Content area
Full Text
For a man who has been living in Los Angeles just three months, architect Norman H. Pfeiffer has certainly made a tremendous impact on local history. More accurately, perhaps, he is remaking a lot of it.
A partner in the New York-based firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Pfeiffer has led his company west to land three of Los Angeles' most prized public works projects in recent memory, namely: the $127 million Central Library expansion, masterplanning the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, including the new $35.3 million Robert O. Anderson Building, and the restoration of Los Angeles' landmark City Hall.
"We're watching the transformation of a major, major city," Pfeiffer says. "To be a practicing architect here, I've been given an opportunity to be a real part of it. I feel tremendously fortunate to be here in Los Angeles at this point in my career."
Though Pfeiffer has only recently moved from New York to Los Angeles, he is by no means unfamiliar with our city. His first foray into the Los Angeles market came during an unsuccessful 1980 campaign to plan and design the entire Bunker Hill redevelopment project downtown. Since then, Pfeiffer has found himself a frequent visitor to Los Angeles. The County Museum contract, awarded in 1981, forced him to be here almost two weeks out of every month. And now that his firm has begun in earnest on the Central Library and City Hall, Pfeiffer and his wife, Patricia Zohn -- a respected film producer in her own right -- have decided to make Los Angeles, specifically Brentwood, home for their family of four.
"This is a city with tremendous incentives for young people," the handsome 46-year-old remarks. "Any lawyer, banker or other professional who's truly interested in the dynamics of their profession would immediately see the advantages to being here, as opposed to having some caretaker job for some foundation in Connecticut. In my lifetime I have the opportunity to watch the results of our endeavors."
Born and raised in a small community just outside Seattle, Pfeiffer says his interest in architecture blossomed at the impressionable age of 12. While other boys his age were pounding baseball mits and tossing footballs, Pfeiffer was tagging along with his grandfather,...