ARCHITECTURE : Different--and Private--World Hides in Belly of the ‘Blue Whale’

The Blue Whale is a strange building.

What goes on in that sign-free, massive building on the corner of Melrose and San Vicente? Why does it look like the mantelpiece from Godzilla’s home? Why is it such a deep, unnatural blue? Why is this gridded behemoth named after a marine mammal?

The Pacific Design Center, as it is officially called, is a vaguely tube-shaped, eight-story warehouse with few visible openings that gives no sign of what goes on inside. Though it is covered with blue glass from bottom to top, those glass panels are backed by sheet rock, so you can’t see through them.

Several years ago, the Blue Whale spawned a green addition (“The Green Building,” as it is officially called), an equally mysterious stone bunker and a supposedly public plaza hidden from the street by elaborate plantings and stern security guards. This is not a very inviting set of buildings, and it seems at odds with its neighborhood of small homes and big parking lots.

Yet in some ways the Blue Whale fits perfectly, both in terms of its function and its site. It was built in 1975 to house the largest collection of designer showrooms in the West, thereby converting an unused Southern Pacific rail yard into the magnet that has made West Hollywood into the decorating capital of the Southland. That function is also what makes the place so mysterious: It is open “to the trade only.”

On the inside, the Pacific Design Center is crammed full of showrooms selling office furniture, carpets, chairs, fabrics and antiques. In fact, it is the absolute difference between the continually changing interior landscape and the enigmatic outside that makes the building so strange and, in some ways, beautiful.

It doesn’t help to know, for instance, that the bump that sticks out of the top of the building is actually a three-story “galleria” hidden away on the fifth floor of the building, but it does help give the abstract composition of the Whale a top. Outside and inside are two different worlds, unified only by the wash of blue that separates them.

When the Pacific Design Center was built, it was by far the largest building in the neighborhood--this being the years before the Beverly Center and Cedars-Sinai expansion dramatically changed the scale all around it.

To some writers, it looked like “a whale beached in a back yard swiming pool,” to others it was a Pop Art blowup of an architectural fragment. Architect Pelli justified its strange appearance by pointing out that it would be impossible to hide the 750,000 square feet of this monster in the one-story neighborhood, so he played up its surreal, jarring quality. Whatever the reason, the otherworldly quality of the building was an instant hit both with architecture critics and decorators, who flocked to it even in the middle of a severe recession. Neighbors were less enthusiastic.

The Pacific Design Center has changed its neighborhood, sheltering a whole world of decorator showrooms around its base and giving a focus to the newly created city of West Hollywood. But it remains a perfect monument to the character of the urban landscape of Los Angeles: It is a large, abstract and artful version of the anonymous office buildings and security gated compounds that hide richly decorated landscapes open only to those in the know.