James C. Corman Federal Building

The center of Van Nuys is the Civic Center. The raison d’etre of this pedestrian mall: nobody comes here unless they are forced to.

Here is where you come to file small claims, to appear before a judge, to file plans for a room addition, to borrow a book, to speak to your Councilwoman, to talk to a cop, to ask for an extension of probation.

You can also push your shopping cart full of belongings here, plop on a bench, open a bottle of vodka and drink yourself silly without interference. There are guards, guns, and security cameras, but they are aimed at the general public, not intoxicated people covered in four weeks of dirt.

There is one glorious structure, built in 1933, the Valley Municipal Building. And then there is everything around it, including the “new” library (1964), the “new” LAPD (1965), the Marvin Braude Center (1994), the Van Nuys Courthouse East (1965), the Van Nuys Courthouse West (1990), the James C Corman Federal Building (1973) and the double decker County Parking Facility at 6170 Sylmar Ave. an $850,000 symphony of concrete opened in 1968. Also vast and comprehensive: the LAPD Motor Transport Facility at 6170 Tyrone Ave. where cop cars are prettied up behind fences.

If you want to register a new business you can come to the Los Angeles County Registrar at 14340 Sylvan St. and make your way past half a dozen aggressive hucksters passing out business cards in which they offer, for a fee, to transact your business for you.

If Van Nuys were a 1962 film by Michaelangelo Antonioni, its stark, barren, nuclear winter surroundings would make for an immensely powerful setting showing the alienation of man from urban environment.

There is so much concrete here, the place is awash in it. It is sculptured, sliced, stacked, plated, affixed, drilled, and molded into so many walls, sidewalks, plazas, and decorative designs. Never before and not since 1964-70, has concrete been so worshipped, so valued, so esteemed, not just for freeways but for art itself.

Come here if you can, just to see the concrete.

If desolation, emptiness, and gigantism are attributes in architecture, then the buildings around the Van Nuys Civic Center achieve glory simply by virtue of their nihilistic presence.

For here, on the streets bounded by Van Nuys Boulevard, Calvert, Sylvan and Tyrone, is a void at the center of Van Nuys.

As a real place it functions only as a photographic metaphor for enormous potential wasted in sheets of concrete and glass.

"L'Ecclisse" (1962) — “L’Ecclisse” (1962)

Michaelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse” (1962) set its alienated characters inside the vacated EUR district of Rome, Italy dreamed up during Mussolini’s time. Our Van Nuys, the post-war place of big government, benevolent institutions and perfect planning, came of age at the same time.

But it’s all a miserable failure, a disfigurement, a monstrous banality.

In the middle of the day, there are barren plazas, empty arcades, ribbons of cleared sidewalks.

But even dying, there is a weak, faint cry to just do something. It is chronically ill Van Nuys asking, begging, pleading…. for resurrection and recognition.

In its empty post office, in the blank walled State Office Building, in the rows of vertical windows slit into the yellow brick mass of the James C. Corman Federal Building, in the vast parking lot of gravel, chains, walls and a NO ENTRY sign behind The Superior Court Building, the whole mass and substance of the district is on the gurney in the ER hoping for resuscitation.

At the center of Van Nuys, in the historic heart of the San Fernando Valley, in a place that is now 105 years old, nobody willingly visits . They arrive, instead, in handcuffs or carrying legal papers. They are under subpoena, on jury duty, in custody, filing a complaint or reporting a crime.

And that is our civic center story.

Tag: James C. Corman Federal Building

A Stark Place.

The Void at the Center

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