Cerritos Arts Center: a Flexible Prototype for Small Cities

When the Cerritos Community Arts Center opens in 1992, its main theater will be a miracle of technological versatility and ingenuity. In the auditorium, banks of seating “wagons” that float on jets of air like Hovercraft can be moved manually to create a series of different shapes for a wide variety of events. The stage and its proscenium will be able to shift forward and backward to provide large or small performance spaces. The theater’s dropped orchestra floor and pit will rise flush with the stage to make room for a banqueting hall. Thus the auditorium can become a 1,750-seat concert hall, or transform itself into a smaller arena with a central stage for theater-in-the-round, wrestling matches or fashion shows.

“In the new center we will have the most flexible space the mind of man can dream up,” said Cerritos Mayor Diana Needham. “Every possible community event will be accommodated whether intimate or grand.”

The $40-million Community Arts Center, designed by Hollywood-based Barton Myers Associates, got the go-ahead from the City Council last month. The Arts Center is planned as part of the city’s 125-acre Towne Center development opposite City Hall, which will include office and retail space, and a luxury hotel.

Apart from the theater, the Arts Center plan includes a large community meeting room that can be divided up into six smaller spaces with movable partitions. This meeting room can also serve as an intimate chamber music concert hall or small auditorium for public lectures. An Actors Building with dressing and prop rooms opens onto an Actors Garden for outdoor performances. A walled Poets Garden for quiet contemplation completes the complex.

“We can program an incredible range of happenings in this building,” said Arts Center manager Phill Lipman. “The Miss Cerritos Pageant, Broadway plays and Wagnerian operas, symphony concerts and mud wrestling, bar mitzvahs and communion parties--all can be made to feel at home.” Lipman also envisages a community outreach program that will take plays and concerts out into the schools, “to nurture our future audiences.” He sees a variety of workshops and master classes for the city’s budding actors and musicians.

“The Arts Center will be the prototype for the Southland’s smaller cities,” architect Myers said. “The design demonstrates how a town the size of Cerritos, with fewer than 60,000 people, can afford to build and operate a multipurpose facility in scale with its architecture and its aspirations.”

The pivot of the design is the dramatic glass-walled grand lobby--a five-story theatrical space in its own right. The arts center’s exterior, clad in red granite with bands of gray limestone, is enlivened by perky pyramids covered in colored tile. Flagpole finials flouting banners add the air of a circus or carnival to the Postmodern Mediterranean-style composition.

‘Lively and Dynamic’

“Frankly, we felt that the architecture of the center had to be lively and dynamic, to create a focus in what is in effect a giant car park,” Myers said. “It has to generate a powerful feeling of warmth, energy and light to establish its own vivid personality among the rather bland buildings and blank spaces that surround it.”

Known more for its Auto Square off the San Gabriel River Freeway than its cultural heritage, Cerritos is, like many smaller Southland communities, on the verge of a new urban sophistication. Cerritos--originally incorporated in 1956 as Dairy Valley, changed to Cerritos (“Little Hills” in Spanish) in 1967--is a mildly prosperous city with a mixed population of whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians. Median annual family income is around $32,000 and the average price of a home is less than $200,000.

The City Council began to consider the need for more community meeting and cultural facilities in the early 1980s. A staff report recommending a fixed-seat auditorium for 2,000 people was rejected as inflexible and difficult to support financially, given the competition from neighboring cultural centers in Costa Mesa, La Mirada and Downey.

While the council was puzzling over this problem it heard about an innovative, highly flexible community theater at Derngate, in Northampton, England. Built in 1984 by Theatre Projects Consultants, Derngate developed the movable seating wagons floating on manually operated air casters that allow a variety of layouts within the same space. “Like all elegant solutions, (Derngate) is simple,” wrote Francis Reid in the British Architects’ Journal.

Competition for Design

Mayor Needham visited Derngate and was so impressed she had the City Council hire Theatre Projects Consultants to do a study for Cerritos. The city held a limited design competition based on the TPC study, which Barton Myers Associates won.

“We chose BMA because of their experience in designing community theaters in Portland, Ore., and Edmonton, Alberta,” Needham said. “While neither of these facilities is as flexible as ours will be, we liked their approach, and their understanding of the scale and character such a cultural complex needs.”

Though Needham and Lipman acknowledge that the arts seldom make a profit, Lipman, an experienced arts manager, hopes that by providing a mixture of culture and entertainment, from the popular to the elitist, the Arts Center will function with a minimum of municipal subsidy, possibly less than $250,000 a year.

Funding for the center will be provided by the Cerritos Redevelopment Agency, raised mostly by tax-increment levies imposed on commercial development in the new Towne Center. “Culture adds value to commerce,” Needham said, “apart from its intrinsic worth. As Cerritos matures from a bedroom community created out of an old dairy farm into a real city with its own true heart, the arts are a landmark in our coming of age.”