Ground Level: New meaning for Venice's landmark binoculars

In their classic study of commercial-strip architecture, 1972’s “Learning from Las Vegas,” Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour defined two kinds of ornamented buildings: the “Decorated Shed,” a plain shell covered with applied decoration, and a “Duck,” a structure that is itself a symbol. As Scott Brown once explained to an interviewer, a Duck is “a building whose shape itself conveys a message. It's named for the building, made in the shape of a giant duck, where they sell Long Island duckling, a delicacy.”

Los Angeles has always had more than its share of Ducks; the original Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Blvd. was a classic, even unrivaled, example. But the recent fate of Frank Gehry’s 1991 Chiat/Day building, on Main Street in Venice, offers a twist on the local history of this architectural type, suggesting that a building can become a Duck simply with a change of tenants.

Last month, Google moved several hundred of its local employees into the building, on which Gehry collaborated with artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Oldenburg and van Bruggen designed the binoculars that serve as an oversized, Pop art portal to the parking garage.

Even if Venturi and Scott Brown have always been clear about preferring the Decorated Shed to the Duck, the Google move is still a marriage made in “Learning from Las Vegas” heaven -- a search company choosing to lease a building with a façade dominated by a pair of binoculars. Quack.

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Ground Level: One more good looking garage in Santa Monica

Ground Level: Lawrence Halprin's Bunker Hill Steps

Ground Level:  The Superior Court Building near Lafayette Park in Los Angeles

--Christopher Hawthorne

Above: The Chiat/Day building in Venice, with the huge binoculars Gehry worked on with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Credit: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times

Ground Level: One more good-looking garage in Santa Monica

 

Santa Monica may just build the best-looking parking garages in the country.

It hired the local firm Moore Ruble Yudell to design the 900-spot Civic Center Garage (wrapped in brightly colored glass panels and topped with solar panels, it opened in 2008). And it has upped its parking game again with the garage attached to the new Santa Monica Place, the shopping center originally designed by Frank Gehry that was turned last year by retail architect Jon Jerde into an open-air complex.

That garage, given a sleek skin by Pugh & Scarpa (a Santa Monica firm whose founders now run separate offices), is notable for several high-tech features, including a system of red and green lights that lets drivers peer down a row of spaces and see immediately whether any are free.

But the real show is outside, where the garage includes a number of large-scale public-art installations, including pieces by Anne Marie Karlsen (along 2nd Street) and L.A. firm Ball-Nogues Studio (along 4th Street). The Ball-Nogues piece, called “Cradle,” features hundreds of stainless-steel spheres suspended from one of the garage’s exterior walls. The design is open-ended enough to suggest both sea foam and a Newton’s Cradle, that familiar desk toy that sends one steel ball thwacking against a row of others.

“Cradle” looks perfectly good from a car, but the best way to see it is up close, as a pedestrian; that angle allows you to appreciate the reflections and distortions on the surface of the spheres.

Santa Monica has no shortage of pedestrians already, but it is expecting a whole lot more when the Expo light-rail line is extended west from Culver City four years from now. The final station on that line (or first, if you’re heading east) will be just steps from Santa Monica Place, making the garage and its artwork a destination even if you’re not looking for a place to park.

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Ground Level: Lawrence Halprin's Bunker Hill Steps

Ground Level:  The Superior Court Building near Lafayette Park in Los Angeles

—Christopher Hawthorne

Above: The 4th Street exterior of a parking garage for the Santa Monica Place shopping center. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times

Ground Level: The Glendale Public Library, designed by Welton Becket

 
The architect Welton Becket has been much in the news lately. Developers Millennium Partners and Argent Ventures have announced plans to surround his famed 1956 Capitol Records building with a massive mixed-use development. And as I wrote earlier this week, his 1959 Sports Arena in Exposition Park may be headed for demolition — despite a brief burst of attention this fall when the UCLA basketball teams arrive to play there while their own Becket-designed home, Pauley Pavilion, is under renovation.

