Driving Design of Ventura Blvd.

There are short bursts of Ventura Boulevard as it meanders along the bed of the San Fernando Valley from Universal City west to Calabasas that are as engaging as any urban shopping street.

One of my favorites is just west of Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Studio City. I seldom can drive by there without feeling the urge to park, and take my son Josef by the hand to walk and window-shop, ending our exploration with some soul food at Art’s Deli at 12224.

And then there are the unfortunately predominating stretches of the boulevard where mini and maxi malls, bland based office towers, crass billboards and just plain ugly buildings mock the street, prompting me to seek out the parallel Ventura Parkway and speed away.

But on a recent weekend I endured it all, the good, bad and ugly, on a trip to Tarzana to check out a few, new architectural salutes to the boulevard’s pervasive car culture.

Nearly complete at 19611 Ventura Blvd. is Fleetwood Center, a commercial complex with a front facade that, after a few blinks of the eye and an adjustment to the two-story scale, resembles in design the front of a circa 1970 Cadillac.

It was designed by the architecture firm of Matlin & Dvoretzky for CBS Realcorp with the obvious intent to slow traffic and attract attention. In that it succeeds.

Framed in a light pink stucco wall, the second floor central windows of dark gray glass are set in the grid pattern of a radiator grill and flanked by glass block walls marked with double circular elements that clearly appear as headlights. Accenting the composition further are two perimeter walls angling above the roof line to hint at fins.

However, the design fails as an attempt to carry forward the Los Angeles tradition of programmatic architecture, where buildings have been used as sort of thematic, three-dimensional billboards. With no Cadillac dealership scheduled to locate in the center, it is apparent that the developer used the design simply as a gesture to the street.

And that gesture is not particularly friendly. The building is set back behind a raw parking lot edged by a low block wall, painted a garish blue. The effect is a maxi-Caddie in a mini-mall. Cute, but no cigar. The center looked a lot better in the renderings the architecture office sent to me and which prompted the visit to the site.

I had a similar experience visiting the remodeled and expanded Tarzana Car Wash at 19348 Ventura Blvd. The photographs of the project sent to me by photographer Glen Alison were stunning, and looked a lot better than what I saw when I visited the brightly colored and detailed facility.

Try as it did, the architecture and design firm of Payson-Denney just could not overcome the fact that the wash is jammed on a site that obviously is too small for the amount of business it does. Whatever trendy color combination was selected and however expressive the building materials, they could not overcome the basic problems of vehicular and pedestrian circulation.

While the gas pumps and merchandise were attractively accommodated, the customers were not. It was awkward viewing the car wash process, especially having to hold up a child so he could see through the partial glass wall. The waiting area also was lacking.

It was a design with a lot of polish, but not much product. It was a car wash trying to be something more, and for that effort we can congratulate it. At least we finally got our truck cleaned, and got to tour Ventura Boulevard.

For something really inappropriate, a mile or so further east on Ventura Boulevard at Yolanda Avenue there is a new mini-mall labeled Wall Street Plaza. Looking very much as if it had been washed ashore after making a bad trip around the horn from Martha’s Vineyard, it fights the street with a multi-angeled facade and a multi-peaked roof.

But by no means has Ventura Boulevard cornered the ugly architecture market, judging from some of the letters I have been receiving here. This is to inform those who have written in that the buildings they have commented on will be considered for a periodic compilation.

With the list gaining weight and momentum, I have to ask that for obvious reasons those in the design and development profession try to refrain from submitting recommendations.