Designs in the Valley Now More Diverse

As those who live and work there testify, the San Fernando Valley is no longer simply a patchwork quilt of bedroom communities stitched together by raw commercial strips.

That cliche was crushed some time ago in a rush-hour traffic jam on the Ventura Freeway and unceremoniously buried beneath an anonymous glass-and-steel office building in Encino.

Forming in the Valley over the last few decades has been a loose network of varied urban centers, replete with their own downtowns, industrial zones, office parks, shopping centers and residential areas. Once considered a suburb itself, the Valley now has its own suburbs.

And while for many residents the Valley may not be as verdant, comfortable and convenient as it once was, from an architectural point of view it has become more diverse, interesting and challenging. Illustrating this shift are three projects that recently were honored in a design competition sponsored by the San Fernando Valley chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Winning a merit award was the recycling of a 25-year-old boring, brick box of a bank building at 8338 Topanga Canyon Blvd. in Canoga Park into a Sizzler restaurant. The well-detailed design by the firm of Hipskind + Chase was praised by the competition’s jury for the sensitive use of materials, including glass brick and tile, to set it off from from its unattractive surroundings.

Beyond the design, I found it noteworthy that the original structure was saved and renovated. As the project’s principal architect, Robert Chase, said, a few years ago in the Valley the building would simply have been demolished and replaced by a predictable franchise design, or more typically built on a vacant piece of land.

The inference in the project, in addition to the economic advantages of recycling structures, is that prime sites in the Valley are becoming increasingly scarce, a mark of urbanization.

There also is the recognition in the project that good design can be an aid to a business wanting to stand out in the madding scene of bland, obnoxious or inappropriate buildings, rude gas stations and unsightly billboards that dominate the Valley’s commercial strips.

The menu in this Sizzler may be the same as in other outlets, but happily the sauce that is its architecture is not.

The considerations of dwindling sites and the need for a distinctive design as a marketing tool also are implied in a 13-unit condominium complex in Studio City, which won a merit award in the design competition for the architecture firm of Fisher/Morris & Associates. The three-story complex at 4711 Colfax Ave. was cited by the jury for addressing the street with individual entrances and for its attractive interiors.

Such projects, though unfortunately not as well designed as the one on Colfax Avenue, are becoming more and more common in the Valley. In many communities there, they are elbowing out the single-story, single-family house that for decades lent the region its identity as the rear bedroom and sprawling back yard of Los Angeles.

What marked most of those houses--built in the waves of development after World War II, and which replaced the Valley’s truck farms and orchards--were their modest price and design. Many were so-called “off-the-rack” and “down-and-dirty” models of about 800 square feet that sold in the $10,000 range, and were churned out by competitive contractors trying to outproduce and undersell one another. Their goal was quantity, not quality.

How this too has changed is dramatically illustrated in the design by architect William Pauli of a model house, labeled the Montecito, which won a merit award in the AIA competition. The 4,327-square-foot structure is one of four models priced between $540,000 and $750,000 being offered in Westbridge, a master-planned, attractively landscaped, gated community of, at present, about 80 houses in Calabasas.

The Montecito is a nicely detailed and packaged, scaled-down, nouveau rendition of the Spanish Colonial-style mansions that marked the development of Beverly Hills and San Marino in the 1920s and ‘30s. A “down-and-dirty” tract house it is not.

“That the Montecito is selling well as a developer ‘spec’ house, I think says something about the maturity, style and aspirations of the buyer,” Pauli observed. And of the Valley, too.