Strange Beauty: Bestor Architecture's Barbara Bestor on Freedom, Playfulness, and a Feminist Form of Office Culture

By Julia Gamolina

Barbara Bestor, FAIA is the Principal and founder of Bestor Architecture. Barbara’s award-winning studio is recognized for consistently pursuing experimental architecture that engages the city through design, art, and urbanism. She believes that good design creates an engaged urban life and embraces the “strange beauty” that enhances everyday life experience.

Barbara Bestor is also the author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake (Harper Collins, 2006), a book dedicated to the suppressed narrative of informal and eccentric modernism found in Silver Lake’s rich domestic architectural history. Barbara received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her Master of Architecture from SCI-Arc. She is the Executive Director of Woodbury University’s Julius Shulman Institute. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Barbara talks about her creative practice in Los Angeles, learning from crisis, and the true challenges that women face, advising those just starting their careers to try working at several kinds of offices.

JG: Let’s start at the very beginning—tell me about how you grew up!

BB: I grew up in the 1970s in Cambridge, MA, when it was a hippie intellectual town with lots of used bookstores and quite a lot of architects. However, I used to spend summers alone at my grandmother's in southern Germany, and I would spend a lot of time making boats and other things out of stuff like leftover milk containers and take them to the big park near her house and float them in the fountains. I always liked working with my hands, making and painting little buildings, boats, cars, that kind of thing.

In middle school, I babysat for a few different architects who had cleverly converted their old wooden duplexes into modern interiors with super graphics, bright colors, and fabrics from the Design Research store in Harvard square, and I loved them! I read a lot of architecture books when babysitting on Saturday nights after Fantasy Island and The Love Boat were over, and that is when I began to think this was my jam. In high school I had an internship at CambridgeSeven and probably just organized their slide library as I had no skills, but I liked the work environment and had always loved their brutalist New England Aquarium growing up. I was also a dancer and choreographer, a theater nerd, and managed a ska band—we all had fake IDs and would go to a lot of shows, especially at the Western Front which was a great reggae club owned by a friend’s dad. I was a good organizer and put on a big punk band show to raise money for Cambridge Students for Disarmament.

How did you arrive at architecture as a career path?

In college I majored in Visual Studies and Fine Art, and then I went away for a year to the Architectural Association in London which was mind blowing and such a creative place, even though at the time, not that much new architecture was getting built in London. Alvin Boyarsky, the head of the AA, suggested I go to Los Angeles after college if I wanted to have a career actually building experimental architecture, because to him, that was the only place where you could actually build interesting work.

I ended up moving to LA in the late 1980s and going to SCI-Arc when it was a teeny tiny school in a somewhat dusty industrial hangar in the nether regions of Santa Monica, and it really was amazing. Mike Davis taught there and Joan Copjec, Carlos Jimenez, Neil Denari, Laurie Hawkinson, and the graduate program was run by Robert Mangurian and Mary Ann Ray, who I worked for part time, and in later years I also taught with them in the grad program.

House Stepping Down a Hill in Los Angeles. Photo by Bruce Damonte.

How did you then get your start in working in architecture?

When I was in grad school in the late 1980s, there were not many women-owned design firms that I could find on the map, and I felt like there was an old fashioned straight jacket and implied glass ceiling. There were not that many women faculty either at that time, and some of us started a group for women in architecture at the school.

Starting back then I thought it would be really something to have my own office and show that you can be a creative designer, woman, architect in the world, without a male partner—though I have to say, I wasn't sure I would be able to pull it off. Right after school, I worked at a really big firm for maybe a half a year, and it wasn't a great fit. Luckily I got a couple of small, very small, projects on my own and then got a new house project as a joint venture with my friend, the great late architect Norman Millar, who I had worked for part time while I was in school. The clients were people I knew through my own networks from college. Norman and I interviewed together and got the job, and we rented a little office in the old Disney animation offices off of Vermont Ave in Los Feliz, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. It was the first of many spaces we shared for years while pursuing our individual practices as well as several joint ventures.

Tell me how Bestor Architecture came about, and your personal evolution with it over the years.

