Rising star / Randy Brown architects: the Nebraska native aims to redirect the midwest mainstream - 2003 leadership awards - Biography

Residential Architect, June, 2003 by Cheryl Weber

in retrospect, it's not hard to see why architect Randy Brown, AIA, chose a 1970s Montessori school as his first studio-cum-living quarters. The 40-by-40-foot passive-solar structure, with its tall, south-facing windows and concrete floors, was the perfect canvas on which to experiment with movable sunshades, tilted planes, exposed joists and studs, and salvaged light fixtures. Over a period of two years in the mid-1990s, he and his wife, Kim, camped out there. They plotted a collage of flexible live/work spaces, which they built themselves.

Three years ago, the firm and the family outgrew the old school. But its design set a course for the work Brown is known for: adventurous buildings that catch visitors off-guard, but that are unwavering in their respect for the environment, the site, and the diverse needs of their occupants.

Brown practices architecture on his home tuff in Omaha, Neb., a sprawling telecommunications capital far removed from its roots in farms and ranches. But the architect still looks for inspiration in Nebraska's rural life--the bold forms of barns, the silos with their rusted joints, and the material textures of corrugated metal and wood on out-buildings. Perhaps it was the pull of the prairie that drew Brown back home after he finished graduate school at UCLA. But he had other reasons for returning, too. "I could have lived in Los Angeles and been one of hundreds of architects who wanted to do Modern architecture," Brown says. "But I knew if I went back to Nebraska I'd be maybe one of two architects in the Midwest who want to push Modern architecture. I thought it was a great opportunity to see what I could do to bring not just Modern architecture, but design, to the Midwest."

Brown has been sketching houses since he was three years old and living in "a typical suburban house." Even in high school he was most interested in exploring buildings with clean lines and strong volumes. But it was Los Angeles' bright lights that opened his eyes to diversity and expressionist forms of architecture. "UCLA had the who's who of practicing Modern architects coming through to teach studios--Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry" Brown says. "In the early 1990s, the big thing was the studio class Richard Meier taught while working on the Getty." He learned the language of architecture from other well-known professors, too, such as Frank Israel, Julie Eizenberg, and Charles Jencks. And touting the houses of Modernist masters like Richard Neutra and R.M. Schindler was, he says, "a life-changing event."

After school, Omaha beckoned. Serendipitously, it was the source of two commissions he couldn't turn down: a design for his father's law office, and a girl store his mother was opening. If that scenario seemed like a safe way to test his skills, it also presented Brown with a large dose of reality. "My parents both wanted me to design these projects in a one-month period," he says. "I did the designs while still living in L.A. and coordinated all the construction." The success of those commissions gave Brown enough momentum to launch his own practice in Omaha in 1993.

live and learn

With its gleaming metal-clad angles and strange asymmetries, Brown's current office building is like nothing Omaha has seen before. He says he had in mind a building that doesn't become any one form, but rather grows out of the irregular geometries of the ravine and creek that run behind it. The southern end of the building twists away from the main mass, and a trapezoid "hammerhead" as the architect calls it, rises out of it. The trapezoid is split east to west with a jagged gash that forms a two-story atrium inside, and windows in the crevices bring in views of the creek. As in every Brown building, the emphasis was on green methods and materials: skylights for passive solar gain, recycled wood floors and walls, and recycled steel.

Inhabiting the space are five employees--three project architects, an interior designer, and a marketing person. Although they work with the latest computer technology, in recent years they've moved almost exclusively to design/build to satisfy Brown's penchant for hands-on design. The project architects collect bids from subs, schedule construction, and watch the job being built. Any given project may find the architects rolling up their sleeves to grade the site and nail up drywall. "We're not afraid to get our hands dirty" Brown says.

The design/build model also attracts young talent. A part-time professor at the University of Nebraska, Brown selects students from colleges all over the Midwest to participate in summer workshops. Two years ago, six of them converged on Brown's own landscape, part of a 1950s farmhouse. They designed and built site-specific observation decks, play structures for Brown's children, and a retaining wall made from recycled limestone stacked in wire cages. "What was drawn in the studio quickly became obsolete, once all of the realities of building and a better understanding of the site were discovered,' Brown wrote about the project. "The instruments to design with became shovels, rakes, chain saws, Skil saws, wire cutters, screw guns, radial-arm saws, and sledgehammers."