Robert
A. Baron: Photographic Essay
Presidential Circle
Hollywood, Florida
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An Office Complex for a Beach Community
An Office Complex for a Beach Community The glass-clad office building on Presidential Circle in Hollywood, Florida is the most imposing and modern structure in this beach community of over 100,000 residents. It is located on the westernmost of the three park-sized circles envisioned in 1925 by city founder Joseph Wesley Young as part of Hollywood's original plan. [Map] Originally the site of a military academy (hence its former name, Academy Circle), as late as the 1940s what is now Presidential Circle was but an isolated outpost in an undeveloped wilderness. But by the late 1950s, as Hollywood began its westward expansion, Academy Circle was already being surrounded by new housing, with malls and improved highways coming soon to meet the needs of Hollywood's growing population. Each of founder Young's circles diverted the otherwise uninterrupted east-west axial flow of the broad main thoroughfare, Hollywood Boulevard. Terminating Hollywood's path to the ocean, was the elegant mission-style Hollywood Beach Hotel. The eastern-most circle, formerly Harding, now Young Circle is a municipal park that serves as a gateway to Hollywood's now "historic" business district. City Hall Circle (now Watson Circle) lies about 2.7 miles from the coast, while Presidential Circle lies yet another mile inland. The imposing presence of the building at Presidential Circle is made all the more striking by the long unobstructed vistas that converge upon this ediface. These vistas are created by the wide berth of Hollywood Boulevard and by the proximity of single-storey modestly designed commercial structures that flank both sides of Hollywood Boulevard in either direction. The monumental effect is magnified even further because the entire Presidential Circle structure and the land on which it sits has been artificially raised slightly above the flat expanse of the so-called "Hollywood Hills" district that extends in all directions around it. [AA] An Architecture of Pseudo Realities The building at Presidential Circle, the work of architects Barreta & Associates, Boca Raton, consists of two approximately trapezoidal structures, each entirely surfaced with mirror-like sapphire blue glass. These two units meet and join at the center of the property in a circular glass-domed atrium rotunda of contrasting clear transparent glass. The trapezoidal elements (see plan) are each chamfered at a 45 degree angle on their east and western façades, thus meeting each other on axis at right angles. In effect, these indentations form matching exterior walled propylaea that direct visitors from the peripheral parking lots, through covered walk-ways and then into the atrium rotunda, itself. Significantly, these intersecting massive glass walls on the east and west create optical illusions for travelers along Hollywood Boulevard. Because the building manifests as two monumental blue mirrors set at ninety-degrees to each other, from both east and west vantage points the north building reflects the south building and the south reflects the north. Viewed from a distance, the reflected architecture, an image of itself, can appear more tactile and more substantial than does the physical structure. [AC] From a distance, looking straight on from east or west, blue glass reflecting blue glass produces what can only be called a fictive architectural essence whose perceived density is greater than that of the real building. The observer soon realizes that the Presidential Circle one sees is fabricated out of reflections and the play of light. [AC] The observer, instinctively following the ancient lessons of atmospheric perspective assumes that the darker reflection is closer than the lighter-appearing tactile structure. Another illusion takes over when the observer is not lined up on the axis of Hollywood Boulevard. These off-axis reflections of the east and west façades conjure a quite different effect, one that makes the expanse of blue glass appear to be an insubstantially flat screen through which the real building appears as if it were a ghost architecture extending beyond into a non-existent world. [BB] The interplay of fictive and real architecture is not unknown in Florida. Disney World, for instance, continuing a tradition of festival architecture that extends back to the extravagant pseudo-buildings of nineteenth-century Coney Island and further back to the ephemeral architecture of Renaissance pageantry, plays this game too. But Presidential Circle achieves opposite results: Here, in this Hollywood of the eastern seaboard, we find fictive architecture that appears to be real while the real building presents itself as a stage prop. Indeed, as a stage prop, this architecture, when seen from east or west, where, in early morning or late in the day, the sun most strongly and directly assaults the vectored façades, begins to allude to shapes one typically would associate with classical architecture. The wings as they reflect one in the another seem not unlike a temple façade surmounted with a pediment and then capped by a structure (here real) that implies the presence of a central dome. [AC] Some of these illusions only exist because of the play of filtered light on the building's surfaces. In contrast, on the north and south sides, where no avenue offers views from the distance, the building at Presidential Circle reveals only undistinguished but monumental flat walls, the monotony of which is relieved only partly by a vertical notch that divides the structure in half. [EA] Close up, the exterior mirror-blue walls produce another effect. They obfuscate their real mass, and by virtue of their blue-filtered reflections return the viewer's space right back to him, but with impurities removed: White clouds seem to become whiter, the sky is bluer or more dramatic in its moods, and the reflected ambiance absents any vestige of the slightly blighted surrounding neighborhood . [EB] [ED] [alley] The effect may be said to be as if seen "through a glass," but more brightly. Eighteenth-century cultured Englishmen sometimes would carry with them a convex tinted glass, called a "claude glass." Through this device they would observe and thereby transform the landscape before them into a surrogate of paintings by Claude Lorraine. For those who come near it, the blue sapphire mirror-glass wall of the Presidential Circle building serves very much the same purpose. If Hollywood at its birth was the dream city of successful real-estate speculators that its founder envisioned, the interplay of real and unreal within Presidential Circle would be the perfect end-of-the-century metaphor for this town of ever hopeful expectations. Presidential Circle's biggest surprise, however, and the feature that makes it especially noteworthy, in my opinion, appears only after the sun has set, after the offices have closed and the building lies dormant. Absent the light of the sun to hoodwink the observer, Presidential Circle defines its nocturnal presence with building-sized neon or fluorescent lights that outline the edges and corners of the building's mass -- blue lights for the office blocks and white lights for the rotunda. The result uses the aesthetic of the neon sign to extend into the night a hint of the daytime presence of this building. [AD] [CC] [CD] Unlike day, at night, the suggestive effects of surface reflections, with only the neons as their subject, simplify and reduce the building to sets of intersecting vectors of light. Walls intersect with their reflections to create an impossible architecture of masks and pseudo realities. The effect is not unlike the transparent skin armatures computer imaging programs create in their efforts to simulate three-dimensional objects, except that the observer has difficulty distinguishing real from reflected light. At night there is no mass except that which light suggests. If the exterior of Presidential Circle dissolves architecture in favor of what lies outside, the interior -- what lies inside the rotunda atrium -- is all about messing up our ideas of enclosed space. It is difficult to determine whether this domed precinct is an enclosed space bounded by architecture or an outdoor solarium courtyard protecting inhabitants from the weather. Here, too, while the surface of the architectural surround suggests boundedness, and even evokes the walled space of a metropolitan street, it is the space enclosed under the glass dome that predominates. The interior space at floor-level in the rotunda is only minimally occupied -- noticeably vacant. [FA] In contrast, floating from the ceiling is an expansive space-consuming wire sculptural assembly (a hanging sculpture) that attempts to merge its raylike form and its golden color with the light streaming in from above, much as Bernini did when he created golden pathways for the divine radiance that lights the epiphany of St. Theresa's ecstasy. [FB] [GC] The key effect created by this interior space is seen near the glass-domed vault. Looking up from below we observe countless reflections bouncing off the faceted surface of the interior sapphire panes. The effect fragments the image of the dome into a complex network of fractured and repeating designs, [FD] [GD] evocative, I suggest, of the lace-like network of ribbed vaults found in some English Gothic buildings.. If the dimensions of light and the fracturing effects of the sun are the subjects of this building, its theme expresses our need to understand the world as a better place than it really is. This is a serviceable concept; it is a dream that brought and continues to bring populations from the cold north to warm Florida; it attracts families to Disney World, and, perhaps it is a just expression of the love of sometimes impossibly optimistic promises that has worked so well for businesses that depend upon hope, prayer, and a little smoke. A
Brief History of Hollywood Florida Credits Map: Microsoft: Streets Plus Images on this page were taken with a Nikon Coolpix 900 digital camera. The large 1280x960 pixel images are the uncropped output from the Coolpix. They have been highly compressed for this Presidential Circle Presentation. The medium-sized images were reduced to about 640x460 pixels and have been highly compressed by PhotoShop 3.0. The thumbnail images and the html matrix in which they reside were produced by IrfanView ver. 3.20. The viewer: The Thumbnail images and the hot-link labeled 1280x960 download high-resolution low compression images of about 200k each. Only users with fast connections or infinite patience may wish to choose these options. The hot-link thumbnails will download a much smaller file. In both cases, downloaded images spawn secondary viewers. The user may download as many images to this viewer as he wishes. After selecting the secondary viewer the user may use the back and forward buttons to page through his selections. The thumbnail page remains current in the primary viewer. Images chosen from the text use their own viewer. License: Educators and individuals are welcome to take copies of these images and to use them for personal, educational, nonprofit purposes in the same way that educators would ordinarily use copy photography for classroom use. They may not be transferred to others to use, nor may they be used in for-profit endeavors, including distance education that has no face-to-face component. In addition, I ask that the images be attributed to me as the photographer in cataloging records. Do not link to these images. They may be taken off-line shortly or moved. I will attempt to keep the thumbnail pages on-line however. Credit line: (c) 2000 Robert Baron () Naming convention: The file names on the web-site give the date and time (yr/mo/day/hr/min/sec) that the photo was taken. "_t" after a filename indicates that it is a thumbnail. "_m" after filename means the image is 640x480 and has been highly compressed, _L here indicates that the image is large and highly compressed. Write to | Home Page Last edited: 09/17/2010. |
