Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, California.

Pacific Design Center is a colossal design complex where West Hollywood's creative character meets Late Modern architecture, saturated glass façades and a multigenerational concentration of the interior-design trade.

Set along Melrose Avenue near North San Vicente Boulevard and just steps from West Hollywood Park, the 14-acre campus occupies an immense corner parcel where three intensely colored structures rise above lower commercial blocks and landscaped public grounds. Sweeping blue glass, faceted green planes and curving red towers create radically different masses across the site, with courtyards and pedestrian passages separating buildings conceived as enormous architectural fragments. Moving through the campus shifts the encounter between grand exterior scale and interior galleries lined with furnishings, textiles, lighting and architectural products from international manufacturers. Terraces, plazas, water features and planted courts add a second physical dimension, allowing Pelli's vast glass forms to be encountered across changing elevations and long exterior sightlines. The result is a design center whose architecture functions at the scale of urban sculpture, making the buildings themselves inseparable from the creative industries assembled inside them.

What you should know about Pacific Design Center.

Pacific Design Center is best known for the three-building architectural composition conceived by César Pelli and developed across nearly four decades into a 1.6-million-square-foot campus. Pelli designed the project at Gruen Associates with Norma Merrick Sklarek, the pioneering architect who had become the first Black woman licensed as an architect in California and whose technical leadership helped bring major projects from design into construction. Center Blue opened in 1975 with 750,000 square feet, immediately acquiring the nickname “Blue Whale” through the immense scale and vivid glass skin that distinguished it from the low-rise surroundings. Pelli conceived the architecture through exaggerated planes and unusual geometric forms, imagining the individual structures as oversized fragments that had fallen onto the site. Center Green followed in 1988 with 450,000 square feet, its sharply faceted mass establishing a second color and geometry beside the curving original building. The final component, Center Red, completed Pelli's original three-part conception with 400,000 square feet distributed between two curving office towers above eight parking levels. Developer Charles S. Cohen carried that final phase through construction, and the building entered service in the early 2010s more than three decades after Center Blue had established the campus. The completed triad united blue, green and red glass into one of Southern California's most immediately recognizable experiments in Late Modern commercial architecture.

The institution inside those buildings fundamentally reorganized Los Angeles' professional interior-design market by consolidating manufacturers and showrooms within a single trade center. Center Blue's opening created an all-inclusive procurement destination for designers and architects, replacing a more dispersed model with hundreds of thousands of square feet devoted specifically to residential and contract furnishings. The campus now contains more than 70 showrooms representing 2,200 manufacturers across furniture, textiles, wall and floor coverings, lighting, kitchens, baths, antiques, art and accessories. 100,000 people enter the complex annually, and more than 200 trade markets, exhibitions, conferences, fundraisers, screenings, premieres and other events use its facilities during a normal year. Contemporary art became another substantial component when MOCA established exhibition space at the property, later mounting projects devoted to figures including Iannis Xenakis, Gaetano Pesce and Peter Shire alongside presentations examining architecture and design. The Xenakis exhibition brought more than 60 musical scores, architectural drawings and conceptual renderings from 1953 through 1984 into the complex, connecting a commercial design center with the experimental work of an engineer, architect and composer who had collaborated with Le Corbusier. Charles S. Cohen's stewardship also placed large-scale contemporary sculpture and digital installations across Center Red, including Gerardo Hacer's green steel works The Fold: Mountain and The Fold: Valley and Leo Villareal's programmable light installation Stars. Those programs extended the property beyond product procurement into exhibitions, architecture, art and professional exchange, reinforcing its role as an institutional center for Southern California's design community.

How to fold Pacific Design Center into your trip.

Pacific Design Center works as the anchor for an architectural exploration connecting experimental domestic modernism, civic construction and the preservation of twentieth-century design across West Hollywood.

Begin at Schindler House, the dramatic 1922 residence and studio R. M. Schindler created on Kings Road after arriving in Los Angeles to supervise Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House. Schindler conceived the property for himself and Pauline Schindler alongside Clyde and Marian Chace, replacing conventional rooms with separate studios organized around shared living functions and gardens. Tilt-up concrete slabs, redwood, glass and canvas formed a construction system of striking economy, and rooftop sleeping baskets exploited Southern California's mild climate as part of the domestic plan. Pauline's salons subsequently drew artists, musicians, writers and political thinkers into the house, and fellow Viennese émigré Richard Neutra lived there after reaching Los Angeles during the 1920s. Friends of the Schindler House formed in 1976 amid redevelopment threats, the property was acquired in 1980 with state preservation funding and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture began operating there in 1994. Continue to West Hollywood Library, the 32,000-square-foot civic building by Steve Johnson and Jim Favaro that opened October 1, 2011 as the centerpiece of the first phase of the West Hollywood Park Master Plan. Johnson Favaro placed major reading areas behind an expansive glass wall oriented toward the surrounding civic landscape, joining library functions with council chambers accommodating more than 150 people and spaces for community programming. Phase I represented a $64 million public investment, supported by a LibraryPark fundraising campaign that had secured nearly $7 million by the opening period. Shepard Fairey, RETNA and Kenny Scharf simultaneously transformed exterior walls through a public-art collaboration among the city, MOCA, Vanity Fair and Cadillac, bringing three distinct strands of Los Angeles street and graphic art directly onto the new civic architecture. Conclude at MAK Center for Art and Architecture, founded in 1994 through cooperation among MAK - Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, the Austrian federal government and Friends of the Schindler House. The institution operates across three R. M. Schindler buildings: the 1922 Kings Road headquarters, the 1939 Mackey Apartments residency and exhibition site and the 1936 Fitzpatrick-Leland House used for smaller programs. Its exhibitions, commissions, performances, lectures, publications and international residency program use Schindler's architecture as active cultural infrastructure, extending the experimental principles of his buildings into contemporary artistic production. The organization's Austrian-American structure also reconnects Schindler's Southern California work with the Viennese education that exposed him to Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos and the architectural debates preceding his migration to the United States. The progression moves from Schindler's experiment in communal domestic architecture through Johnson Favaro's civic building and culminates in an institution using historic architecture for contemporary cultural production, tracing a century of design experimentation around Pacific Design Center.

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