The Douglas Emmett Building is located at 10880 Wilshire Boulevard, at the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Boulevard, in Westwood, California.
The renovation project included re-configuring interior spaces and repositioning exterior landscaping of the building to accentuate the architectural design of the building. Exterior design alterations included addition of a highly visible cascading water feature that creates motion and noise in order deplete unwanted urban influences. In addition to the buildings architecture, it also offers magnificent skyline views of Westwood, downtown Los Angeles, as well as the Pacific Ocean.
The water feature is a canted water wall that is supplied by upper and lower cascade pools. The lower pool includes trio of fixed shallow aerating jets that add to the visual and acoustic components of the design. Although simple in form and function, the physical design required detailed hydraulic coordination of the upper an lower cascade flows in order to form a seamless stepped water cascade. Hydraulic and basin design required careful consideration so that both cascade flows could be independently balanced tuned. Key design component of the water feature is to mitigate unwanted man-made noises created by the surrounding urban environment. To achieve this, cascade flow is made to be variable so that flow can be increased to set the best counter noise to the surrounding environment and that can be adjusted in the future to counter environmental changes. Furthermore, the wall is sloped to prevent splashing to the surrounding hardscape.
The cascade wall surface is clad with mortar set fluted stone. Fluting was added to the stone surface to cause water to lift and fall in order to create aerated water that is both noisy and frothy white to capture and convey ambient light. The base of the cascade wall and the fixed vertical jest are up-lighted by high intensity white LED light fixtures that can be tuned so their output temperature and be adjusted to be even with surrounding architectural lighting.
Project Owner: Douglas Emmett (www.douglasemmett.com/10880-Wilshire)
Project Design Team: Gensler: www.gensler.com, Saiful Bouquet Structural Engineers: www.saifulbouquet.com, KGM Architectrual Lighting: www.kgmlighting.com, Psomas: www.psomas.com, LRM Landscape Architecture: www.lrmltd.com, tk1sc: www.tk1sc.com, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger: www.sgh.com, and Fountain Source Engineering and Design, Inc.