I got my license roughly three years after I graduated from grad school, and that's when Bestor Architecture became official. I think a lesser known aspect of the profession is that there are so many great designers out there, but successful practice in architecture isn't only about design excellence. Building a practice is as much about what kind of networks you can build, how you communicate ideas with clients and the world, what type of work you're doing, and of course quality control, client management, etcetera. Without those things, it's pretty hard to keep the whole thing going.

Bestor Architecture started really small in 1995, I was half teaching and half practicing, with maybe three employees. We've grown to almost thirty people, and I no longer am able to teach, but I still try to keep my hand in various, shall we say, intellectual endeavors through curating and things like the Julius Shulman Institute. I’ve also worked on a lot of the preservation and rejuvenation of historic modernist structures—Lautner, Schindler, Ain, and others—and I love learning from these, thinking about how past modernisms relate to our own in the 21st Century modernisms.

“Building a practice is as much about what kind of networks you can build, how you communicate ideas with clients and the world, what type of work you’re doing and of course quality control, client management, etcetera. Without those things, it’s pretty hard to keep the whole thing going.”

— Barbara Bestor

Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?

When I was younger the biggest challenge was one of confidence, where I was torn between feeling excited to be building this practice but also worried that I didn't have a coherent enough ideology or vision. My analytical and critical thinking would take over too often. When I was in my 30s and had kids and then got divorced, I had a big personal crisis and it actually really let me cut loose… it seemed like none of those neo-modern rules I had learned earlier in grad school or establishment dogma of “what architecture was” no longer mattered to me and instead, I started to pursue things and formal ideas I really enjoyed. A crisis really began an evolution, and I started doing work that was colorful and fun, that integrated a little more with nature, and was overall more playful. My daughters were very playful and I learned a lot from them because they certainly didn't obey the same rules that I did. They had lovely freedom that inspired and helped me think out of the box.

There are always ups and downs in the workflow of a practice, but perhaps because we have a very diverse project portfolio and a relatively small office, we have luckily not had any devastating downturns where we've had to downsize. I think the more difficult challenge in an architecture office, given our profession’s fraught history of workaholism, is trying to maintain a workload that is balanced and a culture that has positive energy, supports people in their endeavors, and feels equitable and fun… and that's really just super hard to do all the time.

Luckily, I have several other people running the internal office who put a lot of work into building and maintaining the culture of the firm. We need to make sure people feel heard and cared for and we do this in many ways. Right now we have a mix of outside coaching and internal leadership structures, and have built small, intimate teams that allow for closer communication and direct feedback. We also support our staff in the long haul and subsidize the overly expensive process of becoming licensed architects—the numbers of women and POC design grads who don’t get licensed is still really grim. We are focused on design and creativity and try to have the architects in the office be generalists who can follow a project from design through construction. Our work has attracted really amazing creative clients that allows us to do these more design-centric projects.

Exhibit design at LACMA for Scandinavian Design & the US, 1890-1980. Photo by Yoshihiro Makino.

Intelligentsia in Silverlake. Photo by Ray Kachatorian.

On this note, what have you learned in the last six months?

I have learned to be really patient. As we've started to get some bigger projects, they really take a very long time and there are a lot more people involved, both in the decision making and in the production of the architecture. When you scale up like that, patience is required. It's enjoyable, but I would not say that patience is my strong suit, so I'm having to retrain my brain a bit; I can’t be as improvisational as I like to be in smaller residential or retail projects.

I also feel like some of the work we did as an office towards building a more fun, livable, equitable studio culture has paid off, and I feel like the group of people I'm working with are generally in a good place post-pandemic and looking forward to new unknown horizons in architecture. I’m also hopeful that our great new mayor— Karen Bass was just elected this year—will remove roadblocks to building new models of housing. My peers in architecture and planning in LA have been scheming and dreaming to imagine how we grow our communities with care and creativity.

What are you most excited about right now?

I love form and color as well as critical thinking and social theory, and I feel like our new work is increasingly able to address bigger cultural issues, like what a “sanctuary” and “education” can be. Certainly, more than when the firm was working at a small, super detailed scale. That new development has been really exciting… although I still love getting my hands in small projects as well.

“Bestor Architecture’s mission is that everyone should experience strange beauty every day. We explore new possibilities for community, intimacy and joy and the architectures of daily life.”

