CENTER PIECES : Design of Civic Structures in County Reveals Character of Cities’ Time, Place

Europe has its piazzas, the East Coast its town squares but Orange County, built to reflect the suburban life style of postwar America, conducts its public business in special government parks called civic centers.

More than just a neighborhood where city offices tend to be located, a civic center in Orange County usually means a campuslike setting of identically styled buildings, closed to cars and outfitted with walkways, gardens and sometimes even a sculpture or a fountain.

At their best, they form the focus of a community, providing a stage for public discourse and inviting residents to linger in libraries and galleries. When designed well, they can even symbolize their cities and inspire residents, much as the Capitol in Washington represents the federal government and democratic ideals.

But many residents find it difficult to appreciate their civic centers; most were built between 1950 and 1980, when the severe aesthetic known as the International Style dominated architecture. Looking with a critical eye, however, can be as valuable in an Orange County civic center as in an Italian piazza. Both are public spaces that reveal something of the character of their time and place.

Among Orange County government buildings, the Brea Civic & Cultural Center (1 Civic Center Circle, 1980) elegantly expresses both the local pride of Brea residents and the anxiety of modern society everywhere.

Located in the commercial and intellectual center of town, the Civic & Cultural Center abuts the giant Brea Mall and the local high school. Virtually all city offices are housed under its roof, along with the school board, chamber of commerce and several community groups. A theater, library and art gallery breathe life into the complex, neatly showing that the arts are as much a civic concern as is parking enforcement or redevelopment planning.

The design of the building, by Warneke/Dworsky, thoughtfully complements the array of services it contains. Certainly, the center’s monumental form, with its sweeping entrance and rows of columns, proclaims Brea’s prosperity and its desire for preeminence among northern Orange County cities.

More broadly, though, the building comments on the fragility of life in the postwar era.

Designed in a style that architects call brutalism, the Civic & Cultural Center is by no means an effete, whimsical building. Its unfinished concrete and massive volumes seem more evocative of bomb shelters than culture palaces, of primal force rather than restrained civility. Although the building itself is attractive, it seems to reflect the destructive path that civilization has taken in the 20th Century, when terms such as genocide and nuclear annihilation entered the vocabulary. The Civic & Cultural Center is not itself a bunker, but it symbolizes the dangerous yearning of a frightened world for security above all else.

The Brea complex isn’t alone in using its design to express social concerns; traditionally, public architecture seeks to reflect--and shape--society.

One striking example is the Costa Mesa Civic Center (77 Fair Drive, 1967), which expresses the leftist and nihilist ideals pioneered by such German architects as Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

From the total uniformity of all buildings--rectangular glass and brick sections stacked to different heights--down to its very nomenclature, the Civic Center conveys a radical image of society: classless, functional, sterile, stark.

Start with the names of the buildings; instead of using traditional titles that might refer to historical ideas, the Civic Center’s designers chose terms that would describe the buildings’ function, and nothing more. For example, there is no Costa Mesa “city hall”; instead, there is a five-story structure designated solely as “Administration.” Rather than a police “headquarters,” which suggests a hierarchy where some are more powerful than others, there is a “Police Facility”--a building whose function is not the exercise of authority per se, but merely the facilitation of policing.

The Costa Mesa center, designed by Schwager, Henderson & Associates, dramatizes the International Style’s tenet that buildings should articulate themselves as buildings and nothing else. The tasks carried on within them may differ, but the function of buildings is always the same: to house human activity.

So, Administration, while making no reference to its role as the seat of city government, makes several indications of itself as a building. Any observer can tell it has five stories, three elevators or staircases and is filled with offices.

Each floor is articulated by a white level that extends beyond the length of the building. The walls of each story are floor-to-ceiling glass. As a result, Administration resembles a stack of glass trays--five of them. The horizontal continuity of the glass walls is broken only by three pillars of beige brick that reach from the building’s base to above its roof. These pillars represent the structural support of the building and show the location of the vertical corridors of elevators and stairways.

Just as the buildings’ uniformity seeks to erase any rank or class distinction among them, the use of identical materials on the inside and outside of the buildings tries to blur the difference between indoor and out.

Administration’s lobby is constructed from the same beige brick and glass as the exterior. Symbolically, the inside of the building is the same as the outside, an effect heightened by the use of floor-to-ceiling glass, through which people inside can look out, and vice versa.

The ideology of the International Style, which appeared following World War I, was born out of historical circumstance. Many architects and other artists of the period blamed the war on traditional social institutions. The buildings they designed rejected elements that might recall those institutions.

There was optimism in the style because the intellectuals hoped the end of the old European order would usher in a utopia. Instead, fascism rose, and World War II followed. Demoralized, these architects, many of whom had found refuge in American universities, professed a style with a dark view of the human condition.

