Contract Magazine - January/February 2019 - 49

A visionary in workplace design, risk-seeker, and disruptor,
Clive Wilkinson has an accomplished history-and exciting future-
of creating spaces that push conventions while honoring
the fundamental needs of community

By Mimi Zeiger

Born in Cape Town, South
Africa, Clive Wilkinson
studied at the Architectural
Association in London, worked
for postmodernist British
architect Sir Terry Farrell, and
later, after a move to LA, found
a job as a project manager in
Frank Gehry's practice.

It's an uncharacteristically wet day when I meet with Los Angeles-
based architect Clive Wilkinson at his office in Culver City, a
mixed-use building he designed in 2012. Wilkinson is a bit of a coffee
snob, so it makes sense that his ground floor tenant is Cognoscenti
Coffee, which serves some of the best brews in the city. Despite the
downpour, brave souls on laptops shelter under the overhang formed
by the stairs leading to the reception desk at Clive Wilkinson
Architects (CWA).
It's a tableau indicative of our time-of how we work now.
Work is itinerant and flexible. Work is everywhere and anywhere
there's Wi-Fi and espresso.
Given the transient nature of our contemporary work lives,
supported by a host of mobile devices, the actual need for an office
might seem unwarranted. But Wilkinson believes in the workplace
as a kind of urbanism, as community, and as a theater for everyday
life-his book, "The Theater of Work," is scheduled to come out
in February. For close to three decades, he's been at the forefront
of workplace design. How, why, and where we work is central
to his award-winning practice.
Rain streams down the windows of Wilkinson's headquarters.
Inside the open-plan office, designers sit at monitors placed along
an oversized desk that looks like a giant, squiggly strand of DNA.
And even though in recent years there's been backlash against the
ills of the open office-noisy, distracting, lacking privacy-here,
everyone is quietly productive.
"Our philosophy is encapsulated in the idea theater, in the
idea that environments need to maximize the potential for social
interaction," says Wilkinson, once we are seated in a conference room
with a large glass wall facing back into the office-we are on display.
"We always look for different theatrical opportunities. There isn't
really a good enough reason to be boring with what you do."
A conversation with Wilkinson is hardly boring; we stray from
design topics and follow tangents about baking, politics, and poetry.
"I have a bread recipe from South Africa that's gone with me
from there to England, to Australia, to here," he explains, efficiently
covering the territories of his biography. "I've had to adapt the recipe
in each country because the water and the flour are different in each
place, and the bread does different things."
Charting his own path
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Wilkinson studied at the
Architectural Association in London, then worked for postmodernist
British architect Sir Terry Farrell for the better part of the 1980s
before moving to the West Coast. Landing in LA, he found a job as
a project manager in Frank Gehry's practice at a time when the firm
was embarking on its most signature projects to date: Disney Hall
and advertising agency Chiat\Day's headquarters in Venice. While
Claes Oldenburg's iconic binoculars still sit outside the Gehrydesigned building, it's now home to Google. Both companies,
however, are pivotal to Wilkinson's creative success.
contract

Contract Magazine - January/February 2019

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