In Beverly Hills, a Civic Disappointment

The Beverly Hills City Hall is a wonderfully self-confident and inviting building. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, of the group of rambling structures that have recently transformed the area into the giant Beverly Hills Civic Center.

Despite earnest attempts by the architects, Charles Moore and the Urban Innovation Group, and some wonderful work by landscape designers Campbell and Campbell, in the end the new library, police station, office auditorium, fire station and parking garage present a disconnected and bombastic parody of a very pleasant civic gesture.

The problems with the recent addition--notorious for its cost overruns--and the subsequent debates over the appropriateness of such lavish facilities actually stem from aspects of the original design.

When architect William Gage and the Beverly Hills civic fathers planned the original building, they wanted to create a mixture of traditional American civic gestures and Spanish Colonial ornament. They also wanted to create a public counterpart to the commercial core of the “Golden Triangle” just to the west.

The City Hall’s most striking feature is its five-story tower: Emerging out of a three-story base with four-square forthrightness, it erupts into a volcano of a multicolored tile dome that leaves Spanish Baroque detailing dripping down the sides. The actual base is more restrained, but it does offer us two wings that come forward to set the stage and welcome visitors into its public realm.

The problem with this civic design is two-fold: First, the marriage of functional, logical and monumental planning with whimsical detailing was never fully consummated, so that all the details of the building are applied to its mass, rather than growing out of the actual logic of the building. Second, the site left City Hall marooned in an odd lot, turning its side to the thoroughfare of Santa Monica Boulevard while having the front face the backs of the commercial buildings to the west.

Moore’s scheme, which he developed after winning a 1982 competition, amplifies both problems. He chose to strip down the forms of the City Hall even further into a base note of flat stucco piers that rise up into zigzagging set-backs, while adding grand arches--the exuberance of which seem both out of scale and hollow. The detailing looks silly and puny.

Even worse, Moore chose to create a new diagonal axis that leads from the corner of Crescent Drive and Little Santa Monica all the way to nowhere at the northeast corner of the site. This diagonal is defined by three elliptical courtyards, each of which seems to be carved out of rambling masses of buildings.

The best of them is the middle one, which is bisected by City Center Drive. You reach it from Santa Monica Boulevard by driving under a rather grand, arched bridge; it has the romantic character of a ruined stage-set.

The worst of the courtyards is the largest--a rear-space, concrete graveyard of civic ambitions dropped well below street level. You can’t even enter any of the buildings of the Civic Center from these courtyards. They are nothing but gestures of public space outlined with paper-thin ideas about a historically allusive architecture.

Still, Charles Moore is a master designer, and his inventive hand shows through in some of the wonderfully picturesque massing of the new buildings, which draw you in while activating the complicated geometry of the site.

You can find the best sequence in any recent civic building in Los Angeles inside the library, where Moore draws you through a properly grand main room, past arches, screens and staircases lit by skylights, to an amply arched reading room.

This sense of discovery is duplicated in the main public spaces outside by the landscaping, which alternates formal rows of palms and flower beds with lushly planted mounds that hide some of the worst mistakes of the architecture. On the road from somewhere-off-the-

side to nowhere, at least you can stop and smell the flowers.