Pyramid Provides Identity : Building: Provocative new office structure adds a landmark to a nondescript Miramar Road commercial strip.
Visible from miles away, the new Miramar Metroplex office building looks like a ghostly apparition out of ancient Egypt. Its 150-foot-high white steel pyramid rises spectacularly from a sea of nondescript commercial and industrial complexes across from the Miramar Naval Air Station, giving some much-needed identity to this busy stretch of Miramar Road.
The new 150,000-square-foot landmark building marks the third and final phase of the $47-million Miramar Metroplex commercial center developed by Fargo Industries (the other buildings were designed by Turpit Architects of San Diego).
San Diego architect N. Charles Slert, 44, designed the $9-million pyramid. Although he designs many types of structures, Slert is best known for inexpensive but provocative glass-skinned office buildings, including 9444 Balboa (near Interstate 15), Rio Vista Tower in Mission Valley and several in the Golden Triangle.
Slert’s pyramid is his most distinctive office design yet. The soaring steel pyramid straddles a flat-topped, six-story reflective glass office building with matching ends that protrude from two sides of the pyramid like delicate butterfly wings.
Neighboring merchants are so smitten with the building that they are already using it in television and radio ads to pinpoint their locations.
The building and frame interact with a powerful yin yang. The light-looking frame (actually, it weighs about 120 tons), with its repeated triangles and strong diagonals, contrasts sharply with the sensuously curved glass walls on the ends of the building.
The building’s most significant flaw is that the frame is really nothing more than a gigantic sculpture. It serves no structural purpose and doesn’t even touch the actual office building, but Slert believes its $750,000 cost was an essential expense.
“This is not pure structure,” he admitted. “It would have been perfect to blend the two (to let the frame help support the building), but you can’t on a budget of $52-a-foot (the cost of construction).”
Slert sees the space frame and building as inseparable, and refers to the building as a, “Spider in a web. You don’t separate the two. Together, they start to make a place.”
At the center of the building is a six-story open-air atrium with a fountain crafted from shards of black granite, ringed by palm trees in raised concrete planters. Simple steel balcony railings were designed with a chevron pattern that relates to the building’s forms. A landscape designed by Slert and San Diego landscape architect Roger DeWeese consists of drought-tolerant plants arranged in dynamic diagonal rows.
Craftsmanship is surprisingly good for an economical office building. Concrete is sculpted into graceful forms such as the footings that support the space frame and planters that surround the interior fountain. Each of more than 3,000 steel pieces that make up the frame screws into custom 60-pound steel ball joints.
The pyramid frame was not quickly approved by the city’s building inspection department. The city, concerned with fire safety, wanted Slert to give the frame a special fire-retardant coating that would have been prohibitively expensive. Instead, Slert persuaded the city to approve the frame as a giant skylight over the central courtyard--without glass.
“So the frame didn’t need to be fire rated or sprinklered,” he explained. As the pyramid rose last February, its sections lowered into place by a gigantic crane over two weekends, design-oriented observers began to discuss it--and sometimes criticize it--as a takeoff on the pyramid New York architect I. M. Pei added to the Louvre in Paris.
but this is a very different situation. pei’s design became controversial because it was a glitzy contemporary addition to a venerable 16th Century building. Slert’s pyramid is a landmark in a location where there is no significant architectural context.
Not that Slert’s choice of the pyramid form was entirely random. He chose it only after considering the broader setting of his building. Looking beyond the pyramid, its pointed form is replicated in the angled peaks of distant mountains. Across Miramar Road to the south, shimmering in the distance, hangars at Miramar Naval Air Station feature white steel trusses reminiscent of the Metroplex’s steel pyramid frame.
Although this building looks great, it will, like other sealed, mechanically cooled and heated glass office buildings, probably not be a perfect place to work. There won’t be fresh air. And, although tinted glass will help control temperatures inside, offices on the south and west that get lots of sun will probably be a little stuffy in spring and summer.
The building’s unusual shape generates unconventional floor plans that will be difficult to fit with conventional furniture. But the shape also provides tenants with a variety of unusual and stunning views of the building and frame.
