Environment by Design : Husband-Wife Team Creates Total Picture Inside and Out

E nvironment , defined, in its modern sense, by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the sum total of influences which modify and determine the development of life or character,” is a word that has come to cast a lengthening shadow over our minds.

In response to this concern, environmental design has taken on an increasing significance for architects, landscape architects and graphic artists. Its impact blurs the usual boundaries between design disciplines, dissolving the barriers between the professionals who devise the interiors and exteriors of buildings.

Graphic designers, particularly, have led the way in this fertile fusion of experts. They have broken out of their traditional box as the contrivers of corporate brochures and the designers of signs that decorate architecture, to deal with the spaces inside and between buildings, and the total look of the man-made environment.

The husband-and-wife team of Deborah Sussman and Paul Prejza, practicing as Sussman/Prejza & Co. Inc. in Culver City, is widely recognized as a pioneer of environmental design in the United States. Expanding from a basis of conventional graphics, Sussman/Prejza now conjures up sophisticated environmental scenarios that encompass everything from the gravity of near-architecture to the lighthearted creation of miniature worlds for toy fairs.

“Increasingly, architects and developers call upon us to help design environments that harmonize the look and feel of everything from the color of a wall to the configuration of the spaces surrounding and linking buildings with their neighbors,” Prejza said. “What we have done in essence is expand our expertise in creating coherent images from a small scale to a larger one.”

Sussman/Prejza earned a national reputation for their designs for the 1984 Summer Olympics, in collaboration with architects of the Jerde Partnership. Their Olympic pastiche of boulevard banners, lighthearted stars fallen from heaven and the jaunty pavilions they erected up all over the city drew wide praise for creating an unifying identity for the farflung Los Angeles Games.

Architect Barton Myers, who has collaborated with Sussman/Prejza on many projects over the past decade, praises the designers for their “amazing skill in moving out into the wider environment, beyond the mere making of signs, logos and patterns that preoccupy most graphic artists.” Sussman/Prejza has been an integral element in Myer’s design team, from his proposal for the Grand Avenue development on Bunker Hill in the late 1970s to his recently won commission for the American Pavilion at the 1992 Seville World’s Fair.

‘Taken the Lead’

“Paul and Deborah have taken the lead in breaking out of the usual restricted role of graphic designers,” Myers said. “They have taken under their wing all the areas between and within buildings that often fell through the cracks dividing architecture, landscape and urban design in conventional practice.”

A major environmental design project currently on Sussman/Prejza’s boards is the Citadel, a commercial development planned around the landmark Samson Tyre and Rubber Co. building in the City of Commerce, east of downtown. Designed in 1929 by Morgan, Walls and Clements, the now-abandoned Samson factory features a crenelated wall nearly one-third of a mile long contrived to resemble a Cecil B. De Mille version of an Assyrian palace decorated with heraldic griffins and bas-reliefs of Babylonian princes.

Behind the preserved facade of the old factory Sussman/Prejza are designing a 140,000-square-foot factory retail outlet center and food fair to serve a nearby office park and hotel. After the architects developed the Citadel’s schematic master plan and the landscape architects devised the basic layout of the open spaces surrounding the buildings, Sussman/Prejza fleshed out the project with a range of designs from tented stalls and glass pavilions to paving patterns and the internal architecture of the muscular columns and trusses of the old factory. With colorful booths, signs and streamers, they transformed it into a fanciful cathedral of consumption.

Sussman/Prejza have suggested that the Citadel development adopt the winged griffin as its integrating image. They would like to see a huge golden griffin soaring above the Assyrian palace as a beacon to attract motorists on the neighboring freeway.

‘Symbolic Shorthand’

“We always seek out the one striking visual metaphor that can become the symbolic shorthand for the whole design,” Sussman explained. “Everything else, down to the tiniest detail, is keyed to that prime image or plays against it as a counterpoint. This device helps integrate the entire environmental scenario and gives it a sense of overall cohesion we think is vital to its humanity.”

In a recently opened Minneapolis shopping mall, Sussman’s team came up with the idea of using the loon, the Minnesota state bird, as a symbol. The creature’s staring eyes and vivid profile are repeated in many of the mall’s signs and packaging, culminating in a giant gilded loon suspended over the mall’s central stair.

Prejza points to an increasing sophistication among architects and developers about the need for environmental design. The total look of a development has become a huge plus in an increasingly competitive commercial market. Kevin Staley, a partner in Trammell Crow Co., the Citadel developers, insisted on Sussman/Prejza’s participation in the project “because of their nationally recognized leadership in environmental design, which has become such a vital ingredient in the success of major commercial projects.”

“Clients want to make a splash,” Prejza said, “and they know we can give it to them. They know their design image is a vital ingredient in their corporate or market message to a public that has become sensitized to its man-made surroundings. They know design counts, at every level.”

To respond to the wide range of projects they are offered, Sussman/Prejza has structured its 40-person office into four fluid categories, each under the supervision of a senior associate. Exhibits, such as the annual Hasbro Toy Fair, are in the charge of Mark Nelsen. Scott Cuyler leads the section dealing with industrial design that involves free-standing objects, such as the road signs decorated with stylized Mickey Mouse ears for the planned Eurodisney complex outside Paris. Debra Valencia supervises the design of traditional graphics, including logos, brochures, posters etc. Fernando Vasquez oversees the design of architectural interiors and retail projects such as the Gaviidae and The Citadel.

Sussman and Prejza’s unusual combination of training and talent explains the firm’s unique expertise in environmental design. Educated as a graphic designer at Chicago’s Institute of Design, Sussman honed her skills in the L.A. office of Charles and Ray Eames in the 1950s. “The Eameses were the world’s first environmental designers, before the term was even invented,” she said. “They crossed boundaries at will, designing everything, from children’s games to houses, without changing hats. It was a wonderful apprenticeship for me.”

Trained as an architectural historian at Pennsylvania State University, Prejza was employed in the L.A. City Planning Department when he met his wife in 1967. Six years later they decided to set up practice together. Prejza’s cool competence acts as a foil to his wife’s exuberant imagination, and his grasp of the wider issues of urban design complements her passion for detail.

Success makes Sussman feel that the sky’s the limit. “My ambition is to design an airline,” she said, “from the tickets through the flight attendants’ uniforms to the arrangement of the seating and the painting of the planes. Air travel is one environment most of us have to suffer, and it has become increasingly stressful and ugly. Imagine what it would be like to fly with an airline in which everything you saw and experienced pleased the eye and soothed the nerves.”