Photography Grant Mudford |  |
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Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg, Australian architects in Los Angeles, have produced a colourful practice range to support the film city’s current fascination with golf.
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Above Aerial view of the range, looking east. below Looking south along the ground level line of 34 tees, towards the roofed dining patio and pro shop.
AboveThe west side of the two-tier driving pavilion; below Southern stairs leading to the upper deck of the main pavilion, with 21 tees (expandable to 35).
 | | Comment by John Chase
Both the program of and the site for Koning Eizenberg’s Signal Hill Golf Center are unlikely candidates for media coverage. A driving range often consists of nothing more than a high mesh fence, expanses of lawn, Astro-turf pads for teeing off, and a nondescript pro shop. As Los Angeles Timesarchitecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff has written, “It is open to anyone with the $7.50 needed for a large bucket of balls.” But in the small LA industrial suburb of Signal Hill, Australian architects Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg have rethought the prosaic program, structure and aesthetics. The $US1.4 million project, completed in 1998, consists of a pro shop and a long, grassy driving range, linked together by a covered patio.
Signal Hill is one of the last places in Los Angeles that anyone would think to locate a driving range. This small city is a patchwork of oil drilling tracts, interspersed with residential and commercial development. The golf range is located on land that was formerly used for oil drilling. As Julie Eizenberg has noted, it was also “a good interim use for the City as it transformed itself from an industrial setting to a mix of residential and office uses.” The very rawness of the site came to be an advantage for the driving range. It fit both the lively yet direct aesthetic of Koning Eizenberg, as well as owner Philippe Marill’s plan to attract more adventurous patrons. Forms in the project are boldly scaled, using the repetition of simple elements to achieve their impact.
Julie Eizenberg writes, “While golf courses have traditionally provided country club amenity, stand-alone golf driving ranges have rarely provided a social setting beyond the soda machine. Philippe was targeting a younger, less conservative following that might be interested in more than fine-tuning their game. In short, maybe it was time for golf driving ranges to be more fun and allow patrons to hang around, have a meal and socialise as well as practice their swing.” Thus the pro shop was reinvented as coffee house and a patio for barbecues, coffee and casual socialising. The pro shop’s exterior walls are sheathed in a pattern of red and green shingles that evokes the houndstooth checks on golfers’ socks. A screen wall of 1x6 slats nailed to 4x4 posts screens the west facade of the pro shop. A large opening in the screen wall frames the shop, giving it monumental scale commensurate with the other components in the driving range.
The patio has an irregularly tilted corrugated metal roof raised above the roofline of the pro shop, supported on the same log poles that support the high net fence surrounding the property. In a sense, the large scale of these tall fence poles sets the tone for the large scale of Koning Eizenberg’s architecture. The main component of the project is the tee-off pavilion, where I-beams support a sweeping arc of two tiers. The same slatting used outside the pro shop is deployed to shield the driving platforms from the road to the west, creating a defined space for teeing off.
And indeed the point of Koning Eizenberg project is that all the factors that would have seemed to make this driving range problematic, such as its site, program, tight budget and probable impermanency, have been a challenge rather than an obstacle to the creation of architecture that is both engaging and functional.
John Chase is the urban designer for the City of West Hollywood, a teacher at SCI-Arc and an author. His next books are The Architecture and Urbanism of Everyday Life (Monacelli) and Glitter, Stucco & Dumpster Diving (Verso)
| Signal Hill Golf Center, Los Angeles
Architects Koning Eizenberg—principals Hank Koning, Julie Eizenberg; project team Tim Andreas, Carole Chun, Dason Whitsett. Structural Engineer Parker-Resnick. Civil Engineer Ashba Engineers. Developer/Builder Philippe Marill. |
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