Board Gets 1st Look at Arts Center Plans

The Orange County Performing Arts Center’s plans for a $100-million-plus expansion turned tangible as center founding chairman Henry T. Segerstrom and renowned architect Cesar Pelli gave county arts leaders a first look at their vision of the expanded complex.

Segerstrom and Pelli, at a regular center board meeting Friday, showed a bare-bones 3-D rendering and sketches of a facility that would include an 1,800- to 2,000-seat concert hall, a 400- to 500-seat multipurpose theater and a space for an art museum, according to several people at the meeting. It also included a sweeping outdoor plaza in front of the center on a stretch of Town Center Drive that would be closed to traffic.

The new buildings would occupy an open 7.5-acre lot owned by the Segerstrom family located across the street from the existing center.

It is the first time center officials have shown trustees or leaders of groups that use it representations of anything being considered for the expansion.

The mock-ups, described as strictly conceptual, were created to give a sense of relative sizes and positions of new facilities. One of those attending said the representations of the buildings were not finished architectural designs, nor even roughed-out models, but place cards showing where the various elements might go.

“If they have [official architectural] designs,” one person at the meeting said, “they certainly did not reveal them. They just wanted to give people an idea of the site with various buildings in place and to show us what [Pelli] has done in the past.”

Also included was an expansion for South Coast Repertory, which is adjacent to the center. SCR was shown with a third theater that would seat as many as 500. SCR officials declined comment Monday.

Segerstrom, co-managing partner of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, did not return calls from The Times on Monday. His family, the largest single contributor to the center and the donor of the land on which the present facilities stand, has agreed in principle to donate the empty lot for the center’s expansion but has not yet deeded the land, estimated to be worth about $16 million.

Center officials refused to discuss anything about Friday’s meeting at the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel, except to confirm that officials from the Pacific Symphony, Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Opera Pacific, William Hall Master Chorale and Pacific Chorale had been invited.

Those who attended said they were instructed not to discuss what they had seen with the media. The secrecy exists in part because plans are still sketchy and in part to allow the Segerstrom family, as a dominant force in the county’s arts scene, the attention when expansion plans are formally announced.

“We want [local arts groups] to be involved and supportive, to participate” in expansion plans, center President Jerry E. Mandel said Monday.

“No decisions have been made about any of this,” Mandel added.

Those attending the meeting said center officials noted that a new concert hall would be built primarily as a home for the Santa Ana-based Pacific Symphony, the county’s largest professional orchestra. In addition, the Philharmonic Society and the center itself bring touring orchestras to the center. But center officials still have not committed to building a concert hall rather than a multipurpose facility as the major element in their expansion plan.

Center officials did not discuss costs for any part of the project or a timetable for construction, attendees said, except that it would take four to five years if and when all funding had been raised. Nor did they address whether Pelli, who designed the gleaming glass Plaza Tower building adjacent to the center and the Performing Arts Center of Greater Miami, would be hired for any expansion.

Previously, they have said that several phases would be required to realize their ultimate vision for the center, and have estimated the cost of a single concert hall at $100 million or more.

Attendees also said several other members of the Segerstrom family, who collectively must decide whether to deed their property to the center, were at the meeting.

An Orange County Museum of Art executive who has had several discussions with Segerstrom about moving the Newport Beach institution to the empty lot by the center said that, at Segerstrom’s suggestion, he met privately with Pelli and three of his assistants after Friday’s meeting.

“We discussed the site plans they have for what would be the symphony hall,” said museum chairman Charles D. Martin, “and the opportunities for the other space, if it were to be made available to the museum.”

But Martin said the museum has not decided whether to move, and Segerstrom “hasn’t offered the space to us.”