INDUSTRY: Businessman’s Architect

Travelers who have seen such strikingly dissimilar buildings as Cairo’s Nile Hilton hotel, Los Angeles’ disc-shaped Sports Arena. Abilene’s stark Eisenhower museum and Hollywood’s Capitol Records Building (which looks like a stack of records) would be hard pressed to say what all had in common. The answer: they were all designed by Los Angeles’ Welton Becket, a Jack-of-all-styles architect who can run up a pancakelike auditorium or a soaring office building—or any of several dozen other styles and treatments—with equal ease.

Becket, 58, has won the title “The Businessman’s Architect” by giving businessmen what they want and need in buildings, paying close attention to the balance books as well as the plumb lines. So successful is the formula that his Welton Becket & Associates is the world’s largest singly owned architectural and engineering firm.

Becket’s latest building, the $37 million Kaiser Center, which opened in Oakland last week, is a monument to Becket’s flair for fitting design and treatment to an individual business or institution. At Henry Kaiser’s request, Becket designed the building to use as much as possible of the materials produced by Kaiser enterprises, e.g., aluminum. The extra work may cut Becket’s profit margin, but he feels that the experience that he got by extensive use of aluminum will help him in future jobs. This year Becket expects to direct the building of $150 million worth of architecture in 22 states and several countries. Says Becket happily: “The enclosure of space is the largest business in the world.”

Master Concept. In enclosing space, Becket shows little of the imagination or pioneering spirit of a Wright or Saarinen. Becket makes no apology, feels that his sort of made-to-order architecture is ideally suited to the varying needs of business. “The one who takes the position that he is primarily a creator and that his services must be sought,” he says, “is headed for failure.”

Becket does not wait to be sought. He is a superb salesman and organizer who goes after his clients, convinces them with facts and figures that the building will make money. He prefers the “systems approach” in which his firm does the entire job for a client—from the selection of the site to the color of cocktail napkins.

The result is that Becket’s plans, unlike those of many less business-oriented architects, consistently turn into buildings. His clients, which include six of the top ten U.S. industrial corporations, often come back for more. He has completed five Hilton hotels, six projects for Kaiser. When Hallmark Card President Joyce Hall admired some card-display racks in a Pasadena store completely designed by Becket, he went to see Becket. Becket not only got Hallmark’s business but a contract to build a home for Hall. He has since done eight Hallmark buildings.

Becket does not succumb to the temptation to build drab hatbox or birthday-cake buildings; he tries to give each client a distinctive building. Yet he does not kowtow to his client’s every wish: when a New York company asked him to design a building similar to Capitol Records’, he turned it down on the ground that the building would not fit its needs.

Steam-Heated Doghouse. Becket’s first made-to-order design was a far cry from such independence. After graduating from the University of Washington’s College of Architecture (’27) and attending Fontainebleau’s Ecole des Beaux Arts, he got one of his first commissions in Seattle: building a steam-heated doghouse. Becket later formed a partnership with College Classmate Walt Wurdeman, in 1932 moved to Los Angeles, where the partners made their mark by building houses to order for movie stars. During World War II they switched to mass production, built housing for 50,000 California workers. Their first big break into commercial construction came when they designed a Pasadena store for Bullock’s, Inc., with such new features as movable partitions and direct package delivery to customers’ autos. Bullock’s hired them to design two more stores, and their reputation spread quickly. Since Wurdeman died in 1949, Becket has owned the firm.

Becket is an untiring but low-pitched contact man whose widespread friends in big business make up a readymade clientele. His average fee of 6% enables him to live with his wife and two children in an 11-room house in movie-star-studded Holmby Hills in West Los Angeles. Becket has a strict rule against taking any work home with him—or letting his employees take work home. But he had to break his rule in designing his own house. Says he: “My wife was my toughest client.”