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Irma Hardjakusumah: Designing for Hollywood
After the Academy Awards on Feb
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After the Academy Awards on Feb. 22, about 1,500 of Hollywood's brightest talents moved to the official after party the Governor's Ball.
The inspiration for the party, held at the top floor of the Hollywood & Highland Center, came from the archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. More than 3,000 pieces from its collection were incorporated into the decor.
Black-and-white photographs, for example, were coupled with a velvet interior and burgundies, deep greens and golds to give the hall a vintage look.
The woman behind the after party's look is Indonesian ' Irma Har-
djakusumah, a designer who started her own firm in Los Angeles a few years ago.
'Designing is an extension of who I am and how I think. It comes naturally to me,' the 39-year-old said. 'I love the design process. I love tinkering, solving problems and creating fantasies.'
It was the seventh time that Jakarta-born Irma was asked to develop what she called the 'hard set' of the Governor's Ball, blending the ideas of the event's producers into the realities of physical spaces, such as lighting, audio and projectors.
'I usually make lots of concept sketches, exploring details, styles and several design directions,' Irma said. 'It will go back and forth until we got something that everybody feels strongly about.'
Irma's background is eclectic: She graduated from the University of Indonesia in engineering and then took art and design classes at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Art Center College of Design.
'I see everything I learned about these different fields as one collective [piece of] knowledge,' Irma says. 'I also don't see 'space' as an interior space or event space, etc. [...] I see them as spaces that need to live for four hours or two days or a week or a month or as long as possible. That kind of thinking helps me to eliminate unnecessary limits.'
She traces her love of deisgn to her earliest years. 'I have been interested in art since my mom bought me a 'Leonardo Da Vinci for Beginners' book. I love the way that the 'Renaissance Man' is the ultimate multi-disciplinary designer, the way [Da Vinci] merged art, engineering and design.'
Da Vinci's multidisciplinary approach stayed with Irma, she said. 'I am a naturally curious person and over the years I trained my mind to dissect objects, thoughts, stories, phenomenon [and] perceptions. This is what children naturally do and we as adults tend to think that we 'know' the world, so we judge ' instead of question.'
Special effects such as projection screens and hologram projectors, also come into play when conceptualizing spaces, she adds. 'With technology, you want to preserve the 'magic' as much as possible ' and that usually means more work for the set designer to hide things within the architecture.'
While Irma originally only planned to leave Indonesia for six months at the end of the 1990s, she started getting job offers from her instructors. Her big break came when Irma was hired to design modular canopies for the Music Center in Los Angeles.
Irma then gradually moved up the ranks to design director, launching her own consultancy in 2011.
'I started from the bottom,' Irma said. I drafted, made presentation boards, made coffee. Nothing was beneath me. I offered help to watch the fabrication during the weekends and holidays and I learned a lot from that. My first design task was bittersweet. I learned a lot of 'what not to do in the future'.'
Irma, who has also designed exhibitions or stages for Swarovski and the Costume Designers Guild Awards, says that there are bright spots, even though her work can be frustrating and exciting at the same time.
'Recently when I was working on the Costume Designers Guild Awards stage, Emmy Rossum, the host, was rehearsing on the stage and gave me compliments. Boyhood director Richard Linklater made a comment in his speech, complimenting the stage and the decor as a whole. That made my day.'
Irma ' who has a 5-year-old son with her Indonesian husband, whom she met in Los Angeles ' says that she makes it back home about twice a year.
'I am taking this one day at a time. I believe in seizing opportunities,' she says on her long-term plans. 'At this time, I am living here though I travel back to Indonesia very often to visit my family, I just take my work with me.'
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The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post.
' Photos Courtesy of Irma Hardjakusumah
