Designwire Daily: from the editors of Interior Design magazine

Rios Clementi Hale Completes L.A.’s Hollywood & Vine Metro Plaza

by Nicholas Tamarin | Monday, November 1, 2010 | 1 Comment

One block east of Los Angeles’s iconic intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, the famed center of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, hometown architects Rios Clementi Hale Studios’s stunning, just-completed subway entrance is open for business.

The entry portal to the city’s Hollywood/Vine Metro Red Line stop features a golden entry canopy surrounded by a lush public plaza that does double duty as an entrance to the W Hollywood Hotel and Residence’s Station Hollywood lounge, where guests can dine, drink, and view movies projected on a screen on the hotel’s façade, visible to subway riders through the portal’s transparent canopy.

“Our intent was to functionally and visually integrate the plaza into the urban fabric of Hollywood Boulevard, and create an environment to satisfy the diverse groups intersecting on this stretch of it,” says Rios Clementi Hale Studios principal Frank Clementi. “We envisioned an energetic space, cross-referencing the block’s main elements, merging its people, and linking Hollywood’s iconic past to its revitalized present.”

Rios Clementi Hale based the plaza’s design on the courtyards that line Hollywood Boulevard at nearby landmarks like the Pantages, Egyptian, and Grauman’s Chinese theaters. And like the theaters, the architect’s chose a foreign reference for their project.

“We used a Southeast Asian palette of low lush tropical plants,” notes Clementi. Dwarf Bamboo, Black Bamboo, King Palm, Lily Turf, Variegated Shell Ginger, and various types of Elephant’s Ear were selected for their exotic appeal, easy maintenance, and root bases that could easily be accommodated in shallow planters.

The firm also used a rich spectrum of colors and patinas and materials to contrast and connect project areas. On the plaza’s east side, a red carpet made of terrazzo channels Hollywood glamour and stretches from the sidewalk’s Walk of Fame to the hotel lobby. The yellow-brick road from “Wizard of Oz” also deserves mention—it was the inspiration for the granite- and metal-portal canopy’s golden glass.