ARCHITECTURE : A Maverick Form Among the Masses
If you get stuck in traffic trying to turn at La Cienega and Wilshire boulevards, look to the side and you will see a bit of the myth of the West charging through Beverly Hills.
Still in the saddle after 20 years, John Wayne rides off into the sunset--at a diagonal, carrying a curving 10-story building with him.
Strangely, the Great Western Savings Bank building has none of the pseudo-realism of either Wayne or this “Great Horseman . . . the indomitable spirit of the West” (as the company calls the statue). It is a brash and enigmatic form breaking out of the parade of straight-edged buildings with all the fluidity of a spaceship. If Wayne represents Reagan-like romantic realism, the Great Western Building stands for a high-class modernism. Together, these two icons bracket the idea of a bank building in Beverly Hills, giving you something that dares you to be part of a different team.
The Great Western Savings Center is a 250,000-square-foot office building that floats on top of a banking hall while hiding a stack of underground parking below a curving landscape of planters, ramps and ATMs.
Oval shapes make for very efficient floor layouts. They give you the most amount of square footage in relationship to the core of elevators, mechanical systems, stairs and toilets that take up a quarter of the space in most high-rises. Ovals also make nice, fluid shapes that catch your eye. It was no doubt these two reasons that led architect William Pereira, the master of Rococo Modernism in Los Angeles (he designed the original County Museum buildings just down the street) to choose such a seemingly eccentric shape when he designed the Great Western building in 1972.
Unfortunately, ovals also present the designer with some big problems. First, because there are so few of them around, they look strange in almost any urban setting. It is also difficult to assemble them with materials such as steel and glass that are by their nature straight without causing the round shape to fracture into unsightly planes. Finally, it is hard to give them any kind of scale, or to enter them.
Pereira managed to make most of those disadvantages work for him. He and his team gave the Great Western building a taut skin of steel and bronzed solar glass whose vertical elements are so closely spaced that you barely notice the segmentation of the arc. Most of the detailing of the glass, spandrels and frames has been kept to a minimum, so that your eye just glides over them. The almost-black coloration, and the absence of a base or top to this pure extrusion, make the building appear like a scaleless piece of finely honed sculpture. The two main entrances are mere indentations in the face of the building. They are grand and clearly visible, but don’t attract any attention to themselves.
The main banking hall continues to follow the simple logic of the oval. It is a two-story space covered with small gold tiles. You feel as if you are in a proper banking place, but you also feel a sense of ease. There are no corners and few obstructions, only curving, lustrous surfaces. Pereira and his team obviously tried to continue the curving motif in the plaza that ebbs and flows around the eccentric placement of the building, but the eddies that erupt into spiral fountains and garish planters seem timid by comparison with the boldness of the original gesture.
The Great Western Building is not very polite or politic. It doesn’t enrich what street life this canyon of banks has to offer, nor does it have any interest in reflecting the nature of its site. It is a macho kind of building, standing with inarticulate strength in an architectural desert and daring us to just try something--or at least to deposit our money there.
Aaron Betsky teaches and writes about architecture.
