Stop-and-Go Survey of What’s Going Up

With more people than usual driving these days, picking up or dropping off someone at an airport, visiting friends and relatives or shopping, it seems like a good time for a windshield survey of a few architectural additions to the cityscape.

Certainly it can be diverting when slowed or stuck in sluggish seasonal traffic.

If you happen to be waiting for the long signal at 96th Street and Sepulveda Boulevard entering or exiting LAX, take a look at the sleek, metallic blue-gray banded Centinela Hospital Medical Center Airport Clinic at the southwest corner.

Designed by Parkin Architects, the three-story clinic is a modest delight, with an exterior skin of curved aluminum panels hinting of aircraft. And while the clinic itself does not fly, its architecture--combining high tech and updated Moderne-style details--soars.

Off an increasingly congested Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, at 16th Street, is another new medical facility of note, Santa Monica Hospital’s Merle Norman Pavilion. The scale, tone and, in particular, the subtle detailing of the six-story addition designed by Bobrow/Thomas and Associates soften the usual institutional look of such structures, and its qualities are welcome.

Driving east on Olympic Boulevard from the San Diego Freeway, looming larger and larger on a crest in Century City is Fox Plaza, a 34-story office tower in the last throes of construction. You can’t miss it.

Assuming the building’s size was dictated by the developer, the Miller-Klutznick-Davis-Gray Co., taking advantage of a perverted zoning code, the design by R. Scott Johnson of Pereira Associates makes the most it. The tower is, in a word, stunning.

Clad in two tones of pink Finnish granite and a reflective glass, the tower seems to change moods and form in changing light. Also distinguishing it are the tower’s upper floors, which tilt and angle to create multiple edges for additional and desired corner offices. The total is a piece of late modern sculpture that one hopes will work as well as it looks.

If you have wondered, as some callers have, what that dark green and deep yellow colored complex is on the north side of the Santa Monica Freeway at the Arlington off-ramp, it’s an office building designed by John Aleksich Associates. Though composed of modest materials, the sensitive siting, detailing and coloring make for an attractive architectural landmark alongside the freeway.

Of continuing interest to those who suffer the Harbor Freeway downtown is the construction of the office tower at 1000 Wilshire Blvd. As seen from the freeway, the 21-or-so-story, spade-shaped tower designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates is marked by a very busy facade and what seem to be three-story high windows, but are not.

The design frankly distorts the building’s scale and from an architectural point of view could be considered dishonest. Nevertheless, the whole is engaging, especially when compared to most of the bland, boxy office buildings that line the Harbor Freeway downtown. (In the holiday spirit, those and other architectural disappointments that abound downtown and elsewhere, marring the skyline, shall not be identified.)

More deserving of mention, and merit, is the office architecture rising in Glendale, that can be glimpsed from the Ventura Freeway.

South of the freeway at 550 Brand Blvd., nearing completion, is a 21-story, distinctively stacked tower detailed with bands of rose-colored granite. It was designed by the architectural firm of Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum (HOK). Set on a three-story base scaled to the street, the facade is marked by a towering arch.

Across the street at 505 Brand is a 15-story tower, clad in light-colored pre-cast concrete inlaid with polished red granite panels. Consistent with the city’s urban design guidelines, the upper floors of the tower are heavily articulated--no boring boxes for Glendale. It was designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill office of Los Angeles.

If Brand Boulevard is still “Bland” Boulevard, it is not because of the emerging architecture there being promoted by a design-conscious and sensitive local redevelopment agency.

Central Avenue a block away also is improving. There at 520 N. Central, Leason Pomeroy Associates has designed a modest, friendly eight-story late modern-styled structure, topped by a maroon-colored metal mansard-shaped roof.

And though I would have liked to have taken a closer look at the building, the light on Central Avenue changed, the car behind mine honked and I had to move on. Given the traffic and parking problems during the holiday season, windshield surveys will have to suffice.