Nouvel's First California Project on Hold
Correction appended January 8, 2008
Jean Nouvel’s Los Angeles debut has been delayed. Construction of 10000 Santa Monica Boulevard, a 45-story condominium tower designed by the French architect and 2008 Pritzker Prize winner, has been put on hold due to financing problems.
Lehman Brothers, which declared bankruptcy in September, was underwriting the $400 million project. The project’s developer, SunCal Century City LLC, has since filed for bankruptcy itself. “No work is taking place on the project at the present,” says SunCal spokesman Joe Aguirre. “We don’t consider it dead. Our goal is to obtain new project funding.”
SunCal has a tentative financing agreement in place with D.E. Shaw & Co., a global hedge fund, for up to $75 million. But the deal is contingent upon the court approving SunCal’s plan to reshuffle financing.
Situated on 2.4 acres in Century City, the 600-foot-tall and 50-foot-wide glass tower was conceived as a thin “green blade.” The building would rise from a 40,000-square-foot garden, and every level would be ringed with planted balconies. Rios Clementi Hale Studios is the landscape architect for the project.
The tower’s 177 units would range from 3,400 to 9,500 square feet. Prior to its bankruptcy filing, the developer had yet to receive planning approval or start selling condos. A new timeline has not been established.
The project would be Nouvel’s first building west of Minneapolis, where his Guthrie Theater opened two years ago.
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