Gehry’s Putting Stamp on Playa Vista

In a move that promises to boost the profile of the Playa Vista project, renowned architect Frank O. Gehry has been hired by developer Rob Maguire to plan about 60 acres of the development and to design at least four buildings on the site formerly intended for the DreamWorks SKG film studio.

The project would be one of the largest commercial undertakings in Southern California for the Santa Monica-based Gehry, who has gained wide attention in recent years primarily for museums and cultural facilities, such as the Disney Concert Hall under construction in downtown Los Angeles; the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Experience Music Project in Seattle; and a proposed second Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

Gehry’s hiring coincided with an announcement that Maguire plans to spend $90 million to buy the 60 acres Gehry will plan from Playa Capital Corp., the principal owner and developer of Playa Vista. The site includes the historic Spruce Goose hangar and 10 other buildings.

Gehry’s participation in Playa Vista could give permanent value to the still-unbuilt development, said Janek Dombrowa, a Los Angeles-based architect and visiting faculty member at the USC School of Architecture.

“People at that level of exposure and experience can leave behind cultural landmarks,” he said. “It is always nice to have a son of the city represent the city in something so visible, and especially someone who is so accomplished.”

For Maguire, the hiring could help him land a major tenant and fill the gap left after DreamWorks scratched its planned Playa Vista studio in 1999.

“It draws renewed focus and enthusiasm for a project that has been bogged down for so many years in false starts,” said Neil Resnick, an office broker who is senior vice president in the West Los Angeles office of Grubb & Ellis.

In addition to the DreamWorks defection, the 1,087-acre Playa Vista project has been hamstrung by the inability of some earlier developers, including Maguire, to secure financing. The project has also been a lightning rod of environmentalist protest from groups that claim the developers will damage the Ballona Wetlands.

Resnick added that Gehry’s architecture might also serve as a marketing ploy among image-conscious Westside office tenants, which “might be attracted to the cachet of being in a Gehry building.” He compared the developer’s decision to hire Gehry with Michael Ovitz’s decision years ago to hire I.M. Pei to design the Creative Artists Agency building in Beverly Hills.

Meeting with reporters Monday, however, Maguire emphasized that Gehry was hired in part for his ability to work with other architects.

That’s a potentially important skill at Playa Vista, where other architects will likely be invited to design individual buildings within Gehry’s master plan. “He is great at collaborating,” said the developer, adding that “a lot of ‘name’ architects do not like the idea of collaborating with other architects and landscape architects.”

For Gehry, whose studio is full of plum commissions such as museums, the prospect of designing commercial office buildings might seem comparatively prosaic. But Gehry cited Maguire’s track record in hiring distinguished architects and landscape architects to design office buildings.

Those architects include the late Craig Ellwood, the Santa Monica firm of Moore Ruble Yudell, Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretta, Berkeley-based landscape architect Peter Walker and Philadelphia-based landscape architect Laurie Olin.

“I’ve been wanting to work with [Maguire] for years because he’s the best,” Gehry said. “No other developer has that history out here.”

Gehry is designing four buildings, containing a total of 450,000 square feet, to start construction in the fall of 2002 at Centinela Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard. Gehry would not commit himself to an exact number of buildings, but said he expected a number of different architects to contribute individual building designs to the complex, where developers are allowed to build as much as 2.2 million square feet of office space, hotels and retail space.

In contrast to the billowing, twisting shapes of his museums in Bilbao and Seattle, Gehry’s designs for Playa Vista are hard-edged buildings that were inspired, in part, by the simple, industrial form of the hangar where Howard Hughes built the giant Spruce Goose seaplane that flew its first and only time on Nov. 2, 1947, in Long Beach Harbor. Plans call for preserving the massive hangar, which has found a second life as a motion picture sound stage.

The largest building is a multistory office building covered in a glass curtain wall--a material not often associated with Gehry--that features floors 12 feet in height.

Landscape architect Olin is designing 14 acres of open space surrounding the Gehry buildings, including a meadow and a jogging trail along a tree-lined canal that stretches about 1,000 feet across the center of the site.

Maguire was one of the principal developers of Playa Vista until 1997, when he ceded control of the project to Playa Capital, a partnership of Goldman Sachs, Oaktree Capital Management and Union Labor Life Insurance.

He announced in March that he hoped to buy a prime chunk of the project, and those plans solidified Monday with the announcement that he plans to buy 60 acres for $90 million. The deal is scheduled to be completed in November.

The purchase would be a big step toward the developer’s goal of gaining control of all 114 acres of commercially zoned land in the first phase of Playa Vista. Last year, Maguire agreed to buy a separate, 6.5-acre site that he is developing as the Water’s Edge office park.