Curiously, many American institutions, including corporations and government agencies, embraced the International Style. They were, perhaps, attracted by the futuristic lines of the buildings and less concerned with the philosophy behind them.

But despite its intellectual idealism and technological sheen, the International Style has proven unattractive to many people. Instead of seeing buildings such as Administration as symbols of equality, they find them antiseptic and alien. These structures seem to emphasize government’s disciplinary role, rather than its participatory one.

That shift from personal government to impersonal can be seen dramatically in Santa Ana, where prewar and postwar city halls stand a few blocks apart. Horace Austin’s Old City Hall (217 N. Main St., 1935), an exuberant Moderne building with zigzag ornamentation and marble trim, sports relief sculptures of bearded Assyrian warriors who watch over its doorway. These faces--stern, but wise and human--have been supplanted in New City Hall (20 Civic Center Plaza, 1973) by a giant abstract frieze that hangs over entrances to the building.

Where Old City Hall seemed approachable, if authoritative, New City Hall memorializes faceless institutional efficiency. The building’s earthy colors of sandy concrete and smoked glass suggest Santa Ana’s environment of desert and smog, but New City Hall makes no other reference to its location or function.

Santa Ana, which has helped preserve Old City Hall as commercial office space in its downtown redevelopment area, takes even greater pride in its new corporate home. A picture of New City Hall appears in the town seal, and Santa Ana police officers carry badges decorated with the building’s sculpted image.

Old City Hall was built before the era of civic centers in Orange County; it stands on Main Street, down the block from a Spanish-language movie house and a title insurance firm. New City Hall, on the other hand, sits in the ultimate civic center in Orange County, the complex of city, county, state and federal buildings so grand it is known as Civic Center Plaza. These buildings surround a barren series of subsidiary open spaces, each with a distinguishing design element.

The most enigmatic of these is the Plaza of the Flags, an elevated square space that bridges the distance between the county law library and the new Orange County Courthouse (700 Civic Center Drive West, 1966), itself a harsh International Style structure designed by Richard Neutra. The flags of the 50 states encircle this enormous plaza-within-a-plaza, which contains nothing except a monument to slain police officers and a raised square platform at its center.

The monument, added in 1986, presents disproportionate relief sculptures of officers riding various police vehicles, executed in a fashion that recalls the unsophisticated style of children’s artwork.

But it is the central platform that most mystifies observers. Skateboarders use it as a ramp on which to perform stunts, but its other functions remain as obscure as the purpose of the Plaza of the Flags itself.

Newport Beach City Hall (3300 Newport Blvd., 1948), by Ralph C. Flewelling, looks back to the more optimistic International Style as practiced before World War II. Like the Orange County Courthouse, the building is free of ornament and composed of clean lines and full volumes. But where the towering courthouse projects a cold, almost totalitarian vision of authority, the Newport Beach City Hall remains accessible to people while presenting the purity of form so treasured by early modern architecture.

Graceful but economical, Newport Beach City Hall reflects the restrained style of the war years. It is capped by a tower, but a plain one. Most later additions have been built behind the original structure, and so don’t detract from its appearance. The most appropriate added feature is the civic center’s flagpole: in an evocation of the yacht club ambiance that Newport Beach likes to affect, the pole is fashioned in the shape of a sailboat’s mast.

A handful of city halls have avoided the International Style. Designed in a manner reminiscent of the California missions, although without the finesse of the prewar Spanish Revival style, Laguna Beach City Hall (505 Forest Ave., 1951) offers a pleasant and unpretentious governmental seat for the seaside art colony.

But in Orange County, only the Classical Garden Grove City Hall (11391 Acacia Parkway, 1924) actually resembles the popular image of a governmental seat; ironically, it is one of few city halls originally intended for an entirely different purpose.

Built as an elementary school 64 years ago, the structure’s traditional design, central location and cost--it was sold for $1 as surplus property--must have appealed to the leaders of the new city, who acquired it shortly after Garden Grove’s incorporation in 1956.

Although hardly the epitome of Classical perfection--the Greeks favored marble over stucco as a building material, for example--the building was apparently perceived by town leaders as a symbol of ancient democratic ideas that they hoped would guide their community. As a reminder of that past, every street sign in Garden Grove bears a picture of its city hall; the structure also is a design element in the city’s otherwise modern-design official seal.

Despite its prominent place in the municipal iconography, the Classical style was abandoned when Garden Grove constructed a new civic center in 1976.

Made of concrete blocks and smoked glass, the complex of low-rise buildings housing a library, senior citizens center and city meeting rooms offers no architectural continuity with City Hall.

Instead, the overall design of the Civic Center plays to the vegetative imagery suggested by the city’s name. Undulated landscaping and a variety of sensual delights--trees, fountains, a Japanese garden and, best of all, a large, gleefully quacking duck pond--reinforce the fecundity that should characterize a community known as Garden Grove.

