ARCHITECTURE : Lofty Imagination Transforms Culver City Industrial Complex
Over the last few years, architects, designers and now developers have discovered that the anonymous industrial buildings of the Westside contain our equivalent of New York lofts: big, open spaces often filled with light filtering down between dramatic bowstring trusses. Behind the rough walls that line the boulevards, a new landscape of studios, art schools, restaurants and offices has been growing. Nowhere is that more dramatic than inside the 60,000 square feet that make up the 8522 National Boulevard Office Building in Culver City.
During the 1980s, the owner of this set of sightly run-down warehouses and former factories, Frederick Norton Smith, found himself with a new group of tenants, including architect Eric Owen Moss. Realizing the potential of his spaces, he asked Moss in 1988 to tackle the renovation in an organized fashion. He challenged him to create “alternative spaces” that would bring back some of the mystery and beauty he felt was left out of conventional office buildings these days.
Moss’ response was to engage in a kind of urban archeology. He carved away at the buildings, revealing and highlighting the rhythm of their original structure, and using the places where adjacent buildings didn’t quite line up to create dramatic juxtapositions and fissures.
These cuts create a central walkway, or “causeway” leading back several hundred feet into the heart of the complex. To create an entrance and a focal point, Moss cut out an elliptical space from the front of the building, made a similar space in the middle of the building, and then created a fanciful conference room (or “Bored Room”) by overlapping several elliptical layers of plywood in a former kiln.
Smith demanded that each of the tenants, who by now include several film production companies, a computer firm and a graphics studio, among others, also hire Moss to design their spaces. The result is a series of layers of rough plaster, pressed board and other materials that are the basic building blocks of offices before they get covered up with paint and Formica.
A few fanciful geometrical gestures help organize the spaces, but they are usually open spaces cut into the building, rather than free-standing objects. Metal canopies, rough concrete blocks and delicately placed layers of glass enrich the austere feeling of the spaces. They are open, airy and simple environments that combine the rough grandeur of industrial forms with the honest elegance of Shaker furniture.
Moss and Smith are planning to continue their strategy with a few more hundred-thousand square feet around the 8522 Building, and have renovated another complex nearby, on Ince Boulevard. In all their plans, the character of the original buildings is revealed, giving a sense of reality and history to the new uses migrating into these last under-utilized tracts of the Westside.
From the outside, all you see are Moss’ signature idiosyncrasies, such as a few odd pieces of metal or a sewage drainage pipe used as a column, but on the inside, the inventive excavations have revealed a rich, under-appreciated architectural heritage.
