Modernism, a more multi-valented and sustained approach to Modernism. We never had the whole historicist thing here', asserts architect and writer Roger Sherman, who teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

This newer generation is tapping into the rich vein of the Modernism best represented by the free-standing house, where architects have always tinkered with forms, materials and programme. Sustainability has become the new morality, says architect and urban designer John Kaliski. 'Activism seems to be more about doing something well rather than trying to invent or reinvent things', he observed in a recent conversation. 'It is an environmental, not a socialist, agenda, and a political platform everyone can agree with.'

There is also a blunt constraint to reckon with: a building economy only tentatively breathing again after a sustained recession, and some argue, rising residential construction costs. 'It used to be much easier to do something interesting: the Benson House (1981 by Frank Gehry), an important house, cost about $60 or $70 per square foot. Now, $150 would be the norm', says Paul Lubowicki of Lubowicki/Lanier, a participating firm in the exhibition. (Lubowicki worked for Gehry in the formative late '70s and early '80s.)

Even so, Danelle Guthrie of Guthrie + Buresh suggests an additional reason for the new restraint: 'It is recognizing that the world is an overwhelming place, much, much huger than our parents' [one], the result of an intensification in technology. I think [our practice] is challenging whether we want to live in a form that replicates that [chaos]'.

The 1994 Stringfellow Residence, designed by Susan Lanier, is a well-organised addition comprising three-dimensional interlocking volumes that slide or pop out beyond roof and wall planes. It is uncluttered but not uncomplicated work. 'We integrated the most important elements of the design into the structure', says Lanier. 'That was one of our lessons from Frank [Gehry]: everything important can't be extraneous, it has to be part of the building.'

There is a new family of materials, cheap new kinds of translucent plastic and high-strength polycarbonates, which have rapidly become a local vernacular. Certainly much of the new work, including Daly, Genik's Mar Vista Addition (p72) and Guthrie + Buresh's WorkHouse, masterfully appropriates these new industrial products for residential cladding, both exploiting Southern California's abundant sunlight as a pragmatic working tool as well as the idea of light as a sculptural tool.

Another important trend relates to the role of the architect in society. In this century, argue both Sherman and Kaliski, architects have lost their Modern status as heroic purveyors of ideology. They have regained their historic status of being in service to someone else. 'The difference is that today's client is not the State, not the Church, but any number of heterogeneous voices in a pluralistic, democratic society', maintains Kaliski. Certainly in many areas the client is leading the architect, whether that be demanding 'theme' architecture, in which every architectural encounter is doomed to become a Narrative Experience, or in anticipating new hybrid building types straddling office and home. And if architects are no longer team leaders but sitting at the table with everyone else, it is no surprise that Gehry almost - but not quite lost his battle to maintain control of the working drawings for the Disney Concert Hall to a general contractor.

Noberto Nardi, an architect teaching at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, recently remarked that 'we will be devoured by other ways of building if we do not show more concern with the "mundane" elements of architecture. The fireworks of forms are easy to deal with. What is going on now is a lack of interest in "descending" to simpler issues, simpler themes'.

Those 'mundane' elements - which will always include form-making - seem to be the precise area of concern for this newer generation, at least for the moment; the hope is that they can accomplish an appropriate working arena.

1 Victoria Casasco; Richard Corsini; Daly, Genik; Guthrie + Buresh; Johnson, Favaro; Lubowicki/Lanier; Lorcan O'Herlihy.