ARCHITECTURE : Ken Edwards Center Shapes Up to Be a User-Friendly Building

It’s hard to make civic buildings these days.

Our courthouses, city halls and even halls of records used to be imposing edifices that spoke of the community’s pride in its government. These days, we just want the cheapest possible box to house the bureaucracies that are the reality of government.

In their design of the Ken Edwards Center for Community Services, architects at the Santa Monica firm of Koning/Eizenberg have tried to be both civic and economic, and they have been remarkably successful. Here is an inviting, well-mannered and intelligently put together building that gives dignity to both its users and its surroundings. It may not be a grand celebration of the city of Santa Monica, but it works.

What makes it work is Hank Koning’s and Julie Eizenberg’s ability to understand the stuff of which buildings are made.

For their residential projects, they use something called a “shape grammar,” a kind of dictionary consisting of basic building elements such as doors and windows, or rules of how one room generally fits with another.

For this project, they looked at the Santa Monica City Hall, at the Santa Monica Place shopping mall across the street, at courtyard buildings, at the relation between public uses and support spaces, and at the way people build things out of stucco, concrete and metal-framed windows. They then reassembled these elements in an abstracted and updated way, creating a sophisticated composition out of well-known and well-used pieces.

Depending on how you look at it, the Edwards Center looks like two or three buildings.

You can see it as a gray stucco public floor surmounted by a white stucco floor of offices. From another perspective, it is a square object topped by an air-conditioning object (which refers to the spire of Santa Monica City Hall), flanked on one side by a simple rectangular form and on the other by a barrel-vaulted building lifted up on columns over an entrance driveway.

If you stand back far enough across 4th Street, you can see another object: a yellow-painted wall that serves to bridge the gap between the relatively small scale of the front and an ocher-painted, six-story senior citizens housing building on the next street.

The square in the middle is pulled off the street at an angle, inviting you to enter either through it or along the driveway to the south, where the separation of the objects allows light to come down into this automobile realm.

The downstairs is given over to public services and a large kitchen, flanked by a plywood-clad walkway that manages to be formal and warm at the same time. A grand staircase next to the entrance invites you to move upstairs, where the three buildings assemble themselves around a little courtyard populated by geometric objects that turn out to be the tops of skylights. This sheltered oasis is surrounded by complicated patterns of windows and doors, each of which seems to indicate a different use, though most doors are labeled “staff only” and seem to lead to nothing but offices.

By breaking the building down into so many pieces, Koning and Eizenberg have turned what is a fairly simply constructed center into a village of specific forms, each tailored for a different use, each recognizable, each somehow familiar, but each also new and abstract. They have managed to combine our need for comfort and ease of use with the idea that a civic building should sum up the forms of a community and transform them into something beyond the everyday.