CRITIQUE : ARTFUL CIVIC HEART : Cerritos Center for Performing Arts displays innovative modular design that can serve many functions

The adage, credited to H. L. Mencken in 1925, that Los Angeles is 19 suburbs in search of a metropolis, is even less accurate today than at any time in the past half century. The reality is that, in the endless suburban sprawl that now covers most of Southern California, there are a host of small, rapidly developing communities each in search of its own particular center.

Many of these new suburban cities rely on a local or regional shopping mall to create a communal focus. Others pivot around a major freeway interchange; still others float free with no central fixed point.

The city of Cerritos, 15 miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles, has adopted a bolder strategy in the creation of its own distinctive communal center. This week the city will unveil the $60-million Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts as the cornerstone of its civic core.

Designed by Hollywood-based Barton Myers Associates, the Cerritos Performing Arts Center is a highly original and innovative facility that is also a brilliant building. The center’s playful yet crisply detailed architecture skillfully fulfills its role as a home for the city’s future cultural programs without lapsing into a self-conscious solemnity.

With this center, Cerritos has lifted itself up by its own cultural bootstraps and set a high benchmark to live up to. In creating this fine architectural landmark, Cerritos has made a tacit promise to its citizens to strive for excellence in art and entertainment.

Situated in the midst of a patchwork of small cities straddling the border between Los Angeles and Orange counties, Cerritos has mostly been identified by its huge Auto Square and regional shopping center off the San Gabriel River (605) Freeway on its western edge. Originally incorporated in 1956 as Dairy Valley, Cerritos (“Little Hills,” in Spanish) is a mildly prosperous community with a mixed population of about 60,000, including Anglos, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians.

In planning its Performing Arts Center, Cerritos had two major imperatives. One was that the center should be as flexible as possible in its operation, to accommodate a wide range of events to attract its culturally diverse citizenry.

“We want to develop an audience where none presently exists,” said Victor Gotesman, the center’s general manager. “And that means we have to appeal to every segment of our community.”

The second imperative was the need for the new building to anchor Cerritos’ embryonic Towne Center, located at the intersection of Bloomfield Avenue and 183rd Street, opposite the existing City Hall.

The new Performing Arts Center performs brilliantly in both aspects. As a cultural facility, its flexibility is remarkable. As an act of architecture, the building has a strong yet graceful presence. In architect Barton Myers’ words, the center is “a muscular, highly active facility that also functions as a symbol for the community’s aspirations.”

The Performing Arts Center presents a composition of pyramidal roofs covered with lively tile patterns created by noted graphic artist April Greiman. The pyramids cascade down from the tall fly towers--the spaces above the stage in which theatrical scenery needed during a performance is temporarily housed--to others just above pedestrian eye level. The effect is to break a massive architectural complex down to a scale that is friendly at street level.

Below the pyramids, the center’s exterior is finished in polished red granite relieved by horizontal bands of French limestone. The blank solidity of these surfaces is contrasted by the transparency of several glazed towers housing stairs and services.

Taken together, all these forms and finishes create that fine balance between approachability and solemnity that suits a small city’s cultural and civic ambitions.

The center includes a major auditorium with its ancillary dressing rooms, scenery storage and loading bays, plus two community meeting rooms and offices. A large auditorium lobby, adjoining entry court and a fancifully named “Poets’ Garden” complete the complex.

The square, tall lobby has the atmosphere of an open-air piazza brought indoors. Ringed by balconies and colonnades, it provides a spacious gathering place for theater and concert audiences. High windows on two sides fill the lobby with light and link it to the glazed galleries that give access to the main auditorium. A sweeping cantilevered main staircase leads to the upper gallery levels.

The heart of the Performing Arts Center, and its most innovative feature, is the auditorium. This high wide space has been designed for maximum flexibility in its capacity to house almost every variety of public performance, from grand opera and wrestling to intimate recitals and popular cabarets.

Almost everything moves in this amazing auditorium. Three-story seating towers, lined up along three sides of the auditorium, float on air-powered casters. Horizontal lifts hydraulically raise and lower large sections of the auditorium floor. The wide bank of seating at the rear of the stage, weighing more than a hundred tons, can be pulled forward by electrically driven cables beneath the stage floor.

Altogether, the towers and lifts provide five different layouts, varying from 950 to 1,963 seats.

The arena and concert layouts focus on a raised central podium with the movable seating towers lined up along the side walls. The lyric arrangement, intended for opera, large-scale musical shows and theatrical dramas, provides a wide and deep proscenium stage at one end of the auditorium, under the 80-foot fly towers that house scenery and backdrops.

In the recital mode the towers along the back wall are moved forward to reduce the auditorium’s size and create a sense of intimacy. In the cabaret mode the auditorium’s floor is leveled out to accommodate dining tables and chairs, surrounded by the seating boxes in the towers.

The side towers, which weigh about 140,000 pounds, are so finely balanced and supported that they can be moved by hand as well as by electric tow tractors. The efficiency of this operation is such that any floor layout can be reconfigured by four people in eight hours.

The system of movable towers and adjustable floors used in the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts was developed by a British firm, Theatre Projects.

The honeycomb acoustical ceiling above the stage can be lowered for concerts or rotated and lifted up out of the way when not required. Electrically operated banners and curtains can be swung into place to fine tune the sound patterns. A free-standing orchestra shell can be rolled into position when needed and a system of insulated hinged “flippers” can be pivoted up and down to provide the mandatory fire curtain between the stage and auditorium.

All this mechanized flexibility could have resulted in an auditorium interior that resembled a giant high-tech toy. Instead, the architects have taken great care not to overwhelm audiences with clever machinery and metallic structures. They have softened the steel towers with a generous amount of white and black-stained ash and cherrywood finishes, and covered the fixed rows of seats in the three-level balconies at the north end of the hall in warm red plush.

Barton Myers Associates is recognized as one of the most experienced and accomplished theater designers in the country. They have built a number of theaters in the United States and Canada, including the award-winning Portland, Ore., Center for the Performing Arts, completed in 1985. In 1990 BMA won a national competition for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.

BMA’s international reputation for an architecture that is finely conceived and scrupulously detailed is enhanced by the design of the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, which provides a highly sophisticated model for other performing arts centers in small communities throughout the Southland.