Pepperdine to Consolidate Two Campuses

Pepperdine University will move its satellite campuses in West Los Angeles and at Los Angeles International Airport next month to Corporate Pointe, the sprawling mixed-use development in the Fox Hills area of Culver City.

The relocation will bring the 50-year-old university one step closer to its original home in South Central Los Angeles, which it sold in 1982 after a phase-out that lasted more than a decade.

Pepperdine will move its School of Business and Management and its Graduate School of Education and Psychology into a new, eight-story building on Slauson Avenue near Bristol Parkway, a few blocks from the Fox Hills Mall. Roddy Wolper, a Pepperdine spokesman, said the university is relocating because it needs more space and wants to consolidate its two Westside campuses.

In addition, Wolper said, Pepperdine received an ownership position in the new building from the project’s developer, Costa Mesa-based Bramalea California. The university currently rents space for its two Westside campuses.

Pepperdine’s satellite campuses in Encino and Irvine will remain open, Wolper said, as will its Malibu headquarters.

The deal marks another milestone in the success of Corporate Pointe, a 34-acre mixed-use development bordered by Slauson and Hannum avenues and the Marina Freeway in Culver City.

The complex, a key element of Culver City’s ambitious redevelopment program, will contain about 1.5 million square feet of office and retail space when the $300-million project is completed around 1995.

About one-third of the office space has already been finished, as have the 67 condominiums that are part of the project.

Pepperdine will move into 400 Corporate Pointe, the fifth of nine office buildings planned for the site. The school will take up half the space in the 160,000-square-foot building, which will be renamed Pepperdine University Plaza.

About 520 students will attend classes in the building, and about 200 faculty members, administrators and support staff will work there. The building will also house a library, computer laboratories and a book store.

The new complex is about eight miles northwest of Pepperdine’s original location at the corner of 79th Street and Vermont Avenue in South Central Los Angeles. The school began phasing out of that area and into its Malibu facility in the late 1960s, in part because administrators grew jittery of the old location after the 1965 Watts Riots.

The university opened its West Los Angeles satellite campus on Sepulveda Boulevard near Palms Boulevard in 1982, just after it sold the South-Central facility. The 10-story building, with its huge reflective-glass windows and white banding, is a common sight to motorists on the San Diego Freeway near the National Boulevard off-ramp.

Samuel Haynes, an executive vice president of Bramalea California, said the “surprisingly” short amount of time it took to find a tenant for half the space in 400 Corporate Pointe has convinced Bramalea to move up the ground-breaking date for the next phase of the development, a 12-story, 285,000-square-foot office building.

The company originally planned to begin construction of that office tower next summer, Haynes said. Now it will break ground by the end of the year, providing its plans are approved by Culver City officials.

The Westside office of Grubb & Ellis Commercial Brokerage Services is Corporate Pointe’s exclusive leasing agent.