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NEVADAN AT WORK: Architect aims to stay up on trends, ahead of the pack

By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Architect Howard Perlman says that when he was a child in Chicago, he grew fond of the idea of creating spaces where people would live. Photo by Clint Karlsen.
 
Running on the Strip among 12,000 people in the Las Vegas Marathon in early December, architect Howard Perlman thought back to the trip he once took to Africa and the herds of wildebeests he'd watched run endlessly across the plains.

The wildebeests had no destination, it seemed, changing directions for no apparent reason, slowing and quickening their pace in accordance with their leader.

Now Perlman felt like one of those wildebeests, running simply for survival. Perhaps, he reasoned, one of the beasts got spooked and when one runs, they all run.

"If you're a real wildebeest, you want to get ahead of the pack. I think it's the drive, the instinct for survival, to go from being a young wildebeest to an old wildebeest," Perlman said.

Perlman ran the marathon, his first, in four hours and nine seconds.

"Four hours is a lot of time to think about things. You don't want to lose ground. You're looking at a guy from the back and you don't want to lose ground," he said.

That's kind of how it is for Perlman in his business. As founder and president of Henderson-based Perlman Design Group, he leads a group of 120 employees like a wildebeest looking for water.

Perlman started his architectural firm in Phoenix in 1978. With construction booming in Las Vegas, he found himself spending increasingly more time here to serve his growing client base. He moved the firm to Las Vegas in 1993, expanding his offices to Newport Beach, Calif., and Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1999.

Perlman Design Group is a full-service architecture, planning and interior design firm with experience in residential, retail, office, industrial, hospitality and mixed-use projects.

Perlman's high-profile projects in Las Vegas include The District at Green Valley Ranch, Boca Park Fashion Village, the Hofbrauhaus and Nevada College of Pharmacy.

Question: What made you want to become an architect?

Answer: I had relatives in the building business when I was growing up in Chicago and it always fascinated me to build things. (I liked) just the idea of creating things, creating spaces where people would live and the design of buildings.

At the time, as a kid, I thought if I did enough of those, it would become my legacy, because buildings last forever.

But I found out they don't last forever; songs outlast buildings.

Question: How do you come up with your designs?

Answer: "Design" to clients and most people is a noun. "Design" to an architect is a verb, something that's continuing. It never ends. It's the last line in thousands of sheets of paper. Design gets reworked and reworked and reworked.

A custom house, we start with this is the site, this is the budget, this is the view. When we do a shopping center or mixed-use, the price of land is so expensive, the developers are trying to figure how much gross leasable area they can cram on this site and be integrated with the rest of the neighborhood.

The longest project I ever worked on was probably Village Square (on Sahara Avenue and Fort Apache Road) because the client was constantly adding to it.

Question: Las Vegas has been knocked for its lack of sustainable architecture, other than the Strip facades. Why is that and what do you think of local architecture?

Answer: I think Las Vegas kind of struggles with what's the Las Vegas style. Chicago has a style, Miami has a style, San Diego has a style, Seattle has a style.

Las Vegas just grew so fast and architects came from everywhere and brought their style with them, so it's difficult to identify Las Vegas architecture.

Another thing in Las Vegas is the skyline, the hotels, and that big casino hotel is architecture. It's themed and filled with fantasy. It's a stage-set, Disney-style of architecture.

If you go to the suburbs, it's the same thing you see in California. Most of what's going to define Las Vegas is the high-rise condominium towers. We have a lot of developers here from Florida and a lot from New York, which has another style.

It's going to be interesting to see what style ends up dominating.

Question: You're planning and designing several high-density, mixed-use centers for developers in the valley. Is that part of the "smart growth" principle to live, work and shop in the same area?

Answer: As of today it is. The next phase of Boca (Park) is going to be that.

I go to a lot of (International Council of Shopping Centers) conventions and you talk to guys there and it gives you a totally different perspective, depending on where they're from. If you go to any of the older cities, they've already had mixed-use, retail and residential.

With mixed-use, what we're trying to do is replicate what happened naturally in cities all over the world.

Streets in Paris started out being trails and in the buildings, the first floor was the shops, the second floor was the office, the third floor was high-end residential and the sixth floor was for the lower class.

Now we're doing a mixed-use project as a romantic idea for us to live that way, the way they do in Paris. That's kind of an exciting deal. I think Las Vegas is to the world today what Paris was in the 1800s. It's just a hip place. It's happening.

Question: What's in the ideal mixed-use project?

Answer: Mixed-use is about one-third residential, one-third retail and one-third office. It's better when it's vertically integrated. Downtown has the potential because it has the walking grid. Too bad the buildings are older. Otherwise it could be like SoHo. But the grid is there to walk from street to street.

Question: You studied in France for several years. What did you learn over there?

Answer: It was my fourth year of architectural school. It was great living a European lifestyle. I lived in a mixed-use project, a building that was 350 years old.

We lived on the second floor above a restaurant in a back room I rented from an insurance company. I shared a bathroom with the people from the insurance company. Our window was on the main street and the grocery store was kitty-corner from us. If I went to the grocery store, my buddy could lean out the window and say, "Hey, and get this or that."

Within four to five months of living there, you knew everybody on the street. It was a cool way to live.

While I was there, I traveled around a lot. You live in that European environment and you get used to everything being so tight, the streets and sidewalks.

I remember coming home to the house I grew up in and everything seemed so spread out and so far apart. It seemed as if we're wasting so much land, so much pipe and all that goes with living so far apart and it was just so lonely.

Question: If you weren't an architect, what might you have envisioned yourself doing?

Answer: I think I'd have to do something in building. If I wasn't designing (buildings), I'd be developing them or building them or doing something.

My mom wanted me to be a doctor. I didn't do well in chemistry. I couldn't memorize the periodic table. And biology had too many long words.