If you had to identify Scott Johnson as an architect in a word, it would be serious, as evinced in his just-published opus, Inside Architecture: A Design Journal (Balcony Press). So when he writes that in 1987, seeing that the upper floors of his exactingly designed and recently completed Fox Plaza office tower had been altered, he became “anxiously” concerned, it’s likely an understatement. He probably also turned red, gritted his teeth, and murmured a rare obscenity. 

After all, the tower was to be his glistening calling card as the young design principal of choice in a venerable firm in transition then persevering in the muddle that was Los Angeles architecture, known in the 1980s more for its deconstructionist design exercises than its high-rise expertise and urban planning. (Personal note: I was the Los Angeles Times design critic in that tumultuous decade of architectural angst.)

That Johnson was soon to learn that his illustrious, if curt, clients at Fox, including Rupert Murdoch, had leased the upper floors out as a film location did not allay his fears that the tower would not be known for its architecture, but rather for being trashed by European terrorists holding a party of tenants hostage in a Bruce Willis movie entitled Die Hard. 

What at first blush Johnson didn’t appreciate is that in L.A., where he now lived and worked, any publicity was considered good publicity. This is understandable, considering that Johnson—Mormon-born, suburban-bred, and educated at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Harvard—was attentive and composed. And then, according to the book’s early years chapters, he apprenticed at the prestigious firms of SOM in San Francisco and Burgee Johnson (no relation) in New York City, and became unerringly groomed and polite. 

The film would become a smash hit, with the tower an instant landmark and its office space fully rented and getting top dollar, while the firm, with the late Bill Pereira the marquee name but then in the throes of management permutations, received an invaluable boost. The office phone began ringing, and the soon-to-be reminted firm of Johnson Fain + Pereira, and eventually just Johnson Fain, was taking on choice challenging assignments and turning away others.

Among the calls was one from Donald Trump, at the time a brash New York City developer, asking if whether they were “the Die Hard guys,” as Johnson recalls, and if so, whether “we would be interested in designing the world’s tallest building on the site of 26-acre Ambassador Hotel (in L.A.), famous for the historic Coconut Grove nightclub, and equally infamous for the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.” 

Johnson declined Trump’s offer, but not several others that, in time, became locally praised and profitable buildings gracing L.A.’s Century City and downtown San Francisco. These are featured in captioned photos, but for the purposes of the book, Johnson goes into more revealing detail, recounting the design and development process and remembering the client personalities involved in the guarded packaging of several other singular projects.

One of them, assiduously reviewed, is the Opus One Winery in Napa Valley, which Johnson had been involved with before the Fox Plaza bonanza, as an associate of the former Pereira firm. With Johnson then a relatively young designer, the firm had won a competition in 1984 for Opus One, a joint venture of the wine royalties Robert Mondavi and Baron Philippe de Rothschild, and when he passed, the baron’s daughter, Philippine de Rothschild. It was a project to be toasted with 1945 Mouton Rothschild. 

For Johnson, the subsequent protracted design process becomes a tutorial in wine making and social pretensions, which not only makes for good reading, but also obviously served him and the emerging firm of Johnson Fain well. Also scored were several other hospitality assignments that saw them through a looming economic downturn, and their wooing of an international clientele post–Fox Plaza.

Documented in the book are the varied design histories of enviable commissions the firm landed in far-flung locations that included master planning resorts on the islands of Hawaii and Guam; office towers in Taichung City, Taiwan, and Jakarta, Indonesia, and in the People’s Republic of China; a winery in the Chinese county of Changli; and, notably, a contract to plan Beijing’s central business district. 

Closer to home, and for political and client contrasts, taken on were an office tower dominating the Arts District of Dallas, a sprawling Native American museum in a planned park in Oklahoma City, and several more office towers neighboring the Fox Tower in Century City. Each one had its cast of clients, site constraints, design considerations, and financial challenges, all warily noted by the observant Johnson, who also emerges in the journal as a deft conciliator. 

He is also very much the chronicler in tracing his unique involvement in both the original design of the Baptist Crystal Cathedral in Orange Grove, as an apprentice to its renowned architect, Phillip Johnson, in the 1970s; and then, some 40 years later, as a principal of Johnson Fain in its renovation as the rechristened Catholic Christ Cathedral. Here the crucible was not personalities, but budget.

(In the interest of full disclosure, after retiring from the Times in 1991, I intermittently accepted assignments as an urban design consultant, among them from a financial consortium that retained Johnson Fain and involved my overseeing the firm’s planning of a commercial center for the sprawling Playa Vista development on the city’s far Westside. Years later, I was invited to join a team cobbled together by the firm vying for a contract to master plan the L.A. River. Unfortunately, the team lost, but it gave me an appreciation for the firm’s back-room talents critical to the principals’ design and planning efforts.) 

Lending a pronounced personal perspective to Johnson’s architecture was his stepping outside the firm to design several private residences, including four of his own. These included a town house for his family of four on a commercial street he aptly describes as an update of Le Corbusier’s “machine for living,” which he acknowledges was more about work than living. When the children left for college, he and his forever-on-call physician wife, Meg Bates, moved to L.A.’s gritty downtown Arts District, where he renovated a tall, toolbox-shaped industrial space into a neatly functional loft apartment. 

More challenging, more detailed in the text, and therefore more revealing of Johnson’s architectural virtuosity, were the family vacation homes he designed and built from the ground up. The first, in the Napa Valley north of San Francisco, a cluster of striking, linked minimalist boxes; the second a long, linear single structure built closer to L.A., in Ojai. Each is functional and private, sensitive to its rural sites and views, the interiors comfortable settings for the furnishing the accomplished Johnson designed and the art he painted.

This more intimate view of Johnson as the designer of places for living ends with him and Meg in New York City, where they have bought an apartment, a pied-a-terre, apparently. Interestingly, he does not go into any detail concerning its design or that of the building, but instead describes—indeed, rhapsodizes—about the south Harlem 110th Street location, with its dense diversity of cultures and characters, convenient shopping and nearby museums, streets jammed with traffic, sidewalks crowded with people, a welcoming Central Park steps away, the midtown skyline in the distance, dazzling.

“We watch the sunlight slowly fade and the streetlights come on as we step away from our daily tasks and into the night,” concludes Johnson in the last line of the chapter on private residences that could be a love letter to the art of architecture and would have made a poetic end to the book. Certainly, if the architects up to these pages can read between the lines, there are lessons to be learned that would serve them well in their practice—that is, if they can overcome the schadenfreude Johnson’s accomplishments might generate.

But the peripatetic Johnson is a serious soul, and also an academic. To be sure, his various appointments, including teaching design at UCLA and heading USC’s Master of Architecture program, have served his CV well, as have his being an incidental artist and an irrepressible art and architecture design theorist, with a host of previous publications. These are excerpted in a discursive 70-page epilogue, a lengthy curtain call for the book that can be read (or not) to appreciate Johnson’s journey as a gifted architect in a demanding and arguably diehard profession.

Featured image: Opus One Winery, Oakville, CA. Architects: Johnson Fain. Photo by Tim Street-Porter. All photos courtesy of Johnson Fain.