The newly opened California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) District 7 Headquarters building designed by Morphosis, located in downtown LA, is the first building project by the State Department of General Services. Not only manage the State highway system, Caltrans is also actively concerned with public transportation systems in California. Like Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Jose Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the Caltrans District 7 promising that downtown Los Angeles could reclaim its status as one of the most original and vibrant urban experiments in America.

The result of a competition that invited the architects Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands and Benedetta Tagliabue of Barcelona, it was not the kind of competition that commonly requires high class design. The enormous scale, which required packing 1.2 million square feet of office space into a 140,000-square-foot site, give conceive that the city would get a conventional office block. And the project’s modest initial budget, roughly $165-170 million, seemed to leave little room for the architectural innovation to appear.

Overall, the offices are relatively banal, victims of budget constraints. In the downgraded version, most of the offices were in a 13-story office block that covers the eastern part of the site, the remainder would be in a three-story structure on the site’s southern side, bordering a public plaza. Features like the mechanized perforated metal facade, the open-air urban lobby and a 120-foot light well would cost roughly $16 million or more. Morphosis strategy forced the city to question how highly it impacted architecture, and surprisingly it worked. Some of the design elements were aborted to save money: the urban lobby, for example, was reduced from six stories to four, and a glass-enclosed conference room was eliminated.

Marking the entrance of the building at 100 South Main Street is a huge ‘100’ icon towering 40 feet above the sidewalk. This sign marks the building and the institution as an urban landmark. Another noticeable architectural element is a long light-bar that juts out from the First Street side of the building to cantilever out over the street and in a low yellow neon strip that wraps around the northeast corner of the building at shoulder level. It’s a statement of movement, about a reflection of car culture in Los Angeles and the contribution of Caltrans.

Morphosis inverses the main lobby from the inside to the outside to create an outdoor room for 1,000 people with public amenities, containing a cafeteria, a large public outdoor lobby area, and an exhibition space to be shared among building workers, visitors and the general public, an intention to create a building that contributes to the civic life of downtown Los Angeles. Pedestrian traffic on Main Street passes directly into this urban lobby, which is defined by a towering void that carves right through the building’s core. The design seeks in every way to engage people actively while camouflaging the building identity, so that this government bureau works as a truly public building.

Inside, the hierarchy of office space is challenged by the reversal of floor plan layout. The Morphosis design brings openness theme, interplay and sustainability into the building. In the Caltrans, Morphosis has concentrated the private, closed-door offices in the core of the building, so that the perimeter and the windows are left free for large, open work areas that promote employee interaction.

In the entrance lobby, a translucent resin reception desk is supported on an I-beam that seems as if it had splintered off from the building’s structure and was now floating in midair. A cantilevered staircase behind the reception desk leads to the second floor. From here, elevators shoot up to a series of smaller lobbies on alternate floors. It operates on a “skip-stop” method, opening onto mini-lobbies located on every third floor, a scheme that increases vertical circulation speed, establishes interim gathering places throughout the building and encourages people to use the stairs.

Lighting contributed to these goals with a building-wide, interconnected workspace specific system. This system permits individual users to control the direct component of the overhead luminaries from their own workstation, while occupancy and daylight sensors continually monitor and adjust the indirect component. The ultimate goal is lower energy consumption and higher user satisfaction. HLB, the lighting designer, scopes this project included interior lighting design for open and private offices, conference rooms, auditorium, childcare center, health center, credit union, lobby, and restrooms as well as exterior lighting design for the building facade, plaza, atrium, and roof garden.

The outdoor lobby is activated by an extraordinary public art installation designed in co-op with Morphosis by the internationally acclaimed artist Keith Sonnier, who evoke the hypnotic glow of cars moving along a freeway at night. Keith named his work Motordom, the largest public art installation in Los Angeles. The work is integrated directly into the architecture of the four story outdoor lobby, filling it with half a mile of neon and argon tubes arranged in horizontal bands of red and blue light that mimic the ribbons of headlights on California’s freeways.

The building’s metal skin peels up to form a canopy that wraps around the plaza’s edges, as if to draw the surrounding street life directly into the composition. The metal skin is alternately open or closed depending on the conditions of outside temperature and sunlight. The building’s south facade is entirely layered with photovoltaic cells which will contribute approximately 5% for the building’s energy. The photovoltaic wall concept is in keeping with the mission of the Design Excellence Program to approach environmentally sensitive design solutions. This project has received the US Green Building Council’s Silver Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Also, the project’s lighting design has received the IES/IIDA Award of Merit and Lumen West Award of Excellence. The design emphasizes sustainable design and energy conservation throughout while staying within the Spartan $200-per-square-foot construction budget that the state imposed on the project, Morphosis did the great job.

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