The city of Los Angeles is embarking on its own version of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The city has signed a lease for 286,000 square feet of space at Figueroa Plaza in downtown L.A. to be occupied by the Los Angeles City Planning Department and the Department of Building and Safety as temporary quarters while City Hall undergoes an earthquake retrofit.

If all goes as planned, the two city departments will move out of Figueroa Plaza and back into City Hall about the middle of 2001, according to Onno Zwaneveld, corporate managing director for the commercial real estate brokerage Julien J. Studley Inc., which represented the city in the lease.

The 286,000-square-foot total makes this the second largest office lease in downtown L.A. this year, surpassed only by 300,000-square-foot sublease by Prudential Health Plan of California Inc. at the former First Interstate Bank operations center at 1200 W. Seventh St., Zwaneveld said.

The 286,000 square feet includes 169,000 for the Planning Department and 117,000 for the Building and Safety Department.

The Planning Department already occupies its 169,000 square feet at Figueroa Plaza, where it moved several years ago when city officials thought the earthquake retrofit of City Hall was about to begin. But the retrofit was delayed, and is now slated to begin in the second quarter of next year.

Zwaneveld said the new lease represents a renewal of the planning department’s existing lease and an expansion to accommodate the Building and Safety Department, which will move out of City Hall during the earthquake retrofit.

The 7.5-year lease is valued at $29.7 million, but the city will pay considerably less rent than that if the deal goes according to plan, Zwaneveld explained.

He said terms allow the city to terminate the lease and move the two departments back to City Hall as soon as the earthquake retrofit project is completed. The retrofit is scheduled to be completed 38 months after it begins in other words, mid-year 2001. But the lease was written for 7.5 years in case the retrofit takes longer than scheduled, he said.

“Basically, (the city departments) will only be in Figueroa Plaza for half of the lease term if the retrofit project stays on schedule,” Zwaneveld said.

Zwaneveld, who led a Studley team including David Kluth and Steve Bay, said the lease will increase occupancy to 95 percent at the 615,000-square-foot Figueroa Plaza project, which was represented in the lease negotations by Brad Cox and Kathy Porter-Sikora of Cushman & Wakefield of California Inc.

Ad agency leases space

Santa Monica-based ad agency Kovel Kresser & Partners has signed a five-year, $4 million lease on 25,000 square feet of space at Pacifica Square, a 175,000-square-foot office complex at Washington Boulevard and Via Dolce in Marina del Rey that formerly was known as Washington Square, according to Steve Solomon, a Seeley Co. broker who represented landlord Pacifica Capital Group.

Lee Kovel, chief creative officer at the ad agency, said the firm was looking for space much different from its existing corporate-style digs at MGM Plaza at Colorado Avenue and 26th Street in Santa Monica. He said the agency, whose clients include Atlantic Richfield Corp., Countrywide Credit Industries Inc. and Kaiser Permanente, has hired Santa Monica-based architects Hodgetts & Fung to create an open office design that will be more conducive to creativity.

The space in Marina del Rey is ideal, according to Kovel, because it has high ceilings and the sort of “wide open, warehouse space that we can design with very few walls.” The design will be more appropriate for the ad agency business, in which people generally work in teams rather than individual offices, Kovel said, and will allow for a combination of open spaces, small “think tank” rooms and other touches the agency has in mind. For example, the agency plans to wire its kitchen for computers “so that people can grab some coffee and bagels and work around the kitchen table, just as they would at home,” he said.

According to Solomon, Pacifica Square is 96 percent leased with the signing of the ad agency deal.

EarthLink inks deal

Fast-growing EarthLink Network Inc., the Pasadena-based Internet service provider, has signed a 10-year, $9 million lease for an 85,000-square-foot expansion at its headquarters at 3100 New York Drive, according to Vice President Mark Evanoff of Ramsey-Shilling Co., an L.A.-based brokerage that represented EarthLink in the lease.

Evanoff said EarthLink, which started with 500 square feet of space when it was founded in 1994, now occupies 150,000 square feet in Pasadena. The space includes two full floors of the headquarters building and 55,000 square feet at 2947 Bradley St., across the street from the headquarters that EarthLink leased in June.

DreamWorks adjacent

For the second time in less than a month, an office building near the site of the proposed DreamWorks SKG movie studio in Playa del Rey has attracted the attention of a new tenant or buyer.

Lincoln Properties Co. of Irvine has paid $9 million for the 87,000-square-foot Collins Properties Inc. building on Jefferson Boulevard across the street from the site of the proposed DreamWorks studio, according to Seeley Co. broker Solomon.

Collins currently occupies about half of the space in the building, formerly known as the Sizzler Restaurants headquarters, but the company will be vacating the space over the next six months.

Solomon said one of the attractions of the building was that its location will make it appealing for companies that want to be near the proposed Playa Vista real estate development and DreamWorks assuming the long-delayed project comes to fruition.

Early in September, Venice-based ad agency TBWA Chiat/Day Inc. said it signed a lease for 100,000 square feet of space in a warehouse on Jefferson Boulevard that is about two blocks from the Collins site, Solomon noted.

“It’s a good location with or without DreamWorks, but the studio does make it an even more attractive location,” said Solomon, who said the Collins building is directly across the street from what would be the main entrance of DreamWorks.

HMO Lease

Managed Health Network, a wholly owned subsidiary of Foundation Health Systems Inc., has signed a five-year, $4.5 million lease for 50,000 square feet at the WaterRidge office complex on Gold Leaf Circle near Slauson Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard in Culver City. Solomon said he and the Sacramento brokerage firm of Aguer Pipgras represented the tenant as co-brokers in the deal.

Contributing Reporter Bob Howard covers the real estate industry for the Los Angeles Business Journal.