Project Description
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.”