Design Distinction

Helios House

Angelenos are driving out of their way to fill up at BP’s Helios House, a faceted-steel gas station in Beverly Hills. Formerly a standard 1970s box, the station was reinvented as BP’s image-greening flagship by Boston architects Office dA with local firm Johnston Marklee & Associates (BIG, Ogilvy & Mather’s brand-building division, orchestrated the project). Helios House’s enviro creds are impressive: Solar panels drive the lighting system, the 1,653 steel panels are recyclable, recycled-glass aggregate is embedded in the pavement, and rainwater gets filtered and fed into irrigation pipes that nurture the site’s drought-resistant native plants. In the bathroom, motion sensors activate the lights and faucet, the tiles are recycled glass, and the woodwork was fashioned from sustainably harvested bamboo.

Controversy nonetheless raged among the jurors. Lignano dismissed the form as “clunky. It’s contemporary rocaille, like a papier-mâché crust. It’s meant to be sculptural, but in a gallery I’d walk right past it.” Carpenter, though, lauded the station’s sustainability and ability to “spark conversation,” while Kroloff described the pipe-concealing columns supporting a fiberglass-reinforced canopy as “actually fairly straightforward, a superstructure on a faceted form. And it’s such a departure from the American gas-station landscape. In its setting it looks amazing, as if it were carved right out of the street.”

Design Office dA (Boston): Nader Tehrani, Monica Ponce de Leon, principals; Dan Gallagher, project architect; Arthur Chang, project manager; Christian Ervin, Lisa Huang, Ji-Young Park, Brandon Clifford, Cathlyn Newell, Harry Lowd, designers. Johnston Marklee & Associates (Los Angeles): Sharon Johnston, Mark Lee, principals; Anne Rosenberg, project manager; Robert Garlipp, Lorena Yamamoto, designers
Client BP USA
Materials Steel, fiberglass, concrete, recycled glass, cedar, bamboo, Corian
Software Rhino, AutoCAD, Digital Project (Catia)