Concrete Bond - Award-winning Santa Ana architect Ralph Allen cements the marriage of unadorned modernism and sculptural design.

Virtually all architects have to compromise their ideas to satisfy clients.

Ralph Allen, a canny 65-year-old Nebraskan, has figured out how to get around this: work for public school districts.

"The architect?" Allen said, giving his low-key, cracker-barrel voice the brisk intonation of a school superintendent. "He's going to do the best he can. I'm not going to tell him how to do it because I have no background in it."

Allen's strategy paid off handsomely this year when his little-known Santa Ana office--which specializes in concrete buildings--was named architectural firm of the year by the California chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Previous winners include Los Angeles legend Frank O. Gehry (1987), the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (1988) and Leason Pomeroy Associates in Irvine (1990).

Sigrid Miller Pollin, a member of the 1998 jury and dean of architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, said Allen's firm was honored for its "consistent search for meaning and form."

The jury, she said, enjoyed the opportunity to select a firm that doesn't belong to architecture's "in crowd" and lacked the usual long list of awards and publications.

Pollin singled out the way the firm added a "sculptural quality" to its designs for schools, despite typically tight budgets and long lists of requirements. She also remarked on the difficulty of working with a building material that isn't popular in Orange County.

Allen--whose designs include the Orange County Law Library, Century High School and Fremont Elementary School, all in Santa Ana--learned long ago how to cope with people's often hostile perceptions of his ideas.

"A lot of times I think we deal in opposites," he said. "We think one thing is true, and its opposite is."

Concrete sounds cold and forbidding to many. A building that extends underground, as does Fremont Elementary, conjures up images of claustrophobic bomb shelters. And classrooms without windows? How heartless can you be?

"The typical underground building has less building," Allen said recently, leaning back in a chair in his firm's conference room. "You have grass and trees. If you have the choice between nature and building, always go with nature because you have the winner."

Allen, whose wife is a retired elementary-school teacher, said the concept of an underground classroom "doesn't matter" to children and isn't a negative factor for teachers.