<p>Scott Strasser brings austere elegance to corporate America
</p>
<p>By Kurt Anderson
</p>
<p> During the past decade or so, interior decorators have been
successfully lobbying to upgrade the nomenclature of their
trade: they now insist on being called interior designers.
Which is fine, except that for all the nominal professionalism,
interior design remains for the most part a trivial pursuit
that prizes fancy blandness above all. While the other design
professions at least aspire to greatness, and even encourage
their innovators to provoke the rest of the field, most
interior design wants to be pretty and profitable and make no
waves.
</p>
<p> But not Scott Strasser. At 35, Strasser is a thoroughgoing
anomaly. His spiky hair and Tokyo-hipster clothing might be
unremarkable in Los Angeles or New York City, but he was raised
and still lives in conservative Texas. There he is director of
interior architecture of the big, conventional, Houston-based
architecture firm CRSS, directing a staff of 35. And he has
become a leader in a courtier's discipline (Interiors magazine
named him 1989 Designer of the Year) despite an aggressively
impolitic style. "Corporate design," he says, "is a stupid
profession that hasn't learned what it's doing wrong. Most
interior design is like elevator music."
</p>
<p> Most improbable and intriguing of all, Strasser is being
permitted to apply his fluent vision--joyfully modernist,
austere but playful, reasoned, practical, never grim--to the
interiors of huge blue-chip office hives. He recently finished
a 1.2 million-sq.-ft., multibuilding IBM outpost near Dallas,
and construction has begun in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., on a
two-block-long office building for a giant entertainment
company. "I don't assume a corporation is conservative and
conventional," he says. "I don't feel that as soon as they say
`corporate,' you have to do chickenshit work."
</p>
<p> Decor as such doesn't much excite Strasser; he is not one
for gushing about some marvelous chintz or a divine settee. "I
hate wood," he says, editing that a moment later: "I hate wood
used in the wrong place, in the wrong way." "I don't like
furniture and fabrics," he says, before once again catching
himself: "No--I don't place a high value on furniture and
fabrics." But often he lets the absolutisms stand. "Every time
I do a space, I like it better before the furniture comes--without exception." And when it comes to colors, he says, "I
abhor perfect matches--it's tacky."
</p>
<p> What makes Strasser's work refreshing is its liberation from
slick superficial image making of either the "traditional" or
the trendy variety--no capriciously transplanted Corinthian
columns, no aren't-we-important mahogany wainscoting. "The
problem with most interior designers," he says, "is that they
just decorate. I try to design architecture indoors."
</p>
<p> Strasser the infrastructure nerd (his Texas Tech degree is
in architecture and engineering) finds buildings' guts--beams, electrical outlets, air conditioning ductwork--compelling pieces of the interior design puzzle. "I want my
interiors to be a little raw, stark, to the point," he says.
"Architecture is good--you don't need to cover it up on the
inside. But it's hard to get clients to go raw." The severe
Texas recession of the 1980s was his big break: with corporate
budgets tight and deluxe froufrous out of the question, it
became easier to convince businesses of the merits of
thoughtful Strasserian austerity.
</p>
<p> When a software firm called Computer Associates hired CRSS
to design its eight high-rise floors outside Dallas, the
intended budget was just $21 per sq. ft. (Corporate interior
design routinely costs two to five times that.) Strasser
brought the job in for $17.50. But he does not take a modest
budget as an excuse to make a space cheap looking and
characterless. Computer Associates' elevator banks are artful
black-and-white geometric compositions reminiscent of the
Viennese secessionists and feature handsome light fixtures on
the walls--short, exposed fluorescent bulbs only partly
shielded by rectangular flanges. IBM's bigger budget permitted
Strasser to design even more perfectly realized industrial
sconces, each a chunk of aluminum appended to a smaller Lucite
chunk.
</p>
<p> Strasser's modernism does not mean that his interiors are
unswervingly "honest." In the kitchenettes at Computer
Associates, the black-and-white sobriety is relieved by a goofy
pony-skin-pattern Formica counter, and structural columns in
the cafeteria are nicely echoed by fake columns across the
room. More typically, at the CRSS Dallas offices (which
Strasser also designed), the handsome patterns of sprinkler
heads in the ceiling are a game: some are real, others are small
air-conditioning vents, still others are dummies, there simply
to complete a pattern. What would otherwise be prosaic
necessities, scattered helter-skelter, become handsome details,
all conveying the worthy message that the humdrum texture of
modern life need not be arbitrary and slapdash.
</p>
<p> Strasser also has a redeeming weakness for illusion and the
surreal. The back corridors at Computer Associates, with their
white walls, black floors and deep side niches, are moody and
de Chiricoesque. Both there and in his offices, conventional
ceilings in the reception areas simply end at the passage into
the back offices, showing themselves to be flimsy
quarter-inch-thick sheets--and suddenly revealing the ducts,
pipes and light fixtures above. "Thresholds are important to
me," Strasser says. "Going from one place to another is more
important than the places."
</p>
<p> Strasser now dabbles in industrial design and ultimately,
he says, he "will probably turn into an architect." His
extraordinary aesthetic and worldly success is, of course, a
function of his talent and intelligence. But it is also, he
believes, a product of Texas laissez-faire can-doism. "I'm
clearly a Texan," he says. "I hate committees, I love the Texas
freedom of spirit--the renegade, what-the-hell,
we're-gonna-do-it-our-way attitude." Strasser admits, however,
that it was only in the past year, when a wider world
recognized his elegant embodiment of that spirit, that he "went
from being a very angry young man to a very happy person in
about six months." Strasser did what he wishes his profession
