ARCHITECTURE : Click & Flick: A Collage of Forms by the Wizards of Special Effects

You might say that Click & Flick is a hybrid. The home for both a modeling (Click) and a talent (Flick) agency, it is made out of stucco, steel, concrete block, glass, wood and concrete.

At less than 5,000 square feet, it is the size of the bungalows that surround it, but it has ambitions of being an office tower.

Presenting neither one simple face to the street nor rising up as a sculptural mass, it appears as a collage of screens and scrims.

Looking at it from the street, you get the idea that you are not looking at a single building, but at something rather complicated though small--like a miniature of a whole city condensed into a little box.

Architects Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung, working with project architect Lynn Martin, designed the building in this way because they are ambitious architectural populists. Not content to design isolated monuments or comfortable little houses, they see their job as that of set designers on an urban scale.

They want to make buildings cheap and beautiful and useful enough that everybody in them can feel as if they have a part to play in the city. Wizards at using ordinary forms and images taken from films or car designs for dramatic purposes, Hodgetts & Fung Design Associates are the special-effects department of the architecture world.

At Click & Flick, the drama speaks through in every part of the design. The building is divided into three main sections: a stucco box at the front, a curved metal piece at the back, and a glass-and-steel connector.

The two solid shapes symbolize and house the divisions of the company, while the glass piece is the service spine that connects them.

Images of both medieval castles and mobile-home trailers come to mind, only to be sent whirling around by the boat-shaped interior wall that turns the main office area into an operatic aria in white. The meandering placement of these pieces through the narrow site and over the ground-floor parking area makes the building seem even more like a (very) miniature city abstracted into the minimalist forms of modern architecture.

For all the inventiveness in the composition of this dramatic little stage set for the display of actors and bodies, the materials used by Hodgetts & Fung are remarkably simple and even mundane.

Depending on what part you are looking at, you see pieces of a standard stucco apartment building (complete with aluminum sliding glass doors), a 1950s office building, or even a commercial building peeking up above walls of corrugated metal and concrete block. The architects are less interested in inventing a new language of form than in putting together the forms we see every day in ways that make us aware of their innate beauty.

My favorite piece of the building is the place where the architects have used a perforated metal drainage deck as a vertical screen in front of the parking area. Vines are growing up the metal, which catches the light in a way that belies its humble origin. A cutout composes the hose connections and alarms that the fire department demands in front of every office building. These fragments of ordinary materials give coherence and attractiveness through design. And they are enough to make me believe in any script these architects might want to write.