A Green Oasis Flourishes Amid a Desert of Concrete and Steel

The Water Garden office complex in Santa Monica raises an interesting question: Does it matter whether a building is badly designed, if it creates a beautiful outdoor space for its tenants?

This question is made even more difficult to answer by the fact that the Water Garden, which opened earlier this year, is only half finished and, given the state of the economy, will probably remain that way for many years. This unfinished state makes the building difficult to judge, but it also makes it a symbol of the type of isolated, anti-contextual office buildings produced by the confluence of the Reagan-Bush economy and the rise of postmodernism.

The four six-story buildings that make up the Water Garden are, in my opinion, awful. Architects McLaren, Vasquez & Partners have designed structures whose only rhyme and reason appear to be to provide a great deal of office space. Their precast concrete skins can’t decide whether they want to be 1920s downtown office buildings or the sort of gridded block you find on your way to the airport in any American city.

Expanses of greenish glass and green mullions stand in for bays, while bulging half-rounds offer cartoon versions of lintels and mullions. The architects have made the already bloblike shapes of these buildings even more confusing by adding stepped protuberances that provide more corner offices.

Finally, as if realizing that they had made a mess, they added oversized vaulted entrance lobbies that connect the buildings. Though nice enough in themselves (in a generically opulent office lobby sort of way), these spaces are part of some other order of steel, glass and marble that wedges its way in between the acres of concrete. They provide ceremonial axes that go nowhere. From the outside, they look like the front doors, but they are set at angels to the street and you enter them in the middle, after you have parked your car in the vast and confusing garage below grade and found your way up through an elevator.

Then there is the outdoor space. A giant basin at the corner of Olympic Boulevard and 26th Street spills its water into a cascade that slowly transforms into a meandering little river. It winds its way past bridges and gazebos to a 1.4-acre--but only 18-inch deep--lake that takes up the middle of the 17-acre site. Surrounded by walkways, trees and generous plazas, it looks like MacArthur Park as it probably only could appear in our memories.

This is a green oasis in the middle of a desert of office buildings, a large open space protected and isolated from the outside world behind corporate walls. This is why the office blocks were wedge-shaped; they are each just slivers of a giant ring of concrete that protects this office idyll. Standing next to the lake, the office blobs don’t even look so bad any more. Their bases erode into colonnades and their skins disappear behind the palm trees.

At this point, you still have to turn your back to the north to get the full effect because only half of the 1.2-million-square feet complex has been built. I almost prefer it this way, though. At least now you feel the tension between the desire of the Water Garden to create its own little world and the reality of the parking garage visible at the edge of the lake, the vacant land left over after the building boom ended and the bland office buildings of an older vintage across Colorado. Yet this perhaps slightly perverse pleasure does not take away from the fact that I am also continually offended by these hulks as I drive by them on Olympic Boulevard. This is building activity that has given nothing back to its community while carving out a niche for itself and its inhabitants.

I would probably enjoy working in the Water Garden, assuming I would have time to linger in its water gardens, but I would hate to live within sight of these particular bastions of bad design.

The Water Garden: Olympic Boulevard, between 26th Street and Cloverfield Boulevard, Santa Monica