The pyramid-shaped office building in Laguna Niguel known as “Ziggurat” should be hit with a wrecking ball.
Instead, the federal government says any buyer must preserve what most folks see as an industrial eyesore.
After a lengthy review process, the General Services Administration says it will start a public auction March 7 for the 89-acre Laguna Niguel site with a starting bid of $70 million. The centerpiece is the yellowish, seven-story building officially known as the Chet Holifield Federal Building.
The key twist in the bid proposal is that any successful buyer must create a “preservation easement” for 26 acres that includes the terraced building, two guard stations, a driveway, and a rooftop parking area. Basically, the gaudy structure must be kept intact.
Preservation will likely limit Uncle Sam’s proceeds from the auction. It will also prevent the community from gaining the maximum from a total rethinking of prime Orange County land.
This isn’t some beloved icon. Yes, it’s “historic” in a sense – if old and unappealing qualify. Demolition would create a grand spot for much-needed housing that would be instantly supported by nearby shopping and dining, a major park, as well as some low-rise office space.
But Laguna Niguel has currently zoned the 1-million-square-foot property for “a wide range of public, semi-public and special-purpose private facilities to provide a variety of government and social services to the community,” federal documents say.
As for what federal coffers might gain from a sale, consider the bad timing. The auction comes as office space is out of favor with investors. The post-pandemic era of hybrid jobs, mixing at-home and in-person work, slashed demand for corporate workspaces.
Plus, the 51-year-old building is in bad shape. The federal review called Ziggurat a “large but obsolete building” … with “substantial repair and building safety requirements.”
Odd shape
A federal review determined the facility has historical value worth keeping.
It’s not that anything famous happened there. Rather it’s the Holifield building’s odd look crafted by well-known architect, William Pereira.
Ziggurat looks like something from a sci-fi story or ancient Mesopotamia, depending on one’s architectural eye. Some call it an example of “brutalism” design, a style that clearly doesn’t soothe the soul.
Its shape is rare, too, one of seven such structures in the nation. Others include Fort Knox, the nation’s gold depository in Kentucky, and New York’s Guggenheim Museum designed by the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright.
Pereira, who died in 1985, has quite the California portfolio. His futuristic style can be seen in the spider-like “Theme Building” that greets visitors to Los Angeles International Airport. There’s also the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. And even the Disneyland Hotel.
His prolific body of works includes his role in the master plan for the city of Irvine as well as the design of UC Irvine.
But does that resume require saving the Laguna Niguel monstrosity? Hey, Pereira’s Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art recently was torn down.
In Laguna Niguel, preservation feels like doubling down on what’s been a huge construction error.
Bad memory
Some savvy developers might pull off something cool in “preserving” the structure while innovating elsewhere on the “non-historic” slices of the Ziggurat land.
But instead of gaining a blank canvas for significant redevelopment, South County will, at best, get a retooled property that wasn’t supposed to be government offices in the first place.
Architect Pereira gained fame in the 1960s designing futuristic offices and production spaces for Southern California’s aerospace industry.
For example, he was the architect for the Ford Aerospace headquarters in Newport Beach, which was torn down and replaced with housing in the 1990s.
Laguna Niguel’s Ziggurat was supposed to be, at the time of construction, the nation’s largest manufacturing site as well as corporate offices.
Its original owner, defense contractor Rockwell, began construction in 1968 in what was then a rural, lightly populated area. Ziggurat was completed in 1971. But the building was never used for corporate purposes. Deep defense cuts in the early 1970s were said to alter the owner’s thinking.
It stayed vacant until 1974 when it became federal offices after a swap with Rockwell for government defense plants in Los Angeles. Local federal offices slowly relocating to Ziggurat.
Such an Orange County story! Ziggurat was a real estate goof by private industry – and the federal government bailed out the developer.
Not sure that’s a keepsake memory, especially when there are better things to do with the land.
Jonathan Lansner is the business columnist for the Southern California News Group. He can be reached at jlansner@scng.com
