CRITIQUE : SEWAGE TREATED TO FINE DESIGN : Hyperion Plant Proves Essential Public Works Don’t Have to Be Boring

Architecture, it is said, is society made visible, and the architecture of the 1980s was, like the times, flashy, flamboyant and overwhelmingly selfish.

In that boisterous decade many of our best architects poured their talents and ideas into the design of opulent private residences and hotels, trendy eateries and boutiques, and corporate skyscrapers.

By contrast, the few major public projects completed in Los Angeles in the 1980s tended toward such high-profile, icing-on-the-cake commissions as the Museum of Contemporary Art.

In recent years, however, as the private sector economy has faltered, the pendulum has swung back to a concern with a more socially responsible and public kind of architecture. Increasingly, top local designers are turning their attention to the buildings that support civic life.

For example, the series of recent projects designed for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power by architect Mehrdad Yazdani has won national recognition for excellence. And many new local schools, recreation complexes, fire stations and other public facilities have attracted some of our best local architects.

The Los Angeles architect with the longest track record and most respected reputation in the design of public projects is Anthony Lumsden. As head of design for Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, a major Los Angeles-based engineering and architecture company, Lumsden has for the past decade been responsible for the design of more than 30 buildings in the $2-billion program for upgrading Los Angeles’ Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant in El Segundo.

The 144-acre Hyperion plant along Vista del Mar treats most of the sewage generated in Greater Los Angeles. It is the workhorse of a system serving 4 million people in a 600-square-mile area. When completed, the upgraded plant will eliminate all the untreated waste that is now pumped into Santa Monica Bay.

The buildings in the Hyperion complex are easily among the best designed contemporary buildings in Los Angeles. Using strong profiles, bold colors and sculptured details, Lumsden has created a simple yet distinctive style superbly suited to the essential functions these buildings serve.

Lumsden’s Hyperion buildings are excellent architecture in a context in which design considerations are often ignored. These powerfully honest structures don’t disguise the nature of their functions, yet neither do they flaunt them.

“I feel it’s more mature and sophisticated to develop a kind of style that doesn’t hide what goes on inside these places, and find a way to turn that into interesting architecture,” Lumsden said. “After all, the quality of our lives directly depends upon these facilities.”

A mature sophistication is most manifest in the 10 largest buildings Lumsden has designed at Hyperion. These are a headworks building that controls the flow of crude sewage; an electrical switchyard and cryogenic plant; a compressor/operations facility; a utility compressor facility; an intermediate pumping station; a service facility; a technical support facility; a thickening facility; a parking structure and warehouse building.

Lumsden’s design strategy in all of these buildings has been brilliantly simple. To keep costs low he developed a “modular kit of parts,” a series of repeated units that can be economically constructed by reusing the same concrete molds over and over. This modular repetition has allowed him to develop elaborate structural profiles with concave and convex surfaces that provide a variety of shadows and highlights over extended building frontages that would otherwise be visually boring.

One of the most striking of Lumsden’s Hyperion structures is the compressor/operations building, a 200-foot-long structure sitting between the aeration basins where the active organic sludge is clarified for secondary treatment into inert matter. The building has been elaborated into an eye-catching fantasia with aluminum rooftop drum-rolls and loops of exposed piping, terminating in a dramatic end elevation.

Lumsden has also worked his visual magic on other Hyperion facilities. The concrete-clad warehouse building has been enlivened with sloped, metal-clad roof surfaces that sparkle in the sun. The switchyard building features a sculptural profile with artful concrete and metal extrusions in bold primary colors, and the technical support facility explores the drama of concrete in a manner at once sturdy and light-footed.

One of Lumsden’s main concerns has been to make Hyperion a better neighbor to its residential surroundings. (For many years the plant has been so deliberately anonymous it hasn’t even been named in the standard Thomas Bros. map of the area.)

The vivid, sculptural forms of the new buildings are intended to enhance the quality of their surroundings.

Although the Hyperion complex is among his best work, its architectural honesty and aesthetic vigor is typical of Lumsden’s style.

Now 65, and recently retired as head of design for DMJM, a position he held since 1965, Lumsden has always pursued the same central obsession: to explore the sculptural possibilities of the exterior skins of buildings and the ways in which they express what goes on inside.

One of the finest examples of this exploration occurred in the 1984 administration building for the Tillman water reclamation plant at Sepulveda Dam. In this award-winning design, a rolling metal and glass membrane cascades like a waterfall over a bare-bones concrete structure bordering the lake in a Japanese garden.

Even earlier, Lumsden experimented with curved and sinuous building skins in several Wilshire Boulevard commercial high-rises, including One Park Plaza, 3250 Wilshire Blvd., completed in 1971, and Manufacturers Bank (also known as Roxbury Plaza) in Beverly Hills, completed in 1974. In these towers, the glazed enclosure broke free of its structural skeleton to meander in sensuous undulations, which relieved the monotony of the standard commercial glass box.

Over the years Lumsden has developed a highly personal style admired by his peers. This is a unique achievement for a designer working within the corporate structure of an international company mainly concerned with the kind of large-scale engineering and architecture projects.

Lumsden’s design signature is a kind of “Techno-Expressionism”--a high-tech architecture infused with flowing shapes. While staying true to his early Modernist roots, Lumsden has evolved a flexible design vocabulary that can express a romantic kind of emotion even in buildings as workmanlike as those at Hyperion.

“My style focuses on developing productive responses to complex realities,” Lumsden said. “I see the buildings I’ve designed at Hyperion as the confirmation of my belief that architecture can be simultaneously bold, moving and useful.”