Howard Hughes complex in Playa Vista is getting a $50-million makeover
The new owner of the aircraft giant's former headquarters, including the hangar where the Spruce Goose was built, plans to turn it into an office campus for media, entertainment and tech firms.
The decaying former headquarters of aviation giant Howard Hughes will be turned into an office campus for creative tenants as part of a $50-million makeover of the famous operation at Playa Vista.
The complex includes the enormous hangar where Hughes built his infamous Spruce Goose airplane but is now used mostly as a sound stage for movie and television production. The seven-story structure will be upgraded to contain five sound stages that could be used simultaneously, new owner Wayne Ratkovich said.
The complex includes the enormous hangar where Hughes built his infamous Spruce Goose airplane but is now used mostly as a sound stage for movie and television production. The seven-story structure will be upgraded to contain five sound stages that could be used simultaneously, new owner Wayne Ratkovich said.
The property is occupied by 11 buildings, including the hangar, most of them from the years around World War II when Hughes operated his Hughes Aircraft Co. in the area south of what is now Marina del Rey. It was there that Hughes set out to build a seaplane capable of carrying 750 fully armed soldiers nonstop from Honolulu to Tokyo.
Among his many challenges was the fact that no plane that big had ever been built, and he couldn't use materials considered crucial to the war effort, such as aluminum, to make it. He decided to use wood and settled on birch, which made the popular nickname "Spruce Goose" irksome to him.
The plane, officially dubbed Hercules, sported a 320-foot wingspan, weighed 200 tons and flew only once — for about one minute — in 1947.
The airplane has been gone since then and now resides in a McMinnville, Ore., museum. But the vast redwood hangar where it was built is still in demand as a sound stage and generates about $1.3 million a year in rent from filmmakers, Ratkovich said. Much of director James Cameron's 3-D epic "Avatar" was shot there.
In a nod to Hughes' storied seaplane, Ratkovich will call his new development the Hercules Campus. He plans to divide it into three smaller complexes connected by landscaping. Targeted tenants include media, entertainment and technology companies, Ratkovich said.
"We want those kind of firms that are looking for unconventional space," he said. "That's what these buildings represent."
Los Angeles architect Brenda Levin, who worked with Ratkovich on his transformation of several other historic properties, is designing the new campus.
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