State of California Department of Health Services, Phase III Office Building
Richmond, Calif.
Studios Architecture
Studios Architecture highlights functional elements to create a social hub for the third phase of a state government campus.
By Mimi Zeiger
In designing a new office building for the State of California Department of Health Services (CDHS), San Francisco–based Studios Architecture took what might have been a banal cube, hemmed in by parking lots and laboratories, and created a new public face for the CDHS, one in keeping with its mission to promote wellness.
Representing the third phase of a master plan, this 200,000-square-foot structure consolidates the offices of 18 agencies, including Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention, Environmental Health Investigation, and Sexually Transmitted Disease Control. It sits on the CDHS’s Richmond, California, campus—a former industrial site, squeezed between a freeway and railroad tracks.
Although the program is straightforward—offices, open work spaces, a café, a library, meeting and training rooms—Studios faced the bigger challenge of how to encourage a sense of community among diverse state agencies integrated under one roof. Dr. Raymond Neutra, who heads the Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control, represented the building’s users during design development. “One of the problems in a big scientific building is that we become absorbed in our own work and don’t know what anyone else is doing,” observes Neutra, who happens to be the son of architect Richard Neutra. “I said to the architects, ‘I would like some serendipity, so that we bump into each other by accident. Let’s have a coffee bar and stairways that are fun to walk on.’ ”
Charles Dilworth, principal architect at Studios, took Neutra’s suggestions to heart and added his own item to the brief: innovation. A series of half-constructed, blocky laboratories nearby supplied a bit of backhanded inspiration. Dilworth designed a three-story, cast-in-place-concrete structure with a rectangular plan: “It’s just a big box,” he says. But the main entry, located on the western elevation, belies his modesty. It greets the public with an elongated court created by jostling the facade—pushing the office wings out and recessing the doors. Exaggerating this dynamic, a freestanding concrete wall, wrapped by an exit stair, extends westward.
California’s green-buildings program mandated that CDHS Phase III earn the equivalent of a LEED Silver rating. Accordingly, Dilworth drew as much daylight into the offices as possible. Along the building’s north and south elevations, which are its longest sides, he employed a low-tech solution to reduce solar gain and glare: a Le Corbusier-like brise-soliel.
Want the full story? Read the entire article in our January 2007 issue.
Subscribe to Architectural Record in print, or get Architectural Record digitally
Formal name of project:
State of California Department of Health Services, Phase III Office Building
Location:
Richmond, Calif.
Gross square footage:
200,000 sq. ft.
Total Construction Cost:
$32.6 million
Owner:
State of California
Architect:
Studios Architecture
99 Green Street
San Francisco, CA 94111
415-398-7575 tel.
415-398-3829 fax
www.studiosarch.com
Click here to see all the people and products behind this project |
print
this page
e-mail
this page
Click here for slide show.
