Group Creates Harmony by Combining Disciplines

By LEON WHITESON

Dec. 28, 1989 12 AM PT

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Several years ago, when graphic artist Charles White was creating a series of innovative three-dimensional wall sculptures for the Chiat/Day (now Chiat/Day/Mojo) advertising agency, he was excited by the potential of this new area of design. Such complex commissions challenged his imagination but quickly led him beyond the traditional boundaries of graphic design.

To expand his range of expertise, White began to seek collaboration with designers who had complementary skills and talents. He talked to architects Craig Hodgetts and Hsin-Ming Fung about forming a collaboration that could include a wide spectrum of disciplines.

“We were all vying for a variety of projects that often overlapped professional boundaries and exceeded our particular experience,” White explained. “I wondered if there was some way we could work together as partners rather than rivals.”

The result of these discussions is Harmonica, a Santa Monica-based multimedia design group incorporated this year. Harmonica’s core group of White, Hodgetts and Fung is ringed by a circle of potential collaborators in photography, graphic arts and environmental design, video production, exhibition and electronic special effects.

“In an age when architects design teapots and teapot designers dream of buildings, the once-rigid boundaries between design disciplines are increasingly being blurred,” Hodgetts said. “The barriers between architecture, say, and graphics are artificial when shopping malls strive more and more to be multimedia events, and theme parks become permanent environments.”

Harmonica has already won several unusual commissions, including “RockPlex,” a behind-the-scenes MTV “experience” for MCA’s planned Entertainment City in Universal City, and an imaginative, sport-oriented “Wellness World” for Mitsubishi 200 miles north of Tokyo.

Aimed at releasing the raw adrenaline of an actual rock performance, the entrance of RockPlex re-creates a backstage of a concert, complete with rough scaffolding, parked vans and miles of trailing cable. Inside the RockPlex, which will open late next year, a vast interactive digital screen can reflect everything from a visitor’s face hugely blown up to an array of computer-generated sound and images from rock ‘n’ roll.

“Limovators”--elevators shaped like stretch limos and rock band vans--lift patrons past electronic re-creations of poignant events in rock ‘n’ roll, such as the crash of Buddy Holly’s plane. In another section of the “experience,” visitors may perform on the stage of a recording studio and see themselves magically transformed into Mick Jagger.

In Mitsubishi’s 400-acre Wellness World theme park, scheduled to open in 1992, people will participate in a range of fitness experiences from skiing to scuba diving under one great dome. The visitor may ski down a slope, then trade his parka for a wet suit and plunge into a heated tropical lake complete with coral reefs. Unlike most theme parks, Wellness World lets the patron make his own entertainment and choose his own mix of pleasures.

On a more modest scale, Harmonica has developed the prototype for high-tech Cookie Express brownie outlets that will celebrate the “American Graffiti” drive-in experience. The Cookie Express architecture features neon and is dominated by an electronic circle emulating the oversized doughnuts of the 1950s.

Harmonica’s imaginative design has attracted immediate attention. A prominent West German design magazine has already expressed interest in publishing an article on the group, as an example of West Coast innovation and willingness to break old molds.

Architect Jon Jerde, the principal designer of MCA’s proposed Entertainment City, has also engaged Harmonica to collaborate in the creation of an immense walk-in, electronic “Whizzbang” sign for Manhattan’s Times Square. Jerde thinks Harmonica’s diversity of expertise is an ideal complement to his firm’s fascination with large-scale urban concepts.

“I love these guys’ heads--nothing daunts them,” Jerde said. “They can think synergistically, about everything all at once, rather than in the conventional linear terms that tend to parcel out the pieces among separate specialists who operate sequentially.”

Jerde sees the interaction between his office and Harmonica as synergistic.

“No one profession can do everything in today’s complex environment,” he said. “My people can lay down a basic design or visual armature that outfits like Harmonica can imaginatively flesh out. It’s a kind of harmony among equals.”

The name Harmonica was chosen for its suggestion of harmony and its wry musical resonance.

“It’s a name you can sing,” Fung said.

“Harmony among equals” is a new way of doing business in the design world. Unlike Jerde, many contemporary architects fear a loss of status if they concede power to other professionals.

In the more conventional model the architect is usually the main person and hires other designers as temporary consultants subject to his will and whim. This often leads to professional resentment and awkward confrontation when disagreements surface.

“The old adversarial setup among designers bothered me,” White said. “It seemed such a waste of spirit and usually results in a sum that’s less than its parts. Harmonica’s math is that 2 and 2 makes 5, not 3.

“To make Harmonica work we have to trust everyone’s openness and honesty. We must share an appetite for one another’s ideas and be willing to merge our individual and often egoistical imaginations for the greater good. If we can do this, we can redefine the act of design in a changing world.”

Harmonica’s innovative style is defined as the architecture of experiences.

“It’s a kind of spatial storytelling that reacts with great flexibility to how people feel in the designed environment. Flexibility, both in the design and in the act of designing, is Harmonica’s core concept,” Fung said.

The Harmonicans believe that many practical functions that were once thought to be purely architectural have been superseded by technology.

“Take the traditional banking hall, which is being challenged as a necessary space by automatic teller machines,” Hodgetts said. “One day soon the old idea of the bank building may vanish, when customers can link into ATMs from their home computers and manage their money without leaving the house. While these changes are happening, architects are still obsessed by outdated totems. In the future we will be designing rows of ATMs instead of traditional bank building halls.”

Before Harmonica was formed, Hodgetts and Fung designed the Case Study House exhibit currently occupying the MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary gallery in Little Tokyo. This multimedia event includes everything from full-scale reconstructions of two of the Case Study houses to multiscreen video panoramas of talking heads and film footage from the 1950s re-creating the heady atmosphere of the period.

The Case Study show is ambitious but not quite as challenging as their new commissions. The integrated multimedia environment of the RockPlex demonstrates how Harmonica’s group talents have given its partners extra energy and skill.

“Working with other designers, your eyes keep on unfolding with fresh perspectives,” Fung said. “You become aware of elements most architects usually ignore, such as emotions like mystery, foreboding and delight, and the expressiveness of body language as a clue to how people experience a space.

“I’m constantly surprised in this collaboration,” she added. “Why didn’t we do it long ago?”