Everybody’s a Critic : Sculpture Wins 1st Prize, But Developer Won’t Show It

Balancing art with business is not easy.

That’s what the winner of a student art contest discovered when he tried to erect an unusual sculpture in the lobby of a new $65-million Warner Center high-rise.

Artist Steve Hurd won $7,500 and the right to permanently display his sculpture in the cavernous main lobby of the glitzy Warner Corporate Center. The competition, held eight months ago, was sponsored by the building’s developer and judged by outside critics.

But builder Gene Rosenfeld’s jaw had dropped when the panel of judges picked Hurd’s whimsical design--an 18-foot-tall stack of welded rusty chairs, desks, file cabinets and office supplies balanced haphazardly atop a metallic pile of papers and a coffee pot.

“It wasn’t my first choice,” Rosenfeld admitted at the time. He said he favored more abstract forms depicted by the five other contest entries from UCLA’s art school.

Hurd called his rickety looking design “Office Party,” a metaphor for the way businesses start out small and grow large.

The design was worrisome to the high-rise’s builders, however.

“They were really concerned it was going to scare people,” Hurd said. “They were trying to fill the building with tenants. They wanted something that wasn’t so scary.”

Hurd said the builders stalled him when he sought to erect the sculpture in the two-story high-rise’s marble lobby before its carpeted floor was installed.

“The next thing I know they’ve got the building completed, and they’re making it difficult for me to do it,” he said.

The builders said Hurd’s sculpture had to be studied by structural engineering experts and certified to be safely balanced. They told the 32-year-old artist that he would have to pay for the engineering review, estimated to cost $60,000.

“Our main concern is with public safety,” said John Long, president of LAMCO, the Torrance-based company that is building the 12-story office building at 21300 Victory Blvd.

“We cannot allow something to go in that is not safe. That’s the mandate we put to him. You didn’t have to be an engineer to see the intricate balancing involved with that sculpture.”

He denied that the aesthetics or the theme of “Office Party” had anything to do with it. “Certainly nobody said it was trashy,” Long said.

Hurd feels otherwise. “They thought it was going to be junky,” he said. “They couldn’t handle it . . . emotionally.”

He said he talked to lawyers about trying to force the high-rise to take his artwork. “But rather than try to take them to court or anything, I decided I could make a different piece.”

The replacement will have a scaled-down, stacked-furniture theme. But it will hardly dominate the high-rise’s lobby. “It will be about 5 feet high . . . about 1,500 pounds and as solid as a rock,” Hurd said.

He will also give the new sculpture a new name: “Dreamer.”

“Maybe the tenants will like what they see and will be begging for the full-size piece,” Hurd said. “Maybe the dream will come true.”