STYLE: Lobbying for Space
By LAURENCE DARMIENTO
Staff Reporter
Given its wide-open sprawl, L.A. is notoriously bereft of public spaces.
It has a mountainous park that runs for thousands of acres down its spine, but no Great Lawn. It has a downtown core bustling with thousands of workers, but nothing comparable to a Rockefeller Center.
And it has a high-rise district that has sprung up over the last three decades, but few interior lobby spaces approaching, say, the art deco grandeur of the Chrysler Building.
The Aon Building at 707 Wilshire Blvd. isn’t going to change those perceptions. But a recently completed renovation of the 62-story building’s lobby shows what can happen when property owners consider the public in their deliberations.
For years the lobby had been consumed by the headquarters branch of First Interstate Bancorp. But after the bank’s purchase by Wells Fargo & Co. in 1996, the branch was downsized, leaving a carpeted area where tenants and the public could walk through.
Two years ago, building management decided to do something with the space, so they hired the Los Angeles architecture firm of Leo A. Daly, which is overseeing architectural and engineering work at the Our Lady of the Angels Roman Catholic Cathedral downtown.
Public space
The firm only had $500,000 to work with, but for that price it created an inviting space where tenants can hold functions and the public can cut through or take a quick break from the heat or rain.
The carpet has been replaced with the de rigueur marble and granite paving common to many a high-rise lobby. There also are granite planters that sprout tropical foliage, and wooden benches for taking a load off your feet. But what really commands attention are a series of alabaster columns that mark a pathway from entrance to exit.
“The light towers are very dramatic. They really play up the attribute of that space,” said building manager Peter Anastassiou, a vice president of Jones Lang La Salle.
Architect Alex Ward borrowed the idea for the columns from the cathedral, designed by famed architect Jose Raphael Moneo, where alabaster, a translucent Spanish stone, is being used in abundance.
He said he wanted a design element to offset the rectangular shapes of the high rise. The alabaster has a vanilla color with irregular brown veins that are prominent when backlit.
This isn’t the first lobby that Ward, a transplanted New Yorker, has renovated downtown. A few years ago he worked on a lobby just a few doors down at 911 Wilshire Boulevard, a 22-story high rise built in 1980. Building manager Jody Palontino said the lobby was not only “very dated” but “hideous.”
Again on a tight budget, Ward transformed the space, adding marble and granite flooring in geometrical patterns and brushed bronze lighting and art deco-styled ceiling fixtures.
The modest renovation captured an award in 1996 from local building owners and managers, and now, along with the Aon lobby, it’s become a calling card, helping him win a commission to renovate a higher profile building the Mellon Bank Center at 400 S. Hope St. on Bunker Hill. That’s territory where at least more than a nod has been given to lobby design and public space.
The 73-story Library Tower, jammed on a site too small for its massive size, doesn’t have much of a lobby, though it does feature commissioned artwork that captures the eye. Outside, the steps that carry pedestrians from 5th Street to Arco Plaza are decked with foliage, a waterfall, and nooks and crannies to catch your breath and grab a bite to eat.
Next door, the Southern California Gas Co. building at 5th Street and Grand Avenue features a widely lauded indoor/outdoor lobby designed by local architect Richard Keating, with a building-length Frank Stella mural and fountains underneath the floor.
However, that’s the exception. Los Angeles, with its skyscrapers built in the latter half of the 20th Century, is a place where corporate modernism rules. Form follows function, and the idea of a lobby is to hold people warm while they are waiting for the elevator. “Office buildings were containers for office space. They lacked a sense of poetry,” is how Ward puts it.
Area architect David Martin argues that building owners are short sighted if they take that approach. After all, he was given free rein with the Sanwa Bank Building, the visually appealing office building at 601 S. Figueroa St.
Martin calls the building a monument to the free-wheeling 80s. The Japanese owners allowed him to build a lobby with arching atrium and backlit Portugese marble that serves as a transition space between the bright, sunny Southern California outdoors and the upper floors of corporate office space. The result has been an office building that tenants clamor to get into.
The jury is still out on 400 S. Hope St. Ward has put together some initial sketches, which he isn’t sharing.
The building has a potentially inviting atrium that building manager Debra Greene acknowledges is dated. It’s not just the old carpeting, but all the dark brick can give the space a gloomy feel unless its brightly sunny. Greene says she wants to brighten it up, but beyond that no decisions have been made.
“A lot of times, this comes down to a matter of dollars,” she said.
