Architect’s New Train of Thought : Redevelopment: Design team says it has the answer for a former rail corridor in Culver City. Plan includes adding a park and rows of 60-foot-high columns to support walkways and building extensions.

The abandoned rail corridor south of National Boulevard in Culver City does not seem to offer obvious lessons about aiding American’s troubled industrial landscapes. Weeds, junk and rusty tracks are the main features of the old Southern Pacific right of way nowadays.

But if developer Frederick Samitaur Smith and architect Eric Owen Moss succeed, the half-mile-long, 50-foot-wide spur would become a model of avant-garde design and urban revitalization. And their audacious proposal would give literal meaning to pie in the sky, or at least workplace in the sky.

Recently unveiled at the Culver City Redevelopment Agency, the plan would convert the rail spur to a grassy park and pedestrian thoroughfare in the neighborhood known as the Hayden Tract. Bolder additions would follow: rows of 60-foot-high steel columns to support glass-enclosed walkways, building extensions in the sky, enormous sculptural objects and even a bridge over the adjacent Ballona Creek into the city of Los Angeles.

“You can call it a wound,” Moss said of the railway corridor, which curls in a J shape between warehouses and factories from National Boulevard to the creek. “But you could also call it an opportunity to stitch the wound together.”

Such an unusual project, backers contend, would attract theaters, high-tech workshops, artist studios and cinema-related businesses to the area, which is located near Baldwin Hills and the MGM-Sony Studios. The rail corridor would become a double-decker spine of amenities, a new wave Main Street in an area that lacks pizazz or coherence.

Property values would rise along with the columns, they hope. “This used to be a very hot little industrial area, but it lost its identity. The idea was what could bring it together and give a new identity, a new definition,” said Smith, who is a major property owner there.

His Samitaur Constructs company and Moss’ atelier are in one of several aging industrial buildings in Culver City that the team radically overhauled in recent years. Their work won acclaim from architectural critics for blending old brick walls with radically modern features.

Built primarily in the World War II era as a center of aerospace manufacturing, the 57-acre Hayden Tract now suffers a vacancy rate of more than 40% because of cuts in defense spending and other business flight, according to a Culver City report. An estimated 870 people, about a quarter of the work force during the area’s heyday, are employed in such remaining businesses as a plastics manufacturer and a dental supply house--along with the software and advertising firms attracted to loft-like work spaces in the Smith buildings.

Laurie Smith, Frederick’s wife and business partner, said she fears that many warehouses will decay further and face demolition if what was originally called A.R. City, or Air Rights City, isn’t built.

“It would be a shame to lose them. Some of these old warehouses are overwhelmingly beautiful,” she said. “They’re like walking into a cathedral.”

Her husband insists that the skyward plan, for which he is seeking a new name, “isn’t a pipe dream. The logic of it and the simplicity of it will gather a lot of support.”

Some city officials are not so sure. They point out many potential obstacles, not the least of which is a price tag that could range from $51 million to $65 million if all the theaters, bridges and columns are built.

Another uncertainty is whether the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which controls the easement rights, would agree to the proposal. (The MTA official in charge of real estate holdings could not be reached for comment this week.) In addition, many owners of the 41 properties that touch the rail corridor would have to participate.

“His plans are great and I wish him all the luck in the world, but it’s going to be difficult to accomplish,” Albert Vera, chairman of the Culver City Redevelopment Agency, said about the scheme Smith formally presented last month. While it is important to have sweeping visions, perhaps only such parts as the park and the theaters will be built, Vera added.

Culver City Mayor Steven Gourley considers the idea worth pursuing, despite hurdles.

“It is on the dreamier side of the equation. But if there’s a 10% chance that we can bring that off, it is far more worth pursuing than the standard industrial tract, especially in this time when people aren’t breaking down doors to bring business to town.”

The Redevelopment Agency unanimously instructed its staff to continue discussions with the Smiths, who hope that the city will pay $250,000 for Moss’ fees. Meanwhile, the agency plans to spend more than $2 million in city and county funds this year on more traditional street improvements in the Hayden Tract and assistance for businesses that move there.

The Smith-Moss team anticipates questions about construction techniques for all those girders, poles and cantilevered structures. Partly to prove that the work can be done, they are building a narrow, two-story building that rests on stilts over a former private roadway just across the creek from the Hayden Tract. It is between La Cienega and Jefferson boulevards, in a state enterprise zone that offers incentives to businesses that locate there.

What at first can appear to be an optical illusion, the Samitaur project connects and floats over four older warehouse structures and creates a courtyard below. A fountain is perched in the air on the side and balconies extend like decks on a ship. The developers declined to reveal construction costs of that project, which they said is expected to be finished in December.

In a disappointing development for Smith, Los Angeles building inspectors have restricted automobile access to the new courtyard. But the building otherwise works and can be a model for other central city projects, said Steven MacDonald, deputy director of L.A.’s Business Team, the program that Mayor Richard Riordan formed to help encourage new enterprise.

And what about the rail spur ideas, including the bridge that would cross the creek and city boundaries just near the new Samitaur building? “I think it’s an idea that sounds interesting and that needs to be investigated,” MacDonald said.

Many old rail lines nationwide have been made into hiking trails and bikeways, and hundreds of buildings have been constructed above operating rail lines, according to J. Thomas Black, a resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, a real estate think tank in Washington. The Culver City proposal sounds different and its potential, he said, may have more to do with the Westside location near the movie studios than with snazzy architecture in the air.

“Most industrial areas, in places like Detroit or St. Louis, don’t have that market situation,” Black said.

A large wooden model sits under skylights in Moss’ Higuera Street studio, where enthusiastic architecture interns and Japanese tourists study its muscular forms and crystal-like structures. It takes imagination, a visitor commented, to connect the model with the dusty reality just outside the door.

“I don’t want anybody to [think] that this belongs to an exhibition at Harvard,” Moss said. “It’s a pretty hardheaded discussion, something plausible and tangible and real.”

Although architecture is “the hook,” he said the goals are economic and social improvement. “I think it has to do with the fact that America’s industrial base is deteriorating. . . . And the question is what can be done to reconstitute it.”