There’s something uncanny and deceptive about the Van Nuys Government Center. Indeed, the complex seems to deceive even itself: Government Center is only one of its three designations, along with The Van Nuys Civic Center and The San Fernando Valley Administrative Center. The program is just as variable: Ten local, state, and federal government office buildings flank an open-air plaza, within which lie garden areas, monuments, and memorials. What architectural pedigree the plaza has can be largely attributed to the 1932 Valley Municipal Building, otherwise known as Van Nuys City Hall. Ornate, with a petit tower that climbs only eight stories, the hall appears too small for its ostensible purpose and, in actuality, houses the City of Los Angeles personnel department head and her HR team.
Because Van Nuys is a part of the City of Los Angeles, Van Nuys’s government should be in Downtown Los Angeles, right? Not fifteen or so miles northwest of LA City Hall. Out in the Valley, among the lords of bad taste—boring midrise office towers wrapped in brown glass, dull stucco apartments, and bumptious hillside mansions—there are no Peter Zumthor museums or Bjarke Ingels hotels or Diller Scofidio + Renfro performing art centers slated for construction. Out here, the building labeled City Hall fulfills that role only in Hollywood fiction; the film crews that stalk the place seem to have art-directed the orange trees punctuating the sunny plaza. They call back to the Valley’s mythic origins—millions of flat, water-guzzling acres dedicated to citrus farming, bulldozed, then transformed over twenty short years into a vast carpet of single-family homes developed speculatively, in racially biased manner, and deliberately accessible only by car.
The dupe City Hall and other civic buildings that make up the unseeming seat of power, then, are as real as a studio backlot hiding in plain sight. Van Nuys Government Center is a stand-in for downtown democracy flung out to the suburban hinterlands, where folks might feel like citizens in an act of imaginary placemaking. But what kind of ruse is on offer?
It’s certainly not the kind of simulated world featured in 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling, Harry Styles’s Jack tricking Florence Pugh’s Alice into living in virtual Victory City because she is “miserable at work in the real world.” And it’s not really The Truman Show either, pure reality being just a peel of a set piece away. Nor does it have much in common with the Wizard of Oz’s pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain situation work; Van Nuys isn’t trying to be something it’s not.
What Government Center is is seventeen rectangular acres off Van Nuys Boulevard. A collection of fairly boring ostentatious buildings (though some possess architectural qualities very deserving of appreciation) line the campus perimeter without much order otherwise. A quick prompt describing a generic government campus plugged into Midjourney would spit out something not too dissimilar. (I tried. It does.)
The foursquare piles are boxed in by low-slung storefronts and apartment blocks. Deep in the eastern portion of the campus, the Los Angeles Police Department Valley Division Station, Van Nuys Branch library, and Los Angeles Superior Court Van Nuys Courthouse East huddle around a small square, out of sight from any busy boulevard. This trio, completed from 1964 to 1967, offer pristine examples of post-Eamesian modernism in Los Angeles; the police station, a classic precast concrete work by Daniel Mann Johnson and Mendenhall, floats on a plinth of deep blue tiles, while the unfussy Superior Court offers a few Pop moments. (Circular ceiling lights visible through the curtain wall create a fun, polka dot pattern.) The latter was the site of the seedily seductive Menendez Brothers murder trial, cementing Government Center as a ground zero for occasional paparazzo-worthy celebrity gawking, where flimsy authenticity rubs right up against very real consequences of criminal law.
To the west, the 1990 Superior Court building looms stoically over the newer side of campus. Built during Pete Wilson’s tenure as governor and opening just after Reagan exited politics for good, the courthouse intimidates with formidable gray-pink granite walls, as if to signal its distrust of defendants. The atrium vestibule is eccentrically formal, with white columns topped with chrome capitals, and sunbaked, on account of a bulky Michael Graves–ish skylight. The architecture, more tone deaf today than that of its 1967 courthouse cousin next door, was worked out by Dan Dworsky, who gained notoriety as Frank Gehry’s hated (and later removed) executive architect on Disney Concert Hall. An intemperate Gehry told Los Angeles Magazine in 1996 that his former partner “made a lot of money. He begged me for the job. I’d like to shoot him.”
The civic fantasy is really just banal reality, and that plain honesty points up the wobbliness of “civic-ness.” By way of architectural types, layout, building names, and memorial plaques, the center asks us citizen visitors to perform in its pantomime, too.
More than a decade separates the Marvin Braude Building, aka The San Fernando Valley Constituent Service Center, from the dour courthouse, yet a postmodern influence lingers—namely in the many stylistically divergent details. Red flagstone tile cladding hints at a vague desert southwest inspiration, and Wrightian intent comes through in overwrought mullions and rust-colored buttresses. Arches, columns, merlons, even a sky bridge add to the jumbled architectural palette. The building is successful in certain respects, however, as in its covered arrival areas, where one can gather one’s thoughts before heading inside or find a relatively quiet place to take a phone call. And the look-alike government seal on the front door that reads “Constituent Service Center” sure fooled me.
If you want more municipal pastiche, head on over to the James C. Corman Federal Building. It’s a disaster of watered down civic motifs and threadbare detailing—a mean-and-lean campus cornerstone dating from the ’70s. Tall, narrow windows punched into the black facade have carceral overtones. A brutal forecourt offers a badly underscaled piece of public sculpture and countless menacing blue bollards. A nearby hot dog stand is joyful by comparison.
The Braude was built in 2003, and apart from recent alterations at the Corman Federal Building, there has been little construction at the Van Nuys Government Center since. The surrounding area hasn’t changed much either. In 1988, the Los Angeles City Planning Department and the Urban Design Advisory Coalition sponsored a study to redevelop Van Nuys Boulevard, whose retail corridor mostly comprised adult bookstores and pawnshops. It was thought that a private developer could be persuaded to front the financing for the Vision Van Nuys project—in return for the equivalent of 450,000 square feet of office space.
In the end, the elusive developer never materialized, no funding sources were identified otherwise, and so the complex, along with its vision plan, faltered through the ’90s and 2000s’ recessions. In the past few years, some of the disreputable storefronts have been replaced by their millennial equivalents—weed shops, dental implant clinics, and the Guadalupe wedding chapel. Late in 2022, the LA City Council named the Van Nuys Government Center yet again a “priority” in its efforts to add more green space to the park-poor region for public gatherings like farmers’ markets and summer-night movie screenings. That plan is still in the works.
Very real police, maintenance workers, angry homeowners seeking building permits, and anxious defendants come each day to do their business at the Van Nuys Government Center. The civic fantasy is really just banal reality, and that plain honesty points up the wobbliness of “civic-ness.” By way of architectural types, layout, building names, and memorial plaques, the center asks us citizen visitors to perform in its pantomime, too. And even though there is no mayor of Van Nuys who sits in Van Nuys City Hall, proposing laws and fighting for her constituents, we can surely imagine her doing so. (Personally, I’m imagining Leslie Jones, feet on a stately oak desk, just after the chase scene and the third act resolves.)
In our “posttruth” era, architecture still meets its own representation in a world of proxy presentation materials, rarely more complex than an Enscape rendering. In his 2018 book Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, which examines where factual reality unravels in the face of climate-change denial, the late Bruno Latour argues for a reconceptualization of realism and a further complicated, more complex understanding of “facticity.” The goal being, partially, to unsettle the traditional understanding of how we know what’s real before we find ourselves stuck in obsolete paradigms of real versus fake. The ease with which the Van Nuys Government Center ricochets from sim to real to set piece and back again makes it a hypertimely device of contemporary urbanism, effortlessly lacking self-consciousness. You don’t even have to wear a headset to get folded into its game.