Santa Fe Freight Depot

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.

Use as a freight depot

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. At 1,250 feet in length, the building is so long that, if it were upended, it would be as tall as the Empire State Building. The building had 120 bays with opening on both sides, allowing freight cars to unload one one side while trucks were loaded on the other side.

Conversion to SCI-Arc's campus

View from north

By the 1990s, the depot was a vacant building covered in grafitti. The building had been stripped to the concrete, with a single room as long as four football fields. Then, in May 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 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 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:

"The recombinant building is a lesson in engineering and architecture. Thirty thousand square feet of studios and seminar spaces, a workshop, a thesis pit and a bridge to the library have been stacked, cantilevered and suspended to form an open-ended, permissive, flexible space. It seems that anything can happen within these walls. Enter a studio through its doorway (which has no door), and you are standing on what is more like a stage, looking out through a proscenium framed by new steel posts and girders set parallel to and in tandem with the old concrete columns and beams."

North side of depot

Prior to the opening of the SCI-Arc campus, the neighborhood around the depot was referred to as a "gritty corner of downtown." Since 2000, SCI-Arc's presence has helped revitalize the neighborhood. However, the area's revitalization has driven up the property's value and resulted in a legal battle that ended with a determination that SCI-Arc's option to buy the property was unenforceable. The property has since been sold to a developer with plans to erect two high rises on the empty lot next door.

Historic designation

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.

See also

• List of Registered Historic Places in Los Angeles
• Southern California Institute of Architecture