Los angeles may be the first city to have taken plywood seriously as a finished material, a fact that was not lost on architects David Freeland and Brennan Buck when they designed the interior for Earl's Gourmet Grub. Opened in May 2010 in an empty 1,500-square-foot storefront on an otherwise nondescript section of Venice Boulevard about three miles northwest of the beach, Earl's is the kind of casual restaurant that Los Angeles does so well. Polished ground-concrete floors and plywood mix with glass and marble and organic comfort food, all to fresh effect.
The two architects met as graduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles, and then worked separately for a few years before founding their firm, FreelandBuck, in 2009. So they readily acknowledge debts to the Los Angeles school, particularly to the use of plywood in the early projects of Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne. But there are nuances evident in the design of Earl's that distinguish Freeland and Buck as part of the digitally connected, theory-based generation of young architect-academics behind a small-scale revival of craft. If allusions to the Los Angeles school occur'Freeland previously worked for Michael Maltzan, while Buck taught with Greg Lynn'they certainly don't dominate.
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