Police facility design fits community’s bill
Glendale, Calif. – City officials knew they needed a new police facility to keep pace with their rapidly growing community. Challenges, however, abounded. First, plans called for the facility to be located in downtown’s bustling Civic Center. Fitting a huge building into that area would not be easy. Second, the police facility could not overshadow its recognizable neighbor, City Hall.
“We wanted to create a strong identity for the new police facility, but not take anything away from the existing City Hall,” says David Goodale, a principal with CHCG Architects, part of the local team (Dworsky/CHCG Architects) that designed the new facility. “Contemporary urban police operations require increasingly larger facilities. At the same time, the city wanted its police headquarters to project a sense of community spirit and community openness in its architecture.”
The resulting design expanded and linked the useable pedestrian spaces in the Civic Center and provided a new vehicular and pedestrian motor court into the new civic campus.
The $48 million facility will include a three-story, state-of-the-art administrative headquarters building; a four-story custody facility; an above-grade parking structure and a subterranean light maintenance facility for city vehicles. The existing police building is being upgraded for use as a community-oriented facility following a secondary needs assessment process currently being conducted.