The Architects Who Taught Me Without Knowing It
A few weeks after the Whittier High Hall of Fame ceremony, I’ve been thinking about something the night brought up but didn’t quite have time to say.
When you stand at a podium and thank people, you naturally name the ones who were closest to you: the family, the teachers, the first employer who took a chance. That list matters. But there’s another list, quieter and just as important, that doesn’t usually make it into a speech: the architects whose work shaped how I think long before I ever knew them personally.
This is a note about that second list.
Mr. Reed — The One Who Was Actually There
The first name on either list is Mr. Reed, my drafting teacher at Whittier High. I’ve written about him before. I’ll just add this: he’s the reason I understood, before I could have articulated it, that architecture is a discipline you have to practice — not a talent you either have or you don’t.
He let me wander off-assignment when something interesting caught my eye. He didn’t make a big deal of it. He just kept the drafting room open and let me figure it out. Forty-some years later, I still try to run our studio the same way for the people who work here.
Richard Landry — The Apprenticeship
After USC, I joined Richard Landry’s firm as one of his earliest employees. That period was a real education — the kind you can’t get in school. I learned how high-end residential actually comes together: from the first client conversation through the last installed detail, from the way a budget shapes a decision to the way a contractor reads a drawing set.
Richard ran a firm at a scale and standard I hadn’t seen up close before. Watching him work taught me how to think about a residence as a complete project, not just a building. Much of how Dean Larkin Design operates today traces back to lessons I picked up in those years.
Harry Gesner — Studied at a Distance, Met Just Once
The third name on the list isn’t a mentor in the conventional sense. I studied Harry Gesner’s work for years before I ever met him. But his houses taught me things long before that.
Gesner designed homes that responded to their sites instead of correcting them. The Wave House. The Sandcastle. The Boat House. The Triangle House. Each one started with the land, its slope, its view, its idiosyncrasies and let the architecture follow from there. He put houses on lots most architects would have walked away from, and made the constraints into the most interesting parts of the design.
What I took from his work, studying it over the years, was three things: a discipline of site-driven design, the courage to put a house in dialogue with its landscape rather than imposing on it, and maybe most importantly, the freedom to express individualism and creativity in a profession that doesn’t always reward either one.
That last part has stayed with me. Architecture has its conventions, its safe moves, its expected forms. Gesner’s body of work was a long, beautiful argument that you don’t have to follow them and that the houses worth building are usually the ones where the architect trusted their own instincts.
The Macapa Drive house — originally designed by Harry Gesner in 1974, renovated by Dean Larkin Design in 2014.
In 2014, we completed the renovation of a Gesner-designed house on Macapa Drive in the Hollywood Hills — the “Flying Wing,” built in 1974. Working on a house someone else conceived is its own kind of responsibility. You’re not trying to copy what was there. You’re trying to honor what made it worth saving and then make it livable for the people who’ll live in it now.
Later that year, AIA-LA hosted a public “Breakfast with the Architect” tour of the renovated house, and Harry Gesner came to walk through it. After years of studying his work from a distance, meeting him at the house we’d restored was a quiet, full-circle moment. He couldn’t have been more gracious. I’ve thought about that day many times since.
The Difference Between Mentors and Influences
I’ve come to think of mentors and influences as two different things. Mentors are people who knew you, who took the time, who corrected you when you needed it. Influences are the work you keep coming back to, even when no one’s watching, because something in it speaks to how you see the world.
You need both. Mentors teach you how the profession works. Influences remind you why you wanted to be in it in the first place.
I owe Mr. Reed and Richard Landry the first kind of debt. I owe Harry Gesner the second.
Both kinds of debt are worth paying forward.
Contact Dean Larkin for Exceptional Contemporary Design in California
Dean Larkin Design was established in Los Angeles in 1999 and this modern architecture firm maximizes the intrinsic potential of a location, including its available natural light sources. Dean Larkin is very familiar with both historical and contemporary design in the entire Los Angeles area, and the firm endeavors to achieve a complexity that is multi-layered with an effortless elegance. For a design that is modern and innovative, unlocks your location’s innate potential by making specific use of light, views and more, and uniquely designed for the way you live, contact Dean Larkin for a consultation.