Culver City-based architecture firm SPF:a has a history of designing many performing arts and cultural venues in Los Angeles.
“I really just try and hone in on the absolute functionality of the place and the programming and of course how the whole thing comes together on the site,” said Zoltan Pali, design principal of SPF:a, which he cofounded in 1995 alongside wife Judit Fekete-Pali. “But at the same time, we’re wanting each project to have its own identity and bring to it some sort of visual meaning.”
Pali was drawn to architecture from an early age and meshed his schooling in both engineering and fine arts to chase a career out of it, enjoying both the technical and creative elements of the profession.
His firm was the executive architect of the $280 million, 210,000-square-foot renovation and expansion of the Getty Villa Museum in 2006, also completing the 80,000-square-foot Pantages Theatre renovation in 2000 and the transformation of a dormant post office into the 70,000-square-foot Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in 2013.
And the upcoming creation of the Bezdek Center for the Performing Arts at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica is a project that Pali is especially excited about.
The design calls for the centralization of the currently fragmented performing arts facilities into a new 55,000-square-foot performing arts building that will include a 650-seat main auditorium, a 100-person recital hall, shared filmmaking and rehearsal space, music department classrooms, and practice rooms.
“There’s rarely a better feeling than when you finish a project like that and you see people use it,” Pali said. “It’s quite satisfying and actually quite emotional when you’re able to create spaces where people come together and they can create, perform and make art.”
SPF:a is also remodeling the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. The organization recently broke ground on the project – a conversion of its 22,000-square-foot, 1965 warehouse into a two-story public venue.
But despite its heavy pattern of designing performing arts centers, Pali doesn’t consider them the firm’s specialty. Rather, he said SPF:a has a diverse roster of typologies – and is in the midst of designing some massive commercial projects while also pursuing a series of high-end modernistic single-family homes – all within Southern California.
“It’s all about design. Somebody came to me once and said, ‘design a perfume bottle,’ and I did,” Pali joked. “To us, it’s not about the project type that is interesting, it’s about what we can do with it.”
SPF:a is currently designing 9229 Wilshire, an active mixed-use development in Beverly Hills. The project, which replaces a commercial building, will include the construction of a new eight-story multifamily building featuring 56 units of housing above roughly 8,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space and parking for 119 vehicles.
The firm recently completed WE3 at Water’s Edge – a four-story, 160,000-square-foot creative office in Playa Vista which Nike calls home – and Wonder Bridge – a sinuous pedestrian bridge spanning the Paso Robles Highway at the eastern edge of Lost Hills, which was commissioned by The Wonderful Co.
