Hollywood’s Fresh Blueprint

‘What is fascinating is that, as the oldest new city, L.A. poses the question of ‘what is next?’ ” says Dutch-born Rem Koolhaas, who has been named to create a master plan for MCA/Universal’s 415-acre site in Universal City.

The architect, co-founder of OMA, the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture, was personally selected by MCA/Universal’s new owner, Edgar Bronfman Jr. Koolhaas’ mission is to inject clarity and excitement into the plan for 5.9 million square feet of new studio and production, retail, resort and office facilities that are planned to be added to MCA/Universal’s existing theme park and studio lot.

Meanwhile, in nearby Glendale, architecture is being put to work to realize a very different vision of “what is next” for another entertainment industry client--DreamWorks SKG. The company recently unveiled Los Angeles architect Steven Ehrlich’s design for its new 300,000-square-foot animation studios, a Mediterranean-style collage of piazzas and courtyards with dripping foliage.

“We wanted to create a congenial and creative atmosphere for the animators,” Ehrlich says, pointing to the proposed shady orchard, gurgling brook and seating nooks of the collegiate-style environment that is to be located in a light-industrial area near Griffith Park.

These are just two of several large construction projects in the works for major local entertainment industry studios that are expanding and using architecture to give them a competitive edge. At each, architects have been hired to give concrete form to very different ideas reflecting the companies’ self-image and working environment.

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Bronfman comes from East Coast old money, and while he may be a newcomer to the film business, he is no stranger to architecture, being the scion of a family that has long exhibited an interest in modern buildings. Bronfman’s grandfather, Samuel Bronfman, commissioned, at the urging of his architecturally enlightened daughter Phyllis Lambert, the famous Mies van der Rohe 1958 Seagram Building in New York, a monumental gesture that legitimized Modernist architecture and established the minimalist steel-and-glass extruded box as the model for corporate America.

Lambert, Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s aunt, founded the prestigious Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal and is a dedicated proponent of contemporary architecture as well as a vigilant defender of Montreal’s historic architectural heritage. Knowing Koolhaas’ work, Lambert knew he would be inspired by the L.A. condition, and she advised her nephew to add him to his list of possible choices.

Bronfman’s choice of Koolhaas is both dramatic and bold, for while the architect may not yet be widely known beyond architectural circles on the West Coast, this cool intellectual is currently Europe’s hottest architect and theorist, lauded particularly for his approach to mega-structures and large-scale environments.

Koolhaas, 52, a longtime devotee of Americana and graduate of the progressive and highly experimental Architectural Association in London, spent several years in the United States as a journalist and screenwriter (of a never-produced Russ Meyer film, among other projects), before catapulting into the eyes of the architectural world with the publication of “Delirious New York,” a book bulging with novel theories and images about that city--among them an image of the Chrysler Building in bed with the Empire State Building.

In New York, he found what he termed the “culture of congestion” in the intense overlapping of human activities. Like Gehry in Los Angeles, Koolhaas went on to create poetic buildings that are seemingly ad hoc collages of cheap industrial materials. Unlike contemporary town planners who hate the sprawl, malls, infrastructure and other hallmarks of late-20th century cities, he applauds modern urbanity, with all its over-scaled and scattered ugliness.

“OMA produces an architecture that embraces aspects of the maligned metropolitan condition with enthusiasm,” proclaims Koolhaas, who since establishing his grandly named design firm in 1980 has attempted to capture in his projects this delirium, or “chaotic adventure.”

The commission from MCA/Universal is a break for Koolhaas, who has never built in this country before. He sees Los Angeles as “entirely defined by the 20th century” and relishes its “mutant, ‘liter’ urban substance.” Koolhaas sees his design challenge as “the renewal of the new”--how to “make the city more intense without losing the qualities of its dispersal.” While he will reveal little about the MCA project--which remains under wraps until the entitlement process is completed (spokesmen will concede only that the ideas are “exciting”)--hints about his direction can perhaps be gleaned from his recently completed Euralille.

Euralille was the project that turned the hitherto dreary northern French town of Lille into the fulcrum of the United States of Europe and put Koolhaas on the map as designer of “Bigness.” It involved the insertion into the city of a new 8.5-million-square-foot urban complex, comprising shops, offices, parking, hotels, housing, a concert hall and a new TGV station at the intersection of local transit, the high speed French TGV and new London-to-Lille Chunnel trains.

There, Koolhaas was given license to act out his urban fantasy--to bring together, as he describes in his newly published treatise “S,M,L,XL,” “all the components that together form cities,” in reaction to the “developer-driven architecture of the ‘70s and ‘80s” that “resisted anything complex.”

