Design: Hip Styles for Blue Chips

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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."