Hip Styles for Blue Chips

By KURT ANDERSEN

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.

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."

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."

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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 would get around to doing: "Grow up."