Architect thinks inside the box
Local architect Don Tomasi on the empty second floor of the old AT&T Building in downtown Santa Rosa. The 6th generation Santa Rosan plans to add floors for apartments, move his firm into the building and create a home for the Sonoma County Museum and a restaurant on the first floor.
John Burgess/The Press DemocratPublished: Saturday, April 24, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 11:34 p.m.
It has been called the ugliest building in Santa Rosa — a characterless, concrete box that would make the blandest Cold War architecture look attractive.
But when Don Tomasi first stepped through the metal roll-up portal that conceals the entrance of the old AT&T building on Third Street, he was struck by its inner beauty.
The ground floor is one massive empty space, cold as a meat locker, broken only by 17-foot monolithic columns. The smattering of dim fluorescent lights high in the tall ceiling keeps the light mercifully dim.
As an architect with the sensibility of an artist, Tomasi nonetheless was able to project past the post-apocalyptic feel of the onetime long-distance call-switching station, built to withstand a nuclear blast and empty since 1993.
“It's the project of a lifetime,” Tomasi declared, peering down an open grate through a shaft descending to the ground five stories below. “Architects love challenges. Any architect would have been up to working on this project.”
To Tomasi, this foreboding bunker is a thing of beauty if for no other reason than its possibilities.
Within the coming year, the drab AT&T building, which has been occupying Third Street across from Courthouse Square since it was built in the early '70s, will undergo an extreme makeover. And its dazzling, glassy new look, which observers say will transform downtown, is Tomasi's vision. The 53-year-old Tomasi's TLCD Architecture, one of the largest architecture firms in Sonoma County, will move its offices there as well.
TLCD is responsible for the design of some of the more visible buildings within the North Bay landscape. The firm has done everything from the new North Wing at Kaiser Hospital in Santa Rosa, now under construction, to the state-of-the-art $46 million Doyle Library at Santa Rosa Junior College, a collaboration with the Boston firm of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott that incorporates sweeping views and green features like Thermal Energy Storage Ice Banks that create ice used for cooling during the day.
Tomasi was lead designer on Santa Rosa's Maria Carrillo High as well as Napa's stylish Carneros Inn, created as an agri-chic cluster of cottages with front porches overlooking a mini town green.
Creating spaces that are attractive, inviting and user-friendly — everything the old AT&T building is not — is Tomasi's architectural ethos.
The best projects, he maintains, come from collaboration.
“Well-conceived architecture should be thoughtful while embracing new ideas and technologies,” he says.
His design for AT&T — a dazzling wall of glass completely open to the street that will offer a mix of uses, from a modern-art museum and upscale restaurant on the ground floor to professional offices and 40 apartments above that — helped persuade the city to pick the Hugh Futrell Corp. to partner in a redevelopment of the site. Because TLCD is not a developer, Tomasi and TLCD co-principle Alan Butler approached Futrell to join the project, as they knew he had a proven track record for bringing downtown projects to fruition.
When the design was unveiled in January, Mayor Susan Gorin praised Tomasi for a transformative design that is “going to knock people's socks off.”
“I'm a little surprised by all the attention,” says Tomasi, an affable and soft-spoken man who, despite an impressive portfolio of work and stints in various design review boards, is accustomed to working quietly and largely out of the limelight. “I think Santa Rosa is desperate for something to happen downtown. And finally, something good is going to be built.”
Butler said what is now being called The Museum on the Square goes beyond what many are calling an inspired design solution and adds a big focus on sustainability.
“We really saw this as a 21st-century building rather than something that is more of the same we've seen for decades,” Butler said.
The idea of taking a lead in refurbishing the AT&T building sprang from a combination of practical need and civic interest in downtown. TLCD's lease for the upper portion of the WestAmerica bank building will expire next year, and the firm found itself looking for a new home. Tomasi said it was one of his partners who first threw out the idea of the AT&T building.
“We arranged a tour of the inside. We walked in and went, ‘Wow!' The ceilings are 14 to 18 feet high, big, industrial, concrete loft-type spaces. It's an architect's dream because we work in a very open collaborative fashion. There's nothing like it in Santa Rosa. We walked in there and the wheels started turning.”
Tomasi sketched out plans, doing a lot of the intensely creative work on his kitchen table at home, a multi-level modern house of his own design wedged perpendicularly into a hillside in Santa Rosa's Hidden Valley.
Here, in this house with views of the forest on one side and the city on the other, he lives with his wife, Lorrie, son, Michael, a sophomore at Santa Rosa High, and daughter, Genna, 19, a student at SRJC. Eldest son Geoffrey is an economics major at UC San Diego.
Designing a building that may be a catalyst for a real downtown revival comes for Tomasi at a time of personal creative revival. After 25 years of solid work and hundreds of projects, he's committed at this point to taking on only the best — projects that will make a difference, that are sustainably designed and elegant.
He was born to design. Father Tom, whose grandfather emigrated to coastal Marin and Sonoma in 1877 from Switzerland, was also a leading Santa Rosa architect. The first house Tom designed in Santa Rosa in 1965 is down the street from Don's house. Brother Alan is an L.A. architect.
“The Tomasi family crest shows a man holding a plumb bob, a T-square and a triangle — the tools of a builder,” said Tom, who designed SRJC's Forsyth Hall music building and worked for Cox and Liske, ironically the firm that designed the old AT&T building.
“They solved a problem the telephone company asked them to do,” said the elder architect, who didn't work on it.
Tom grew up playing with blocks and building materials his dad brought home, visiting job sites with him and all the while designing anything and everything, including cars and soap-box coasters.
After graduating from Montgomery High School, he studied architecture at UC Berkeley and the University of Washington. He got practical experience on his own before joining his dad's firm in the early '80s and eventually taking over when Tom retired.
Tomasi feels the weight of a high-profile project that may well define his career. But meanwhile, as it wends its way through the City Hall review and approval process — he hopes to move into the dazzling new 10-story structure by early 2012 — he's on to the next thing. TLCD is designing a new courthouse in Lake County, and Tomasi himself has taken on the task of restoring the historic DeTurk Round Barn in Santa Rosa's old West End.
“I'm definitely into a cleaner, more precise style of design,” he reflected. “I just find myself doing more progressive design work than I have in the past and I can't even tell you why. It's almost like a second career for me.”
You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg. mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.
All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.