By approving more than $30 billion in school construction bonds, voters have been fueling the fortunes of a small Santa Monica architectural and design firm.
WWCOT has taken on more than 80 education-related design projects since 2000, including the latest incarnation of the now-infamous Belmont Learning Center high school just west of downtown Los Angeles. That’s helped almost double the firm’s revenues over the last four years.
“The key to our growth has been our ability to see this education market coming, to prepare for it and move quickly when the funds became available,” said WWCOT founding partner Chester Widom.
There are challenges to such rapid growth, like keeping the small-company feel and avoiding an over-reliance on a single submarket. To that end, WWCOT (which stands for Widom Wein Cohen O’Leary Terasawa) is working on a large design project in China and trying to capitalize on the senior housing market.
WWCOT has also developed an expertise in forensic architecture, which is the practice of mitigating design and construction flaws in buildings. A rash of construction-defect litigation had taken its toll on the building industry in the 1990s and demand was climbing for architects who could redesign buildings to eliminate mold, water infiltration and seismic weaknesses.
“They can look at an old building and figure out what’s wrong with it,” said Serena Chow, senior development specialist and project manager with the Riverside County Economic Development Agency, which has hired the firm to retrofit and expand its offices originally built in 1971.
“We knew we had seismic problems and also some water intrusion,” Chow said. “They were able to identify the building systems affected and come up with the proper remediation.”
Its forensic experience also helped WWCOT land the design contract for the rehabilitation of Belmont. Before environmental concerns stopped the project in 1997, the Los Angeles Unified School District had racked up $172 million in design and construction costs.
A scandal revolving around contamination from an old oil field on the site and the potential for methane explosions led to the ouster of three school board members. The huge, half-completed complex was boarded up and essentially abandoned, until Roy Romer took over as superintendent and made restarting the project a priority.
Last year, WWCOT received the design contract for a scaled-down development, which will consist of a 2,100-seat high school and 500-seat academy, at an additional estimated cost of $111 million.
“The main issue from a design standpoint is the sorry state the buildings are in for the lack of use,” said Dominic Zagant, director of design management for the L.A. Unified School District. “The fireproofing system has mold on it, the roof leaks, there’s been some vandalism. All this needs to be gotten back in shipshape condition.”
Neither Zagant nor Widom would disclose the dollar value of WWCOT’s contract, in part because the extent of the forensic architecture work needed has not been determined. Last month, demolition began on two of the Belmont buildings. The entire project is scheduled to wrap up in 2007.
Widom has been a fixture in local architecture circles for more than 40 years. At age 24, he became one of the youngest people to receive an architecture license in California and led the design of the Sierra Tower that stands at the western end of the Sunset Strip just west of Doheny Drive.
In 1964, Widom opened up his own shop specializing in construction management and design of homes and apartment buildings. After a failed partnership, he joined with George Wein and Adrian Cohen in building up a practice focused mostly on Southern California.”
In 1998, Widom Wein & Cohen acquired the boutique firm of O’Leary Terasawa, creating what is now WWCOT. (O’Leary Terasawa’s lead partner, Arthur O’Leary, had been Widom’s professor and mentor at USC and is now retired.)
Widom said that two top partners Pam Touschner and Andrea Cohen Gehring are being groomed to eventually take over, and if the succession plan holds, the two would join a small group of women heading up sizable architectural firms in the nation.
While education projects make up more than half the workload, WWCOT has won contracts to design major medical facilities for local hospitals, two Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad facilities and the Beacon Building at the old Helms Bakery site.
The firm has also expanded its geographic base, first to other western states, then briefly into Mexico and, most recently, China. In 2004 it won the grand prize at the Wuhan International Design competition in China for its master plan of an 8-mile stretch of land alongside the Han River (a tributary of the Yangtze River). The design calls for major clusters of buildings, shops and squares.
An office in Shanghai was opened last year, staffed with three full-time architects and engineers, although Widom said most of the major design work is done on computers at the Santa Monica headquarters.
To avoid becoming overextended, WWCOT will not bid on other large master-plan projects in China. But the company is on the lookout for small architectural firms that it could acquire. A year ago, it bought a small practice specializing in senior housing. “That is another area we expect to do very well in as the baby boomer generation ages,” Widom said.
