Columbia Plans Culver City Headquarters : Development: The 44-acre, 1.5-million square feet complex would grow to 2.5 million square feet by the year 2005. It used to house the MGM Studios.

Columbia Pictures Entertainment Inc. has unveiled plans for adding more than 1-million square feet of office, retail and technical space on its Culver City lot.

The ambitious renovation and construction is aimed at establishing the site as Columbia’s corporate headquarters. It is estimated that it would take 15 years to complete the project.

The 75-year-old movie lot at Overland Avenue and Washington Boulevard is the former home of MGM Studios. At 44 acres, it is by far the largest studio lot in Culver City, a community that likes to bill itself as “the Heart of Screenland.” Culver Studios, the second-largest studio property in the city, is less than one-third the size of Columbia.

The plans were presented, along with a public slide show, to 250 people Thursday night at one of the lot’s stages. It was the first step of a review process that is expected to take at least a year. Environmental, traffic and fiscal impact studies have yet to be prepared, and the proposal has to wind its way through the city Planning Commission, the Redevelopment Agency and the City Council.

The plans call for buildings of Art Deco style in cream and other subdued colors, to complement the site’s Thalberg Building. The eastern end of the lot, where the Thalberg sits, would be turned into a grand entrance way, with a park, circular driveway, and twin 11-story office buildings.

The Columbia complex now totals 1.5-million square feet, including 457,000 square feet of offices. Other structures on the lot include sound stages, production and technical facilities, and mechanical and storage space.

Several of the aging beige bungalows and other buildings would be demolished or renovated. The project would yield a net increase of about 1.1-million square feet--of which 1 million would be for offices.

By the project’s finish in 2005, the lot would have almost 5,000 employees. Columbia, which acquired the property from Time Warner Inc. earlier this year and is in the process of moving its corporate offices there from New York, has just a few hundred employees at the site now. In the 1980s, MGM employed about 1,500 workers there.

Ken Williams, Columbia senior vice president for finance and administration, declined to offer an estimate of the project’s cost other than to say that it would reach several hundreds of millions of dollars. Once completed, the studio would generate more than $18 million in tax revenues to the city each year, Williams said.

Twelve buildings, four to six stories tall, are planned along Culver Boulevard. The ground floors would have shops catering to the employees and selling Columbia movie souvenirs to the public. The upper floors would be offices.

Two nine-story office buildings and a crafts center, two stages, a 900-space parking garage, and offices, are also proposed.

Scattered about the lot would be small, landscaped parks, as well as a 19th-Century Town Square with a gazebo, benches, and walkways. Hedges and palm trees would be planted around the lot’s borders.

Columbia said the new office buildings are needed to handle projected growth and the consolidation of operations that are now in Burbank, New York and elsewhere.

And, because of technological and business changes in the film industry, huge sound stages and other industrial space has become less crucial, while “creative and administrative spaces” have become more important, according to a Columbia spokeswoman.

Culver City Mayor Steven Gourley expressed some reservations about the office expansion. “We’re happy to have them redevelop it as a studio, but we have to look very seriously at any doubling of office space,” he said. “We’re looking to make movies there, not build new offices.”

Some of the offices might be built on nearby sites instead, Gourley said, adding that he is proud “that Columbia has chosen Culver City to make its headquarters.”

Many of the proposed buildings would exceed the city’s height limit of 56 feet, which voters approved in April. The lot, however, falls in a Redevelopment Agency area in which the City Council can approve exceptions to the limit, Culver City Development Director Jody Hall-Esser said.

Gourley, who generally takes a more skeptical view of growth and development than most of his colleagues on the City Council, said that the planned office towers are “not acceptable according to the most recent vote of the people of Culver City,” and “I certainly have to listen to that mandate” before endorsing Columbia’s plans.

“I’d like to renovate downtown, but 1-million square feet of office space, including buildings well over the height limit of Culver City, is very questionable,” he said.

However, Columbia’s Williams said a poll of several hundred Culver City residents showed that they were willing to allow buildings over four stories on the lot, if the plans included open space. The corporation does not want to launch a “Universal Studios-type tour,” but it plans to allow limited public access to the site, a spokeswoman said.