Lehrer Architects — A facility to prepare, distribute, and store the elections materials for all 5,000 of Los Angeles' voting precincts, the County Clerk Elections Operations Center is located in an existing 11,000-square-foot warehouse in a suburban office park, a building type that juror Marion Weiss calls "deadly." The design team at Lehrer Architects took a novel approach, using supergraphics—bold floor stripes in pop colors and large-format photographs of a beach at sunset and other natural settings—to enliven the massive shelving units that hold boxes of ballots and voter guides and to lend a sense of place to the cavernous room. "It's a reinvention of a tired type," juror Ellen Dunham-Jones said—and one done for an incredibly low $50-per-square-foot budget. "I like that it's really inexpensive stuff," said Weiss, while juror Ralph Johnson appreciated the design team's "strategy of doing more with less."
Project Credits
Client County of Los Angeles, Community Development Commission Owner/Developer Los Angeles County Department of Public Works Architect Lehrer Architects, Los Angeles—Michael B. Lehrer (principal-in-charge); Steve Deyer (project architect); Travis Frankel (project manager); Nerin Kadribegovic Engineer John Labib + Associates General Contractor MTM Construction Mechanical and Plumbing Engineer Airplus Engineering Consultants Electrical Engineer Vector Delta Design Group Artist Rebeca Mendez Design Size 11,000 square feet Cost $5.6 million ($3.6 million general, $2 million racking system)