But even Becket aficionados may not be familiar with one of the most muscular and extroverted works his firm, Welton Becket Associates, ever designed: The main branch of the Glendale Public Library, which opened in 1973. (Following Becket’s death in 1969, the project was completed by his colleagues at the firm.) With its mute concrete exterior and angular, battlement-like bay windows, the library reflects an interest in the tough-minded offshoot of late modernism known as Brutalism. For that reason alone the library stands out in Southern California, where significant Brutalist designs are relatively rare (and thank God for that, many who detest the style would tell you).

But the library also shares a great deal with the firm’s earlier and more accessible work, such as 1967's circular Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center. In fact, the closer you get, the more the library’s aggressive posture reveals itself as something of an act. This is particularly true once you walk inside, where the sunny double-height main reading room is overlooked on three sides by a mezzanine, and where the design is more humane than brutal. The building is a sheep in wolf's clothing.

Glendale Public Library, 222 E. Harvard St., Glendale.

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Ground Level: Lawrence Halprin's Bunker Hill Steps

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—Christopher Hawthorne

Above: The Glendale Library designed by Welton Becket Associates. Credit: Katie Falkenberg/For the Times

Ground Level: Lawrence Halprin's Bunker Hill Steps

One theme of last week’s Landscapes for Living conference at SCI-Arc, which I write about in a Critic’s Notebook in Wednesday’s  paper, was the continuing, puzzling obscurity of landscape architects and their work in Southern California. As it happens, a main goal of our new Ground Level feature is to bring attention to overlooked street-level design around the region. Serendipity!

So today we’ll devote this space to one of many pedigreed-but-underappreciated examples of postwar landscape design in downtown Los Angeles: Lawrence Halprin’s Bunker Hill Steps, completed in 1990 directly across 5th  Street from the Central Library and in the shadow of Pei Cobb Freed’s U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building in the city. In romantic as much as literal terms, Halprin’s design is meant to recall the Spanish Steps in Rome, a debt that makes this project a textbook example of postmodernism in landscape architecture. More practically, the steps provide a pedestrian link between downtown’s historic core and the newer architecture of Bunker Hill.

Bisected by a stream-like water feature, the 103 steps flow around and past artworks by Robert Graham and others. The project is one of a number downtown from the period by Halprin, a giant of postwar landscape architecture who lived in Marin County and died two years ago at age 93.

Halprin’s nearby designs include the Maguire Gardens at the foot of the library, Grand Hope Park and the glass-enclosed Wells  Fargo Court (formerly Crocker Court) at 3rd Street and Grand Avenue. According to Charles Birnbaum — founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, which organized last week’s conference — this loose network of L.A. projects contains Halprin’s “most diverse vocabulary of indoor and outdoor spaces.”

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— Christopher Hawthorne

Photo: The Bunker Hill Steps, which rise from Fifth Street, across from the Central Library. Credit: Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times

Ground Level: The Superior Court Building near Lafayette Park in Los Angeles

This is the first in a series of occasional articles by architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne on highlights (and lowlights) of the Southern California streetscape.

 The 1972 Superior Court tower at 6th Street and Commonwealth Avenue, on the edge of Lafayette Park, is among the most under-appreciated landmarks of postwar architecture in Los Angeles.

Built as the headquarters for CNA Insurance by the architects Langdon and Wilson, who would go on to produce the very different J. Paul Getty Museum (now Getty Villa) in Pacific Palisades just two years later, the tower’ has a fading mirrored-glass skin that gives it a shifting, even painterly personality in the skyline.

At ground level its impact is no less surprising. Working with the landscape architecture firm Emmet L. Wemple and Associates, Langdon and Wilson began with a simple grid of granite panels flanked on two sides by trees and flowers. But then those panels rise from the plaza in a series of waves that slip directly under and appear to hold up the tower above. The fluid forms of the space at street level are in sharp contrast to the well-behaved geometry of the rest of the building.

The result is a small but potent exception to the familiar rule that Los Angeles is a terrible city for pedestrian plazas. And yet the design succeeds nearly as well as seen from a car heading east on 6th, toward downtown, as it does on foot.

--Christopher Hawthorne

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times

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