The many upsides of going underground

WHEN it comes to architecture over the last few centuries, ambition has typically been expressed through height. Designers, companies or even nations intending to announce themselves do so with glittering facades or chest-beating, gravity-defying skyscrapers. They don’t dig holes.

But the underground seems to be getting an image upgrade of late. Several recent projects -- the expanded Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, the U.S. Congress and two sites on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. -- have either gone, or are going, underground. It’s not just for James Bond villains anymore. In an increasingly built-up world, projects of all kinds are finding the answers to their design dilemmas underground.

“As more and more properties are being considered historic, it’s a natural phenomenon to begin building underground,” says Stephen Johnson, the L.A. architect who helped set the observatory’s expansions into the Los Feliz hillside. “In other places, public spaces are treasured,” and going underground allows them to survive. “There’s a recognition that it’s not just the structure that needs to be preserved but the setting.”

Frank Gehry, the architect who will expand Philadelphia’s Greek Revival museum with 80,000 square feet of new gallery space, much of it excavated beneath an existing terrace, says he’s “excited” by the prospect. “It’s a challenge, but a good challenge.”

Gehry’s decision to sign on startled some: This is an architect, after all, known for boosting the fortunes of entire cities with intensely personal sculptural designs. In this case, he says, “I liked the idea of not having to do an exterior.”

Loretta Hall, whose 2003 book “Underground Buildings: More Than Meets the Eye,” describes more than 100 below-grade structures in the United States and Canada, sees not only high-profile civic expansions but a “slow but steady” growth of underground offices, schools, concert halls, campus libraries and even homes. The phenomenon has sort of sneaked up on people, though. “Underground buildings have an inherent image problem,” Hall writes in her book. “They don’t have much visibility.”

Evident or not, they’re motivated by aesthetics, population density, environmentalism and rising energy prices.

Dense European and Asian countries are generally ahead of the U.S. in underground building: Tiny, populous Japan has a large warren of housing and shopping underground, and Hall estimates that between 30 million and 40 million Chinese -- roughly the population of California -- live in subterranean homes. Canada has taken a lead, especially because of its cold climate, and Montreal has more than 40 city blocks of subterranean city.

“Underground buildings,” Witold Rybczynski recently wrote in Slate, “are all the rage.” Could the world someday look like the one H.G. Wells’ envisioned in “The Time Machine,” with a race of subhuman cannibals living beneath the surface? Or, more plausibly, will underground buildings become as trendy as prefabs?

Historic precedent

GO back thousands of years and most of our ancestors lived in caves or pit houses; underground cities in Asia Minor, inhabited by early Christians, went 20 stories deep. Italian hill towns still have passageways and grottoes dating to the Middle Ages, and London has operated a subway since 1863. Carnegie Hall has had a below-ground concert hall (recently updated as Zankel Hall) since Tchaikovsky’s time.

But much of the downward movement in the U.S., Hall says, is of recent vintage. She sees three quiet booms since World War II.

The first, in the immediate postwar period, was provoked by Cold War fears of nuclear attack and led to underground bomb shelters, many furnished with fallout suits and Spam. The second was sparked in the 1970s by the Arab oil embargo and escalating gas prices and connected the movement with the then-nascent push for “green architecture.” Architect Malcolm Wells of the “earth-sheltered” movement was the visionary-guru, with designs that recalled the dwellings of Tolkien’s hobbits.

The third wave has been hitting since the mid-’90s, Hall says, as concerns over the environment and energy efficiency have dovetailed with greater density. And this time, she says, underground builders are more successfully banishing the old memories of dank, claustrophobic, tomb-like spaces.

Doing that requires overcoming challenges that are both human and structural. People really do have a physical and psychological need for sunlight, for sensing the progression of the day and the seasons. And human life requires fresh air, which has been of mixed quality in subterranean spaces. In the past, psychological studies have detected anxiety and depression -- thought to be caused by these physical factors as well as negative associations -- in people who work underground.

Thomas Hines, architecture professor at UCLA, isn’t captivated by the prospect of underground living. Housing, he says, “is about having access to air, to the out-of-doors and so on. Let’s face it, the underground is not the happiest place to spend one’s day.”

Throw in concerns over fire safety, ease of access, building codes and zoning difficulties, construction costs that generally run about 10% higher than conventional buildings, and building down can be a hard sell -- especially to those who still associate underground housing with mildewed basements.

