Office Building More Than Just a Container for Furniture

There’s not much you can do with an office building. That’s especially true if it’s one of those three- to four-story glass and steel rectangles that are spread throughout the city with the same regularity as pedimented apartment buildings and garlanded mini-malls.

Office buildings are containers for office furniture, and they often have little relationship to the world around them. They have to be designed as cheaply as possible, although they may have one swoop, dip, color or sign that distinguishes the developer’s “product” or home office from the neighboring buildings. There has to be lots of parking and as much undifferentiated office space as can possibly fit on the site.

The three-story building on the southeast corner of Wilshire and Robertson boulevards in Beverly Hills puts about as good a face on these conditions as you’re likely to find in this town. Designed by the Miami-based firm Arquitectonica, it succeeds because it follows that firm’s exuberant vision of the modern city as playground of colorful, abstract shapes.

To partners Laurinda Spear and Bernando Fort-Brescia, the metropolis is a place with no false messages and no pretensions of being a friendly village, but a world of style in which business is fun and vice versa. You might know their work from the backgrounds of “Miami Vice,” or from their less-than-successful retail building on Melrose Avenue (it’s the black-and-white striped one), but here they have found a palette that fits the situation.

Their big move is a curving, black glass and metal plane that bows out from the Wilshire front. Interrupted only by a metal balcony on the third floor, it’s a giant piece of sculpture posed on the avenue, sweeping up the street with all the grandeur of a black cape.

Behind this dramatic gesture, Arquitectonica has placed most of the front of the building into a simple green grid filled with green glass. The grid is enlarged to Pop-Art scale, though the finishes are too mundane for you mistake it for anything but an office building.

But then the architects couldn’t leave well enough alone. They cut the corner out on the first floor, leaving a jagged, faceted accordion of glass and metal as the entrance to the bank housed inside. This gesture is purely functional (how else do you make a corner entrance in grid?), but it also undercuts the pretensions of the whole building.

With a sweep, a grid and a curve, the architect is done. The rest of the building is just another black glass set of rectangles--what architects call “a background building.”

There is one other touch, but it’s hidden: Slide in behind the curve and you’ll find a three-story lobby crossed by white and green marble bridges, lighted with skylights, structured with metal-clad columns and altogether a pretty zooty experience.

The best part of it is the inside of the curve, which gives you framed views of the street outside filtered through the heavily bronzed glass windows that turn out to be just a pattern in this part of the fake wall. As on the outside, the architects here came in, made their move and got back out quickly: The rest of the interior could be anywhere.

This is obviously not a building that is going to change the way we think about either office work or Los Angeles, but it is a building that at least takes the trouble to give us, if nothing else, a little attitude.

Planned and developed in the 1980s, it has all the bravura of those go-go years. Remarkably, it is one of three or four sophisticated designs for similarly sized buildings that stretch between here and the CAA Headquarters on Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards, and which include two buildings for the ill-fated Columbia Savings & Loan.

Maybe these buildings were all silly investments, but at least we got a decent set of buildings that not only continued, but contributed to the lively dance of forms that line our most famous boulevard. Let’s hope that our next boom finds us as lucky in our choice of architects.