Also, the developer downgraded some materials specified by the architect. Colored concrete was to have been poured in geometric patterns around the base of the building and in the courtyard. Instead, a roll-on rubbery coating was applied to standard concrete, and the effect looks all right from a distance, but tacky and superficial up close. An interior corridor that would have connected the north entry to the courtyard has instead been configured as leasable space. And such hardware as handles on the main first-floor doors is not as nice as what was originally specified.
The building is leasing slowly, perhaps because of the recession. So far no leases have been signed, and the developer, Fargo Industries, is rumored to be experiencing financial difficulties. Last year, lenders took back two of Fargo’s buildings in La Jolla, including La Jolla Prospect Plaza at 909 Prospect, the location of the Hard Rock Cafe.
But Kim Campbell, Metroplex project manager for Fargo, denied that the company is suffering financial woes. He said Fargo hopes to have the first leases signed soon for the pyramid building.
In spite of its minor design flaws, the building accomplishes Slert’s primary mission: to establish a sense of place in an area that had none.
Through the early post-World War II years, the Miramar Road area had been an open, undeveloped mesa.
During the early 1970s, as the community of Mira Mesa to the north developed with affordable single-family homes, the city of San Diego decided that the Miramar Road area should be used for light industrial and business purposes. Today, the land to the north of Miramar Road is littered with dozens of long, low, boxy warehouses, while Miramar Road itself developed in a different fashion than city planners had envisioned.
“Because of its capacity (for autos) and its location (close to Mira Mesa), Miramar Road became a major commercial strip,” said City Architect Mike Stepner, a veteran city planner.
“By the time the original community plan was adopted in the early 1970s, many of the commercial strip structures were well under way or completed,” added Bruce Brown, chairman of the Mira Mesa Community Planning Group. “There’s a real hodgepodge, and it’s a real concern to the community, because it’s not the most pleasant place to drive through.”
Today, Miramar Road is an ugly four-lane, east-west ribbon of asphalt that connects Interstates 805 and 15, lined with a haphazard collection of offices, light industrial buildings, restaurants, auto parts and repair shops, warehouse-sized furniture stores and small strip centers with a range of retail uses and bare asphalt parking lots out front.
Miramar Road has none of the public amenities it ought to have, such as landscaped medians and street frontages, street trees or an occasional park or plaza. In other words, it lacks the glue that could tie its many buildings together.
Even Stepner acknowledges that the area has been neglected.
“There have been a lot of discussions and proposals (about improving Miramar Road), but the question has always been funding,” he said. “There is no city money for improvements, so private development is the only way it can occur.”
Miramar Road businesses rejected a proposed assessment district that would have paid for landscaping.
A rewrite of the Mira Mesa Community Plan is now in progress and will probably be adopted by the city by summer’s end. The city does not want auto traffic along Miramar Road to increase much beyond its present 66,000 trips a day and hopes to limit office and commercial strip development while emphasizing light industrial and business uses such as furniture stores and high-quality office buildings like the Pyramid.
Given the city and community’s lack of funds for upgrading Miramar Road, Slert’s building emerges as a significant role model. It sets a new, higher standard for architecture in the area.
“The dilemma is, in America we talk about individual buildings, while in Europe they talk about cities,” Slert said. “I hope that the focus won’t be on my building or any other individual building, but on the character of the city. I hope that the pyramid doesn’t remain a diamond in the rough, but can be the impetus for a new type of development in an area that used to be a throwaway.”
DESIGN NOTE
The American Institute of Architects’ annual San Diego by Design week, a series of design-related events, will be held between June 24 and July 2. Highlights include opening ceremonies Thursday night, June 25, at 7:30, in UCSD’s Peterson Hall, featuring this year’s local AIA chapter design awards jury of architects Carlos Jimenez, Hank Koning and Anthony Ames, as well as the awards presentation on Saturday, June 27, at 11 a.m., at UCSD’s Mandeville Hall. There also will be a City Architect’s Town Hall Meeting on June 30 at 7:30 p.m. at the Pan Pacific Hotel downtown, focusing on affordable housing alternatives. Call the AIA office at 232-0109 for more information on these and other events.
