Tee Time -- With a Twist -- in Signal Hill

There is an uneasy territory between building and architecture, where the need for ready-made solutions to common problems intersects with the desire to create something of aesthetic and social substance.

The work of Koning Eizenberg Architects has long hovered somewhere between the two. The Australian-born duo, Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg, who moved to Los Angeles in 1979, have consciously avoided cloaking their work in the slick surfaces and ornate formal gestures that lesser talents often use to mask an underlying emptiness of ideas. Instead, the team has fashioned an architecture marked by simple geometries and a straightforward appeal. The risk, of course, is a loss of originality. But at their best, the firm’s designs achieve a refreshingly direct clarity.

The Santa Monica-based firm’s just-completed Signal Hill Golf Center is set amid the rusting pumps of a decaying oil field, at 2550 Orange Ave. The tough, industrial context gives the humble driving range a surreal edge. Completed for just $1.3 million, the project is also a key component in the transformation of Signal Hill from an oil center into a growing residential area. But the temporal quality of the golf center’s playful, wood-frame forms also strangely evokes the tenuousness of the process of urban renewal. Will the neighborhood reinvent itself and thrive? Or will the gritty oil fields once again swallow up this suburban oasis? It is that sense of unease that gives the project its power.

Koning Eizenberg’s past work has often been reminiscent of the simple forms of Irving Gill, the celebrated early-20th century Los Angeles-based architect known for his abstractions of the Spanish Mediterranean style. In Signal Hill, however, the firm’s pieces are more loosely arranged, their composition less tight, less formal. The design is composed of a few well-placed elements--a long, gently curved double-deck tee line faces away from the street toward the landing area, which slopes slightly upward and extends 260 yards toward a row of condos. To the north, a veil of mesh netting--supported by giant wood poles--encloses the fairway. A small, 1,200-square-foot clubhouse and an outdoor patio--its roof playfully skewed--line the fairway’s southern edge, with the entry drive just beyond. Nearby, a cluster of 11 oil-storage tanks--the “tank farm”--remain huddled together, with a few pumps rocking rhythmically in the distance, oblivious to the occasional white ball sailing overhead.

The curved form and raw detailing of the tee-line structure echoes the tough appeal of these nearby machine forms. A series of heavy I-beam columns and V-shaped braces support the upper deck, vaguely evoking the raw structure of an elevated subway. The tee line’s roof is made of corrugated metal, while twin metal stairs anchor either end. From here, the grass lawn--spotted with a few lanky palms--unrolls like a carpet over the raw industrial landscape.

That landscape, in fact, becomes part of the architecture. The center’s developer, Philippe Marill, convinced Bob Lee, owner of the oil fields from whom the site is leased, to paint the massive tanks a dull green to match the clubhouse’s orange-and-green camouflage-patterned facade. The facade’s asphalt shingles are a nod to the temporary workers’ shacks that dotted oil fields years ago. And the tanks become a key element in the overall composition, giving the more lightweight, shack-like structures of the golf center added weight and further obscuring the boundary between past and present. Even the pumps become a haunting reminder of the site’s faded industrial past.

There is an element here of what critic Mike Davis once wryly referred to as “Dirty Harry architecture.” The golf center is shielded behind a long bright-orange screen made of 6-inch horizontal redwood slats, hidden from the sidewalk and passing cars like a bright florescent warning, while a second, smaller screen shields the center from the main driveway and creates a protected, funnel-like pedestrian entrance into the clubhouse. The effect gives the place a no-nonsense urban edge, making it appear a working-class alternative to the aura of the more predictable pristine country club.

Yet that toughness is balanced by a cheerfully democratic appeal. Visually guarded, the project also seems deceptively fragile. The design’s urban grittiness is softened by both the playfulness of its forms and the use of everyday materials. Like other urban golf centers--the popular driving range found in Los Angeles’ Koreatown to name one--it is open to anyone with the $7.50 needed for a large bucket of balls. Nor does it hold any aspirations to permanence: If the economic landscape changes, it will likely be replaced by something new.

This kind of project occupies a valid territory for the architect: the low-budget, the commonplace, the temporary. It also begs a question: Is it really architecture? Or simply good building? The answer is irrelevant. There is little artistic or theoretical pretension here. Only solid work.