With defense conversions on the rise, Southland sites where weapons of war were once created now offer . . . : Prayers and Pasta

In West Covina, hundreds of worshipers pack each of several Sunday services held in a cavernous space that is Faith Community Church.

Their spiritual fervor doesn’t seem at all diminished by the fact that they worship where torpedoes and flight simulators for Stealth bombers were once built by Hughes Aircraft.

In El Segundo, Wolfgang Puck’s Cafe, a trendy restaurant owned by the Los Angeles food guru, is packed with diners.

Most are unaware that Continental Park Plaza, the office park that includes Puck’s eatery, was once occupied by Hughes and TRW, which secretly tested powerful lasers for “Star Wars” systems there.

Making peace, not war, a new Southern California economy is growing up in the aftermath of massive defense-spending cutbacks. With dozens of buildings once occupied by defense-related businesses now vacant, cities are working with the military to find new uses, and architects like Irvine-based LPA Inc. are finding new business planning and designing these reuses.

Even if the changing California sometimes produces odd ironies, such as spirituality and fine dining taking the place of high-tech tools of war, companies like LPA are happy to accommodate.

“We’re going to have our best year ever,” said architect David Gilmore, a principal in LPA. “It’s been a key factor in creating a new market for LPA, the rehab of existing space built for aerospace. The percentage of our business it accounts for is not huge--15% to 20%--but we expect that area to grow.”

Although neither of LPA’s major conversion projects was simple, both were cost-effective compared with new construction, and both produced spaces that satisfy their new tenants: the church in its 56,000 square feet, converted at a first-phase cost of $1.5 million, and Continental Park Plaza, converted at a cost of $6 million to include Wolfgang Puck’s Cafe as well as 500,000 square feet of renovated office space and a 10,000-square-foot food court.

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Such projects are among the first examples of what will be dozens of renovations of defense buildings. Conversions will include not only private sector buildings used for defense-related business, such as the ones converted by LPA, but also structures on military bases that are becoming available for new uses.

In Southern California, George Air Force Base in Victorville, Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, March Air Force Base in Riverside, the Long Beach Naval Station, the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station, the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and the Naval Training Center in San Diego are bases--already closed or soon to be closed--where reuse of buildings may occur.

Redevelopment of San Diego’s 400-acre Naval Training Center, for instance, will include reuse of quaint Mission Revival-style buildings from the 1920s through 1940s. And at March Air Force Base, military buildings--including a recreation center, library and child-care center--are being converted for the same uses by the community. The base’s hospital is being adapted for use by the Riverside County coroner’s office and the county sheriff’s forensics division.

“Initially, most of the bases hope for reuse,” said Ben Williams, deputy director in Gov. Wilson’s office of planning and research. “Longer term, half or more of the facilities will be torn down, but demolition is so expensive, it can’t be done all at once.”

Williams’ office fields a stream of queries about military properties available for new uses. Economic and planning consultants are being hired to do feasibility studies for such reuses. General Dynamics, a large defense contractor, has hundreds of acres in San Diego slated for reuse, including land next to Lindbergh Field, San Diego’s international airport, said Gerald Trimble, senior principal at Keyser Marston Associates, a consultant on defense conversions.

A General Dynamics site in Rancho Cucamonga is also slated for reuse, as is a former Hughes Aircraft building in Fullerton.

Former military buildings, often boxy warehouse-like structures with few windows, present problems for conversion, but also some pluses. Officials of Faith Community Church, for instance, believe that its former Hughes building is perfect--both in size and in appearance. It seems the design objectives of churches have evolved, from quaint to mass-oriented.

“We did not want a traditional church atmosphere,” said Pastor George Rauscher. “What we were aiming for was the feeling of a mall. A place that’s familiar, a real gregarious place. Our church is not such that we want people to be too comfortable. We want to challenge them to change the world.”

