An architect, interior designer, educator, author, and thinker, Neil M. Denari has been practicing for more than 20 years. He strongly believes that design is boundary-less. It’s about making spaces that not only function well but also connect with people. He talks about “being precise in a world that isn’t.” His key thought: “It’s easy to address a project’s program. The challenge is to make it sublime.” If that’s not Hall of Fame material, what is?
As a boy, Denari had a grand plan. He knew he’d be an architect, and he knew he’d leave his native Euless, Texas, for the East Coast. Those goals took shape as a master’s degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a job at James Stewart Polshek and Partners, and a teaching position at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. (When he started at Columbia at age 28, he was barely older than his students.) He also knew, without ever having visited Los Angeles, that he’d eventually settle there. “For a landlocked kid, the California lifestyle seemed exotic and new,” he explains. He opened Neil M. Denari Architects in L.A. in 1988, the same year that he began teaching at SCI-Arc. From 1997 to 2002, he served as the school’s director. Life abroad enters the picture, too. After Harvard, Denari went to Paris to intern at Aérospatiale, now Airbus. The money he earned there financed an additional six-month stay to delve deeper into the work of Le Corbusier “as a reappraisal of my education,” he says. Tokyo came later, when a SCI-Arc exchange program grew into nine months teaching at the Shibaura Institute of Techology. He knew it was time to head back to L.A. when the Gulf War began.
Commissions from clients didn’t come immediately, so he created his own—not just theoretical exercises on paper but plans that could be engineered and built if the right developer came along. His first actual commission was the L.A. Eyeworks boutique, a renovation he describes as a “digital exploration of space that’s almost abstract.” Then came the big time. L.A. Eyeworks literally caught the eye of a founding partner of Endeavor, the powerhouse now known as William Morris Endeavor Entertainment. His name was Tom Strickler, and he contacted Denari about designing a new headquarters for the talent agency. “Putting the energy in the ceiling and walls, against a clean white background,” he says, captured the vitality of the agency and another one of its cofounders, Ari Emanuel. Strickler also taught Denari a fundamental lesson: “Don’t worry if anyone likes it or not.”
Commissions multiplied, as did staff—from four to 15 including his wife, Christine, who manages the office. Five bank branches for Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group constituted a cross-cultural experiment. “Could we adapt an ambitious architectural vocabulary so that it could be embraced by a conservative institution such as a bank with a clientele at the upper echelons of both age and wealth?” he wondered. Apparently. The bank branches reported a 100 percent increase in business. His first ground-up building, sited adjacent to New York’s magnificent High Line park, is the condominium HL23. Within the confines of a tight site, he constructed a tour de force with a facade that combines non-spandrel curtain walls and folded steel ribbons. This is where it really all comes together for Denari. Not to mention that the project led to the opening of a Manhattan satellite office.
Still, he hasn’t abandoned his intellectual pursuits. He’s currently writing his third book, Speculations On, a 40-project monograph to be published in English and Mandarin. He’s teaching, too—at Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles. His approach, he says, is less master-student than an attempt to engage in conversations about his obsessions. Yes, they’re visual. No, they’re not architectural, per se. A short list includes Robert Ryman’s glorious white paintings and Stanley Kubrick’s long, slow 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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