Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–232
TOMBRELLO: We will not talk about the stuff on top of it, because I don’t know anything about
the deal on that, but I suspect Caltech has been fleeced on the solar cells. I may be wrong. We
had a perfectly serviceable architect originally, because we had to have a kind of a preliminary
design for the building. Baltimore didn’t like it—said it looked like a bank. Well, it looked like
a pretty fancy bank, but it did look like a bank. And David wanted a signature architect. I
figured this was going to be trouble. Now, there were two signature architects that were being
considered for buildings on campus. One was Rem Koolhaas. If you’ve ever seen the Seattle
Public Library, you know this guy’s a genius. But as it turned out, he was ill matched to Caltech,
and we ended up basically having to write off the contract with him and get a new architect for
the Annenberg Center [for Information Science and Technology].
ASPATURIAN: How was he ill matched?
TOMBRELLO: He didn’t understand that there are budgets and that one actually has to hold to a
budget. And one has to agree to a design and someday fix it. Well, I got Thom Mayne for the
Cahill. I didn’t know Thom Mayne. I looked up some of his buildings. Looked pretty good to
me. But I thought, “I’ve got my deal. I’m going to be dealing with a prima donna. I don’t know
how this is going to come out,” because I was watching the Koolhaas thing go on in the
background, and “Oh my, I don’t need this!” I meet Mayne. I fall in love. This guy is fantastic.
I’ve got a big building over there, 100,000 square feet. I’ve got to keep it from feeling like
you’re in a hospital, and I can’t waste space. We’re in this meeting, and I say, “Those hallways
are going to look like pipelines; they’re three hundred feet long.” He said, “I can solve that,” and
he starts slashing at a big drawing tablet and shows how he’s going to break these hallways up in
angles. He’s going to break off the corners where they intersect and put things there like little
coffee nooks. I think, This guy is solving a really hard problem that most architects would
stumble over. He knows the building’s got a fill factor that’s unbelievably high. We packed a
lot of stuff in that building, but his design doesn’t feel like you’re packed in there. He slashed
through things. He’s opened things to the sky. He’s broken the corners. He’s got these
hallways that run on the diagonal. And he’s packing people in there. It’s genius. You sit down
and you know you’re working with a guy who just really loves what he does and he’s good at it.
But, you know, there’s always this conflict between the budget and the artist. We’re getting
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