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Overview

This new Police Administrative Building replaced the Parker Center (1955) by Welton Becket as the headquarters building for the Los Angeles Police Department. The headquarters complex consisted of four components: a main 10-story office tower, a parking garage/mechanical shop, an underground parking garage and a data center. The total cost for all of these parts was $437 million.

Building History

DMJM Design and Roth Sheppard designed the 11-story Police Headquarters #2 as a joint venture. The new building would house centrally police administration and investigative offices. The architects set aside parking spaces for 365 cars. They aimed for LEED certification for mechanical systems, day lighting and recycled building materials.

By the time the building opened on 10/24/2009, DMJM had become part of AECOM, a huge construction/design conglomerate. Working for AECOM, Paul Danna and Jose Palacios served as design partners for the LAPDPolice Administrative Building (PAB) #3. AECOM's team worked with the landscape architecture firm, Melendrez on the commission.

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote of the new police center: "As a presence in the skyline, alas, the headquarters -- 10 stories tall and covering 500,000 square feet -- remains cautious and largely unimaginative, a well-appointed office building wrapped in limestone panels and broad expanses of glass and taking the shape of a massive letter L, with long arms pointing east and north. A sharp-edged roof slices across and covers that L, giving the impression that much of the structure is wedge-shaped and opening up a large plaza that offers carefully framed views from the First Street side toward St. Vibiana's Cathedral and from the Main Street edge toward City Hall. Danna and Palacios have tried to create a new home for a powerful institution -- one often connected in the public imagination with scandal or intimidating force -- that looks from certain angles like a place to sell life insurance." (See Christopher Hawthorne, "A neighborly new police headquarters," Los Angeles Times, 10/26/2009.)

PCAD id: 16336