Spencer Clark
Civic architecture has historically established a physical distance between the city and bureaucracy, separating itself via the plinth or podium. Within the horizontal and scattered urbanism of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley an alteration to a ground already characterized by such extreme flatness would create an even more stark power relation.
As such, the creation of a new LADWP HQ in the San Fernando Valley embodies the plinth alone, taking the traditional office tower and flattening it into a new ground of engagement. As a result, the office becomes a consequence of the extreme horizontality the project sits within. The dull bureaucratic repetition of grids and cubicles looks to shift the attention away from the previous sculptural qualities of civic buildings and onto the politic of the space and the surrounding area. The blankness of the surface is no longer constrained by the sealed-off or walled qualities of municipal buildings, instead, the building as a ground makes explicit the political conditions of its existence and is open to the various circumstances of its territory.
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