Killen was here

Patrick Killen helped define the modern architecture that emerged in the South Bay over the last quarter century. Now in the late stages of lymphoma, he has only gratitude, not regrets.

by Mark McDermott

Patrick Killen was a young architect with big ideas when he drove from his native Ohio to Southern California in 1980.

He was already accustomed to going against the current. Killen was naturally left-handed but had been forced by Catholic nuns to write right-handed as a child, which worsened his dyslexia and made school an uphill battle. He was a working class kid who labored in steel mills and aluminum plants and helped organize a wildcat strike while still only in his late teens. He wasn’t daunted by challenges.

Killen also had a natural propensity for making things and knew early that he wanted to be an architect. Despite the difficulty of school, he made it to Kent State, studied architecture, and headed west not long after graduation.

For a young architect of a modern bent, Southern California was a feast. The combination of hyper-expressive culture and lack of weather made Los Angeles a playground for architectural inventiveness.

But Killen distinctly remembers the first time he drove into the South Bay. He thought he’d somehow missed a demarcation line.

“It was like, holy shit, what happened? I mean, is there a fence here that says you can’t practice architecture south of that?” Killen recalled in a 2002 interview.

What Killen found was a place utterly dominated by traditionalism. There were still a few old beach cottages and bungalows, but they were being steadily replaced with Spanish Colonial or vaguely Mediterranean mansions that referenced another time and other places.

So quite naturally, he decided to set up shop. Killen founded a little architectural firm and named it after his new address in Manhattan Beach, Studio 9one2. It was an audacious move. There appeared to be no market for modern architecture locally, and his first years operating the studio business was scarce.

Killen slowly established a small body of work, and soon clients were finding him. In 1991, a family named Shearin approached him in search of an avant garde beach house. He didn’t shy away from the opportunity. He designed a dramatically modern Manhattan Beach Strand home which took cues from the nearby lifeguard towers — its 78 degree windows and canted “fin wall” running through the middle of its face were bold and unprecedented but still somehow spoke the local language.

The Shearin House put Studio 9one2 on the map. “Using simple but durable materials, glass, stainless steel and stucco, Killen created an eye-popping, exuberant, Modernist building in a sea of sameness,” wrote Russell Abraham, who along with Killen authored The Modern California Beach House, a monograph on Killen’s body of work. “With awards and press to follow, Studio 9one2’s Shearin House established Modernism as a viable architectural motif on the western edge of Los Angeles.”

Killen’s subsequent body of work has included dozens of residences in the South Bay, an adventurously inventive mixed-use “Beach Pod” building in Hermosa Beach partly inspired by the original iPod, the much-lauded LA Marina Preschool and the 9-11 Memorial in Manhattan Beach. But even as the American Institute of Architecture awards accumulated, Killen did something unusual for an architect of his ilk. He did not repeat himself. His buildings did not mimic the architect’s earlier successes but were often broad departures. The one quality that each possessed was less stylistic than it was spiritual — a boundless exuberance, a joyful expression against sameness.

“For me every project represented a new opportunity,” Killen said in an interview last week.

The time has come for summation. His life’s work will be the subject of retrospective at the Manhattan Beach Arts Center Thursday and Friday, an exhibit that will showcase photographs and models of Killen’s projects and include a reception and auction of the work Thursday night which will benefit the City of Hope Pediatric Cancer Department.

“My models were always sort of the thing that was the hook — people would come in to interview, to see whether or not to hire me, and see these incredible models and go, ‘Holy shit, I can see my entire house and walk through it with my eyes?’” Killen recalled. “Most people right now are just producing CAD drawings, yet for us the models were proof in the pudding — having a physical model, each which took 200 man hours to build.”

Killen has heretofore resisted selling the models — he’s rare in that he still does hand drawings and builds models of each project. But he is in the late stages of lymphoma, and he is taking this opportunity to say his farewells and ensure that the materials of his life’s work find use.

“I’ve had several people over the years, clients who have chased me since I finished their homes, and I just had to say, ‘I don’t sell my models. It’s part of my legacy, my collection,’” Killen said. “But when faced with what I’m faced with these days, you get to the point — the last thing I wanted to do was roll down to public storage with these things. We may as well use them to raise some money for a good cause.”