— Barbara Bestor

Who are you admiring right now and why?

I’ve been admiring Grafton Architects out of Dublin, Ireland, ever since I saw the model of a project they're doing at the University of Arkansas. When I look at their body of work I am really impressed at the creativity and their ability to use architectural abstractions to make meaningful spaces for people.

Another person I admire is Lauren Halsey, the contemporary artist that has been working in LA, building monumental architectural pieces that are inscribed with images of people, patterns, and words from her community. I feel like she's literally building community out of these building blocks that she herself is making in her studio.

Another person is Pankaj Mishra who is a political and cultural writer, whose work has really helped me understand how colonialism in the 19th century led us to where we are today in this strange global political and cultural moment.

And close to home, my colleague Angela Brooks, of Brooks Scarpa Architects, has been building, writing, and organizing around housing from a practicing architect’s point of view on how to change our city and county's planning and zoning codes to encourage more progressive housing and a more socially just use of the city.

Finally, I met Alison Brooks in New Zealand almost ten years ago and was so impressed with the work that she was doing. I follow her avidly and really love some of the new university buildings she's been creating in England as well as her housing projects.

What is the impact you’d like to have in the world? What is your core mission? And what does success in that look like to you?

Bestor Architecture’s mission is that everyone should experience strange beauty every day. We explore new possibilities for community, intimacy and joy and the architectures of daily life.

I love being in Los Angeles because it's a city that keeps changing and as architects, we have the opportunity to participate in creating the future of this place that keeps growing and transforming.

I suppose from the beginning, I've tried to create a feminist alternative to the dominant assumption that “only white males are design architects” concept that's been running the show for the last several centuries. And I'm really proud that several women who have been in my office have gone off and started their own offices as well. In that sense, maybe my greatest success is that having gotten through thirty years of growing from a seedling into hopefully, sort of a tree, I have the type of practice that can shelter and nurture other generations of architects, feminists, photographers etc., to start their own worlds that they, in turn, have a bigger effect on Los Angeles and California design.

Finally, one thing that is thrilling about architectural practice is that when we do get to build things, they are around for a long time and they really affect people’s daily lives for the better. Architecture can both function as a backdrop to everyday life, but it can also be an exciting and integral component to a community, depending on the context.

Ashes & Diamonds is a winery and event center in Napa, CA. Photo by Emma Morris.

Blackbirds is a small lot housing development in Los Angeles. Photos by Iwan Baan.

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting out their career?

Architecture is for the curious and the slightly obsessive, be they male or female. I think one regret I have is I didn't work at several kinds of offices when I was younger, so I really had to build my firm without having seen other people's models and mistakes. What I have learned has either come on the job or learned about other practices through the advice of peers in the industry, or from hiring people who have worked in other places—which is a fairly indirect way to do it! That being said, growing the office organically was fun and it started somewhat casually, as I was a single parent and splitting my time between a more academic career and a practice. Ultimately, I found that the practice was more fulfilling, in that I really had a desire to see things built in the world and to build a community in the office, hoping to model a feminist form of office culture.

Would your advice be any different for women?

I think for women professionals of any kind, not just architecture, this is a difficult cultural moment because we have managed to eliminate the old extended family models, and instead now have these nuclear style families with two parents in demanding professions that are difficult to manage once children are involved. It becomes a matter of how much money do you have to pay for help, and for moms, very often a ton of old fashioned gender role issues come into play.

Architecture is a job that can be very time consuming and isn’t as well paid as some other professions. The balancing act of work and gendered family labor can lead to a incredible amount of stress for women. I think it's probably likely that I was able to take the career path I did, in part, because I got divorced when my kids were very young and I had fifty-fifty custody. That allowed me to be able to work a lot during half of any week. I also lived in a community where I was able to develop a great network of friends with families of similar aged children, and we had a little group to travel, hang out, and co-parent together. Honestly, even now with our kids in their 20s we still hang out, some of us work together, and we all co-parent to this day. In that note, the village model is something you see even in architecture’s experimental housing models of the early 20th Century, especially those designed by women… so I’ll end by plugging Dolores Hayden’s “The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities.”

Thank you Barbara! I know our readers love book recommendations of all kinds.