ARCHITECTURE : Santa Monica City Hall: A Modest Reminder of a Simpler Time

Enter Santa Monica City Hall, and you feel as if you have returned to an earlier day when government was only a few steps removed from the governed, when people took pride in their city, and when the world had a bright future.

This little building exudes confidence, clarity and optimism. It has also been exiled from the heart of the city and lost in a sea of parking, leaving it as only a romantic memory that just happens to still be the heart of Santa Monica’s now-extensive bureaucracy.

These days, the building is dwarfed by its neighbors. When it was designed in 1938 by Donald B. Parkinson and J. M. Estep, it was supposed to be the centerpiece of a collection of civic buildings organized around rigid axes whose only remnant is the linear bed of roses that leads through a slightly sloped lawn to the over-scaled front door.

Built as part of the Works Progress Administration effort to put people back to work in the Depression, it was meant as an expression of the belief that government could help make a better world of which this would be a building block.

That better world never quite took the shape envisioned in the 1930s, but its contours are still etched into the surface of Santa Monica City Hall. It is a simple, three-story building whose distinguishing features barely escape from its white facades.

Instead of majestic central tower such as Pasadena, Los Angeles and Beverly Hills all placed over their city halls, Parkinson and Estep designed just the hint of a vertical marker. It is covered with horizontal louvers and topped by an antenna, and is barely visible from the front.

The building supports this almost repressed gesture with a slightly higher central entrance piece that emerges out of two thin setbacks. The side wings are divided into bays by just the hint of a pilaster whose scalloped edges form enough of a shadow to distinguish the vertical pieces from the frame in which they are placed.

You get the sense that this building is just putting up appearances--a suspicion that gains ground when you see the jumbled sides and banal rear of the City Hall.

What really distinguishes this building as the City Hall (other than the name, picked out in gold letters on the city’s ubiquitous blue background) is the entrance sequence. Beyond the formal walk, you encounter the frosted glass panels of the front door, which is bordered by multicolored tile set in patterns that mix Streamlined Moderne zigzags with Santa Monica waves.

Inside, a two-story lobby continues the modest job of impressing you with its civic purpose. Murals recount the history of the city from the colonization of the area by Junipero Serra to the polo games of the era in which the building was constructed. Beyond this room, there are nothing but offices and counters, though a tile wainscot along the hallways continues to remind you that you are not just in an office building.

Parkinson, who helped design such masterpieces as Bullock’s Wilshire and Union Station (and was a consultant on the design of the Los Angeles City Hall as well), was here working in a long tradition of civic architecture in which a central space, symmetrical side wings, public art and a logical disposition of offices within this framework were ways of creating a recognizable public building.

He updated that tradition by using an abstract, colorful and horizontal detailing derived from an understanding of both the materials and the tenor of the times. This style reduced what had been grand statements drawn up in stone and covered with columns to stucco boxes streamlined so that they could meet reduced budgets and represents more democratic notions of modern government.

Little did he know that this reductive strategy would only be a way-station in the development of ever blander, ever more efficient civic structures whose civic purpose was no longer built into the very fabric of their architecture.

Luckily, Santa Monica continues to use and cherish its little City Hall, reminding us that perhaps our government should look like something.