CRITIQUE : Smog Complex

For decades Los Angeles residents have struggled to breathe in a smoggy atmosphere that has come to seem as much a part of our climate as the gusty Santa Anas. To survive, we’ve adapted to foul air, even though it has cost us our health and shortened our lives.

Now public protest has finally led the federal and state governments to enact legislation that aims at rolling back the smog. In Southern California the agency charged with cleaning up of our air is the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD).

To carry out this formidable task, the AQMD has been given sweeping powers to implement federal and state clean air acts in four Southland counties, including Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and the non-desert areas of San Bernardino.

AQMD has become, in effect, the Southland’s only regional government with the right to force changes in some of the basic ways in which we live.

These broad powers make the AQMD a potent player in the economic and physical development of the Southland.

The agency’s increased presence is now embodied in its new $90-million headquarters in Diamond Bar. While the agency may be powerful and high profile, the architecture of its headquarters is pleasant and unpretentious, expressing its aim to be a model for the design of energy efficient buildings.

“The AQMD has taken a state-of-the-art building that is an example to others to build on and is consistent with the district’s charter,” said Tom Soto, president of Coalition for Clean Air, a citizen watchdog body.

Set on a ridge overlooking the Pomona Freeway, the 360,000-square-foot AQMD headquarters building has splendid views, particularly to the north, where it looks toward the nearby Pomona Hills and the distant San Gabriel Mountains, topped by the snow-capped peak of Mt. Baldy.

Agency officials can look out of their office windows and judge the state of the Southland’s skies by the varying visibility of the mountains through smog.

To express the separate functions of the headquarters operation, architect Kurt Meyer of Meyer & Allen Associates broke the layout into three sections.

In the middle is a five-story section housing the administration, flanked by the single-story conference center to the west and the research and testing laboratories to the east. Although each section has a distinctive architectural profile, the entire complex is unified by common external finishes of white precast concrete set off by dark green metal trim and panels.

A visitor to the building enters a spacious lobby topped by a large greenhouse-style skylight. The lobby is populated with small pavilions that house information desks and displays and consultation cubicles where a visitor may meet with an official.

The lobby, Meyer explains, is not designed as a “front line” to deflect outsiders or protect the agency from the public, “but as a pivot for people to find their way to the right source of information.”

From the lobby the visitor has direct access to the 300-seat main board room, where public hearings and seminars are held. A series of conference rooms flank the board room, the largest of which houses a “circle of deliberation” where agency committees and officials meet with company executives and private citizens, and their legal representatives, to hammer out agreements and decisions.

The complex’s most hospitable room is the delightful 300-seat cafeteria that occupies the building’s northwest corner. With a wide circular window facing the best view, the indoor dining area opens out onto shaded and sheltered terraces where staff and visitors can dine alfresco.

Although it is flooded with natural light from a large central skylight, the cafeteria has been carefully designed to be free of glare.

The lintel beam of the big circular window is brought down low to block out the hot sky like a cap brim, and the skylight above the lintel has opaque glazing to filter out direct sunlight. Artificial lighting recessed into the slatted wood dropped ceiling supplements natural daylight, when needed.

The administration building is split into two wings separated by an internal landscaped garden court and linked by two bridges. This intimate courtyard provides a sheltered space where staff may relax during their lunch hour.

The south-facing office windows in both wings feature a system of sunbreakers, or “light shelves,” to reduce the penetration of strong daylight. The horizontal sunbreakers have been designed by computer to eliminate much of the high summer sun while allowing the lower winter sunlight to penetrate deep into the office space.

At the same time the light shelf function of the sunbreakers bounce natural daylight off the ceiling to increase the office area illumination.

These sunbreakers play a part in the subtle design of the south elevation of the office building. Here the precast concrete panels that dominate the lower floors gradually give way to the green metal surfaces of the window trim and, on the topmost floor, to full metallic cladding. This arrangement lightens the bulk of the building and gives the sense of an overlay of screens, to intrigue the eye and so reduce the visual boredom found in many conventional office building elevations.

The laboratory building on the eastern wing of the complex is distinguished by its green metal sawtooth roof profile, accentuated by the bright yellow pipes of the lab exhaust stacks.

The landscaping, by Emmet Wemple & Associates, is designed to illustrate the various strategies by which water and energy may be conserved without reducing the feeling of contact with nature.

An area exposed to direct sun features drought-resistant plants such as cacti.

The shaded court between the wings of the administration building shelters more delicate foliage such as azaleas, and an alley of orange trees flanking the main entrance symbolizes the fertility of the Southland’s soil.

Every effort has been made to make sure that the AQMD headquarters lives up to its own environmental agendas. The building’s energy-conserving, non-polluting design reduces its energy consumption by an estimated 25%, and the emissions from its laboratories and workshops are non-toxic.

Electric heating reduces costs and eliminates the pollution of gas-fired boilers. Internal climate control with increased air-change capacity to reduce stale air can be locally adjusted to save energy and provide personal comfort zones. In winter, outside air warmed by the sun is circulated to supplement generated heat.

Air filtration in the laboratory employs advanced electrostatic technologies to purify exhaust fumes. Polluted air from kitchens, print rooms and the like is also thoroughly filtered. Photocells adjust the level of energy use during the day.

The AQMD headquarters building gracefully expresses the agency’s functional, workaday purpose. Dignified yet unpretentious, the architecture is designed to outlast fashion and serve the organization until our skies are scrubbed clean.

Leon Whiteson is a freelance writer who reviews architecture for The Times.