Richmond Civic Center

None
Good

Richmond Civic Center

Site overview

“We are living in an age of clear and well diversified objectives, and architecture must meet these objectives. We are now living in a mechanical, rational, abstractly imaginative age and our architecture should bear the imprint of the age.” Thus proclaimed the 1930 proposal for “A Civic Center for the City of Richmond,” by the Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC), a collaboration of planner Carol Aronovici and architects Richard Neutra and R.M. Schindler. Interrupted by the Great Depression and World War II, the development of the Civic Center did not proceed until 1945, with a new design by Timothy Pflueger, renowned architect of Oakland’s Paramount Theater (1931) and San Francisco’s Castro Theater (1921). The ensemble of City Hall, Hall of Justice, Auditorium/Art Center, and Public Library was completed in 1951 under the direction of Plueger’s younger brother, Milton (Timothy Pflueger had died in 1946), with landscape architects H. Leland Vaughan and Adele W. Vaughan. (Adapted from the website of the AIA California Council)
Commission

1946

Completion

1951

Commission / Completion details

Commission 1945-6(c), completion 1951(e)

Current Use

City Hall, Hall of Justice/police department, library, auditorium, art center

Current Condition

Excellent. The buildings are remarkably well maintained and unaltered. Minor changes have been made inside the library entrance for security. otherwise interiors as well as exteriors are largely intact.

General Assessment

The Richmond Civic Center occupies a 13-acre, six-block site near the city√.s main business district. Its four related but unlike buildings cluster around a broad, sleekly landscaped Civic Center Plaza in a free-form update of a Beaux Arts axial plan. A large parking lot balances the library at the Macdonald Avenue entrance; the other buildings front on a landscaped esplanade. The buildings are asymmetrically composed of multiple sharp-edged rectangular masses one to three stories high. A long horizontal City Hall terminates the plaza on the north. Exterior are clad in stacked red roman brick, trimmed with narrow white bands along rooflines and canopies, and around and between bands of aluminum-sash windows. The complex is described (Gebhard et al., 1985) as a monument to postwar confidence in the most perfectly characteristic style of the time. Architect Milton Pflueger called it the first modern unified civic center in the country. Pflueger√s firm was a leading northern California exponent of this distinctive, angular, austere late 1940s public building style.