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West Hollywood Civic Center
In 1987, the community of West Hollywood, CA, between Hollywood and Beverly Hills, sought designs for a new town hall. Mr. Egan used the project as a training exercise for his New York staff. The program called for a modest building of 50,000 sq.ft., but the site is across the street from the Pacific Design Center with 1,000,000 sq.ft. This meant that the civic building could never compete in scale with the commercial center, and yet we felt it was critical that the smaller building should appear more significant, as a representation of the civic realm rather than the private commercial realm. "Our solution was to design a building with restrained elegance, so that importance would come from detail rather than from bluster. West Hollywood is the ultimate street neighborhood, with huge billboards and gaudy cafes crowding Sunset Drive just before it enters the restrained civility of Beverly Hills. To achieve a fitting symbolism for this street neighborhood, we looked to what we considered the twin icons of Los Angeles: the mission and the freeway. A pedestrian bridge creates a cloistered protection for the small park, while steel and concrete evoke the highway."
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