Frank Gehry, the legendary “starchitect” who designed the Walt Disney Concert Hall and myriad other Los Angeles landmarks, is leaving his mark on El Segundo’s growing creative office landscape.

Construction is underway on an 80,000-square-foot standalone building designed by Gehry at Utah Avenue and Douglas Street, part of a campus that was formerly home to Xerox Corp.

Set to open by the year’s end, Ascend at Utah Avenue Campus will feature 24-foot clear-height ceilings, towering glass panel walls and a 16,000-square-foot balcony.

Unlike other creative offices taking shape in repurposed warehouses once used by aerospace and defense manufacturers, Gehry is starting from scratch, demolishing existing structures and raising the building onto a podium that will house ground-level parking.

Renderings show a vast open space filled with natural light, skeletal support beams, lights hanging from exposed high ceilings and a mix of hip work stations and lounge areas. The space also can be divided for two 40,000-square-foot tenants.

The $50 million project is being developed by NSB Associates, a Beverly Hills-based commercial real estate firm founded by Gehry’s longtime friend, Larry Field.

Freeing space

In a video highlighting the project, Gehry said tenants like creative office space because it offers “the freedom of not being locked into a cubicle.”

“It’s not architectural in the sense that you’re making an architectural statement, it is really creating an environment that energizes and promotes interactivity in a less formal way,” said Gehry, who also designed Facebook’s 430,000-square-foot campus in Menlo Park.

Seven years ago, Gehry came close to moving his own offices to El Segundo. He also designed a 43,500-square-foot research and development facility on the Utah Avenue Campus for Kite Pharma.

In the video, his son, Sam Gehry, called the city an “up and coming area” with a “nice, sort of small-town feel in L.A., but there’s always been sort of these quirky little warehouse spaces leftover from the aerospace industry kind of moving out.”

Utah Avenue Campus promotes its location near Los Angeles International Airport, the 105 and 405 freeways, and the Metro Green Line as selling points, as well as the city’s business-friendly reputation.

Several years ago, El Segundo embarked on an ambitious rebranding and marketing effort to draw in tech companies getting priced out of Silicon Beach, highlighting incentives, such as lower business tax rates, a streamlined permitting process and accelerated plan checks.

More than 100 companies have opened up shop since in the small city of 16,500 residents, where the population swells to more than 70,000 mostly professionals in the daytime.

Sending parking underneath the building breaks the mold of a standard warehouse, Sam Gehry said in the video.

“Because we had the freedom to break from a traditional warehouse in the sense that they’re pretty much boxes with no windows, we were able to incorporate all of the windows into the facade at this point in the design of the building as well as a lot of skylights and natural light,” he said.

A website marketing the property gives visitors a 360-degree virtual tour of the building and patio.

A ‘pioneering building’

Anthony O’Carroll, vice president of NSB Associates, said the firm originally planned to refurbish a couple existing buildings it acquired on the site.

“But when we had the opportunity to work with Frank, he suggested to us building across those two lots, taking them down and solving the parking problem by going up,” he said. “He thought it would really work here and I think it’s the first time I’m aware of that this sort of ground-up construction is being done in El Segundo.”

NSB Associates began acquiring property in El Segundo 12 years ago, O’Carroll said, and in that time, the city has transformed from an aerospace hub to a magnet for creative offices. He called the Ascend project a “vote of confidence” in the city.

“It’s a kind of pioneering building and it speaks to the way that El Segundo is going to continue to grow and to develop,” O’Carroll said. “There’s a lot of interest from real estate investors and builders down there.”