STYLE: ARCHITECTURE : FRESH OFF THE DRAWING BOARD: An Innovative Design Activism Gives New Meaning to Cool in Culver City

It took an earthquake and collapsed overpasses to force motorists off the Santa Monica Freeway into Culver City, perhaps the most bypassed city in the world. But once there, tens of thousands who had only a 65-m.p.h. overview of a town known mostly for the old MGM and Selznick studios encountered several buildings that acted as semaphores flagging something new.

Along National Boulevard, in a 57-acre industrial tract of largely empty factories and obsolete warehouses, passers-by saw the corner of a long building erupting in a cage of off-kilter steel and glass obscuring the black metal silhouette of a cloaked figure. On the next corner, another building supported a levitated box with canted walls and roof. Both buildings bracketed a third, a factory with an oddly tilted canopy centered on a partially hidden oval entry.

For Culver City-based maverick developer Frederick Samitaur Smith, these structures represent an urban idea whose time has come. More than a half-dozen of Smith’s renovated stucco and concrete factories, abandoned by industries that have folded or relocated, are shaping a neighborhood for the small businesses emerging as the area’s primary growth employers. Culver City’s Hayden Tract is starting to look like an updated SoHo, only the urban pioneers reinvigorating the underused and abandoned 40- and 50-year-old warehouses, and hanging out at the local diner, JJ’s Cafe, are not artists but graphic designers, computer jocks, advertising whizzes and independent film producers.

Smith has identified small, creative “neo-industrial” enterprises that thrive in informal, non-corporate loft spaces. “I try to talk the guy who is inventing a mechanical toilet for the handicapped to come into the project because he’s intellectually starved at Imperial Highway and Lankershim,” says Smith, an unconventional developer partial to blue cowboy boots. “There’s nobody next to you to mow the lawn growing in your brain. We’re creating a community. I’m not after creative types alone, not just filmmakers, but also high-tech industrial users like image-processing companies.”

For Smith and his company, Samitaur Constructs, which has remodeled about 175,000 square feet and has about 600,000 on the drawing board, the metaphor and lure of this new community is architecture. Eric Owen Moss, the Culver City architect known for a handful of radically deconstructed buildings and many architectural awards, has designed all of Smith’s buildings.

Smith’s building-by-building bid at reclaiming the area in and around the Hayden Tract coincides with several other improvements undertaken by Culver City and by Sony, the largest company in town. The city’s Community Development Department is now rebuilding the notoriously tangled triangle of downtown streets, at the intersection of Washington and Culver boulevards, refurbishing the storefront business district and redesigning eastern boulevards--creating a sense of place in what has long been a drive-through no man’s land. Meanwhile Sony, ensconced where the MGM lion once roared, has restored and expanded its vast studios and is adding an Art Deco-style television studio off-campus. The synergy of entrepreneur, city and corporation is waking Culver City from an urban slumber that made it the last of the Westside areas near the beach to be developed. The surprising new buildings, streetscapes and landscaping are significant because of their artistic quality and because design is being used to redefine the city’s identity.

Smith has been chipping away at the Hayden Tract since 1987, starting with 8522 National Blvd., a group of now fully occupied light-industrial buildings brilliantly reorganized and rebuilt by Moss into a beehive for computer scientists, filmmakers and graphic and video designers. He next tackled Ince Boulevard and transformed the old Paramount Laundry building opposite the Culver Studios into multilevel, cat-walked loft space. To create a diverse community, Smith and his wife and business partner, Laurie, have also sought the unexpected tenant: The mix in one building on Hayden Boulevard includes two architecture firms, a ballet company and a metal fabricator whose space is part studio, gallery and future cafe.

Smith’s target tenant doesn’t need office space in a conventional high-rise. Take, for instance, the independent film and record company IRS (“Tom and Viv,” “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” the Go-Go’s, dada), which recently located in Smith’s building at the corner of Hayden and National. “Why did we come here?” asks Paul Colichman, the high-energy, rapid-fire president of IRS’ film division. “I wanted to be close to where we do business, which is primarily Beverly Hills, but we looked there, and in order to get the same amount of space, it was going to cost twice as much money to get half as good a building. I thought to myself: ‘Why am I paying this kind of money to be in an uninteresting building when I can go 10 minutes south, have a really gorgeous building designed by a totally interesting on-the-edge architect and built to my specifications for half the price?’ ”

Companies like IRS work best in roomy, loosely laid-out buildings rather than rigidly structured ones. The IRS building’s exploded corner, with the image of a shadowy IRS agent lurking at the back of the steel-and-glass cage, is merely a logo attached to a structure remarkable for its informality and complexity. In the center of the two-story structure, Moss carved out a narrow courtyard as an alternative to interior corridors: Multiple paths in the honeycomb encourage chance encounters. “The difference between a conventional office building, which is conformist, and here,” says Jay Boberg, Colichman’s counterpart at IRS Records, “is the difference between suffocation and spontaneous combustion. The space really lends itself to the fury and flurry of activity that the creative process demands.

“The design helps socialize the company and spark ideas--we don’t have meetings in long corridors lit by fluorescents,” he continues, pointing out the clerestory windows and sunken court outside everyone’s offices, the latter used for impromptu meetings. “We were attracted to this kind of SoHo community that involved everything from ballet and graphic arts to marketing. There are plans next door for an outdoor amphitheater and park. We like being part of the change in the neighborhood.”

