Los Angeles, of course, could never suffer such a simple definition. After decades of sub-, ex-, post-, hyper-, and even New urban legends, Downtown LA is less a specific geographical entity than a mythical conceptual specter. These ghost stories continue to provoke abject fear and perverse infatuation in roughly equal measure, enough to sustain a cottage industry of academic ghostbusters bent on capturing downtown’s elusive spirit or disproving its very existence.[1]

No doubt you’ve ventured your own bold predictions for Downtown or participated in incessant comparisons to the West Side and the East Coast. But what exactly is it we love and loath, promote and dispel? Nobody seems quite sure, and definitions, if ventured at all, are uniformly tentative. As one colleague recently opined, “I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s just where the tall buildings are.”

Most sources will tell you that the term ‘Downtown’ was coined in New York City, a function of Manhattan’s river-bounded geography and upstream development. Through the 19^th century, as American cities mushroomed across the continent, the term quickly dissipated to signify the urban core of any major metropolis. Sure, there are variations – in Chicago you’re in the Loop, in Philadelphia it’s Center City. But local inflection notwithstanding, Downtown, in pragmatic, unequivocal, American vernacular, signifies our version of the European centro storico.

Yet the term’s original usage, still prevalent in its place of birth, does not connote a place so much as a direction. As the original settlement of Manhattan Island expanded northward, Downtown proved an expedient geographical shorthand, distinguishing the old town from more valuable developments on higher, more northerly ground. As delivered to us, the term signifies the area of tall buildings at the tip of Manhattan only by implication. In New York, as every subway sign makes clear, downtown simply means ‘south of here.’

In each case, we begin to see the deep roots of the term’s phantasmal connotations. One variant implies an allegiance to an established, often imagined, typological model of urban density, aesthetics, and inhabitation. This is Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” that catchy jingle of promise and possibility that, when applied as urban strategy, tends to devolve into saccharine nostalgias for a past that never existed. The other notion pushes us further into the realm of the impossible. Downtown as Direction denotes a place where, by definition, one cannot be. Always a bit further south, this Downtown remains an elusive concept, one step ahead of even the most intrepid urban denizen.

To me, whether cast as sappy nostalgia or ghostly inaccessibility, impossibility seems unlikely to provide a viable foundation for an urban agenda. But a third, more positive inflection may prove more effective.

In 1979, the National Basketball Association adopted the three-point rule. By juridical decree, the professional court was divided into two distinct zones, with an extra point awarded for baskets scored from beyond the top of the key. The three-point rule forever altered the game, requiring new strategies for coaches and players and new terminology for sportscasters and fans. The slam dunk, muscled in at close range by brute force, gained a long-distance counterpart as players developed alternative techniques to provide high-value scoring “from downtown.”

This to me seems an apt metaphor for LA architecture as well as our slippery notion of Downtown. In basketball parlance, downtown is not that place in closest proximity to the goal (that’s “the paint”) but rather a much larger peripheral zone whose boundaries oscillate according to who has the ball. It’s the place difficult shots come from, a place that prizes technique over tenacity, marksmanship over muscle. To score from the inside, you need only be a bully; to shoot from downtown, you have to innovate with the game and master its techniques.

This is what LA architecture is all about. The East Coast may remain the seat of architectural power in the United States, but LA routinely draws the most daring innovators. From Neutra and Schindler to the current crop of cutting-edge digital fabricators, generations of architects have abandoned traditional city centers to hone unorthodox techniques in our unorthodox urban context. This innovative bent is what gives LA architecture its distinctive character and what makes us so easy to tell apart from our more traditional East Coast counterparts. While New Yorkers scrap it out in the paint, we fire three-pointers.

Take Frank Gehry’s Bilbao, still architecture’s most dramatic three-pointer to date. Though its effects emanate from Northern Spain, Gehry launched this potent attack on traditional European urbanism from Los Angeles, half a world away. And as its cool swish resonated around the globe, one could almost hear critics shouting in breathless disbelief, “Gehry delivers FROM DOWNTOWN!!”

Long before Gehry’s one-in-a-million shot, LA architects routinely delivered high impact, unconventional architecture, always finding dispersal and distance a crucial asset. Leaving behind time-honored and tightly bounded East Coast rules, LA architects relentlessly innovate and strike from the outside. So I prefer to leave the impossible downtown of ghost stories and urban legends to others. My Downtown is not a forgotten core to return to, but rather an unruly zone at the periphery – the best place to score from.

