Santa Fe Freight Depot
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Santa Fe Freight Depot
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Santa Fe Freight Depot, 2008
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| Location | 970 E. 3rd St., Los Angeles, California |
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| Coordinates | 34°2′42″N 118°13′58″W / 34.04500°N 118.23278°WCoordinates: 34°2′42″N 118°13′58″W / 34.04500°N 118.23278°W |
| Built | 1922 |
| Architect | Leonardt, Carl; Albright, Harrison |
| Architectural style | Beaux Arts |
| NRHP Reference # | |
| Added to NRHP | January 3, 2006 |
Santa Fe Freight Depot is a quarter-mile-long building in the industrial area to the east of Downtown Los Angeles, now known as the Arts District. The Southern California Institute of Architecture converted the structure into its campus in 2000. The building's use as a school has helped revitalize a neighborhood previously considered "a gritty corner of downtown".
Built in 1907, the depot was designed by Harrison Albright, a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete, as a railroad freight depot. The Santa Fe Coast lines secured the property along the Los Angeles River and spent approximately $300,000 building the enormous concrete building. The depot was built to replace a freight center that had burned to the ground, and the narrow steel-reinforced concrete structure became a local landmark. For half its length, the building is only 37 feet (11 m) in width but, at 1,250 feet (380 m) in length, it is as long as the Empire State Building is tall. The building had 120 bays with opening on both sides, allowing freight cars to unload on one side while trucks were loaded on the other side.
By the 1990s, the depot was a vacant building covered in graffiti. The building had been stripped to the concrete, with a single room as long as four football fields. Then, in 2000, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or SCI-Arc, obtained a lease on the property with plans to relocate its campus to the location. Over the next two years, SCI-Arc renovated and converted the building, considered an "industrial leftover," into a 61,000-square-foot (5,700 m2) state-of-the-art architecture school.
The renovation was designed by SCI-Arc graduate and faculty member Gary Paige who described the building as a "found object -- one with ceilings up to 20 feet (6.1 m) high and broad views of the downtown skyline." Paige also added: "We like the unrelenting and extreme nature of the building." One reviewer noted that the structure was a mixed blessing: "Time had been generous to it, giving the interior surfaces a seasoned patina akin to character lines on a wise face. The problem was typology: Being as long as the Empire State Building is tall, the shotgun building was unremittingly linear, with only one jog breaking the monotony of its quarter-mile length." Another review called wrote:
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