Mark Winogrond, director of the city’s Community Development Department, acknowledges that dozens of warehouses are still vacant or underused but is optimistic about the future. “There’s a long way to go before you could say that a new pattern dominates the landscape, but these things are inertial; a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and, definitely, Smith has generated a lot of motion.”

Smith recalls that at first, officials wondered why he didn’t stick to building concrete tilt-up structures like everyone else. Life, they said, would be easier.

“I can remember when he presented 8522 National, when I headed the Community Development Department,” says Jody Hall-Esser, now the city’s chief administrative officer. “We were practically speechless when we looked at the plans. They broke all the rules and didn’t deal with space, materials and construction in the traditional way. Then Smith moved on to two buildings on Ince Boulevard and those were even more dramatic: sewer pipes used for a cantilevered porch support. We didn’t modify the plan; instead it liberalized our way of thinking and opened our minds. The building went on to win local, state and national design awards. Smith’s buildings are an asset to the community, and they planted a deep seed.”

The seed continues to change attitudes. Smith pays a premium for Moss’ unusual and costly-to-execute designs, and the developer earlier this year obtained the city’s tentative permission to have buildings themselves qualify for the 1% art requirement, which stipulates that 1% of a building’s budget be spent on art. Smith argued that architecture--or at least this kind of architecture--is art, making Culver City perhaps the first city to make this important distinction.

Smith’s efforts at creating a new community differ radically from Sony’s more internalized efforts at maintaining its studios, which are largely private precincts sequestered behind high walls. The impressive Art Deco Irving Thalberg Building has been rehabbed and is visible from the street; exterior street sets have been redone: passers-by can spy those make-believe spaces through tantalizing breaks in the surrounding walls. “The combination of the landscaping, the care and repainting of buildings inside, and the new mystery glimpses have all added to the urban experience,” says Winogrond, formerly the director of community development in West Hollywood.

City projects have taken a third direction. “The idea is to make parts of Culver City look like a typical small American town with a warm atmosphere, with cappuccino and chestnut carts on the sidewalk,” says Mayor Albert Vera, owner of the Sorrento Italian Market on South Sepulveda. “The theme is really sort of modern, yet a little like towns back East--decent and friendly to pedestrians.” The mayor, who likes to wear a “Shop in Culver City” button, intends to patronize the design talent now working there--some with international reputations.

Financing for the public-sector development of this city of 40,000 people comes from tax increment funds yielded by the Culver City redevelopment program, which started 23 years ago with projects like Fox Hills Mall and Corporate Pointe. Funds have been used to restore the Culver Hotel downtown--a tall, wedge-shaped brick leftover from the 1920s--and to transform the long-derelict Mission-style trolley substation into a multipurpose cultural facility at the entrance to downtown. The two buildings, once eyesores, are now national historic landmarks.

In addition, an outdoor dining ordinance has been adopted, and sidewalks have been widened to create room for cafes, public art and benches. To help small businesses like Tokyo 7-7, a family-run, 40-seat Japanese coffee shop behind Main Street, stay in operation, a public parking structure has been erected and parking regulations have been eased. The city has approved a farmer’s market downtown to open next spring and is distributing grants for facade improvements. In response, there have been several hundred inquiries about business start-ups, according to Miriam Mack, administrator for the city Redevelopment Agency. Among the most ambitious is a proposal by Danny DeVito to turn the Culver Theater into a nonprofit corporation to showcase films and small theater workshops.

The most adventurous Culver City proposal, however, may deal with simple street design. Los Angeles has been described as an environment of movement, but little positive effort has been made in the design of streets beyond basic engineering and tree-planting. Last year, the Community Development Department engaged Santa Monica building and landscape architects Campbell & Campbell and local environmental graphics designers Sussman/Prejza to redesign East Washington Boulevard from Ince to Fairfax--one of the city’s spines--with an emphasis on the first few blocks leading into Culver City.

Sussman/Prejza, which played a leading role in designing the banners, flags and bunting that gave the 1984 Olympics their ebullient “look,” has proposed adding a “sky gallery of floating murals” in the several blocks west of Fairfax. The gallery idea, enthusiastically greeted by citizens in community workshops conducted by the designers, recalls the famous parade of billboards along Sunset Boulevard. The Culver City billboards would be themed, perhaps representing movies filmed in Culver City--”Gone with the Wind,” “Citizen Kane,” “Bugsy”--or they might be abstract artworks by one artist.

“It’s not a single monument but a sequential gateway formed by a number of elements,” says the energetic and high-powered Deborah Sussman, whose offices are in the Smith-renovated laundry. “You experience it by driving through or walking by a kind of floating sky garden formed not just by the posters, but by the trees, new street furniture and specially designed street lights.”

Campbell & Campbell has proposed capitalizing on the existing colonnades of palms by placing low trees with wide canopies between them, to create a ceiling scaled for pedestrians. A user-friendly environment will help nurture small, isolated enterprises like Mi Ranchito, whose mole enchilada alone is now more of a magnet for the community than the surrounding streetscape.

But perhaps the most arresting proposal is Culver City’s answer to Hollywood. Linked to Hollywood by the city’s north-south surface roads, Culver City--which claims to be the home of the world’s first movie studios--shares its movie-industry orientation. Why not, proposed Sussman/Prejza, build a competing HOLLYWOOD sign in the hills beyond Ballona Creek that spells CULVER CITY?

Whether the sign would spell out the whole name or just the initials CC, or some other variation, is still under discussion. But with or without the sign, Culver City is already rewriting its name on the mental map of the Los Angeles Basin.