Taking Advantage of a Window of Opportunity at Salick Building

The Salick Health Care headquarters on Beverly Boulevard sticks out. It is taller than anything around it, and its glass and stone facades stand out in a neighborhood of stucco. It looks like a brand-new building slicing through the polite, if somewhat confused, neighborhood with all the fearless elegance of a surgeon’s knife.

Ironically, it is just a skin job: a renovation of a bland 1964 office building that subtracted from, rather than added to, the bulk of the existing building to reveal its inner structure.

What makes this particular renovation, designed a little more than a year ago by Santa Monica architect Thom Mayne, so remarkable is that the actual incisions and substructures remain evident in the finished building. Most renovations cover and hide a history that the client and the architect usually would like us to forget.

In this case, the architect decided that he could not hide a building that towered over its neighborhood (it was constructed before there were height limits). He decided instead to reveal its nature and then fragment it into what he calls “localized events.”

Mayne first stripped the six-story building down to its bones, and then found a glass and compositional system that allows you to see those bones. He utilized a greenish glass that Monsanto had just developed for the new generation of minivans with wraparound windows. It is clear and strong, while providing shade and insulation without the usual murky brown-gray tint that drowns most glass skins in Darth Vader-like hues.

Mayne then lifted his new skin over the street by exposing the expressive structure of the semi-enclosed garage and arranged the clear glass in an abstract pattern. The result is that the cleaned-up floors of offices display themselves in almost complete freedom to anyone driving or walking down the boulevard from the east. The Salick Building becomes a gridded crystal that dissolves itself into layers of glass and white planes hovering over the street.

Having pulled this modernist rabbit out of his technological hat, Mayne then gave us the hat itself: He clad the west facade with an almost completely opaque glass, so that it becomes a black box.

The two sides together provide us with a demonstration of how buildings both hide and reveal what goes on inside them. They also just happen to respond to the different nature of the sun angles and the scales of the surrounding neighborhood on either side. To pull it all together, Mayne pasted a granite facade on the south side, the entrance where the Salick organization tries to put a good face on this techno rave dance of grids.

The weakest parts of the design are the only truly extraneous additions, including a diagonal piece of concrete, a bow-shaped addition that protrudes from the slick glass skin, and a metallic “knife” that appears to be slicing open the east facade. They are gestures that are meant to make us understand the reconstitution of the building, but they are wholly unnecessary; one look at the green and black boxes and the thin formal facade and you know the whole story.

The Salick Building is a luxurious piece of construction, fueled by the enormous profits still to be made by providing health-care equipment. It is also much too big for its neighborhood. But it turns out to be a simple building, one that for once tells us more than it hides and provides an elegant, open-ended counterpoint to the closed forms and complicated conditions of the Westside.

Aaron Betsky teaches and writes about architecture.