After the Second World War, cities devastated by the conflict had to rebuild themselves. Los Angeles, devastated by self-inflicted Urban Renewal, began the rebuilding process soon after. This issue examines the several ways in which corporate architects adapted modernism to reconstitute the civic realm of Los Angeles.

Articles:

Whose Turf is This Anyways?
by Julie Eizenberg, John Given, Roger Sherman, Doug Suisman

Plans Come and They Go, or Downtown is Almost OK
by Robert S. Harris

Downtown … Again
by Peter Zellner

Hope or Hype: a Residential Community Downtown
by Tatiana Begleman

All Shiny and New : Disney Hall and Downtown
by Carol Mcmichael Reese

Editorial by Vinayak Bharne and Alan A. Loomis

“… because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves,” wrote Reyner Banham in Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies. Written in the halcyon years before the energy crisis or crippling traffic congestion and well after the Watts Riots, this classic survey is essentially a manifesto for the suburban metropolis. Banham’s four ecologies map a decentralized city organized by regional geography and the freeways rather than a centrifugal expansion originating from the pueblo plaza or City Hall. From his perspective in 1971, downtown was certainly not the focus of the city and nothing more than a historical footnote.

But with the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles seems to be rediscovering its center, and the rhetoric of a downtown renaissance has reached a crescendo. Following the Cathedral, Staples Center, SCIArc, and even MOCA – the hopes for downtown’s socio-political destiny as the cultural center of Southern California are focused on the Concert Hall. Los Angeles has waited sixteen years for it, and its architectural iconography can hardly be separated from the anticipation that Gehry will deliver the “Bilbao effect” for downtown. Rendered in stainless steel, the Concert Hall is the ultimate “silver bullet” project – a structure so heavily endowed with civic will and capital that (supposedly) it can regenerate downtown single-handedly.

Not withstanding the recent Grand Avenue Project, impelled by the Concert Hall’s success, the iconographic messiah building might be nothing more than a myth. While discussion during the Concert Hall’s six year construction has centered on its impressive structural gymnastics and the hope that Gehry’s architectural singularity will put the LA’s center on the map again, a steady revitalization of downtown has in fact already been happening, occurring incrementally through successive planning studies, modest projects and hidden legislative changes – some much older than even the Concert Hall. The Hall may deserve applause, but downtown’s 3000 new housing units represent not just a lucrative residential real estate engine, but also an emerging community of invested residents, who are probably the surest catalyst for downtown’s long term transformation. While the Concert Hall leaves little doubt of its catalytic influence on the immediate context, all the fanfare may be a pawn in the game of downtown’s renaissance, and one that despite all the utopias of the last century, may have innocuously found its own way to resurrection.

We have collected a few “notes” to explore the physical and planning context of the Concert Hall’s promise, with an interest in locating the rhetoric of a Downtown Renaissance. Carol McMichael Reese opens the discussion with an essay (first published in the Walt Disney Concert Hall’s official monograph) that positions the Philharmonic’s new home within the historic lineage of urban visions that have sought to crystallize downtown. With this backdrop, it is possible to see the Concert Hall as the teleological end to a century of civic center plans, a much-needed “dramatic podium” for a city center “ in need of landmarks”, a symbol of the power of architecture to incite and nurture urbanism. Peter Zellner also reminds us that the recently promoted and ambitious Grand Avenue Project – an outcome of the Concert Hall’s optimism and the potential sequel to Gehry’s powerful urban argument – is but another episode in the fifty-year history of urban visions for the Bunker Hill acropolis. From one of the least utopian, yet most pragmatic plans proposed for downtown, Robert Harris, co-chair of the Downtown Strategic Plan (DSP) Committee, also sees the Concert Hall as one among the many catalytic projects the DSP anticipated. He voices the dilemmas that led to the embalming of the plans, whilst arguing that the DSP’s strategies for safer streets and better neighborhoods are coming to life through downtown’s ongoing, incremental housing and reuse boom. Likewise, the offhanded reference to the Concert Hall by Tatiana Begelman in her survey of downtown’s lofts, apartments and SROs suggests the boom as autonomous and oblivious to the hall’s myth as the “key” for downtown’s emergence as a vibrant city center. Yet for all these plans and developments, a final conversation from an event sponsored by the collaborative LAH*UB suggests that downtown’s status as the city’s center remains inconclusive. With the failure of Pershing Square and the present ambiguity of the civic center mall, the panel members – John Given, Julie Eizenberg, Roger Sherman and Doug Suisman – fail to agree on the importance of downtown as a gravitational weight to a polycentric urbanity or the object of a dubious search for “public” or “social” space. And thus we return to Reyner Banham’s thirty-year old survey of Los Angeles, where downtown is but one center among many, and not even the most important at that.