“Frankly, one of the biggest competitors for churches these days is the big entertainment centers,” Gilmore said. “The church wants some of that feeling--festive, inviting.” To that end, LPA’s plans for Faith Community Church involved revamping the interior to create a village atmosphere by dividing the huge space with inexpensive free-standing walls, some of them at striking angles, to define spaces including Sunday school classrooms and a child-care center.

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Project designer Wendy Rogers says the effect is similar to an indoor shopping mall, with a pedestrian promenade running down the middle. New windows bring additional light inside; new entrances spice up the building’s formerly monotonous exterior. Inside, a temporary sanctuary seats 1,250 and is often filled to overflowing, less than a year after opening. A future permanent sanctuary will accommodate 2,500.

The warehouse-like sanctuary, with 22-foot ceilings and spotlights suspended from overhead steel space frames, looks more like a hip concert venue than one of Southern California’s religious hot spots (in fact, singer Smokey Robinson recently performed during a service). Interior walls are vivid purple, yellow and teal, and glass block--generally considered a glitzy, contemporary material--has been inserted into walls to bleed natural light from some spaces to others.

Although Faith’s interiors are striking and not churchlike, they are also highly inviting--a far cry from the cramped, windowless rooms where aerospace engineers once developed defense systems beneath oppressively low suspended ceilings. “Those poor engineers,” Gilmore said.

Similarly, it’s hard to imagine those engineers working inside the buildings that have become Continental Park Plaza. “Continental sought us out for this,” Gilmore said. “We’ve done a lot of office space, and our philosophy is, whatever money is spent you have to see it.” The emphasis here is on catchy entries, lobbies and public spaces. A new main lobby features an Art Deco-style aluminum-and-glass chandelier. Carpeting carries a cool geometric pattern; walls are paneled with granite and maple.

At the corner of Rosecrans Avenue and Apollo Street, the renovated complex attracts visitors with its wide palm-lined pedestrian entry. Continental wanted its own offices near the entry, and Puck’s cafe needed a highly visible driveway for valet parking, so LPA added a new circular drive. Together with the neatly tiled pedestrian walk, it helps lure motorists to an attractive place that is frequently crowded with people and cars. This is good design and good marketing.

Because the building also includes a parking structure in back, and because many visitors arrive there, LPA created a second automobile “lobby” connecting parking with the building. A light well was cut through several floors to open the space near the elevators. The floors and walls are of polished limestone.

Office space at Continental Plaza is attracting solid tenants, including Unocal, Murad Skin Research (a salon) and Andersen Consulting.

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Offices look out on a re-landscaped interior courtyard; new teak benches provide comfortable spots for a garden lunch beneath new plants, including several huge ficus trees and bird of paradise.

LPA’s next phase of renovation for Continental will include a 16-screen multiplex, due to open before the end of 1996, and perhaps a bookstore.

Meanwhile, reuse plans developed by M. W. Steele Group for San Diego’s Naval Training Center call for some buildings to live drastically different lives. “Probably the most radical change is converting barracks to office use,” said architect Mark Steele. Because the barracks are in the flight path for Lindbergh Field, they are too noisy for continued residential use.

“One of the most interesting buildings for a strange retrofit is a huge building, 250,000 square feet, three stories, no windows,” Steele said. “It was designed during World War II so they could operate in blackouts.” Now, the San Diego Community College District is considering the building for classrooms, and another organization may want to store archeological artifacts there.

The Naval Training Center was developed before surrounding neighborhoods like Loma Portal were established, Steele said. By having new buildings on the base designed in keeping with its Mission-style heritage, some consistency between the reused military property and the surrounding community will be assured.

For the developers and architects, such drastic make-overs are still considered risky by many banks. “It took a lot of pain and cajoling of banks to get it to this point,” Gilmore said. “Now, conversion of other buildings is considered a sure thing.”

Though no flight simulators were left behind, there is at least one holdover from the old days that gives Faith’s site some unusual character. “Our parking lot is the only certified helicopter landing pad in West Covina,” says Bob Tarnofsky, director of real estate at Continental Development. “It will become the staging lot for a new helicopter service.”

Dirk Sutro is a San Diego freelance writer.