STRUCTURES : Low Profile, High Ideals : Plans to expand the Ojai Center for the Arts are in keeping with the 1939 complex’s understated solidity.

As Ventura County landmarks go, the Ojai Center for the Arts wears its mantle with great humility. Outsiders, accustomed mainly to cruising Ojai’s main drag, or those not intricately involved in the arts in Ojai, may not even know the center exists. But there it has sat since 1939, a sleepy, rambling structure hunkered down on a sizable parcel of land between South Montgomery Street and the creek.

To put a finer point on it, the center may be the best model in the area for an arts complex of low profile and high ideals. Off the beaten path and deceptively demure as a structure, the center is the polar opposite of the grandstanding, freeway-nuzzling Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

Such is the Ojai way, you might say: quiet but commanding, restrained but resilient.

Behind the unassuming gray facade of the building lies a rich, twisted but ongoing regional history in the making. This property has been the site of untold deposits of dramatic, visual and musical arts, in addition to its assorted educational services.

As it glides up to the 60th anniversary of its founding, making it one of the most venerable multidisciplinary arts organizations in California, the center has plans to increase its public profile--within the boundaries of humility, of course. Local architect Mark Whitman plans to add a marquee, which will make the center visible from Ojai Avenue, and a small new gallery-gift shop: modest additions aimed at helping the center go more public.

The center is also steeped in local architectural history, this being a house that Austen Pierpont built. Pierpont was a son in the family of influential Ojai settlers who, during the town’s seminal period before the turn of the century, ran the Pierpont cottages as well as Ventura’s dramatically situated Pierpont Inn.

Much as his family helped to define what is modern-day Ojai, Pierpont put his design thumbprint on the face of the town. He became one of the most prominent architects in the county--this, despite his never going through the steps to become a licensed architect.

Pierpont’s work can be seen in numerous buildings at the Thacher School (his alma mater), the Ojai Valley Inn and Country Club, the postcard-ready Ojai Post Office, and the Libbey Bowl, which he designed along with the celebrated Santa Paula architect Roy Wilson. Pierpont also designed numerous ranch-style houses in the area.

Pierpont was actually the second architect chosen for the task of building a home for the Center for the Arts, which formed in 1936 and took over the property once occupied by the library. The center’s founders vetoed the first architect’s unrealistically elaborate plans. Pierpont’s blueprint offered a comfortably meandering, modular design accommodating a small (but quite active) theater, a respectably sized gallery, small offices, a painting studio out back, and a homey sitting room in which a formal portrait of founder Dr. Charles Butler looms over the fireplace.

Nestled on a tree-shrouded property across the street from Wachter’s Hay and Grain, the Center for the Arts remains a subtle, almost bucolic complex, befitting a proudly ex-urban town. Wood panels line the understated interior. Heading out back, creekside, the courtyard smells of eucalyptus.

The principle art gallery, which doubles as a dance studio, is an open pagoda-like space, with a skylit airiness that makes it suitable for both contemplative and kinetic activities. At the Ojai Festival two years ago, a horde of music lovers crammed in here, sardine-like, to hear John Cage’s whimsical “Indeterminacy,” between concerts across the creek at Libbey Bowl.

In a newspaper interview in 1967, when he was 78 and retired, Pierpont commented on “the pleasant part of architecture and construction. Your work lives on to either plague you or give you pleasure.”

It can safely be said that his Center for the Arts structure, for all of its modest aesthetic aspirations, succeeds on counts of both pleasure and functionality. As with many buildings that work well, you take this building’s stolid sense of quality for granted.

The center’s challenge now lies in alerting more people to its very existence, while maintaining the the beauty of self-determination and intimacy, the unwritten hallmarks of Pierpont’s work.

This is one of those structures that speaks softly, but substantially, and for a long time.