ANAHEIM’S MAKEOVER BEGINS : Project Is in Hands of Dominant Firm

Take someone out to the ballgame, and chances are good that the ballpark will bear the design imprint of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, the architectural firm that’s directing the Anaheim Convention Center expansion.

The St. Louis-based firm has designed some of the nation’s cutting-edge sports venues, including the Pond of Anaheim, Jacobs Field in Cleveland and Coors Stadium in Denver.

Another measure of HOK’s dominance: Yankee Stadium might be the House that Ruth Built, but New York officials recently hired HOK for a possible renovation of the aging facility.

HOK, which opened a Southern California office in 1984, is the nation’s largest architectural design firm, according to Engineering News-Record magazine. Its 1,500 employees are scattered around the world in 21 offices.

The 40-year-old firm has a built a number of commercial and government buildings in Southern California, including the AT&T; Office Building in Irvine, the Los Angeles County Central Jail, the Santa Ana police headquarters and the interior of San Diego’s bay-front Convention Center.

HOK in January created Studio E, a division that specializes in entertainment industry designs. Based in Los Angeles and Orlando, the division is billing itself as “designers and producers to the global entertainment industry.”

HOK’s field of dreams in recent years has been its dominant role in the design of sports facilities. One of the firm’s principals recently described the breadth of its work by saying it was easier to list the projects it didn’t handle.

Some observers tie HOK’s success with sports facilities to designs that incorporate a sense of nostalgia that manages to coexist with modern-day necessities like corporate loges and state-of-the-art restaurant and retail facilities.

In a sense, the new generation of successful convention centers also is driven by design elements that give once-boring centers a sense of identity.

In convention industry slang, centers have been labeled “boxes with docks”--huge facilities with loading docks where exhibitors can swiftly unload their displays and set about the business of making money.

But as the convention industry matures, innovative designs in places like San Diego and Seattle are forcing older centers to develop distinct personalities.

“These buildings have to send the message that you’re going to have fun here, you’re going to be entertained,” said Steve Brubaker, a design executive with HOK’s convention center team who’s leading the Anaheim project.

In addition to expanding the Anaheim center’s size and linking it to nearby hotels and Disneyland, HOK hopes to give the facility a personality transplant in the form of a huge, lush garden stretching about a quarter of a mile along its front.

“It will let conventioneers feel that they really are in Southern California,” said Brubaker, who played a role in completed designs at convention centers in Indianapolis and St. Louis as well as at a Federal Reserve Bank project in Cleveland. “The idea here was a Southern California paradise, so we have a garden. . . . We think it will add something that no one else has in the marketplace.”

The renovation plan will be overseen by HOK’s Convention Center Focus Group, which recently finished a $120-million project in St. Louis and has won a contract to study a renovation of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York.

HOK will draw upon architects from its Santa Monica office and its headquarters staff in St. Louis. At the height of the project, as many as 25 to 30 architects will be involved, HOK spokeswoman Jamie Gagliarducci said.

But as architects start to deal with acoustics, landscaping and other specialties, the total could reach as high as 50 or 60 people, Gagliarducci said.

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Designer’s Portfolio

Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, the architectural firm behind the Anaheim Convention Center’s new look, has also designed some other prominent county buildings as well as some of the best-known sports facilities in the U.S. Here’s a sample of their works:

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA PROJECTS

The Pond at Anaheim

AT&T; Office Building, Irvine

Santa Ana police headquarters

Los Angeles County Central Jail

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SPORTS FACILITIES

Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies, Denver

Jacobs Field, home of the Cleveland Indians

Oriole Park at Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles

Trans World Dome, St. Louis, home of the St. Louis Rams*

* Doubles as convention center

Source: Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum

Researched by GREG JOHNSON / Los Angeles Times