ARCHITECTURE : Gym Dandy

The unlikely image of a whale, complete with dorsal fin (the canopy over the entrance), is what came to Venice architect Steven Ehrlich’s mind when he was asked to design the Shatto Recreation Center, a low-budget, durable gym for a tough Mid-Wilshire neighborhood. “I was sitting on the beach and watching the way the waves curl when it occurred to me that what I needed for this harsh situation was the softness and continuous energy of the ocean,” says Ehrlich, perhaps best known for his design of Santa Monica’s Broadway Deli.

The wave eventually became a whale, a single curve in standing seam metal that seems to leap out of the sloped ground outside. The form found, Ehrlich asked “master calligrapher” Ed Moses, the Venice artist, to help create a “skin” that would be both appropriate and feasible, given a budget of $1.2 million. They came up with a fanciful brick pattern that helps to visually lift the building off the ground and has a more practical purpose: “There’s no graffiti on the building because we built it in,” Ehrlich explains.

A result of the mayor’s Design Advisory Committee placing pressure on the Recreation and Parks Department to commission more distinguished architecture, the building boasts form and color that speak to its ethnically diverse clientele. Whether it’s instant graffiti, a multicultural icon or simply a whale of a building, the Shatto Rec Center is, at the very least, a wonderful sculpture, rising with the site and opening up into a room where both mind and body can soar.