Post-Modern Civic Center Is Soul of a City

Purple Post-Modern columns, topped by symbolic metal mesh pediments, frame the courtyard entries to South Pasadena’s city hall, police station and council chamber. The latter, with its raftered wooden ceiling and subdued chapel-like gray and cream walls, seems crafted to cool the passions at town meetings.

The chamber’s soothing colors are especially appropriate, given South Pasadena’s history. For 25 years, residents have fought the freeway and other encroachments into their 3.44-square-mile territory, sandwiched between affluent Pasadena and giant Los Angeles. And like most development issues in this small city of 25,000, the civic center proposal stirred vigorous debate.

In fact, soon after the 1983 announcement that South Pasadena’s run-down city hall would be replaced, residents and politicians began arguing about the proposed civic center’s location. Two sites were favored. Mayor Ted Shaw supported an El Centro Avenue location, opposite the city’s rebuilt 1930s public library; another faction advocated rebuilding and expanding the existing 1950s city hall in the historic Mission Street district.

In 1984, the voters decided on Mission Street and, four years later, the $3-million civic center was completed, encompassing a renovated city hall and new council chamber, police station and fire hall.

The handsome Post-Modern complex derives its style from the traditional Spanish and Mission revival architecture of the city’s historic Mission Street core. Scale is modest, a homage to the city’s enduring small-town character, and buildings, both civic and commercial, are low-rise, low-key and friendly.

“It would have been easier to design a building that made a personal statement, but we wanted to create a civic architecture of quality that symbolized the low-key soul of the city,” said architect Stefanos Polyzoides, a former South Pasadena resident who designed the center with partner Peter de Bretteville. “To make this happen we had to be subtle and discreet. We had to do an expressive design that fits in with its neighbors.”

Midwestern Tone

The shady streets surrounding the civic center recall another era, when Midwesterners flocked to the area to settle amid the orange groves. The modest bungalows they built in a hand-me-down Craftsman style still set the tone, and two churches dominate the center, reminders of the Fundamentalist faith of the city’s founding fathers.

In Polyzoides’s view, South Pasadena still remains “the displaced Iowa town established by its Midwestern founders. Any attempt to make a heroic, overscaled architecture would (have been) totally out of the question,” he said.

The center has many civic virtues, among them the fact it fits neatly into the surroundings by aligning main frontages on Mission and Mound streets with the facades of the existing buildings. Two courtyards--one public, the other internal--link the various civic departments. A trio of portals on Mission lead to the public courtyard.

“Our aim was to overlay the historic architectural style of the city with a contemporary gloss to create a continuity between then and now,” de Bretteville said. “We wanted to lay out the civic center as if it were an old Spanish mission, like a complex of low, interlinked, red-tile-roofed buildings.”

The police station, located behind a bullet-proof window that seals off the interior from public access, is airy and unintimidating. Lit by clerestory windows, a double-height corridor floods the inner offices with sun and separates the holding cells and booking areas from the detectives’ rooms. The corridor also opens onto an internal courtyard, linking the police station with the fire hall on Mound Street.

“This building is a hundred times pleasanter to work in than the old police house,” said Lt. Richard Kowaltchuk, a senior member of the 30-member South Pasadena Police Department. “We’re really happy to be here.”

When on duty, members of the fire department live above the garage, and in an emergency, slide down stainless steel poles located on balconies at each end of the fire hall. At the rear, a tile-capped four-story training tower resembles the bell tower of a small Spanish pueblo.

City Manager John Bernardi applauds the civic center design as “very functional, with good spaces and a nice style. People here aren’t easy to please,” he said. “They care a lot about their city, so it’s quite an accolade when most comments I’ve heard about the new building are favorable, and even proud.”