Critique : The Home Tower: : A Flawed Link of Old and New L.A.
The new Home Savings of America Tower dominates the pivotal intersection where 7th Street and the historic Los Angeles of the 1920s meets the modern commercial towers of the 1960s and 1970s, marching down Figueroa Street from Bunker Hill.
Seen from the west by motorists coming off the Harbor Freeway, the 24-story tower marks the gateway to 7th Street. Seen from the south coming up Figueroa Street, it creates an elegant portal to Bunker Hill.
Both the historic and the modern are contained within the 300-foot-hightower. The building’s marble, stone and precast concrete surface is a stripped-down postmodern version of the French Chateau style derived from some of the hotels and skyscrapers built in New York City in the early years of this century.
But while the architecture may be traditional, the tower’s internal layout reflects the present and future character of downtown Los Angeles.
The building rises on the back of a subway station that, when it opens in 1993, will serve both Metro Rail and the Long Beach light rail systems. The lower five floors hide a parking garage that could not be built under ground because of the subway station.
Like all neoclassical architecture, the Home Tower has a base, a middle and a pediment, or cap.
Horizontal bands of beige travertine and green marble defined by strips of sparkling gold tile sheath on the lower levels. The sixth floor cornice matches the cornice of the noble 1925 Fine Arts Building next door on 7th, and wraps around to pick up the roof line of the 1912 Firehouse 28 to the north, now recycled as a restaurant and office building.
Octagonal bays emphasize the tower’s corners. Between the octagons, the office windows rise in a series of narrow pilasters capped by a 23rd floor cornice line topped by rows of small gables and dormer windows in a copper mansard roof.
“We decided the tower needed a vertical thrust, to mark it out from the lower historic 7th Street buildings and at the same time create a presence equal to the Bunker Hill high-rises to the north,” said Tim Vreeland, project architect for A.C. Martin and Associates.
Vreeland said that having chosen a vertical emphasis for the tower, the Italianate style common to the 1920s downtown architecture had to be abandoned.
“The classic Italian Renaissance or Romanesque Venetian models common in the 1920s downtown were all horizontal in emphasis,” Vreeland explained. “They had to be, when the allowed height limit for L.A. buildings was then a mere 150 feet.
“We went up twice that high, and so we needed to find another mode. My background as a New Yorker, and my love of some classic Manhattan buildings like the Plaza Hotel, led me to choose the elegantly vertical French Chateau manner. For me, it’s a style that stands for strength, security and sophistication.”
The core of the tower’s interior is the double-height sixth floor “Sky Lobby,” where the parking garage ends and the office floors begin.
A cube 30 feet high, wide and long,surrounded by a gallery, the Sky Lobby has tall windows overlooking 7th Street and the Italianate 1928 Barker Brothers Building across the way. The lobby floor is a pattern of polished red and cream marble surrounding a fountain graced by a bronze figurine. The ceiling is a juicy panoramic mural by artist Richard Haas that romanticizes the Los Angeles Basin in the manner of Baroque muralists conjuring aerial views of Florence or Venice.
The Sky Lobby is a splendid space, almost as lush as the golden-tiled jewel-box lobby of the neighboring Fine Arts Building.
Following a long Home Savings tradition, colorful murals and painted panels are an integral part of the Tower’s design.
Glowing Venetian glass murals designed by Joyce Kozloff fill 40-foot-high slots over the entrances on Seventh and Figueroa streets.
Terry Schoonhoven will paint the ceiling over the ground floor Metro Rail station stairway with a trompe-l’oeil vista of a downtown Los Angeles sky filled with high-rises. Other murals by Tony Berlant and Carlos Almaraz decorate the Home Savings branch offices that occupy the ground floor.
A More Urbane Touch
“The company has a long history of featuring art on its buildings,” said Jeffrey Gault, Home Savings’ director of real estate. “Sometimes this has been done with more verve than elegance. . . . The tower is the epitome of that popular tradition, done with a more urbane touch, as befits our leading landmark.”
The pop-kitsch artiness of Home Savings branches--such as the mural-covered Babylonian mausoleum on the corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood--is charged with a wonderfully tasteless energy. In the tower, this vulgar energy has been groomed into a polite pastiche of local color.
On the ground floor, the blank corner that will lead into the subway stair is sealed off from the branch banking halls by ornate etched glass screens designed by Patsy Norvell. Heavy wrought-iron “cobra” lamp standards sit on stone podiums to light the commuter’s way on dark evenings.
The tower’s ground-floor plan is confused. The location of the subway station below and the spiraling ramps of the parking garage above dictated the off-center location of the main elevator bank.
This means that office workers who arrive by rail will have to double back down a flight of steps, along a corridor and through a narrow main lobby to get to the elevators that travel to the Sky Lobby. Beyond this awkward circulation, there lies the deeper question of the designer’s choice of the unusual French Chateau style--a style that has no precedent in downtown Los Angeles’ historic commercial architecture.
A Touch Too Sleek
The architecture we inherit that is truly urban is rare. What little there is of it is overwhelmingly Italianate or Spanish Renaissance, and that shared style is the basis of the unity and visual coherence of streets such as 7th, Spring and Broadway.
The few downtown avenues that are urbane cannot easily support the luxury of yet another imported style.
In addition, the tower is a touch too sleek for its own good. Its smooth marble-and-concrete cladding give it the air of a recently plucked chicken. Even in its stripped postmodern version, the French Chateau style needs rich clothing if it is not to look naked. Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, with its deeply incised masonry, elaborately corbelled cornices and frilly gables epitomizes the wealth of texture the style demands.
Today the cost of fine craftsmanship in marble and masonry, even if it can be found, dictates a much simpler finish than was possible half a century ago. The contrast between then and now is pointed up if you compare the blank pilasters of the tower with the twisted columns, sculptured corbelling and stonework figures that energize the facade of the Fine Arts Building next door.
An architect chooses a style for a building out of a tension set up between his aesthetic intuition and an intellectual understanding of the project’s individual character. The choice not only expresses a stylistic preference, it reveals the architect’s caliber as a designer and the quality of his heart and mind.
The Home Savings Tower reveals that Vreeland’s heart was in the right place but his head was not. He should have realized that if you cannot fully bring off the style you choose, you should rethink your choice.
That said, the Home Savings Tower is one of Los Angeles’ most urbane new commercial buildings--a stylish cut above the bland high-rises that deaden the skyline of our revitalized downtown.
