The Metal Construction Association (MCA) awarded the Pterodactyl office building in Culver City, California its 2016 Chairman’s Award in the Commercial/Industrial category.

Pterodactyl is an office building for an advertising agency atop a parking garage in a complex of new and remodeled buildings in Culver City, Los Angeles.

The parking structure is the conceptual podium for the office building. Buildings in the area are three floors or less, so the office building on the roof affords spectacular views of the entire city from downtown to the Santa Monica Mountains to the Westside of Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. The 800-car, four-level parking structure is straightforward and inexpensive construction of steel frame, metal decks, bays, and ramps at opposite ends.

The office building is formed by the intersection of nine rectangular boxes, lifted one level above the garage roof, stacked either on top of or adjacent to each other, along the west edge of the garage roof. The nine boxes organize essential program elements connected by an interior second floor bridge. The underside of the boxes is cut to accommodate an open plan on the main office floor below. The boxes are supported on the steel column grid extended from the parking structure. Highlighting the facade are metal RHEINZINK prePATINA blue-grey Flat Lock Tiles.  The metal tiles were also used in a low-slope roof application.

 “You couldn’t do anything like this in masonry or wood or anything else, that would have the same impact,” said MCA judge Mark Dewalt, AIA, Principal, Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, Chicago, Illinois.

The Pterodactyl office is the final phase of the Wedgewood Holly campus: office buildings that were originally part of a grouping of contiguous warehouses in Culver City that had been added to since the 1940s. The design premise required a strategic removal of portions of the original buildings in order to establish new building identities, allow sufficient space for landscaping, and accommodate both pedestrian and automobile circulation on the site.

The original four-level parking garage was built in 1998. The structure was designed to anticipate a future building, with steel columns extended above the top floor plate. With the addition of the Pterodactyl in 2015, the final element of the Wedgewood Holly complex is complete.

Project Recognition

Building Owner: Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith, Los Angeles, California
MCA Member Distributer: RHEINZINK America, Inc.
Architect: Eric Owen Moss Architects, Culver City, California
Contractor: Samitaur Constructs, Culver City, California
Metal Installer: Architectural Metal Cladding, Inc., West Hollywood, California
Metal Fabricator: CSI Architectural Metal, Inc., Carson, California