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By Ingrid Spencer

When John Enright, AIA, and Margaret Griffin, AIA, principals of Los Angeles-based architecture firm Griffin Enright Architects describe their design process, they sound more like archaeologists than architects. But while uncovering and excavating “embedded, underlying possibilities” may be the way this team approaches projects, unearthing a fixed solution is never their goal. “We’re more interested in experimentation and transformation than either a definite resolution or even continuity,” says Enright.

The six-year-old firm may want to avoid continuity of style and expectation, but it can’t avoid continuing to grow. With a slew of residential projects under their belts, Griffin and Enright are leading the six-person firm into more conceptual ground; adding their design voice to competitions; trying for bigger-scale projects and smaller installations; teaching and lecturing at such schools as SCI-Arc, USC, Cal Poly Pomona, and Syracuse University; and moving into landscape architecture. “Our work has always been about linking interiors to the environment,” says Griffin, “so it’s just a natural progression.”

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Former East Coasters, Enright and Griffin have found Los Angeles to be just the right place to pursue their interest in the relationship between architecture and the environment. Their recent exhibition at SCI-Arc, Keep Off the Grass!: Planar Landscape Phenomena, presented an organic installation of more than 1,000 square feet of sod suspended in the exhibition space. Facts and statistics about grass and the negative impact that watering and maintaining Southern California lawns has on the environment lined the walls. The installation evolved as the sod decayed, serving as a beautiful sensory experience as well as a critique of the way we humans create strange and often inharmonious relationships with natural materials. “Grass costs nothing to install, and it’s this pervasive material that covers the city like a blanket,” says Griffin “and yet here we are in the desert. It makes little sense.”

Despite the implications of Keep Off the Grass!, and the team’s current emphasis on using solar components in their designs, Griffin and Enright don’t necessarily see themselves as “green architects.” “We’re interested in tools and concepts that are useful,” says Enright, “and employing them in different ways. We’re not making ‘solar architecture,’ but it just so happens that there’s a logic in using such things as tools.” Enright explains this with the metaphor of being given a block of ice and being told to make something with only an ice pick, or with only a blowtorch, as opposed to being given the block and being told to find the best way to carve it. “We get the block of ice, and we get to choose the tools,” he says, “and that’s what excites us.” While Enright calls himself a bit of a pessimist (“You have to be to solve problems when there are so many forces out there that seem to be against the world of ideas,” he says), he and Griffin are optimistic about the future of their firm, which they run like an atelier. “Everyone is a designer, and everyone answers the phone,” says Griffin, who agrees that a day may soon come when expansion may change their current setup. “Any architect today has to look outside their backyard,” says Enright. Both architects concur: They’ll keep digging, keep experimenting, and they don’t plan to be left behind.