Modern Is Back, With a Tech Twist
Looming over Westwood Village, the newly renovated Westwood Center resembles a sleek ocean liner, with a prow of glass and steel cutting through a sea of red-tiled rooftops.
“It took a long time for us to get used to it,” said real estate executive Victor Coleman, whose company spent an estimated $91 million on a top-to-bottom renovation of what had been a dowdy concrete tower. “It did take some convincing.”
Like it or not, Westwood Center’s sleek, forward-into-the-future look dominates the new generation of commercial buildings rising across Los Angeles in the first major wave of construction in about a decade.
From the Westside to downtown, many designers and developers have rejected the formal, stone-clad “dress-for-success” style popular during the building boom of the 1980s. Instead, in a nod to mid-century modernism, the new buildings evoke a sense of openness and motion with vast walls of glass and metal, flowing curves, crisp angles and even fanciful fins. Not coincidentally, the industrial, machine-like bent of these structures plays well in a culture obsessed with technology.
“We are trying to create an image of high tech,” said architect Scott Johnson of his design for MGM Tower, a 34-story Century City skyscraper that will become headquarters for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. in 2003. “You will see stainless steel. You will see aluminum. It will have a look of high performance.”
Landlords have discovered that the new look draws tenants as well as attention. It is particularly popular among image-conscious high-technology, multimedia and entertainment companies that are willing to pay top dollar for a distinctive design. Westwood Center, for example, was fully leased before the renovation was completed this year.
The designs run the gamut from such minimalist buildings as the offices of EToys and Imax Corp. in the Olympic Corridor to the swooping curves and angles of Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. Even in humdrum suburban office parks, new buildings are sporting curved and angled forms that resemble cresting waves, or stark exteriors of bare aluminum and glass.
The look is generally lean, spare and industrial, with none of the opulence and excess--such as marble exteriors, brass finishes and rare-wood paneling--that characterized so many commercial buildings of the 1980s.
“If you were to compare architecture to fashion, [the look today] is like an Armani suit instead of Versace,” said Jose Palacios, who created a crisp facade of clear glass for the Rolex Building in Beverly Hills. “It’s certainly more enduring and classic.”
Ironically, spare and severe designs created a backlash against modernist glass boxes about two decades ago. Many architects, most notably Philip Johnson, and developers shifted into a more expressive style called postmodern. In downtown Los Angeles, skyscrapers once again had traditional envelopes of marble or stone, and some were even topped with copper cupolas.
But modernism is riding high again now that a new generation has rediscovered the design philosophy of such influential mid-century architects as Richard Neutra and the husband-and-wife design duo Charles and Ray Eames. As in the postwar years, the economy is strong and architects and their clients are open to new technologies and building forms, such as the computer-designed, stainless-steel shell of architect Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall.
“There is a new opportunity to open the buildings up and make them transparent and make them more interesting,” said Westwood Center architect Michael Walden, who used a new type of glass that can remain crystal clear and still reflect the sun’s heat and ultraviolet rays.
It’s a great time for architects who had long suppressed their love of modernist simplicity.
“I tried to throw in a tweak of my own when I could, but basically I did what [my clients] asked me to do,” said Santa Monica architect Dave Thomsen, a self-described “unrepentant modernist.”
“I’m happy seeing this kind of thing returning.”
To the surprise of many architects, high-tech modernism, as one architect has dubbed the look, is quickly winning converts among developers, who are generally cautious, and their often-conservative tenants. In the Burbank Media Studios North project, Thomsen’s newest office building for developer M. David Paul & Associates features not only an aluminum and glass exterior but alsoan interior of exposed materials and structural elements such as metal floor decks and steel beams. That kind of industrial chic was once limited to trendy warehouse and loft spaces in Santa Monica--not found in a San Fernando Valley office park.
“There has been a change in what the tenants are looking for,” Thomsen said. “There is more appreciation for things that are a little less stuffy, more spare . . . more futuristic.”
It helps that many firms want to project an image that they are part of the high-energy, hip world of high technology and the Internet. For its new broadcasting operations center in Century City, 20th Century Fox asked architect Michael White of HLW International for a design that signaled that the company “wanted to be on the cutting edge of technology and communication.”
White responded with a structure near Avenue of the Stars and Pico Boulevard that features sheer glass walls that rise at an angle. Canopies on the roof and over the main entrance of the Fox Network Center look as though they can be retracted like mechanical flaps on a jet plane wing.
In downtown Los Angeles, Staples Center architect Ron Turner was charged with creating a design that would trigger excitement and be compatible with the curves of the modernist addition to the neighboring Los Angeles Convention Center.
His firm wrapped much of the sports and entertainment venue in a drum of sloping glass walls that let outsiders peek at crowds flowing along the building’s concourses and escalators. The front entrance is flanked by a peninsula of glass-enclosed offices that juts out toward the intersection of Figueroa and 11th streets.
The owners “were very interested in a building that looked to the future,” said Turner of NBBJ Architects. “It would have been silly to put up a brick building.”
Still, the new forms and openness are not for everyone. “Some clients don’t want to go there,” said Johnson, the MGM Tower architect.
In fact, the design of Westwood Center initially triggered a great deal of anxiety among executives at developer Arden Realty Inc., known for its well-run but otherwise conventional-looking office buildings.
“It was fairly alarming” at first, said Coleman, president and chief operating officer of the Los Angeles-based firm.
The redesign of the 22-story tower, formerly known as the Monty’s building, by Nadel Architects includes a towering grid of clear and blue-gray glass. On the south end of the building, the architects added a triangular wedge of glass-enclosed offices that juts out past its base. On the rooftop, an angled canopy illuminated at night seems ready to leap into the sky like a hang glider.
All this was a bit much for one major prospective tenant who passed on the project, Coleman said. “They questioned whether it was going to be conservative enough for them.”
After toning down the initial design and testing different shades of window glass, Arden went ahead with the radical make-over. Though it may be too edgy for some, Westwood Center has attracted a wide range of tenants.
Westwood Center’s design was a major attraction for Dov L. Seidman, whose legal research company occupied a full floor of the building in May.
“The building represents the future,” said Seidman, chairman and chief executive of LRN, the Legal Knowledge Co., which has a large presence on the Internet. “We are a ‘new-economy’ company and . . . there’s an edginess to what we are doing that’s represented by our space and our building.”
Now Arden executives have embraced Westwood Center and feature it prominently in their promotional materials. A few miles south, near Westchester, the new buildings at Arden’s Howard Hughes Center sport towering walls of curving, clear glass and angled rooftops that seem poised for takeoff.
“It is costly to make it look futuristic,” Coleman said. “But as a landlord, you have to be able to sort of look beyond what is the immediate need in the marketplace. The reason we did go out on a limb with the design [at Westwood Center] was because we felt the market was ready for that.”
Westwood Center’s new look has triggered demand for more of the same. Walden, its designer, is working on plans for a project on nearby Wilshire Boulevard with curving forms and walls of glass even more dramatic than those that now tower over the Westwood skyline.
“It’s really wild,” he said.