Yet, we are convinced that downtown Los Angeles assuredly deserves more than a just “a note”. With architectural monuments confirming its position in Southern California, and residences in long-forgotten commercial buildings establishing coherent neighborhoods, a downtown generated of new-found realisms is gradually becoming clear. LA’s urban core is emerging as a “collage city”, rejecting the fixation on “no-topia,” with the idea of reusing the existing city as an irreplaceable cultural and economic resource, for collective form, and multiple utopias. The emblematic struggle to define LA’s urban core has been a palimpsest, constructed and reconstructed over time, each phase displacing its predecessor and generating newer “notes” on its modernity. As we currently enter yet another era in downtown’s rebuilding, one that confirms LA’s sheer size and diversity as a challenge to any singular urban polarity, the task at hand is an unbiased, unapologetic version of downtown’s history to scrutinize the realities, possibilities and validities of its many dialogues and dialects. A note is not enough – indeed a scholarly history of downtown LA is most overdue.

Our second newsletter is now online. This time we address two new Los Angeles landmarks: Raphael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall.

ARTICLES:

Ruins and Reincarnations: the Old and New Cathedrals
by Vinayak Bharne

The Battle of Bunker Hill, or a Grand Avenue Revisited
by John Dale

Continuity of Service: the Cathedral and Concert Hall
by Barbara Lamprecht

Editorial by Tim Durfee

Many of the world’s metropolises have landmarks that strongly embody the social, cultural, or political moment in which they were built. Often the symbolic power of such monuments can exert a tangible force, by shifting or re-asserting an urban center, or by creating or usurping a region’s identity.

Los Angeles has always lacked such monuments. Apart from its visible infrastructure – the freeways or the River – perhaps only the Getty Center could be attributed such status. Yet the lasting urban effects of the Getty are dubious. It hovers, disconnected from the grid, inaccessible by foot, expressing the aspirations of the existing centers of power.

At the lower-rent end of the 10 freeway are presently emerging two new Los Angeles landmarks: Raphael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall – both just blocks apart on Grand Street in downtown. Only in the future will we know if these buildings become the icons that LA so conspicuously lacks. However, as the concrete cures on the new Cathedral and the stainless steel sheathing begins to cover the Disney concert hall, the popular and trade press are already beginning to herald these structures as the crown jewels in a newly affluent and developed downtown. We believe, however, there are more complex, in some cases problematic, architectural and urban implications to these new buildings.

Architecturally, the two structures are emblematic of the two current prevailing stylistic poles: Gehry as the (perhaps accidental) godfather of the voluptuous, software-aided blob, and Moneo, an Iberian representative of Spanish, Swiss, and Dutch European neo-Modern refinement. In this comparison, Gehry’s building is the more exuberant, Dionysian, and unapologetically formal building to the Apollonian, relatively rational Cathedral. Structurally, the rising of the concrete, exoskeleton of the Cathedral has provided a curious contrast to the endo-skeletal steel structure that is the hulking armature for Gehry’s undulating pedals.

Perhaps the most salient comparisons however, address the roles these buildings play in the New Downtown. Each monument seems to address different constituencies the influences of which are passing each other – one on the way up, one on the way down – on the index of cultural hegemony: the West-side, “non-ethnic” Los Angeles and the East-side, Latin and ethnic majority. One is civic, non-denominational, yet private. The other ecclesiastic, dogmatic, yet so open to the public as to serve also as a physical shelter in case of earthquake or plague.

The idea for this Newsletter’s theme developed after Barbara Lamprecht described an article she was writing that compared the Cathedral and the Disney Hall, in part, as telling contemporary interpretations of an ancient typologies. As the issue took shape, the contributors created a range of variations of this idea – each considering, in addition to the architectural or urbanistic qualities of the buildings, the significance of the Cathedral and the Disney Hall being built at this time in Los Angeles’ history, less than three blocks apart, and by these architects.

