Big Thank-You Is Delivered to Architect

Environmentalists delivering a thank-you note Friday to architect Frank Gehry for picking someplace other than Playa Vista for his new design studio said they hope to make the “Spruce Goose” hangar a cornerstone of a future nature center at the site.

In urging Gehry to support the conversion of Howard Hughes’ old aircraft plant, activists said they want to preserve Hughes’ historic and huge Spruce Goose Hangar.

“Being named for a bird, it could become a museum and a natural cultural center,” said Roy Van de Hoek, chairman of the Sierra Club Ballona Wetlands Task Force, as he addressed activists gathered outside of Gehry’s Santa Monica office.

The architect, whose work includes the Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles, has disclosed plans to move his headquarters several blocks north of the sprawling Playa Vista site in West Los Angeles.

That’s a switch from last year, when Gehry announced his intention to relocate to Playa Vista itself. He has been hired by the developer, Maguire Partners, to design new buildings there.

His change in plans prompted Friday’s rally by about a dozen environmentalists who signed a poster-size thank-you card. Marcia Hanscom, head of the Wetlands Action Network, said a coalition of conservation groups plans to press state officials to purchase the land eyed by Maguire Partners and turn it into permanent parkland.

Much of that land contains old aircraft plant structures, including the 742-foot long, 100-foot high hangar once used to store Hughes’ wood-sided Spruce Goose. The one-of-a-kind plane, designed as a troop carrier, flew only once and was never put into production.

“State parks is interested in historical properties,” Van de Hoek said. The Spruce Goose hangar could be preserved as a place to rehabilitate or breed birds or mammals and for educational use--even to demonstrate and display such things as mechanical birds, he said.

Gehry, who was said to be inside his office meeting with clients, did not show up to be thanked personally.

But Peggy Moretti, a spokeswoman for Maguire Partners, said Gehry is relocating away from the Playa Vista site only because he has run out of space in Santa Monica and must move quickly.

Others at the rally said halting further development of Playa Vista would make sense.

“It’s the lungs of the city,” one Marina del Rey resident, Polly Perlman, said of the wetland. “The Spruce Goose hangar belongs there. We’ll make it belong in a park.”