Carrier Center: Rehab in a Shell

By Eric Richardson
Published: Friday, July 07, 2006, at 02:31PM

Carrier Center: Former Robinson Department Store

Eric Richardson

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — The old Robinson Co. department store at 7th and Grand is a very cool looking old building. Built in the early 1910s, the building used to house floors of shopping. Today, though, it's a data center owned by Digital Realty Trust. From the outside you really don't get a sense of what the building's made of internally.

When the building was converted to its present use in the late 1990s thick concrete sheer walls were erected several feet inside the building's fancy exterior. At the same time a concrete slurry was poured into the subbasement. Today the core of the building sits inside a shell -- if a big earthquake were to come the outer tile walls may fall down, but the concrete structure inside will keep on humming with its huge generators and backup water supplies for cooling.

I didn't realize until recently that the exterior you see today (largely the same as in this 1951 photo) isn't what the building looked like when it was built. You can see in this photo from the 1920s that the building originally had a brick exterior that was remade in the ensuing decades. Unlike other facade conversions, this one came out pretty cool.

Comments

mike writes:

If it's really as bad as it looks in the photo (and from street-level on 7th), then this kind of 'rehab' is really a catastrophe. While it's probably better than having the building torn down for a parking lot, putting those concrete walls inside the shell basically means that nothing much else can ever be done with the building--if you wanted to turn it back into offices, retail, or residential spaces, you'd have to either completely demolish the new walls or cut a huge number of holes in them just to get light in. I can't tell how thick these walls might be, but I'd assume that if they needed to add them in the first place, they probably didn't skimp on the thickness.

One of the great things about most of the older buildings downtown is their mutability and their (continued) ability to adapt to new uses and now patterns of living. Hopefully, the city shows a little more fore-thought before allowing more of this type of short-term renovation that minimizes the long-term ability of downtown to change within its own skin. Somehow, I'm just not optimistic that computer technology is going to continue to require half a city block just devoted to housing server racks and drives--and then what happens to this thing and it's slurry-filled basement?

# on Jul.08.2006 AT 11:24 AM

HostBandit writes:

This is where HostBandit.com has it's datacenter.

# on Nov.01.2007 AT 11:37 AM

Carrier Center: Rehab in a Shell

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