Koning Eizenberg’s past work has often been reminiscent of the simple forms of Irving Gill, the celebrated early-20th century Los Angeles-based architect known for his abstractions of the Spanish Mediterranean style. Will the neighborhood reinvent itself and thrive? Or will the gritty oil fields once again swallow up this suburban oasis? It is that sense of unease that gives the project its power. But the temporal quality of the golf center’s playful, wood-frame forms also strangely evokes the tenuousness of the process of urban renewal. Completed for just $1.3 million, the project is also a key component in the transformation of Signal Hill from an oil center into a growing residential area. The tough, industrial context gives the humble driving range a surreal edge. The Santa Monica-based firm’s just-completed Signal Hill Golf Center is set amid the rusting pumps of a decaying oil field, at 2550 Orange Ave. But at their best, the firm’s designs achieve a refreshingly direct clarity. The risk, of course, is a loss of originality. Instead, the team has fashioned an architecture marked by simple geometries and a straightforward appeal.
The Australian-born duo, Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg, who moved to Los Angeles in 1979, have consciously avoided cloaking their work in the slick surfaces and ornate formal gestures that lesser talents often use to mask an underlying emptiness of ideas. The work of Koning Eizenberg Architects has long hovered somewhere between the two. There is an uneasy territory between building and architecture, where the need for ready-made solutions to common problems intersects with the desire to create something of aesthetic and social substance.
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