1 person, 1 vote, 1 big storage spot

Working with his clients at the county, Lehrer pressed to gain "1% for art" funding for the project, which had a total budget of $5.6 million. The result is a hanging photomural banner by the artist and UCLA professor Rebeca Mendez titled "Tree by Tree, From Sea to Mountains." Fifteen feet tall and 150 feet long, it is inspired by the L.A. County seal, which depicts a Native American woman standing near the shore, with the mountains at her back. Mendez's banner shows a series of images leading from the ocean at the far left to the San Gabriel Mountains at the extreme right.

The images are superbly composed, and as an architectural feature the banner helps balance the hangar-like quality of the space with its own eye-grabbing scale. But as a piece of art it strikes an odd note. Isn't the point of this building to suggest that there is pride to be taken in the most mundane and literal of man-made tasks, if they're done in the service of some larger goal -- that it's not the sublime but the quotidian, executed on a massive scale, that's being celebrated?

The Elections Operations Center, as its entirely unpoetic name suggests, is about the culture, not the nature, of politics. Lehrer's design is most effective where it uses color and graphics to frame, rather than obscure or memorialize, the plain, repetitive nature of the work that gets done here. Row after row of voting machines, stacks of pallets holding sample ballots: When the architecture echoes the minimal, serial beauty of these materials, the clarity of the design becomes its own justification. The literal stuff of American politics might be stubbornly inert, but positioned in just the right way it can look almost noble.

--

christopher.hawthorne @latimes.com