Function over form

The new Rand Corp. headquarters is one of the biggest buildings ever constructed near the beach in Santa Monica: 309,000 square feet of space spread over five floors, with remarkable views of the water from the offices on the upper stories. It was completed late last year but will make its official debut in a celebration Thursday that will combine, in classic Rand style, a ribbon-cutting ceremony with deep-thinking panel discussions featuring Robert McNamara, Richard Riordan, Brent Scowcroft and others.

Built at a cost of $100 million on an awkwardly shaped piece of land along Main Street, the project represents a long collaboration between architects Paul Danna and Jose Palacios, from the Los Angeles office of DMJM Design, and the leadership at Rand, where the planning for offices began nearly 20 years ago. Actually, “planning” is not a word that does justice to the process that employees at Rand, the 60-year-old nonprofit research organization that also runs its own boutique graduate school in policy analysis, undertook to figure out what they wanted in their new building.

The Rand staff -- 65% of whom hold either a PhD or an MD -- first presented DMJM with a wish list calling for a new building that would be “collegial,” “academic,” “innovative,” “environmentally sensitive,” “interactive” and “informal,” with “operable windows,” “relaxed conversation areas” and “updated technology.”

Then they consolidated that list into eight “objectives” and finally boiled that down, by the fall of 1999, to four “design principles.”

In that process, the employees also made clear that their taste and aesthetic sensibility, which tilt decidedly in the direction of function and usability over style, were paramount. As a result, the story of the new building turns out to be one about what happens when very smart people are keenly, even obsessively, interested in how a new piece of architecture will help them carry out their work -- but hardly at all in how it will look.

In an era of aggressive form-making and celebrity worship in architecture, there is something refreshingly pragmatic about this approach. But it’s also a reminder of what can happen when a firm allows rationality not just to trump architectural invention but render it nearly meaningless.

It can’t be too surprising that such a fate would befall a headquarters for Rand. The organization, conceived during World War II as a way to produce accurate research on national-security and defense issues, is also, arguably, the grandest experiment ever undertaken to test the idea that even mankind’s most vexing problems can be solved if confronted with enough brain power and analytical rigor.

In this case, the result was an emphasis on function that appears to have tied the architects’ hands. Rand insisted that the building serve its aggressively nonhierarchical culture by giving as many researchers as possible offices with windows and views -- and eliminating corner offices. That priority has led to the banally efficient face the building turns to both Main Street and to the water. (A decision by the architects to stagger the window grid from floor to floor does little to enliven the facades.) Inside, it explains the sameness of the offices, nearly every one of which is 14 by 10 feet.

Indeed, the only unusual feature of the design was dictated by the odd, elliptical shape of the site. To make the building fit and maximize the number of offices with views, the architects divided the space into a pair of curving arcs of offices that enclose a spacious courtyard. Seen from above, the building looks like a football. Or a fish.

From the outside, however, none of that eccentricity is visible. A decidedly muted main entrance leads to a large courtyard, handsomely paved in sand-blasted concrete. The two arcing wings of the building are connected across the middle of this courtyard by connecting walkways. On the second and third floors these walkways are wide enough to enclose a cafeteria with attractive outdoor seating and other shared open-air space. On the fourth and fifth they are narrower skyways.

A key feature on the facade, which bulges in a gentle convex curve toward Main Street on the east and toward the beach on the west, is the use of horizontal and vertical shading devices, which the architects refer to as “eyebrows” and “fins,” respectively. Their positioning, determined by solar-gain studies, will help lower the amount of direct sunlight that reaches the offices, and thus reduce the need for air-conditioning. In a building with so much otherwise undifferentiated facade, they give the exterior a bit of visual variety.

The structure lies immediately to the south of the old Rand offices, a low-lying, boxy design from 1953 by H. Roy Kelley that had become the source of growing complaints from employees in recent years. That building will soon be knocked down in favor of a new mixed-use development. The demolition will open up space for a new pedestrian walkway from the area around City Hall, to the east of the Rand property, to the beach.

The hallways of the new building are lined by a surprisingly good collection of contemporary artwork. Lent by the software entrepreneur and collector Peter Norton, the pieces on view number about 130, including work by Tim Hawkinson, Kara Walker and Larry Clark. One side of the lobby is lined by a mural by John Valadez salvaged from the Victor Clothing Co. building in downtown Los Angeles.

The contrast between the energy and dynamism of these artworks and the architectural container in which they hang could hardly be more striking.

An irony, or at least a side story, of Thursday’s ribbon-cutting is that the hulking new building -- which at more than 300,000 square feet is just about as big as the city will allow near the water -- is already too small. Since Sept. 11, the growing interest in national and private security has meant a lot of new work for Rand, which now leases space in a building to the west of the new headquarters for about 100 overflow employees. That boom was almost predictable: at Rand, national anxiety has always been good for business.