SCI-Arc
Los Angeles
Gary Paige Studio

An architect transforms a freight depot for his alma mater and employer in a quarter-mile-long structure

© Tom Bonner

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Joseph Giovannini

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) has long been one of America’s most vocally avant-garde schools, and recently it decamped from its warehouse facility on Los Angeles’s Westside to a promising former freight depot just east of downtown, next to a nascent loft district. Designating and encouraging the next generation of Southern California figures beyond that of the well-known eminences Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss, SCI-Arc’s then-director Neil Denari looked to his faculty to design the space. He selected Gary Paige, director of the undergraduate program at the time. Paige had built little but was an ensconced denizen of SCI-Arc, having taught there since his graduation. He had designed the library interiors at the school’s previous location.

The building, an industrial leftover in Los Angeles’s sprawling rail-yard landscape, was a mixed blessing. The robust poured-in-place-concrete structure, built in 1906, came with Herculean transverse beams, generous volumes, and scores of large openings for former loading docks. Time had been generous to it, giving the interior surfaces a seasoned patina akin to character lines on a wise face. The problem was the typology: Being as long as the Empire State Building is tall, the shotgun building was unremittingly linear, with only one jog breaking the monotony of its quarter-mile length.

The way the school acquired its new building became a second, unanticipated challenge. In a complicated lease-to-buy arrangement, SCI-Arc rented the building from a developer who pursued historic nomination for the structure to obtain tax credits. The terms of the designation restricted what Paige could do to the exterior, effectively prohibiting any eruptive interventions that would break through its perimeter walls.

Ironically, this permissive school of architecture allowed itself to come under restrictive preservationist rules, and Paige failed to perform a successful end-run around them and the tight budget. Pivoting doors that might have announced a principal entry proved too costly; freight bays were fitted entirely with plate glass because preservation standards required that the bays look either open or closed (as in the original use of the building). Paige somehow talked himself out of installing glazed, operable garage doors in those bays, which would not only have harvested west-facing views of downtown skyscrapers, but might also have enabled crosscurrents that originally ventilated the structure.

Inside, Paige inserted three steel mezzanines, structures within a structure, to add a necessary 35,000 square feet of space to the existing 61,000-square-foot building, and to stabilize the shell seismically. The architect left the shell unengaged to reveal its bones and framework, and each mezzanine is sited and shaped uniquely. He wanted to create a variety of spaces at different scales that push and pull, close and release, pacing along the length of the runway. This parti and its execution are certainly reasonable, but no more original than many open-landscape interiors at vaguely hip agencies in corporate office parks in California and beyond.

See the July 2003 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of Project:
SCI-Arc - Southern California Institute of Architecture

Location:
Los Angeles

Gross square footage:
82,363 sq ft

Total construction cost:
$6.9 million

Client:
SCI-Arc www.sciarc.edu

Client Representative:
Neil Denari, Director (1997-2001)

Owner:
Dynamic Builders
2114 S. Hill Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007

Designer:
Gary Paige Studio/GPS
704 East First St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
tel 213.613.0200
fax 213.613.0500
email gapaige@sciarc.edu