CRITIQUE : Art Park : Escondido marks its artistic coming of age with fine design

Every building exists on two levels. It is a place where we live, learn, play and work. It is also a symbolic statement about who we are as individuals and as members of a community.

Architecture, the saying goes, is society made visible, and nowhere more so than in a building meant to serve a community’s cultural aspirations.

The new $74-million California Center for the Arts in Escondido, in Northern San Diego County, is one of the best recent architectural expressions of a small city’s civic pride.

The arts center, as a functioning complex, gives Escondido a grand new concert hall, art gallery, theater and convention hall. And as a symbol, the center declares that the city of 115,600 residents has come of age.

Escondido’s art center is one of several new cultural complexes that has sprung up in Southern California’s smaller cities and suburban areas in the past decade. Taken together, they represent an expression of fresh public pride in places that have long lacked architectural symbols for their ambitions.

Beginning with the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, which opened in 1986, the region surrounding Los Angeles has in recent years seen the construction of new cultural complexes in areas as diverse as Cerritos, Cal State Long Beach, Claremont’s Pomona College, Poway and Thousand Oaks.

Fusing symphony concerts, opera and theater with popular programs such as musicals and community events, these new arts facilities aim to create a distinct identity for small cities lying in the shadow of Los Angeles or other large cities, in Escondido’s case, San Diego.

Escondido’s California Center for the Arts is, along with Cerritos’ Performing Arts Center, the most architecturally distinguished new arts complex in the Southland. Designed by the late Charles Moore and the Santa Monica-based firm of Moore Ruble Yudell, it provides a proud and finely scaled series of buildings set in a park at the heart of Escondido’s downtown core.

“We had twin objectives in mind,� said former Mayor Jerry Harmon, one of the prime movers in the creation of the Escondido arts complex. “We wanted to bring culture to the heart of town to create a civic focus. And we hoped that this investment of public funds would encourage private investment in the revitalization of our downtown area.�

The city of Escondido provided the land for the center and financed its construction through bond issues and community redevelopment agency fees. In response, many businesses have opened on the surrounding streets, including shops, restaurants, art galleries and antique stores.

In the center, a 1,524-seat concert hall and 408-seat theater are linked with a visual arts building and a convention hall on a 12-acre site on the edges of Escondido’s Grape Day Park, opposite the 6-year-old City Hall.

All four buildings in the arts complex are clothed in uniform gray stucco and roofed in galvanized aluminum. Glazed lantern towers and angled exterior stair walls contrast with the concert hall’s 100-foot-tall fly tower.

The buildings are linked together by a network of courtyards and colonnades, creating a series of inviting formal and informal indoor and outdoor spaces.

The style for the center developed by Moore and his partners derives from the Mission Revival-Beaux Arts fusion originated by noted architect Myron Hunt in the early decades of the century. The massive simplicity of the center’s plain stucco walls is enlivened by classical details, recalling Hunt’s 1910 Throop Hall at Caltech and his 1927 Pasadena Public Library. In the center, Hunt’s mannerisms have been given a gentle postmodern twist, plus a dash of Art Deco.

The center skillfully enhances the urban quality of the city’s major intersection, at Valley Parkway and Escondido Boulevard. Its buildings, colonnades and courtyards follow the lines of the surrounding sidewalks to create a solid edge to the street, rather than being set back behind huge, shapeless parking lots or desolate lawns.

The formal entry off Escondido Boulevard, and the informal entry from the adjacent parking area to the north, meet in a round arcaded court linking the concert hall and the theater. The circular shape of this court echoes the City Hall rotunda to the east and acts as a gateway into the landscaped park, with its wide lawns bordered by eucalyptus and palm trees.

“Our aim was to create the scenario for a village green bounded by a series of pavilions that welcome the public,� said architect Buzz Yudell. “Outdoor events, on the green or in the courtyards, lead people into the more formal performance areas, softening any hint of cultural intimidation or condescension.�

The concert hall has three tiers of balconies above a main floor flanked by raised seating blocks known as “parterres.� No seat is more than 105 feet from the lip of the thrust stage, which can be lowered hydraulically to form an orchestra pit.

The walls are cream, the seats are upholstered in plum red and the ceiling is a soft green floating 60 feet above the auditorium. According to Times music critic Chris Pasles, the concert hall’s sound presents “a vibrant presence at the cost of some clarity.� Given the multipurpose function of the hall, from symphonies to musicals, this is a fair trade-off, Pasles said.

The intimate round theater, also painted cream with red seats, has a conventional proscenium stage and two levels of balconies above the main floor. Its circular shape suggests a teatro communale of the kind found in many smaller Italian cities: A place where popular entertainments are as happily at home as a chamber music concert. The intention is that local troupes can practice and learn theatrical crafts in an environment that isn’t intimidating.

The arts center includes a museum with three gallery spaces, four studios for working artists and public art classes, and a small art reference library. The skylit galleries surround an outdoor courtyard for displaying sculpture.

The Conference Hall, situated on the Valley Parkway/Escondido Boulevard intersection, is set back from the sidewalk behind colonnades and a sunken garden. An outdoor meeting area extends the reach of the interior lobby in a climate that offers at least 250 dry, sunny days in the year.

The landscaping, designed by landscape architect Pamela Burton, is still rudimentary. However, in a few years the now-ragged lawns will be restored and the flowering plum trees and acacias will have grown out. “When the landscaping makes its presence felt, the edges of the oval village green will be more clearly visible and the integration of architecture and planting will be reinforced,� Burton said.

The city of Escondido hopes that the center will be largely self-supporting through box office receipts and rentals, augmented by fund-raising.

On opening day last September, with mariachi bands in full swing and a large and cheerful crowd filling the complex, it seemed likely that the California Center for the Arts is set to fulfill its ambition to establish Escondido as a city with a proud and distinct civic identity.