AECOM has designed a $42,000,000 campus and training facility for a professional basketball organization in West Los Angeles. The building contains a basketball arena, corporate headquarters, a hall of fame, and gardens, among other programs. Despite the building’s varied uses, AECOM was determined to make it “basketball centric.”
Located near Los Angeles International Airport, the building’s form addresses its community by paying homage to long buildings from Southern California’s history as an aviation and aerospace power. In addition, to invite the surrounding community to experience the training facility, the architects designed basketball courts that can double as parking lots.
The training facility’s form derives from AECOM’s desire to envelop the interior architecture’s varied forms with a unifying surface. To accomplish this, the architects wrap the interior spaces with glass walls and cap the entire building with a sawtooth roof, measuring 290 feet wide by 384 feet long. Supporting the enormous building is a grid of steel columns that allows the interior spaces to become structurally independent from the translucent exterior case.
By forming an enormous case around the dramatically different interior spaces, the geometric uniformity of the exterior translucent material makes the building into a “a box full of objects,” according to the architects. Inside the frosted casing, “[interior objects] will operate like spatial non sequiturs, mixing programmatic instability with nearly theatrical specificity.” Despite variation in form and function, these interior spaces all reference the unifying programmatic element of the basketball court.
Architects
Americas Architecture Lead
Ross Wimer, FAIAPrincipal, Studio Design Lead, Architecture:
Peter ZellnerPrincipal, Interior Architecture
Michele Ives-RatkovichAmericas Sports Sector Principal
Ryan SickmanProject Team
Elahe Ahmady, Kelly Capp, Ivan Cremer, John Dillon, Lorene Ford, Josephine Gillard, Yunyun Huang, Carla Idrogo, Eyad Kalaji, Jungmi Kim, Jae Lee, Daniel Lee, Wenji Ma, Tyler McMartin, Zachariah Michielli, Christopher Petzak, Kirill Ryadchenko, Klemens Sitzmann, Armando Suarez, Agus Tio, and Jordan Squires, Dale Strong, Mike WekesserArea
114000.0 ft2Photographs
Courtesy of AECOMPhotographs
Courtesy of AECOMArea
114000.0 ft2
