The 120 Blondo Building by Randy Brown is the prairie’s response to Santa Monica, a collection of composed fragments located at a busy intersection of two arterial roads. Here, there are law offices arise in modernist relief along a typical suburban street. The project is a response to the surrounding banal office buildings that populate urban areas in cities all over the country. Designed only to be functional and cost-effective, these buildings generally lack even a modicum of design input that might elevate them to the status of positive contributors to the urban landscape.

When commissioned to design offices for a law firm for 120 Blondo Building’s main program, Randy Brown took the opportunity to design a working solution to this suburban blight, and to make people question the quality of their built environment. If a conventional office immediately reveals its size and form, this building’s structural elements are designed to conceal the nature of the area beyond, so that the space unfolds as the visitor moves through it.

Randy Brown has used constructivist means to mould the design to its site and brief, and the exterior consists of a series of angled forms and unexpected asymmetries that push and pull away form the orthogonal, in harmony with the adjacent ravine. Familiar industrial materials, such as birch ply, Glulam, polycarbonate sheeting and corrugated metal are incorporated. The 120 Blondo Building exudes youthful energy and, according to the architect, presents perhaps a more critical understanding of context that reflects a less romanticized view of the Plains in the contemporary world.

On the corners are gas stations stores, the backs of houses, and a strip shopping center. The client needed leasable office space as well as offices for their law practice. Rather than translating the program into two distinct portions of the building, Randy Brown divided the space more subtly. The law offices are on the north side and rent office for the client is on the south. Externally, this separation is shown by a metal-clad structure that houses a library and conference room on the first floor, transforming into a canopy that adds a sense of drama to the entrance. Skylights throughout the design allow the building to function without the need for artificial lighting during the day.

A snake-like shape in steel structure rises from the back of the building to hover over the front. The cantilevered metal form helps to define a gash that threatens to form two halves out of the building. The south side of the gash pulls away toward a ravine on the perimeter of the site. The north side simply slides along the flat part of the site toward the corner gas station. Visitors enter the south side of 120 Blondo Building under a two-part canopy. The edge of the metal snake-like shape defines one side of a void. The void weaves to the right then to the left pushed by a slightly bent white mass. The void turns vertical just before the conference room and stairs. This verticality is augmented by a skylit ceiling.

To proceed up the stairs to the upper offices, visitors must pass through the metal form and into the northern half. A strange inversion takes place at the end of this route, outside the front office on the second floor. From this section, the void, which rather than defining a division between two sides, acts as a seam that joins the two parts of the 120 Blondo Building. A large gray frame hovers around the entry to the library, aiding this effect. This spatial dynamic takes away the feeling of a dividing void and reasserts a unity, skewering together what was separate.

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