The Fine Sound and Flawed Design of a Grand Orange County OCPAC

SAN FRANCISCO —  When America gets around to culture, the pioneers used to say, America will make culture hum. Except for places like Texas, there’s nowhere the frontier spirit hums better than in affluent Orange County, which finally has symphony, opera, ballet, Broadway musicals, you name it, in a $73-million Orange County Performing Arts Center, known by its awful acronym OCPAC. Victory over any barbarian past is signified by a mightly triumphal arch.

But this isn’t imperial Rome. It’s the nebulous, non-urban realm of Orange County. The arch doesn’t command intense life at the Forum, but at South Coast Plaza, the vast shopping mall and high-rise office development owned by Henry T. Segerstrom and his family, along the San Diego Freeway at Costa Mesa.

Never mind that the arch is a structural fake. Its reddish granite cladding is pure veneer, covering a trussed inner frame of steel, all angles and squares, that has nothing to do with a rounded form. The great forward wall is nothing more than a free-standing screen, an enormous advertisement, cut open in the shape of an arch.

Yet the superficial effect is grand. No less than 182 feet wide and 120 feet high, the great symbolic portal--which turns out to be not a real entrance at all--swells majestically across the front of Segerstrom Hall, the 3,000-seat auditorium that is OCPAC’s pride and joy. At night, when the building is lit, the arch acts as a monumental proscenium for the social drama attending the performance, revealing open terraces that are crowded on warm evenings, glittering and mirrored spaces within--spectacularly walled in glass--through which a colossal “Firebird” sculpture by Richard Lippold crashes outward into the void, flashing brightly colored metal plumage.

There could be no better emblem for Orange County, crashing through provincialism to the big-time world of music and art. Gone are the days when local gentry had to journey to Los Angeles to enjoy Establishment high culture, as countrified Russians once traveled to St. Petersburg under the czars. Now Zubin Mehta, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leontyne Price gladly come here. That Orange County, on its own, has contributed little to the real culture of our time--indeed often opposed it--matters less than the prospects, say, for the Pacific Symphony, which a short time ago played in a Santa Ana high school. The striving young orchestra has graduated to an acoustically daring, ingeniously organized auditorium; despite many architectural flaws, Segerstrom Hall is, functionally, the finest multipurpose facility of its kind in the country.

Like most American halls of this kind that must make some sense economically, Segerstrom is a little too large: 2,500 seats or less would have been far better than 3,000. But even the most distant seats in the unusual four-tier interior, slashed into different levels for acoustical reasons, are not too far from the stage. Sight lines are excellent. Backstage accommodations and rehearsal spaces are lavish. Chairs and aisles are generous and the whole building exudes a comfortable parvenu mood, not least in the well-upholstered patrons’ lounge, where even people who are unfamiliar with such things feel instantly at home.

There’s no reason they shouldn’t be. South Coast Plaza, from which OCPAC is inseparable, is where these people spend much of their material and spiritual lives. If the local worthies are at ease anywhere, it is in this upscale “instant” environment, where a generation ago the only pretension to culture was agriculture. The first Segerstroms, fresh from Sweden, started farming Orange County at the close of the last century; they are still the world’s leading lima bean growers.

By the 1960s, however, they realized that a far more lucrative cash crop might be planted in the form of a regional shopping center. After a crude architectural beginning, the center has been much expanded and improved; South Coast Plaza has become one of the nation’s largest and most profitable retail complexes. The phalanx of showy department stores still can’t be called serious design (although a few specialty shops are exquisite), but the many arched portals in these malls--at once heavy-handed and curiously insubstantial even in an opulent store like Nordstrom--bear a certain cousinly resemblance to the huge arch of Segerstrom Hall.

South Coast Plaza’s cultural architecture thus can’t be fully understood except in the larger context of its commercial developments. This is not to say that OCPAC is there simply to help stores make money. Henry Segerstrom is a sincere and discerning benefactor of the arts. In recent years he and his wife, Renee, have become internationally known for their sculpture collection, including major pieces by Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Joan Miro and others, gracing both the interiors and the park-like surroundings of his office buildings and the tall South Coast Plaza Westin Hotel. None of these works could be paid for in increased rents, still less the remarkable glass and steel gates by Los Angeles artist Claire Falkenstein that lead to Segerstrom’s most exalted public gift to the environment--Isamu Noguchi’s “California Scenario,” a stone and water garden finished five years ago at a cost of $5 million. A different real estate developer might have put that kind of money into more office-building.

But the interplay between public and private interests is more complex than that. Segerstrom believes that he is “building a city” and maybe he’s right. He is also convinced that his family’s cultural donations, including the land and millions in cash that make the Segerstroms OCPAC’s biggest backer, have clinched a bid to establish South Coast Plaza as the “hub” or even “downtown” for the Southern California “Gold Coast” stretching from arch-rival Irvine to Costa Mesa.

