Universal Headquarters by OMA Office for Metropolitan Architecture
folio. pp. 66. profusely illustrated. 1 page of ads paperback (fine condition). [New York]: 1999.
rare catalogue detailing OMA's project for Universal Headquarters in Los Angeles
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Universal Headquarters
Los Angeles is a city without a centre. It has Universal City. Universal City, in turn, is a centre without a city: myriad functions dispersed across a huge site. The new headquarters building will be its Central Business District – an office building of urban complexity that introduces the reality of critical mass by challenging all components of the new company, (re)assembling the cells, orchestrating their coexistence through expansion, consolidation and reconfiguration. The building has to forge a new entity from disparate parts whose final relationships are uncertain.
The anticipated doubling of the program implies a transition from a spontaneous production of urban substance into a calculated integration of Universal City's current fragments, converting them into a newly planned condition that recuperates the original qualities of the site, exploits its divergences, maintains its idiosyncrasies, improves its flaws and corrects its flows.
Can a building promote creativity? Creativity needs an elusive dose of order and chaos, fixity and improvisation. The building contains Universal's current and future divisions, offers them platforms to interact, laboratories to invent, silos for meeting rooms, places of assembly and relaxation. It is a corporate theatre where groups emerge, are disbanded, and regroup.
By dividing the program into horizontal office floors and vertical towers, the organization of the building becomes a diagram of the unique and the generic: specificity in the vertical direction, generic office space in the horizontal. No matter how turbulent the composition of the company becomes, the office floors provide the necessary flexibility, while the towers guarantee that a single entity is maintained.
There is a Virtual Tower of double height, containing loft-like workshops, a Circulation Tower, which is a travertine-clad atrium with its elevator bank open to the outside air, a Collective Tower of shared conference centres and screening rooms, and an Executive Tower of suites for senior management.
The four structures are connected in mid-air by the Corporate Beam – a glass volume that consolidates corporate activity with special needs and shared support departments. Close to the hilltop the beam cantilevers to lodge corporate leadership. A ramp across the Terrace Parkway gives direct access to an open air parking level for guests and executives.
At this scale of organization, architecture approaches urbanism. Universal is not so much an office plan as an urban plan, a map: the building as an organizer of different elements. The organizational diagram resonates more with a subway map than with a building plan.