Killen is a man at peace with the terms life offered him.

“There’s no question about it,” Killen said. “I have left nothing on the table. I have lived my life like a viking. I have no regrets. I don’t know many people who can say that.”

The hardest part, he said, is his 89-year-old mother’s sadness. “Nobody wants to outlive their child,” Killen said. “I told her, ‘Mom, I’m going to be 62 this September, and I lived a great life.’ I’ve done more in my 62 years — being a kid who didn’t leave Ohio until I was 27, and I didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to flip it out of, as my father used to say. I drove west because I wanted to practice modern architecture and just willed my way into it. I didn’t have a USC degree, I didn’t know anybody, I just willed my way in there. ‘I am going to make this happen.’”

“I don’t ask for anything more. I have lived a privileged life and I lived the life I wanted to live, which is artist-architect first. I could have made it more of a business, but for me the whole idea was of running an art studio.”

“Other guys made millions and millions and live in huge Mediterranean castles they built for themselves in Palos Verdes. I know architects who were able to do that. I, on the other hand — well, I remember telling my children, three of my own and one I adopted, I remember years ago saying, ‘I hope you guys love my models. It might be all you get. And here I am auctioning them off for charity.”

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The closest thing to a regret Killen has professionally is one that he is very pleased to address with the Studio 9one2 retrospective: his design for the Skechers headquarters in Manhattan Beach, which was never executed. The model for the building will be displayed, and Killen, who has maintained a rare public silence on the matter, is finally able to talk about it.

“They are a big corporation and they said, ‘We’ll crush you. We are in a fight with Britney Spears…we have an army of lawyers,” he said. “I got the impression from them I’d be living under the pier the rest of my life.”

Killen is still proud of the design he produced for the headquarters, which he thinks would have been one of the South Bay’s great landmark buildings, with its curvilinear forms, 100 ft. water element, and two bridges. But after 9/11, Skechers asked him to reduce the budget by $7 million and reduce the scope of a project that had already been approved by the city. He refused. “One of the worst pills I’ve ever had to swallow,” he said. “It broke my heart….I remember specifically, it was probably an email I never should have written to their development director of real estate. He said, ‘We have to value engineer the building.’ And I said, ‘I understand value engineering, but I also understand gutting a building. And we are gutting a building, not value engineering. There is just no way.”

His 9/11 Memorial for the city of Manhattan Beach, conversely, is a work from which he still derives great satisfaction. He and his architectural team spent months understanding just where in the Twin Towers the beam they were working with fit, and the design they produced, for all its simplicity, was painstakingly in keeping with its origins. It was an exercise in forensic architecture, and a practice in reverence.

“”We read the whole thing,” Killen said. “We knew exactly where it was, in order to know what to do…If you go there and read the inscription, it will really tell the whole story.”

For a certain kind of architect, the practice at its core is about literally making the world — and the community in which he or she works — a better place, house by house. Specifically, for a modern architect of Killen’s bent, architecture is the art of designing for a better way of life, whether it be a family living more convivially through an open floor plan or more joyfully through an indoor/outdoor design in keeping with the California climate.

Killen embraces a description once ascribed to him as the South Bay’s “Modernist Maverick.”

“I said to myself, you know, it’s a good description. I didn’t want to show off on every corner. The diversity of the community to me was more important than labelling one single style for an architect, going ‘This is what I do, and I’m now going to start planting these things throughout the South Bay,’” he said. “As small as these communities are, I wanted there to be that diversity.”

“At the end of the day, at least for me as I’ve lived my life, that works for me. I can settle into that — yes, that is who I am, that is what it has been.”

Architect Dean Nota, who like Killen has practiced locally for nearly three decades, said that in the deepest sense modernism is not about aesthetics.

“The thing about Pat, more on a personal level, that I always admired is he brought energy and a passion in kind of an unbridled fashion,” Nota said. “He would say things and do things that were pretty brash, but he was just really passionate. He also embodied this idea, which I think is important for people who really want to understand modern buildings — Modernism is not a style, it’s really a way of life. And I think it really fits into the context of a beach area, to bring in light and look at different ways of building in the South Bay.”

