Santa Monica Civic Center Parking Structure

Moore Ruble Yudell develops a lively parking garage that simultaneously cloaks and celebrates Southern California's car culture.

By Russell Fortmeyer
This is an excerpt of an article from the May 2008 edition of Architectural Record.

For better or worse, Los Angeles invented car culture. For the late academic Reyner Banham and his continuing, devoted band of theory-mongers, ostensibly every building, public space, and fragment of architecture in Los Angeles is really about the car. Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners' new parking structure for Santa Monica's civic center is but the latest shout-out to Banham's influential thesis, set forth in 1971 in the book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. There is always a new example to reaffirm Banham-his book is now unanimously understood as the first honest (and perhaps most gushing) critique of Southern California's freeway culture-because the trashy, flashy, global architecture culture that has emerged in Los Angeles from the late 1960s onward took the critic seriously.

Parking garages, generally excluded from the categories of architecture and urbanism, have typically been bland utilitarian boxes or podiums for superstructures. In a nod to Venturi, Scott Brown’s supergraphics and decorated sheds, the parking garage for Frank Gehry’s 1979 Santa Monica Place mall, north of the civic center, presented a scrim of chain link printed with dim white letters spelling out the mall’s name. Gehry’s chain link may have been tolerated more than loved, but the parking garage is a landmark, if not a touchstone for architects pondering such building types.

Santa Monica wanted this 900-car garage in order to redevelop adjacent land currently used as surface parking. A new master plan for the civic center placed the garage at the existing east entrance to the center, so the city, which is well-known in the area for its aesthetic fussiness, didn’t want to build a concrete box in such a prominent location. The architects were, in effect, hired to decorate the nearly 300,000-square-foot structure—to wrap it in visual interest—as well as to tease more use out of what could have been a dead box by planning 10,000 square feet of street-level retail to enliven the neighborhood and introducing sustainable design strategies.

Except for the addition of 25 percent fly ash to the cement mix, the 8-story concrete structure (two stories are below grade) is entirely conventional. Befitting a firm founded by the late Charles Moore, the architects designed a porous skin of multicolored, laminated, U-shaped glass channels that hang off the primary concrete structure and keep the garage open to fresh air and views. Coupled with ribbed, precast-concrete panels and stainless-steel mesh on the corner stair towers, the exterior cladding addresses the varied urban contexts of the four elevations. For example, the west elevation’s glass strikes green and blue colors for the ocean, while reds, greens, and blues respond to the eastern freeway side. The designers also solved a long-standing problem in Southern California by adding a dramatic, cantilevered, 19,200-square-foot, 181-kilowatt installation of solar photovoltaics on the roof, which also provides shading for the top floor of parking.

Formal name of building: Santa Monica Civic Center Parking Structure

Location: Santa Monica, California

Architect: Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners

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