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Pacific Design Center’s Red Building Breaks Ground

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$195.5 Million Project Will Be Built All Union

By Roy San Filippo,
Staff Writer

The ceremonial ground breaking on the Pacific Design Center’s Red Building took place on Mar 29 along with a celebration the included elected officials and celebrities. The $195.5 million dollar construction project will be built with union labor and provide an estimated 1,357 full year union construction jobs, or over 2.71 million man-hours of construction work for union trades men and women and contractors. Construction is set to begin this summer and the building is schedule to be open in 2009.

The site is approximately 2.9 acres and is currently used for surface parking. The site will be improved with a 400,000 square foot Class A office building. The building will be separated by two towers. The East Tower will consist of 6 levels of office space containing 215,000 square feet and the West Tower will consist of 8 levels of office space containing 185,000 square feet.

The building is designed to provide up to 19 watts per square foot in electrical capacity. There will be six levels of above-grade parking and one level of below-grade parking in the building’s West Tower and seven levels of above-grade parking and one level of below-grade parking for the building’s East Tower.
The Red Building will be the third and final building of renowned architect Cesar Pelli’s project. It has been 30 years in the making.

“When I started this I was a kid,” joked Pelli, now 80 and designed all three buildings. “This is the longest project I’ve ever done, by far.” The Design Center’s “Blue Whale,” the huge blue glass office building opened in 1975 and its green neighbor in 1988.

The red glass structure will be on San Vicente Boulevard, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. It will be one of the nation’s few bright-red office buildings in a marker that favors muted shades in order to not offend the sensibilities of potential corporate renters.

“This is probably the only place in the world you could get away with it,” said New York builder Charles Steven Cohen, owner of the Pacific Design Center. In order for the building to maintain its vibrant color, the building’s glass will be colored using an very ancient technology. Red, architect Pelli said in a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times, is an especially hard color to incorporate into building materials. “Red paint fades very fast because ultraviolet light attacks it.” To ensure the building stays red, Pelli called for the glass to be colored with a chemical process similar to that which the ancient Assyrians used to make red glazed bricks. “After thousands of years, they’re still vibrant.”

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“J For Jobs”

The project is being funded with $150 million loan from ULLICO Inc’s J for Jobs investment program. ULLICO is the nation’s only fully-unionized, provider of multi-line insurance, financial services and administrative products. The program was created in 1979 as means to create safe investments for union pension funds, according Frank Kao, Senior Regional Manager of ULLICO’s Real Estate Investment Banking Group. The program provides short term construction loans that range from 18-36 months.

“Apart from creating a solid, safe and well collateralized investment, we insist on construction projects using one hundred percent union labor,” said Kao. “Union members can clearly see the benefit from the use of their pension funds,” he added, noting both the safe return on the investment for union pension funds, and also the fact that thousands of union construction jobs are created through the fund each year.

“We are very proud that this project will be built with union labor,” said Abbe Land, City Councilwoman from West Hollywood. “It is important we get quality work and jobs with the benefits and decent wages and all the protections that workers need and deserve.”

The Developer on the project is Charles S. Cohen. Mr. Cohen’s real-estate development company owns and manages more than 12 million square feet of prime office and showroom space in Los Angeles, Manhattan, Florida and Houston. Mr. Cohen’s experience as a developer in Manhattan has made him very familiar with working with union contractors and craftsmen and women, according to Kao. “In fact, he prefers it,” he said.

Cohen hopes to lure tenants in creative industries such as entertainment and media who are attracted to the design center’s location and amenities such as a branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art, an onsite fitness center, a 380-seat state-of-the-art luxury film venue and reception facility, and two restaurants operated by Wolfgang Puck. The West Hollywood office market currently has less than 5% vacancy rate.

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