DETAILS
Founder Harry Culver’s renowned axiom, “All roads lead to Culver City,” acquires new meaning with a spectacular addition to ongoing downtown revitalization. The Culver Steps is a public/private collaboration between The City of Culver City and Hackman Capital Partners devised to highlight the city’s creative “maker tradition,” from its involvement in the filmmaking industry to feats of engineering like the “Spruce Goose. They are framed on one side by Culver Studios, (famed for productions like Gone with the Wind and Arrested Development) and on the other by the Culver Hotel (once frequented by John Wayne and Charlie Chaplin). Not just a celebration of the past, the plaza is centered on today’s award-winning restaurants, transit, and culture.
Inspired by the adjacent foothills of the sierras, the open space design brings nature into the heart of Culver City, integrating stepped terraces, hilly topography, and tree cover. Canted walls and custom-designed planters flank the steps’ nearly 50-foot-wide span, with integrated plantings between the ground plane and second level. The grand architectural staircase that is the project’s centerpiece invites artists, writers, filmmakers, and restaurateurs to gather and share ideas; the renewed connection to nature serves as a placemaking foundation, and is paired with identity and activation strategies to engage the community in the new plaza’s success.
In June 2018, The Culver Steps was awarded the Los Angeles Business Council’s Under Construction Award, followed in 2019 by a Best of Design Award from The Architect’s Newspaper. This signature civic destination has already attracted high-profile tenants including Amazon Studios and promises to promote diversity and interaction for locals and visitors while establishing a strong identity for Culver City’s downtown.
Work attributed to SWA/Balsley principal Gerdo Aquino and his team with SWA Group.
Shanghai International Dance Center
Inspired by the idea of movement, this collaboration with Studios Architecture achieves an artful harmony of building with landscape, program with site. The image of a dancer in grand jete kindled the designers’ imaginations and served as the project’s organizing idea. Asia’s first professional dance complex is tucked between a freeway, a subway station...
Xiqu Opera Centre
After it was decided to locate the main concert venue on the building’s top floor to create a covered indoor/outdoor public realm, SWA designed the entire ground level of this venue for traditional Cantonese opera, including a dramatic, covered open-air landscape space. There, an urban stage facilitates movement, provides a gathering space, and enhances ...
Jinbocho Redevelopment
Situated in central Tokyo’s university and publishing district, this new mixed-use project brought urban streetscape character to its immediate neighborhood through the introduction of plazas whose fountains, seating areas, cafes and sculptures serve residents, workers, and the community as a refuge from the busy streets.
A diagram of pedestrian flows t...
Peggy Rockefeller Plaza
Stretching along nine blocks of New York City’s Upper East Side, Rockefeller University is a world-renowned medical research institution with an impressive roster of Nobel Prize winners — and beautiful river views. Once a harmonious urban oasis of 19th century buildings and 20th century modernism stitched together by a renowned Dan Kiley landscape, the c...