LAPD misfire

THERE are some pieces of architecture that seem, in a fundamental sense, sure of themselves and their symbolic place in the city. And then there’s the design for the new Los Angeles Police Department headquarters downtown, by Paul Danna and Jose Palacios of the firm DMJM. When the 11-story, 500,000-square-foot building is completed 3 1/2 years from now, across 1st Street from City Hall, it seems guaranteed to rank as one of the most conflicted landmarks in all of Los Angeles.

Danna and Palacios wrapped up plans for the wedge-shaped tower, which will be clad in concrete panels and alternating sections of clear and frosted glass, near the end of last year. Construction is set to start this summer, with an estimated budget of $200 million. To their credit, the architects have tried to make the building a generous neighbor, bowing to demands from local residents to add a small park along 2nd Street and dedicating a large swath of the site to a public plaza that will stretch toward City Hall.

But the planned building -- the biggest single part of the LAPD’s current building spree, with a new emergency operations center, jail and motor pool also in the works -- is intimidatingly large, with a concern for self-protection bordering on the obsessive. It incorporates a number of security requirements common to government projects after 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, including a 75-foot setback from the street to its base on every side. And although the main entrance will be framed by large expanses of glass, the building features a window arrangement on its longest facade, along Spring Street, whose irregular pattern is meant to thwart snipers hiding inside the offices of this very newspaper.

Yes, snipers. Insert joke about editorial potshots or character assassination here.

Like the proposed Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, if at a more modest scale, the LAPD design finds itself torn between a growing national interest in architectural armor and a desire to symbolize the openness of public institutions in a democratic society: It tries to open up even as it hunkers down.

Because the institution in question is our police department, of course, that contradiction is even more pronounced. DMJM’s design reflects the complicated role the LAPD -- half-chastened, haltingly reformed, still a proud culture unto itself -- plays in this city 15 years after the Rodney G. King beating.

The building will fill a high-profile site in a quickly changing downtown, tucked between The Times and Thom Mayne’s Caltrans District 7 Headquarters along Main Street. It replaces the old Caltrans offices, a modest, boxy 1949 design by Anson Boyd (and its 1960 annex), which work crews have spent the last several months demolishing.

The current home of the LAPD, architect Welton Becket’s delicate, architecturally underrated Parker Center, finished in 1955, sits at Los Angeles and 1st streets, just a couple of blocks from the site of the new building. But for all the complications that have dogged its relocation, the LAPD might as well have been trying to move to the top of Mt. Washington.

First, the city and the police settled on a large piece of land at 1st and Alameda, planning to build there not only a new headquarters but also the jail, emergency operations building and motor pool. But that site is right next to the Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist temple, whose leaders, not unreasonably, objected to the idea of having inmates as their new neighbors.

Then, after the City Council approved the site across from City Hall for the office building in June 2004, with the jail and motor pool moved to separate locations nearby, the headquarters became the subject of serious opposition. Local residents -- including some in the Higgins Building, across 2nd Street from the site -- pointed out that a master plan for downtown approved by the City Council in 1997 called for the old Caltrans building to be replaced by a civic park. The city’s Cultural Affairs Commission gave some momentum to the park idea by declining last February to ratify the LAPD’s move, but the commission’s vote, strictly advisory, wasn’t enough to persuade the City Council to reverse its approval.

Danna and Palacios’ design calls for an office tower pushed toward Spring Street, with a separate glass-enclosed auditorium, a cafe and other retail spaces along Main. (The sleek auditorium, which will glow at night, is among the most compelling elements of the design; it will play host to police department events as well as public ones.) A large plaza, opening up toward 1st Street and City Hall, will cover the center of the site.

The tower, which will hold roughly 2,200 employees, including Police Chief William J. Bratton, is essentially L-shaped, with its long side stretching down Spring Street and the shorter one along 2nd. By topping that L with a roof that is shaped like a triangle, and by slicing off the end of the building nearest 1st Street, the architects have managed to make the building resemble a wedge. Seen from the steps of City Hall, for example, it will have a very thin profile.

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Connective axis

For Danna and Palacios, who considered a design with a huge central atrium as well as one with a gently curving facade facing Mayne’s Caltrans building, the decision to slice diagonally across the site was clearly a breakthrough. It allowed them to provide the LAPD with the large, regular floor plates it requires -- 40,000 square feet of space on each floor -- while giving the design a sense of energy and movement. And it created an axis across the site that connects the recently restored Cathedral of St. Vibiana at 2nd and Main streets with the City Hall tower.

For drivers heading north on Main, the architects say, the building will seem to peel back from the street, opening up views toward City Hall. The auditorium and cafe lining Main will stay low to the ground, keeping those vistas largely unobstructed. For motorists coming from the other direction, the LAPD and Caltrans facades will funnel views toward St. Vibiana.

As a conciliatory gesture to neighborhood residents, meanwhile, the architects and the police agreed last summer to push the building back from 2nd Street, along its southern edge, to create a park covering about an acre. A lawn will take up most of the space, with plane, palm and sycamore trees along the sidewalk.

The park design is small enough to seem a pittance to those neighbors who had pushed for open space at the site. It is also large enough to effectively kill the relationship between the building and the street on that side. Creating vital and active street life downtown will require activating the relationship between the sidewalk and new architecture, not hiding buildings behind fences, benches, trees and grass -- not to mention security setbacks. As an urban gesture, it would have made more sense to extend the cafe or add some other retail space around the corner along 2nd Street.

On the other side of the site, near City Hall, the architects have worked painstakingly to create a plaza that they hope will finally give the civic center a true gathering space. The police department has begun discussing the possibility of closing off 1st Street for large celebrations and demonstrations. But it is hard to imagine the public ever warming to a plaza in front of an LAPD building, especially when you consider that the department will become a de facto chaperon for every group that gathers below its windows.

The idea that the area in front of a police headquarters could become a successful public plaza would be an optimistic proposition in any American city; in Los Angeles, it is painfully naive.

A more natural place for a plaza is on the western steps of City Hall, terminating the new 16-acre park that is being built as part of the Grand Avenue redevelopment. But making a plaza succeed fully at that location would require putting a stretch of Spring Street underground so that the park could flow all the way to City Hall, an expensive proposition that the city and county have so far shown no inclination to pursue.

Ten or fifteen years ago, before Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall was built, before Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and Mayne’s imposing Caltrans complex were even under construction, it might have been possible to slip a new 11-story building onto a downtown site, even one facing City Hall, without much advance public attention paid to its design. One consequence of those new landmarks, and of the revived plans to redevelop Grand Avenue, is that the bar for new architecture in the civic center is a good deal higher now. And the LAPD design, as you have probably gathered, doesn’t come close to clearing it.

Maybe it qualifies as progress that a disappointing piece of architecture downtown is a cause for concern rather than merely an example of the plodding status quo. But optimism wrung from cynicism can’t really be called optimism, can it?