Project Sparks Lake Corridor : Pasadena Towers Is Latest Addition to Revitalized Area
Pasadena Towers, the latest addition to Pasadena’s revitalized Lake Avenue office and retail corridor, is under construction on a 3.5-acre site at Lake Avenue and Colorado Boulevard.
The $100-million, 438,000-square-foot complex includes two nine-story office buildings flanking a three-story, 28,000-square-foot free-standing Home Savings of America branch office, according to Stanley V. Michota Jr., president of Ahmanson Commercial Development Co.
Patterned After Civic Buildings
Parking for 2,050 cars will be provided on two subterranean levels and in a five-level garage that will be linked to the two office buildings by 40-foot-high skylit canopies and to the Home Savings branch by a landscaped plaza.
The Beaux-Arts design of the complex, by Scott Johnson of Johnson Fain and Pereira Associates, Los Angeles, is patterned after the architecture of many of Pasadena’s civic buildings constructed in the 1920s.
“It was our objective to develop a project that would make an important urban design and architectural statement compatible with Pasadena’s regional architecture and consistent with the style and tradition of Home Savings,” said Jeffrey M. Gault, executive vice president of Home Savings of America, director of its real estate division and chairman of Ahmanson Commercial Development Co.
A fall, 1989, completion is scheduled for the first phase of the project, the 205,000-square-foot office building at the southeast corner of Colorado Boulevard and Hudson Avenue and the parking structure at Hudson Avenue and Green Street.
The second phase, scheduled for completion in the summer of 1991, will include the new Home Savingsbranch at the southwest corner of Lake Avenue and Colorado Boulevard and the second office building at the northwest corner of Lake and Green.
The towers will be clad in granite and travertine at the base, with precast concrete and inlaid travertine above, according to Johnson. Copper mansard roofs on the towers and the copper-domed cupola of the branch will make the project harmonize with the City Hall (1927, John Bakewell Jr. and Arthur Brown Jr.) and Public Library (1927, Myron Hunt and H.C. Chambers).