In Jack Burnett-Stuart’s article, the neighboring but radically divergent qualities of the Gehry and Moneo buildings are compared to another auspicious double-opening nearly a half-century ago in Berlin of Mies’ Nationalgalerie and Scharoun’s Philharmonie. John Dale’s piece revisits some of the historical and urbanistic conditions of Bunker Hill/Grand Avenue that are critical for understanding the true contexts – visible and invisible – of the Gehry and Moneo projects. Vinayak Bharne focuses on the case of the Cathedral, in which the building it is replacing now assumes the dubious status of urban ruin in its abandoned, de-consecrated state.

Tim Durfee

This issue of the newsletter was edited by Jack Burnett-Stuart and Tim Durfee. Thanks to Frank Gehry and Associates for permission to use their photographs of the Concert Hall, and to Adam Wheeler for selecting them. Thanks to the anonymous source of the cathedral photographs.All texts © the authors and LA Forum, 2001

About the Contributors

Vinayak Bharne is an architectural and urban designer at Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists in Pasadena. A graduate of the University of Southern California (USC), he was Assistant Editor of “Saintonge,” the annual journal of the “Center for Studies of Architecture and Urbanism (CSAU) in Saintes, France.

Jack Burnett-Stuart has lived and worked in London, Berlin and Los Angeles. He is a board member of the LA Forum and currently co-editor of the newsletter.

John Dale is an Associate Partner at Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership in Los Angeles. He co-curated the exhibition “Terms of Engagement: Urban Design in Greater Los Angeles at the Millennium” and, until recently, was Co-Chair of the LA/AIA Urban Design Committee.

Links for Forum Issue 2

The Yellow Armadillo, by Jill Stewart (The New Times, 6/28/01)
http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/2001-06-28/stewart.html

Cathedral
http://cathedral.la-archdiocese.org/

Disney Concert Hall
http://www.disneyhall.org/

MOCA’s upcoming exhibition on the Cathedral and Disney Concert Hall
http://www.moca-la.org/museum/futureexhibition.php

ARCHINECT (archived construction photos of DCH)
http://www.archinect.com/about.shtml

Scheduled to appear:

James Rojas, Michael Dear, Lane Barden, Alan Loomis, David Fletcher

7.30pm, Friday March 24 at the Not the Cornfield project (aka the Cornfield site), North gate: 1799 Baker St. (323) 226-1158.

Co-Sponsored by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

James Rojas is founder of the Latino Urban Forum (LUF) which is group dedicated to improving the Latino built environment through urban planning and advocacy. LUF has worked on many projects such as the Evergreen Cemetery Jogging Path, South Central Farm, and the Cornfields. He holds a Master of City Planning and a Master of Science of Architecture Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is one of the few studies on U.S. Latino built environment and has been highly cited. Excerpts have been widely printed in publications like Places and the Los Angeles Times. For the past 8 years James has lectured extensively at universities, colleges, conference, high schools, and community meeting on his research. His goal is to empower Latinos in how to understand their environment. James Rojas has spent 3 years in the East Europe in the Peace Corps organizing environmental groups for sustainable transportation. Mr. Rojas’s currently is a project manager for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Central Area Team and works on transportation enhancements projects.

Michael Dear is professor and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Southern California, and honorary professor at the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London (England). He is currently researching urban and cultural change along the US-Mexico border, and has just completed a 4,000-mile exploration of the borderlands (on both sides). His most recent book is Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California (Routledge, 2003; edited, with Gustavo Leclerc).

Lane Barden is a Los Angeles-based photographer, teacher and writer. He has taught photography at SCI-Arc and Art Center College of Design. His photographic project “The Los Angeles River: 52 Miles Downstream” was shown at SCI-Arc in a solo show in the Spring of 2005. Selected images will be exhibited in L.A. River Reborn opening at the Skirball Cultural Center April 6, 2006 and will be published in a forthcoming book on Los Angeles infrastructure, edited by Kazys Varnelis and ACTAR Publications of Barcelona. Lane Barden’s commitment to the future of the Cornfields and the Los Angeles River is anchored in his vision of a performance-based public space in the L.A. River at the Cornfields created by a computer operated inflatable rubber dam installed in the channel. “The Los Angeles Waterway Project” has received coverage by the New Yorker magazine, National Public Radio, The Los Angeles Times, and KCBS (Ch. 2) and KCAL (Ch. 9) in Los Angeles. The idea is not to create a lake, but to invite people down to the channel for a good time.

