Riverside City Council Unanimously Designates City Hall as Historic Landmark

The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday, July 15, to designate City Hall as a historic landmark, protecting the controversial 1970s building that has become an icon of the city’s skyline.

The brutalist structure at 3900 Main St., constructed between 1973 and 1975, will receive protection for its unique architectural significance despite its polarizing design.

The designation was made possible through volunteer work by preservation advocate Jennifer Mermilliod, who completed the landmark application at no cost to the city.

“Modern architecture has always been controversial compared to classical styles, and this building is no different in Riverside,” said Councilmember Philip Falcone, who made the motion to approve the designation.

“Irrespective of one’s loving or loathing of this bricked and arched building, there is no denying its iconic nature,” Falcone said. “Nowhere else will one find a building that resembles this City Hall, and for those reasons it has become both synonymous with Riverside and an icon of the local skyline.”

The building looks fortified, with a weight to the structure that projects permanence. It doesn’t have the grand elegance of domes or statues of classical gods. It does have arches, but not the type to be seen on the Spanish trail that characterizes much of Southern California’s civic architecture.

Mermilliod, who researched and documented the building’s significance, emphasized the importance of the 50-year perspective in evaluating architectural importance.

“It is difficult to fully predict the impact of a building when it is constructed, which is why 50 years old is the general threshold for conducting a historic survey,” Mermilliod said.

“The passage of time builds context and allows us to look back on the decades with academic perspective and see the significance of a property more clearly,” she said. “Good design is timeless — it just takes time to see that.”

The designation recognizes the work of the local architectural firm Ruhnau, Evans and Steinman, particularly Swiss architect Kurt Steinmann, who led the design section.

The building blends the bold, heavy forms of brutalism with the symmetry and refined materials of new formalism, creating what Mermilliod called “an exceptional, high-style design not only for its impressive massing and aesthetic, but also because it embodies the character of the community, then and now.”

The building design may never be endeared like the grand hotels, churches and theaters of downtown, but it shows that the city was not winding down from a heyday. Instead, Riverside was creating interesting and challenging structures for the time in which they were designed.

In the best modern cities, you find the finest of today’s buildings next to durable survivors of yesterday’s trends, alongside the ones that survived eras even earlier.

The landmark designation protects the building’s exterior character while allowing interior modifications for daily operations.

Thanks to Mermilliod’s work, the structure that looks so permanent is indeed more permanent, ensuring this controversial but iconic piece of Riverside’s architectural history will endure for future generations.