Hall concedes that the structures of the ‘70s boom were not always comfortable. “But we’ve gained a fair amount of experience about how to make them more attractive. And people are seeing more of them, so it’s becoming less of an unusual concept.” In a well-designed underground building, she says, you often don’t know you’re below grade.

Sometimes, going underground seems to make perfect sense. Bill Gates, who moved his family into a new $100-million earth-sheltered mansion on the shores of Lake Washington in 1997, must have thought so. And if you’re trying to hide an expansion or visitors center, which is the case with upcoming work on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Virginia State Capitol and Congress, there are few alternatives.

Architect Johnson is far from a zealot about underground building, but he sees it as a valuable opportunity to preserve public spaces above or to get into locations otherwise closed off.

When he was challenged with nearly tripling the space in the Griffith Observatory, he didn’t see any other way to go. “The icon just couldn’t be disturbed. We wanted to maintain the feeling of coming up the hill and realizing you were arriving at Griffith Observatory.”

He points out too that in areas meant to simulate the experience of being in outer space, natural light was not an advantage. So in this case, as with an art museum where sunlight can damage artwork, going underground “made sense not just from an architectural standpoint but from a programmatic standpoint.”

It can be trickier, he says, in spaces designed for comfort. Johnson led his firm Pfeiffer Partners’ expansion of the Los Angeles Central Library, which opened in ‘93, and realized there was no natural plot on which to put a high-rise library tower that wouldn’t compete with the existing 1920s building. And while the majority of the expansion is underground, it isn’t gloomy: A light-filled atrium goes through the library’s center, and natural light can be glimpsed even from the stacks. (Skylights, central courtyards and foliage serve the same purpose in other below-grade structures.)

This is a building, like Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, where visitors are often unconscious they’re underground.

“So even if you’re underground you feel it’s a warm public space,” Johnson says of the library. “The worst thing you can do if you’re building underground is not give clues as to which way is north, south, east and west. Even if you’re four stories underground, it should be a pleasing public space. These are definitely not bunkers.”

Similarly, Alan Reed designed a new orientation center and a museum/education center, both mostly underground, at Washington’s Virginia estate, Mount Vernon. Here, as with other historic sites, the goal was to keep from intruding on the original 18th century mansion and grounds, preserving the site pretty much as Washington saw it when he retired from the presidency. Reed detects a greater sensitivity to historic sites “as we age as a country.”

But the key here, he says, was to keep in mind the visitor’s experience. “We’re coming here to celebrate the father of our country. The buildings had to be uplifting. To us, it was mostly a psychological thing; you don’t want to feel like you’re descending into someone’s basement.”

The way he and his firm, Baltimore-based GWWO, designed it, visitors can look out at the grounds during much of their time in the new buildings. And the hillside site allows the orientation center’s entrance to be set into the topography, so most people won’t even know they’re down there.

“The executive director of Mount Vernon said part of the reason we could handle this is that our egos could take it,” Reed says. “They weren’t so big we had to build above ground. To me, that’s what architects do: We’re problem solvers.”

Host of benefits

ARCHITECTS will have a host of problems to solve as the nation gets denser. And rising energy costs could continue to drive buildings underground: A building 10 feet down enjoys a temperature close to any region’s annual average, Hall says, without wide swings from high to low. So, despite building costs, they can pay for themselves with lower monthly bills. Zones of extreme heat or cold -- Arizona or Minnesota -- or those with dangerous wind storms, such as Texas or Oklahoma, have taken the lead, she says.

“I’m surprised that there aren’t more school buildings,” Hall says. “That’s one place there’s emotional resistance on the parts of parents. But it makes good sense: Some of them are in noisy environments, near airports or something. Once you put it underground it eliminates the noise problem.”

Two of Hall’s favorite buildings show the possibilities of the form. The Vilar Center for the Arts near Vail, Colo., designed by Johnson and built under a skating rink, is an elegant, autumn-toned series of spaces that filter out noise and exterior light.

This building, like many, doesn’t announce itself as subterranean. But another of Hall’s favorites, the Grove Park Inn Spa in Asheville, N.C., designed by Robert LeBlond, does. “Rather than ignore the fact that it’s underground, they’ve made it into a beautiful cave-like environment,” she says.

These buildings that draw attention to their location will likely remain the exception.

“One of the architects I spoke to said, ‘When you stop hearing about a building being underground, it won’t be a novelty anymore,’ ” she says. “If people don’t make a big issue of it, the style will have arrived.”

scott.timberg@latimes.com