Such a concept makes civic pride almost indistinguishable from business investment. OCPAC’s great performance hall was planned as the centerpiece of a mixed group of buildings that would all profit from its presence, one way or another. As the arch comes into view, past a line of palms, down the axis of Town Center Drive, it does have a compelling central force, focusing a perspective that has been laid out in the grand manner by landscape architect Peter Walker, in company with SWA Associates.

Then, at the arrival circle, a 21-story office building shoulders into the scene from the left and the charming little South Coast Repertory Theatre perks up to the right--but the whole composition falls apart. What should have been a level plaza, between the office tower and Segerstrom Hall, tilts into a steep ramp, seemingly headed nowhere in particular. The high-rise, rounded at the ends, is an inoffensive middlebrow building, clad in dark red, polished granite that complements the same granite, done in a lighter matte finish, on the face of the arch.

But the incline cuts between them, slicing upward across the lower stories of the tower, in what may be charitably called an architectural no-no. Then one realizes that the ramp is the ceremonial approach to OCPAC, like the ascent to a shrine.

The turnabout below is merely a drop-off point for cars, where the building is entered through what amounts to a basement doorway crammed under the terrace of the auditorium. Many people coming on foot from nearby restaurants choose this lower entrance, but more will take the ramp when a 1,000-seat theater, now being planned, is built at the top of the rise. A well-designed building may justify the processional experience but, for the moment, the theater site is a gap, behind which looms a 1,200-car parking structure, stridently lit at night, clashing with the more softly illuminated facade of Segerstrom Hall.

There’s an environmental truth in these two buildings competing for notice. For most of the audience, the multistory garage, entered from a side road, is the real portal to OCPAC. Between this auto pavilion and Segerstrom Hall is a utilitarian passage that opens at stairs leading to the lofty, glass-enclosed lobby where the “Firebird” flies outward above the broad terrace, commanding a splendid view of South Coast Plaza and the coastal plain.

Here the architects, the big corporate firm of CRS Sirrine (headquartered in Houston but with an office at Irvine), have finally fathomed how elating and sumptuous a performance hall should be. The first impact of the space is alluring--all light and mirrored reflections, with open balconies that seem like loges for the spectacle.

The designers, led by Charles Lawrence, did not want crystal chandeliers; they chose to wall part of the main space and stairs with chamfered mirrors, not too different from those in Davies Hall in San Francisco. The silvery glass sets up a counterpoint with teak and cherry wood paneling and hardware of stainless steel. There is an air of controlled opulence in this piano nobile --the palatial, high second story of classical monuments in Europe--and a distant echo from the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

But once again OCPAC breaks a promise. At the third and fourth levels, as if the architects tired or money ran out, the lines of the building go out of whack and the finishes go blooey as the woodwork, still of good quality, contends with painted Sheet-rock surfaces. Gypsum board, as opposed to carefully laid-on plaster, looks cheap in any major public building but it is particularly disheartening in these upper spaces where many things haven’t been figured out, including improvised steps to some auditorium entries, as if the floors within and without hadn’t matched up.

Inside the tremendous hall, however, all may be forgiven. The architecture suddenly gains force and originality from a revolutionary acoustical concept, presenting the most wildly cut-up hall since the Berlin Philharmonie. But here the acoustics work.

The architects have deferred, in designing seat patterns, to a team of sound specialists headed by New Zealander Harold Marshall, assisted by the young Americans Jerald R. Hyde and Dennis Paoletti. Through meticulous model studies they conceived a house that surges upward in four asymmetrical movements. Looking out from the proscenium opening (itself vertically and horizontally adjustable, to coincide with sound-directing devices that can be raised and lowered from offstage), the auditorium seems to be four separate theaters, slashing irregularly left and right as they climb steeply above one another, shortening the depth of the house and enlivening sounds that could easily go dead in a room of this size.

Every line in the auditorium has been drawn to some acoustical need. The sound isn’t faultless and amplified voices in musicals can be blurred, but the clearly projected notes of a symphony or opera make this great space seem virtually like a recital hall. I don’t know if this is the ultimate answer to multipurpose facilities which, by their very nature involve musical compromise, but it is a brave experiment.

So active a design might have been maddeningly disconcerting, particularly since the architects selected a varied palette of reds--crimson seats, wall surfaces of a different red--but somehow it all hangs together.

After the lights go down, there can be an enchantment and civilized wonder that the people of Orange County should have demanded everywhere in this building. Segerstrom Hall is proof perfect of Lewis Mumford’s troubling dictum that every community gets the architecture it deserves.