He juxtaposed buildings and transportation in a hub of architectural and human activity, with the station as public arcade, straddled by office towers and leading to a vast commercial center and Congrexpo, a conference center and exposition hall. To add to the tumult, he exposed in an open void the underground intersection of highway, railway, metro and three levels of parking; and he appointed a range of prominent modern designers, such as French architects Jean Nouvel (architect of the lacy, high-tech Arab Institute in Paris) and Pritzker Prize winner Christian de Portzamparc, to give different identities to the towers and other individual buildings. One large building, the voluptuous ovoid Congrexpo, he designed himself.

In Lille, Koolhaas had to navigate his way through city, county and regional bureaucracies; he had to deal with stupendous scale and create what was effectively a self-contained city--similar requirements to those at MCA/Universal, with its internecine corporate structure, numerous operations and complicated infrastructure.

By contrast, DreamWorks SKG has taken a different approach. Despite the company’s technologically advanced products, the new campus is nostalgic in design; it attempts to mask its vast scale, the surrounding “maligned” industrial neighborhood and its historical moment.

“We wanted warm and friendly, not cold and modern,” DreamWorks senior executive Mike Montgomery says of the brief given to the six architectural firms that competed for the new animation studios in Glendale. (The campus will be a satellite to the company’s main complex, which is to be located in Playa Vista. Plans for the design of the Playa Vista campus and selection of its architect are still in process.)

The clients showed the competing designers images of details of old Mediterranean hill towns. They asked the competitors to create a welcoming environment that would entice the best animation talent.

In choosing Ehrlich, DreamWorks SKG also named as executive architect a veteran entertainment company architectural firm, Gensler of Santa Monica, to handle the production aspects of the project.

Ehrlich, 50, is known locally for his Sony Music campus in Santa Monica, the Sony Pictures Entertainment child care center in Culver City and the popular Broadway Deli, also in Santa Monica.

He is noted for his ability to adapt innovative architectural concepts into accessible buildings, and he infuses some of his work with an earthy quality, such as the curving, sculptural Shatto Recreation Center in midtown. He attributes this aspect of his work to six formative years spent in Africa, working with the Peace Corps and studying the indigenous buildings.

Ehrlich’s scheme for DreamWorks SKG is a dreamy collage of two- and three-story pitched-roof buildings wrapped around open courtyards and opening onto covered terraces, balconies and interconnecting arcades. It comes complete with a large public piazza, a shady orchard, an artificial river following the site of an old arroyo and a campanile.

This design, however, “is not regurgitating Italy,” says Ehrlich, who like many modern architects asked to design in a traditional idiom is adamant that his building should not be seen as pastiche. He is quick to point out the stylistic twists: Cor-ten steel instead of clay tiles for roofing, an abundance of landscaping and unfussy detailing.

The contemporary spin is also programmatic. The complex has a five-story parking lot with a helipad to airlift staff to DreamWorks’ Playa Vista location, a fiber optic linkup and a high-security entrance evocative of only the most besieged medieval citadel.

Despite his adventuresomeness, Koolhaas’ links to Modernist design are significant. For example, in a nod to Bauhaus’ strict emphasis on the orthogonal grid, Koolhaas’ published notes to a client for a project in the Netherlands describe one of his own projects as “only 90 degrees, please.”

By contrast, the charge given to Ehrlich by Montgomery was “no 90 degrees, please.” And, indeed, Ehrlich has laid out the buildings on the DreamWorks campus organically, in place of what Montgomery terms “perpendicular sharpness.” Ehrlich emphasizes warmth, tranquillity, contemplation, light and nature. Casual public spaces are conceived to enable “creativity through chance encounters.”

This philosophy is carried through to the interiors of the buildings, each of which wraps around a courtyard and has offices lining the perimeter and opening onto a central public core. In a departure from the open plan layout that has come to be the norm in communal and corporate working environments, each DreamWorks animator has his or her own room and window.

Such a luxury is, in addition to the on-site commissary, an extra trimming on what looks set to be a seductive, gilded cage for 1,000 animators.

The aim at DreamWorks, as in the design of many other large-scale corporate and retail environments, is to break down and to soften the effect of its overwhelming size and unwieldiness--to make believe theirs is not a large, threatening institution but a cozy “family.” It is also to create, instead of a strident architectural statement, atmosphere and romantic imagery, which is a characteristic of theme parks and the world of entertainment. And, indeed, DreamWorks’ animation campus may well become the architectural equivalent of a “feel-good” Hollywood movie, of which Jeffrey Katzenberg, as project leader, is the producer.

DreamWorks SKG’s goal is to create an artificially lush environment that will attract talent, so an environment that is inviting was the highest priority. By contrast, Koolhaas’ vision for MCA/Universal will probably be hyper-artificial--a celebration, rather than a concealment, of popular culture and the Electronic Age.

It is clear that both Bronfman and DreamWorks believe in the transformative power of architecture and are using it to make strong statements about their companies.

Back to the future appears to be DreamWorks’ message. Into the future is MCA/Universal’s.