The City of West Hollywood will soon be receiving a new 75,000 square-foot Aquatic and Recreation Center, as developers look to have the project delivered next month. Located within the West Hollywood Park, the project was created for the City of West Hollywood, with the community having a large input in the design.
“I don’t think any other city crosses their t’s and dots their i’s like West Hollywood, they make sure even before a project breaks ground this is something everyone is going to be behind, this is something that everybody wants. They get everyone excited about it because they feel their involvement, they see their involvement in the work,” said Rick D’Amato, Design Director with LPA Designs, the architecture firm behind the project.
According to LPA Designs, the soon-to-be completed building, at 647 N. San Vicente Boulevard, will house four levels of community services. These include two rooftop swimming pools and a 17,000 square-foot multi-sport court with bleacher seating and scoreboards. The building will also house five community meeting rooms, a conference room, City of West Hollywood staff offices, a daycare center, a public access television studio and more. The building will exist between two structures, separated by a public street and connected by a bridge over the roadway.
“This is such an enormous complex project that spans over a public street,” D’Amato said. “You’ve got two pools 65 feet in the air. You’ve got a television studio at the bottom with a gymnasium sandwiched in the middle, community rooms, daycare, staff offices; it’s crazy.”
A focal point of the building, D’Amato explained the rooftop pools are built out of vinyl and wrapped in concrete so as to protect from any potential leakages.
“We built the pool basically in a concrete bathtub. [The City of West Hollywood] was very worried about leakage in case of seismic so the pool actually sits within a giant gutter system so that if anything happens with the pool and it ruptures, the water is automatically captured and filtered out of the building without ever touching the building, which is amazing,” he said.
Located in West Hollywood Park, the building is anchored by a grand staircase, which begins on park grounds and leads 65 feet in the air to the pool deck. According to LPA Designs, the staircase is intended to serve as a place for social activities, with the bottom step large enough to be used as a small performance venue.
“I love the stair. That was the original concept and that I think is what is going to join everything together, because it not only joins together the functional aspects of the building but it connects the public to the site, it connects you to this insane view. Imagine you’re 65 feet in the air looking over at the Hollywood sign, I mean it’s so spectacular,” D’Amato said. “It was designed so that the first stair is the stadium stair. It integrates landscape, it integrates seating so that they can have events, performances, either in the park or on the stair itself.”
The park itself is also receiving several upgrades with landscaping from Los Angeles-based Rios Clementi Hale. These upgrades are set to be complete in October and include additional open space, updated playgrounds, space for public art and two off-leash dog parks featuring water stations, trees for shade and turf terraces.
“For a city of its size, it’s incredibly dense. There’s a lot of rental units, multifamily housing, things like that, so not a lot of room for open space,” D’Amato said. “So this park actually gives them more open space because we built a lot of the building on the adjacent parking lot. What it also did was allow us to give the community this dog park, actually two dog parks, and that was part of their direct influence, so that was great.”
The park itself is located between San Vicente Boulevard and N. Robertson Boulevard. It is also in close proximity to many West Hollywood restaurants and retail properties, who D’Amato said will continue to benefit from future work within the park.
“We’re looking at now as an additional phase, a future phase of the project, the beautification of the alley that connects all those restaurants to the park. So that’s now become another project, which is great, but it’s just been really an amazing story about not only community involvement, but business involvement. We had some amazing meetings with the business community,” D’Amato said.
