To determine the best architectural designs being created in Los Angeles, the Business Journal assembled a panel of three judges with significant design expertise. After viewing a number of noteworthy submissions, the panel selected the following three projects for top honors.

Co-winner, Best-designed project

Samitaur Building, Culver City

Eric Owen Moss Architects

Every project has its challenges; designers of the Samitaur Building rose to those challenges literally.

Architect Eric Owen Moss designed a two-story, elongated boxcar-like building on steel stilts over an existing service road. It also features a large hourglass-shaped sculptural staircase carved into one end of the building. Midway through, a two-story open-air court bisects the building space.

“It’s tremendously ambitious and courageous architecture,” said John Kaliski, a principal at the Santa Monica-based architectural firm AIJK, and one of the Business Journal panelists judging the submissions.

Even more challenging is the project’s location: a down-in-the-heels industrial area in the northeast corner of Culver City. The couple who developed the project, Fred and Laurie Samitaur Smith, envisioned the structure as a springboard for broader redevelopment of the largely forgotten area. To some extent, that has occurred, with several new-media companies setting up shop in the area.

“What this building has actually done is well beyond what it is as a piece of architecture,” said Moss. “A lot of people are interested in it, architecturally. But in a business way it’s going to have some substantial consequences in the next 10, 15, 20 years in opening up a whole area that has not been very active. I think the project will be a kind of instigator to a whole new area of generation or regeneration of jobs and business and in a kind of unusual way and unusual area.”

Moss doesn’t take all the credit. He attributes the larger success to the developers, who saw the potential of the area as a vital business opportunity. Moss is currently designing three other large buildings in the vicinity.

Ackerman Student Union, UCLA

R.L. Binder, FAIA Architecture & Planning

For architect Rebecca “Ricky” Binder, the Ackerman Student Union at UCLA was a project filled with “enormous challenges.”

The biggest challenge was to take an existing five-story building at the heart of the UCLA campus in its most prominent plaza and make something new and exciting with it.

The project involved a 50,000-square-foot expansion, which includes a 20,000-square-foot bookstore that generates millions of dollars in sales annually. But the student union also needed lounges, reading rooms and places where students could meet, in addition to seismic upgrades.

The university also had a stated preference for the student union building to be contemporary in design to create a counterpoint to the existing architecture but not one that would not be out of context.

That is, it had to harmonize with the existing historic buildings, namely the brick Men’s Gymnasium Building and Kerkhoff Hall, the only Gothic building on campus.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for Binder was a personal one. As an alumna of the UCLA graduate architecture program, Binder viewed the project as “near and dear to me,” she said.

The result is a dynamic, colorful and playful building that serves its clients well, the panel of judges said.

“It’s a building that a college student would expect to find on campus,” said

Rochelle Dynes Mills, one of the Business Journal judges, and a designer and director of Architours, which organizes architectural tours. “It works as a student union. It’s the kind of place where students would want to meet. You couldn’t possibly walk by and not know it’s there.”

In the end, it was a very satisfying project for Binder.

“Working with the campus architects was a good experience. They are very interested in architecture, which allowed the building to become what it is,” said Binder.

She is currently designing a 45,000-square-foot building for a client in the entertainment industry, two high school buildings that were demolished after the Northridge earthquake, and a student housing project at UC Santa Barbara.

Best Out-of-town project by an L.A.-based architect

New Jersey Performing Arts Center

Newark, N.J.

Barton Myers Associates Inc.

The New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, N.J., designed by Barton Myers Associates, combines elements from each of the above two projects. Like the Samitaur Building, it is in a neglected, run-down area that city officials are seeking to revitalize. And like the Ackerman Student Union, it is a public building that has many uses.

At the heart of the $90 million project is a 2,750-seat multi-purpose theater that is home to the New Jersey Philharmonic, but also converts to an opera hall and dance stage. There is also a smaller community theater, a restaurant and various community spaces and administrative offices.

The performing arts center is only the first half of a $180 million master-planned redevelopment of downtown Newark.

“This is the cornerstone for efforts to revitalize the area,” said Kaliski. “I admire the ambition that it speaks of in terms of reimagining downtown Newark. It seeks to establish a new civic image and shows the capacity for an individual project to signal a change.”

Such a challenge is nothing new for Myers, who has designed a number of performing arts centers, including the one in Cerritos. But it was a challenge to land the major East Coast project because there was considerable competition from highly regarded architects in Manhattan, which is only about 25 miles from Newark.

“The planning was very ambitious. Instead of doing a building, the planners saw it as a whole development. My hope is that it takes a leadership role in developing the area,” Myers said.

Myers said this is the first major New York-vicinity project that has been awarded to a Los Angeles-based architectural firm (it took some convincing to show the clients that the firm could carry out the project from L.A.).

Myers’ goal was to design a theater accessible to the people, not an arts center that one can “put on a podium,” and remain removed from everyday use. Since the center opened last October, it has attracted more than 100,000 visitors.

Myers, who moved to California from Toronto in 1985, is now designing a studio in Carpinteria for a new film production company formed by Tom Pollock, Ivan Reitman and Polygram Filmed Entertainment.