The name of Westminster also inspired the design of its Civic Center (8200 Westminster Blvd., 1968-79).

In a tribute to the city’s eponym, the Westminster borough of London, this Civic Center offers a varied collection of Englishlike symbols. Rather than produce replicas of actual British buildings, Westminster added elements associated with England to the otherwise undecorated brick structures that make up the civic center.

Imitation shingle roofs top these buildings, and ersatz leading trims their windows. Only the county-operated branch courthouse lacks the Tudor-esque decorative touch--”We couldn’t talk them into it,” a city employee explained.

Inside City Hall, a large map of Westminster, England, is prominently displayed; outside, the municipal flag, featuring the London borough’s royal arms as well as the seal of this Orange County bedroom community, flaps over a surplus British telephone booth and a couple of Victorian street lamps. As everywhere within Westminster, street signs are written in Gothic script.

The clock tower, standing at the Civic Center’s south entrance, offers Westminster’s most dramatic salute to its English heritage. Designed as a sort of Tudor version of Big Ben, only shorter, the clock’s hands do not move, suggesting that time, at least in the fairy-tale atmosphere of the Westminster Civic Center, can stand still. At intervals throughout the day, the British-style tower chimes such favorites as “America the Beautiful.”

Rather than hearken to a distant land for the basis of municipal authority, the builders of the Cypress Civic Center (5275 Orange Ave., 1967-75) erected a monument to powers closer at hand: their own City Council.

Like the Greek gods, who decided human fate far above earth on Mt. Olympus, the Cypress City Council meets in a high-ceilinged chamber that hovers above the ground. A two-story structure without a bottom floor--visitors can walk under it--the chamber has been built on pillars solely to elevate the council’s proceedings. Giant staircases lead up to oversize doors, serving at once to raise the stature of the elected officials who govern from the chamber and to remind those who come to petition the council of their own lowly status.

Standing forth in such contrast with the rest of the civic center-- undistinguished stucco and concrete structures partially hidden behind cypress trees--the council chamber testifies to both arrogance and idealism. The chamber’s altitude clearly signifies the council’s lofty rank. At the same time, however, it calls upon the council members to leave behind their earthly failings as they ascend to their dais. The builders seemingly believed that if they are nearer to heaven, the council members would be more likely to obey their higher instincts.

Even the less imaginative civic centers can include distinctive elements: an eternal flame burns at the Spartan La Palma Civic Center (7822 Walker St., 1969) memorializing the city’s war dead; the Orange Civic Center (300 E. Chapman Ave., 1963) resembles an airport terminal, but eclectic relics outside, including a 19th-Century Italian fountain and a World War II cannon captured from the Japanese, make attractive distractions.

Other civic centers offer subtle commentary on the life styles of their particular cities. Functioning oil wells stand at the entrances to Huntington Beach Civic Center (2000 Main St., 1974), marring the view of the hilltop City Hall much as offshore oil rigs obscure the sunset at Huntington’s popular beaches.

The present Irvine Civic Center (17200 Jamboree Blvd., mid-1970s), though built as temporary quarters, seems surprisingly appropriate for that city’s non-urban character. An office park of undecorated, windowless, one-story buildings surrounded by parking lots, the civic center is largely unapproachable on foot. It can be distinguished from neighboring industrial complexes only by a concrete marker set in a grassy knoll at the center’s street corner.

The present center reflects the automobile-dependent Irvine life style, one in which residential life is wholly segregated from commercial and industrial activity.

However, in the new civic center, now under construction at Harvard and Alton avenues, Irvine seeks to express another side of itself: the progressive spirit of a university town.

Designed in the Postmodern style and adorned with fountains, sculpture and a 110-foot clock tower, the new civic center aims to serve as a symbol of Irvine. The building’s emblematic function is detailed in city documents, which describe the anticipated “symbolism of the building to the people of Irvine. There is a great need for a central city building to serve as a visible landmark and identity to the public,” press releases say of the structure, which is scheduled to open in early 1989.

In contrast, San Juan Capistrano City Hall (32400 Paseo Adelanto, 1970) seems to symbolize Orange County’s famous disdain for government at all levels. A metal-sided building that resembles an aircraft hangar or warehouse, City Hall sits hidden on a dead-end street next to a flood-control channel. Sequestered from public view in this impoverished shelter, city officials cannot forget the low esteem in which their occupation is held.

But perhaps the most appropriate response to Orange County’s suburban life style is the Villa Park Civic Center (17855 Santiago Blvd., 1972). Tucked away in a corner of an outdoor shopping center made of concrete blocks and Spanish roof tiles, City Hall is architecturally indistinguishable from the tanning salon, Chinese restaurant, travel agency and other mall storefront merchants. Although city offices are marked by a tree growing outside their door, it is the 24-hour supermarket that dominates the mall’s vista.