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By Russell Fortmeyer

Only a handful of city blocks separate A.C. Martin’s 1965 building for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Morphosis’s 2004 region-al headquarters for the California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans, but the concepts inform-ing their design reflect a much greater divergence.

The DWP and Caltrans ar-guably rank as the most influential institutions of the city—plentiful water and power enabled the freeway-obsessed birthplace of sprawl to evolve into the de facto financial and cultural capital of the world’s seventh-largest economy. And it takes a lot of power to keep it humming (think Hoover Dam). This explains, perhaps more than their 40-year age disparity and different architects, why the DWP and Caltrans buildings look so unrelated. Unlike a Hollywood starlet, the look isn’t skin deep: The buildings function radically differently owing to a culture of energy use that has moved from the freewheeling to the conservative.

Los Angeles Department of water and power, 1965 —A.C. Martin Partners Photography: © Julius Shulman

In his 1997 book The Reluctant Metropolis, William Fulton calls the DWP building “a far more imposing structure today” than the Welton Becket–designed Los Angeles Music Center located across the street. The DWP’s effect on the skyline is enhanced by its canny mix of Modernist design and decorative exhibition of its use of water and power for its (at-the-time) high-tech mechanical systems.

David Martin, FAIA, a design partner at his family’s firm, fondly remembers when in his youth his late father, A.C. Martin, Jr., FAIA, would discuss the progress of the DWP. “The attitude of the time for the DWP was of tremendous civic pride, so energy was understood not in terms of using the smallest amount, but using it in innovative ways,” Martin says. “The building’s design was meant to symbolize the use of energy.”

The DWP building occupies an artificially constructed promontory surrounded by pools and fountains that feed the building’s cooling towers. As the iconic photography of Julius Shulman ably demonstrates, the uniformly lit floors—continuously illuminated around the clock with linear fluorescent T12 lamps— bolster the structure’s imposing monumentality. Here, natural resources are a kind of decoration. They are yet another Southern California marketing campaign, like flowers attached to floats in the Rose Parade. That tactic continues, however reversed, with the Caltrans headquarter’s advertising of conservation and energy generation, witnessed in the building-integrated solar photovoltaic array on its south side.

DWP’s curtain-wall system, with overhangs at each floor to limit sunlight and heat gain, wraps all four building sides. At Caltrans, each face is computer modeled and built to respond to the conditions particular to that side. Where the DWP eschewed boilers, depending instead on its energy-hogging fluorescent lighting for heating, Caltrans’s efficient central plant operates through a building control system to target its performance toward shifting environmental conditions. A lighting control system cuts energy use further. These performance improvements are increasingly common in buildings, though few states mandate energy efficiency quite as strictly as California.

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