Learning from Los Angeles

The son of two Hungarian immigrants new to Southern California, Zoltan was born in 1960 and raised in the San Fernando Valley. Although well within the boundaries of LA County, he felt removed from the city both culturally and geographically living with Hungarians and surrounded by mountains.

“My family wasn’t really Angelenos, and we didn’t really live in LA. The valley, at the time and even now, felt far away, like living at a campground, and my parents—well my parents were typical immigrants: we didn’t speak any English at home and they were afraid to go outside.”

His father, an engineer, instilled in him a love for technical drawing and drafting, and some of Zoltan’s earliest memories were of sitting up at his dad’s desk, watching him draw stuff. Another formative memory? His dad’s cars: first a 1954 white and red Buick Convertible, followed by a 1961 Mercedes 220s, all white with a bright red interior. “Those were the first designs I fell in love with.”

Less inspiring was the valley itself. “I remember nothing except for a flat land filled with bad apartments and bad buildings. I say bad, I mean 'bad'—boring. Everything looked exactly the same.”

It was only when the family would venture out over the mountains and into downtown that architecture would begin to leave any impression at all, specifically at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax where a young Zoltan marveled at the May Company Building and witnessed LACMA being built. “The insides of the May Company Building were so impressive, so immersive and grand, especially so to a child. I remember as a family we would go inside and just walk around to look, to touch and feel things. We couldn’t afford anything there, so we’d actually do our shopping across the street at Ohrbach’s. But we’d always go inside.”

For college Zoltan stayed close to home, attending UCLA. Persuaded by his father, he entered school intending to get a degree in engineering. It was a disaster—“I was perhaps the worst engineer on the planet”—and he began taking design classes before transferring into UCLA’s main College of Letters & Science.

Despite being a self-professed inadequate engineer, he was already a seasoned draftsman, having worked throughout high school and college producing technical and mechanical drawings for a local engineering office. Now studying design, he began to have inklings of architecture’s true possibilities—but still viewed the discipline largely as the distillation of details into flawless floor plans and elevations. “For me, at that time, architecture was entirely about the drawings. I was focused on the production side, on the physical nature of the documents. I wasn’t thinking about styles or famous architects. I was thinking about how things were put together. I was thinking about drawings.”

Zoltan traces his first real design to the mid-80s while working for the Santa Monica architecture firm Solberg & Lowe. The project was a simple two-story office/retail building for a Texas developer. Given the assignment on a Thursday with a Monday deadline, he worked solidly through the weekend drawing up a scheme. “When I showed them my design they were shocked. They said ‘We can’t use this! It looks just like Neutra!’ It was rectilinear and simple, and they were right. It did look like Neutra. I had no idea.”

“Architecture at that time, especially in LA, you didn’t see the best projects. The best projects were hidden, and you weren’t confronted by these now legendary homes tucked all over the place. I was woefully behind, and began to re-educate myself.”

Shortly after he set out on his own, completing smaller jobs, entering competitions, and immersing himself in the big architect's works and lives. He experimented with styles, briefly imitating Deconstructionist Eric Owen Moss (“I made some ugly stuff where everything was blowing apart. I wasn’t going down that path”) and slowly began to form a personal architectural foundation.