Architect Frank Gehry plans move to El Segundo

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The firm of well-known Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry has outgrown its offices in West Los Angeles and will move 160 employees to a former warehouse in El Segundo next year, the owner of the warehouse said Wednesday. Gehry Partners designed the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and several other prominent structures. Moving again wasn’t in the plans when Gehry took his firm from Santa Monica to the former West Coast headquarters for BMW in 2003. After renovating the high-ceilinged industrial space near Playa Vista into offices, he said, ‘This is it. I’m 74, and I don’t want to move again. I’m in pig heaven.’ But Gehry’s firm quickly filled 44,000 square feet of old BMW space and needs the 75,000 square feet in a campus being developed in El Segundo by NSB Associates, said Lawrence N. Field, chairman of NSB. Field and Gehry are longtime friends and Field also redeveloped the former BMW space. Gehry is working with Field to design the ‘Gehry Campus’ between Utah Avenue and Alaska Avenue, near Aviation Boulevard. Two warehouses built there in the 1960s will be converted to offices. El Segundo is the historic home of Standard Oil and several defense contractors. In recent years it has become known as a lower-cost alternative to the pricey Westside for white-collar office tenants and creative firms.

--Roger Vincent