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The Palos Verdes Art Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, was founded in 1931 and is one of the oldest, continually operating arts organizations in southern California. The Center provides classes in art (painting & drawing, sculpture, ceramics, photography and art appreciation) to children and adults, and the Center brings art into the public schools through a twenty-year-old classroom outreach program staffed entirely by volunteers. With a membership of 1500, drawn largely from the culturally diverse suburban communities of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and adjacent Beach Cities, the Center provides a refuge for artists, both professional and amateur. The Center also mounts more than twenty exhibitions each year, with a focus on contemporary artists from the Los Angeles area. While the Center has no permanent collection, it functions as a venue for regional artists to display work and as a local gallery for patrons and art-lovers to appreciate and celebrate the lively arts scene in Los Angeles.

The existing Art Center facility consists of a complex of several buildings arranged around an open-air patio. The buildings total approximately 11,000 square feet and are subdivided into zones by use, including classrooms, studios, administrative offices, exhibition galleries, a small gift shop, a film / lecture space, a commercial kitchen and various support spaces. As the Center's needs have changed and its programs and audience have expanded, the complex has grown organically over time. Through private donations, galleries and classrooms have been added and remodeled, various areas have been expanded, and in general, the complex has lost sight of its original architectural intention.

The time has come for the Center to fund construction of an expanded campus on the current site. An easement over adjacent property has been negotiated to support increased parking to 125 cars and improved vehicular access, by relocating the driveway away from the busy intersection of West Crestridge Road and Crenshaw Boulevard. A parking structure will be a necessary element of the expanded campus, because the adjacent land lease will allow surface parking and access roads only, with no permanent structures or foundations.

Renovation and expansion, as well as demolition and rebuilding, are all under consideration. Any new plan must deal sensitively with the ancestry and remarkable history of the existing campus, including acknowledgment of past as well as future donor generosity. Opportunities and incentives exist for the Center to make a powerful architectural statement and its prominence in the community as well as its placement at a highly visible major intersection demand careful design consideration. The Center's Board of Directors has initiated this International Design Competition, which will be open to all designers, architects, artists and students of the arts, worldwide.

A juried exhibition will conclude the competition, and cash prizes will be awarded to the winning schemes. The exhibition will run August 5 - September 10, 2000, and will provide the impetus for the launch of a capital campaign aimed at funding construction of a renewed and expanded campus that better serves the current programming needs of the membership. At the same time, the scheme ideally will anticipate future flexibility and continued expansion in coming decades.

It is critical that the design scheme address issues of the Center's history. The generosity of past donors must be carefully factored into any new design, and the diverse interests of the membership must be carefully considered. Designers are asked to present their concept for a building that contains an element of narrative, a building that blurs the lines between the constructed and the natural, utilizing the given context to the fullest and taking full advantage of our glorious southern California climate. The average temperature year round is between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, and there rarely are more than two consecutive days of heavy rain. Solutions should embrace exterior courtyards, plazas and walks as integral parts of the design, limited in scope only by the site boundaries, the designer's discretion and imagination.

Entrants are challenged to present a design in the format outlined in this document showing whatever drawings are necessary to relate the solution, including floor plans, elevations, sections and perspective renderings. This is not a planning exercise. Therefore the floor plans do not have to be detailed. Basic layout of the departments, the circulation and the relationship of departments to each other are the most important challenges. The success of the design solution will weigh on the relationships created between the facility and the site, the components of the facility and how they relate to each other, and most importantly, the user's experience created by the architecture. Incumbent on this is the crafting of space and the careful and considered use of materials.

© 1999 P.V.I.D.C. - Los Angeles
     December 1999. All Rights Reserved

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