Calabasas hears feedback on civic center
By Gregory Koteles
Special to The Acorn

The end of the beginning to construct a new civic center in Calabasas may be on the horizon.

A joint meeting of the city council and planning commission convened last week to begin sorting out details of the beleaguered, long-anticipated project.

Michael Freedman, a San Francisco architect specializing in civic center master planning, chaired the meeting. Freedman’s firm, Freedman, Tung and Bottomley (FTB), was retained by the city council in September to help facilitate the planning process.

Representatives of Gonzalez/Goodale Architects, contracted to design the city hall, library and performing arts theater complex, presented the initial plans as conceived by the 10-member Civic Center Advisory Committee (CCAC).

Freedman then proceeded to point out design flaws as FTB saw them.

Two primary design blunders Freedman cited were the setback of the buildings from the Park Sorrento (more than 100 feet) and the plinth (an elevated area) on which the whole center would sit. With the complex sitting atop a pad elevated 21 feet above street level, Freedman estimated about 42 steps would have to climbed to reach the envisioned plaza, which Freedman called effectively "a wall."

However, Freedman was careful not to lay the blame for the perceived obstacles at the feet of architects, but rather in the contradictory guidance they received from the city.

While one of the primary intentions of the city council was to "encourage the maximum utilization by the public" and create a space that would be "warm and welcoming when approached by car or on foot," another guideline called for the architect to create "a distinguished and prominent visual image" for the complex.

Freedman said the architects had followed the direction of the city to the letter in designing the center, but added the designs were "flying in the face of the real intent of the city council" because of poorly written or conflicting specifications.

Afterward, the architects displayed preliminary revised plans, which attempted to resolve some of the problems FTB had pointed out prior to the meeting. Though Freedman viewed the plans as an improvement, he didn’t find them ideal.

In discussing visual prominence of the civic center, Freedman brought up the issue of a "vertical element," which he saw as either a bell tower, free-standing campanile or other type of monumental edifice to distinguish the buildings as a government center.

In a rare moment of consensus at the meeting, the idea was struck down in favor of a "massing" or built-up area on the city hall or library buildings to provide a sense of monumentality that’s desired for the complex.

Another decision—opposed only by City Councilman Dennis Washburn—was to keep the proposed theater small in scale, with only about 100 seats.

The idea to build something grander than a community theater had worked its way into the initial designs drafted by the architects and was more or less quashed by the majority of the city council and planning commission.

Parking was a major point of discussion as well.

"When you talk suburban," said Washburn regarding motorists in the city of Calabasas, "you’re talking Suburbans."

The initial plans called for 190 underground parking spaces, located beneath the plinth of the civic center. The possibilities of a deeper underground garage, a parking structure, a lot behind the center, a contract with adjacent properties or the acquisition of more land for parking were all thrown on the table.

Whether the primary access to the civic center will be by vehicle or by foot from The Commons or the Hilton Hotel which will flank the center, the parking situation will likely be a sticking point in designing the complex.

Mayor Janice Lee expressed concerns at the meeting that the discussion largely ignored the costs. According to her, the plans were being made without any "idea or clue of how much you [the city council] want to spend." Lee, who’s been critical of Freedman’s involvement in the project since September, was also unhappy about FTB’s desire to expand the scope of its participation by redesigning the Park Sorrento approach to the center.

"Are we just going to have you redesign the project?" asked Lee, before shooting down Freedman’s request to provide an additional scope of services.

The final portion of the meeting was spent attempting to reach some sort of consensus among members of the city council and planning commission on the desired setback, elevations, vertical aspect and parking for the center. From the various responses, it was clear that no uniform vision for the civic center existed among elected or appointed officials.

Freedman called the meeting "the early stage of a collaborative process" but he couldn’t provide a specific time frame in which the design phase might reach a conclusion. Following a second meeting in December, he might be able to predict an end to the process, Freedman said.