“Pat was a person who looked forward, which is consistent with the modern approach to design and way of life. He stuck to his principals and put all his energy, and everything, into it — I think he put his life into it. There are not many architects like that; there are a few, and those are the names you recognize.”

Architect Grant Kirkpatrick, who along with Killen, Nota and Michael Lee practiced modern architecture before it was common in the South Bay, said that Killen has been a galvanizing figure.

“A few of us 25 years ago were doing modern homes in Manhattan Beach and we were not very popular,” Kirkpatrick said. “A lot of people just didn’t get it. So it was a lot easier to take your business and focus it on what I used to called ‘Manhattanerranean’ or ‘Manhamptons’ — that is all anybody wanted and that is what 99 percent of architects did. Unfortunately a lot of times it was not done well. And people would do modern, but modern is tricky — it looks simple but the reality is to do it right there are rules behind the proportioning, massing, and materiality. That is hard, but in the hands of someone like Pat — you could go anywhere and say, ‘That is a Pat Killen house.’ He really always knew what he was doing in that vain, and then pushed it, sometimes for better, or worse. We’ve had quite a few beers, and glasses of wine later in life, after he’d done a project that just pushed the envelope in some way. And you’d go, ‘He kind of went over the edge,’ but you had to admire that. It’s what modernism is all about and how it’s advanced. I mean, the guy has always pushed the bar. All of his work has been searching to inspire. He’s inspired a lot of people and done a lot of great architecture through the years.”

“It’s hard to see it now, but looking at all the positives, he’s lead a great life, influenced a lot of people, and made our South Bay proud.”

Kirkpatrick said Killen was inspiring for his pure creative verve.

“That creative energy inside of him is just unstoppable,” he said. “It oozes out, primarily as an architect, but also as a painter, a classic car enthusiast…a world traveler. You know, for better or worse, those of us that have that creative fire inside, nothing can smother it. It takes you in a lot of different directions. And he did it all.”

Nota said that Killen has had an impact on the South Bay in part because he was committed to the community.

“He was a guy who gave back, not just a guy who worked in the community,” Nota said.

Killen served on a number of commissions, including the planning commission in Rolling Hills, the Cultural Arts Commission in Manhattan Beach, and as Kiwanis Club president in Manhattan Beach. But perhaps his greatest influence was through the Rudat committee that he and Nota co-chaired in the early 1990s that resulted in the reshaping of Hermosa Beach’s Pier Avenue, and subsequently the design competition that resulted in the rebuilding of the pier itself. Nota said Killen was the head of the South Bay/Long Beach AIA at the time and brought all of his considerable creative resources to bear on the process.

“The result of that committee was, in the plaza, to remove all the cars and traffic, and it created a space that doesn’t have that many precedents in LA,” Nota said. “The only space in any way like it is Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, but I don’t know any street like it in metropolitan LA. I always thought that was a tremendous feat, and Pat was a big part of that….That was the beginning of the turnaround in downtown Hermosa.”

Killen said Studio 9one2 would continue under the guidance of his longtime colleague and friend, architect Howard Crabtree.

“I said to my kids, Howard will probably succeed me and stay at the office,” he said. “He’s been with me 22 years and I’ve always said I could not have done this without him. About ten years ago, I remember telling Howard, ‘When you are done, close the lights, I’ll follow you out.’ I wouldn’t have considered running this practice without him. He’s a brother to me. He’s family.”

Killen said he is pleased this week to have the opportunity to look back with friends and colleagues and promised to be “my usual perky and gregarious self” at the reception Thursday night. All things considered, Killen said, he can only be grateful.

“I am solid with my choices, and I do think I made a difference with architecture in the South Bay,” he said. “It’s just a really good feeling.”

Studio 9ONE2 Architecture presents “Models & Photographs: 25 Years,” an exhibition by architect Patrick Killen, Thursday and Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m with an opening reception and silent auction from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday in the Manhattan Beach Art Center, 1560 Manhattan Beach Blvd., Manhattan Beach. (310) 802-5440.