Artist’s concept of the Pacific Design Center’s completed campus. |
Today’s ground breaking ceremony for the third and final building in Charles Cohen’s Pacific Design Center (PDC)’s campus, REDBUILDING, the 400,000 sq. ft. ultra-modern keystone of Cesar Pelli’s iconic trio of opaque glass buildings marks a historic moment and completion of a generational cycle.
This model shows the Pacific Design Center’s complex with the addition of REDBUILDING and completion of Cesar Pelli’s vision. Photo by Ryan Gierach. |
Why? It has been 31 years in the making. “We don’t want to be accused of rushing anything,” real estate baron and owner of the PDC Charles S. Cohen told WeHoNews in an exclusive interview, “but how many times do you get to complete – not finish, no project is ever finished – such a historic project? I’m really honored to facilitate its completion.”
Begun in 1975 with construction of the “Blue Whale” building, the PDC campus has been over 30 years in the making. If the Green building, completed in 1988 (four years after cityhood), marked an important moment in the newborn City’s youth, construction of REDBUILDING’s forward-looking design and state-of-the-art construction marks its maturing development as a creative center.
Charles S. Cohen heads Cohen Brothers Realty, West Hollywood’s largest landowner and taxpayer, which controls a commercial real estate empire straddling the continent that owns and manages over 11 million sq. ft. of prime Manhattan, West Hollywood, Florida and Houston office and showroom space, including the Decoration & Design (D&D) Building Manhattan, the Decorative Center of Houston and the Design Center of the Americas (DCOTA) in Dania Beach, FL.
For a design center mogul, he acknowledges that he is investing a large amount of money in creative office space. “Hard costs are $120 million,” he said, “soft costs make it amount to much more. But that’s how the design world is changing. The Green Building was to be all design space, but we found that it works better with half the space as offices.
Charles S. Cohen heads Cohen Brothers Realty, West Hollywood’s largest landowner and taxpayer and developer of REDBUILDING. |
“We look forward to drawing creative and new media firms to West Hollywood with this building.” Recent reports show that top drawer office space in the Los Angeles basin is a hot commodity (see Office Market Sizzles in our Nov. 30, 2006 issue).
Pacific Design Center, anchoring the City of West Hollywood on land that 100 years ago was the former Los Angeles-Southern Pacific rail yard, is the West’s largest resource for traditional and contemporary contract and residential furniture, fabrics, floorcoverings, architectural products, wallcoverings, lighting, kitchen and bath products and accessories. The campus already has 1.1 million sq. ft. of space; the addition of another 400,000 sq. ft. will make the total 1.5 million sq. ft. on the 14-acre plot.
Mr. Cohen describes himself as a design nut, “I love design, and all my experiences leading up to this point positioned me to create both lifestyle and architectural design. I view the two things together as living art. I look at the PDC as a museum of lifestyle.”
He recalled the day in 1999 when he first saw the PDC. It was on the heels of his purchase and successful resuscitation of the D&D building in New York, he struggled also with a painful divorce.
"I drove up to it and was blown away by it,” he said. Since taking over, the interior has been completely renovated, design elements on the exterior brought into line with the architect’s original vision and fountain’s and green space have been added to the campus’s courtyard. 
Artist’s concept of the PDC’s REDBUILDING. |
“What allowed us to prosper was removing the barriers that kept people away. The direction design centers are moving these days,” Mr. Cohen said, “is toward more public access to their facilities. The PDC was very intimidating, and we’ve been reaching out to the public to invite them inside. Adding REDBUILDING will bring in many more people to use the facility.”
In keeping with that philosophy, Mr. Cohen added, “We also think of the PDC as a university of higher learning for the design field. We have seminars, workshops regularly. In fact, during West Week, which we chose for this groundbreaking because the design world comes here this week, we’ll have over 130 seminars in a two day period.”
He asserts that people-oriented purposing builds business. “As people come to enjoy our world-class restaurants (WP, Wolfgang Puck’s gem) and visit offices, they’ll stroll through our ‘Museum of Lifestyle’ and realize that they could re-do their living room or that they need a new bedroom."
To nurture those instincts, the PDC has even begun offering a comprehensive set of “design services” for the otherwise “retail” customer who needs a referral to a designer and a “Consulting & Buying Program” that allows limited “retail” access to the PDC’s showrooms – the PDC’s representative acting as the designer making the wholesale purchase.
So far as the effect on the community wrought by drawing in creative professionals by building REDBUILDING, “If you ask people around here what they think of West Hollywood,’ he said, “they say ‘hip.’ We should be in the center of that.”
REDBUILDING isolated as a model. Photo by Ryan Gierach. |
The new addition, consists of two state-of-the-art office towers, six and eight stories high respectively, sitting atop seven levels of enclosed parking capable of accommodating 1,500 cars – a huge boon to the City of West Hollywood, given its endemic need for parking.
According to the architect, REDBUILDING is designed “to allow for a variety of office floors ranging in size from 14,000 to 36,000 square feet, the six-story west tower and eight-story east tower will both feature sky lobbies overlooking an elegantly landscaped palm court configured for both spectacular views and maximum energy efficiency.
“The complex's ultra-modern infrastructure and state-of-the-art building systems, including elevators, HVAC and electrical, have also been designed to provide maximum flexibility to suit the most demanding tenant requirements.”
But what strikes everyone who sees renditions or models of the structure is its beauty of line and color. Cesar Pelli told AIArchitect Magazine that, taken as a group, “Each one of these three buildings works within the same vocabulary, but they create quite different forms. They are like three girls dancing.
Another view of the model for PDC’s REDBUILDING addition. Photo by Ryan Gierach. |
“Each figure is different, but they are all following the same rhythm, the same music, and they move to the same compass. These three buildings will be such a dance together around a wonderful public space.”
According to Wikipedia, Mr. Pelli is counted among the most influential architects living; in 1991, the AIA (American Institute of Architects) listed Pelli as one of the ten most influential living American architects. Known for his skyscrapers, he designed the Petronas Twin Towers, which were for a time the world's tallest buildings.
Mr. Cohen told WeHoNews that actual construction will begin in June and require two years to complete.
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