Alan Loomis is the principal urban designer for the City of Glendale, California. Previously he was an urban designer with Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists, were he directed planning projects for Pomona College, the University of California Santa Barbara, and various cities in the Inland Empire and Central California, in addition to participating in other urban design and research projects throughout California, New Mexico and New Jersey. He has taught urban design at Woodbury University, and written for ArcCA, loudpaper, among other journals, and co-edited Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric Region, a survey of regional smart growth architecture and urbanism. He has served on the board of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, the local Congress for New Urbanism chapter, and he is the creator/editor of DeliriousLA, a comprehensive weekly listing of architecture events in Southern California.

David Fletcher is an urban and environmental designer, professor, and writer. He holds an MLA with Distinction from Harvard University, where he studied urban design and landscape architecture. He also holds a Bachelor of Art in studio art and Bachelor of Science in landscape architecture from the University of California at Davis. He is presently working at Mia Lehrer and Associates on a range of projects including civic spaces, parks, and regional planning projects. He is interested in the unique systems and forms that evolve from sustainable design practice. More specifically, his work addresses process, void, symbiosis, infrastructure, and post-industrial urbanism. As project manager for the Los Angeles Revitalization Master Plan, he is leading efforts to identify and plan a comprehensive open space network that interfaces with channel restoration and urbanism. He is also managing the Compton Creek Master Plan and the LA Riverfront Park projects. He has taught urban design and landscape architecture at Harvard Design School, the Centre d’Etude et d’Urbanisme in Saintes, France, and at the USC School of Architecture. He has recently authored a paper “Imprinting Watershed Awareness through Environmental Literature and Art” in Facilitating Watershed Management: Fostering Awareness and Stewardship, edited by Robert France and his writings on the Los Angeles River will be published in a forthcoming book on Los Angeles infrastructure, edited by Kazys Varnelis. David was the assistant curator and exhibition designer of “Inhabiting Infrastructure”, at the Harvard Design School. His temporary art installations have been shown at Connemara Sculpture Park, Harvard Design School, Davis, USC, and in Art Center’s GardenLAb exhibit. His recent work on postindustrial urbanism was been honored with a 1st place national award from the American Society for Landscape Architecture. He also received an Honor Award in 2004 from the Boston Society of Landscape Architects for environmental planning work in Beirut, Lebanon.

ABOUT THE NOT A CORNFIELD PROJECT
Growing in the historic center of Los Angeles, the Not Cornfield project transforms an industrial brownfield site into a cornfield for one agricultural cycle. Now the Los Angeles Historic State Park, the site popularly known as ‘The Cornfield’ had remained derelict for more than a decade. The project serves as a potent metaphor that provides a focus for reflection and action in a city unclear about the location of its energetic and historic center.

ABOUT LAUREN BON, NOT A CORNFIELD ARTIST
Lauren Bon resides in Los Angeles and holds a Masters of Architecture degree from MIT and a BA from Princeton. Ms. Bon is a trustee of the Annenberg Foundation and President of Not A Cornfield, LLC. Her recent urban, public and land art projects in the U.S., Hong Kong, Belfast and Northern Ireland, as well as her role as a trustee, make her uniquely poised to build the capacity of the Foundation in the area of site based philanthropy, serving communities through education, civic, health, artistic initiatives and programs. Not a Cornfield art project is being developed through a grant by the Annenberg Foundation.

On June 17, 2003 the collaborative LAH*UB [Los Angeles H* Urban Bureau] sponsored a panel discussion at Gallery 727 on the subject of public space in downtown Los Angeles, in conjuction with their Civic Park Proposals competition/exhibit (see Issue 5). The following conversation is an edited extract from the panel transcripts. For the full transcript, including audience comments, contact www.lahub.net.

Doug Suisman : We talk interchangeably, and I think mistakenly, about open space, public space, civic space. They’re not the same thing. They’re also other problems of terminology in our discussion that we should address, which is that the notion of civic is also sometimes equated with government. Government is often interchangeably spoken of as bureaucracy. Civic is not government, government is not bureaucracy. Civic fundamentally has to do with the city, and in particular with the citizens of a city. It may have to do with self-governance and democratic institutions, but not necessarily. Now, the reason I raise this is because my experience was as a member of the team that developed the master plan for the Civic Center, known as the ten-minute diamond.

There have been many, many plans for the civic center. One of the confusions of our downtown is that we don’t know whether we’re a north/south downtown or an east/west downtown. And partly that’s because of Bunker Hill – we’re always trying to get around it. Some of the plans have said that the main civic spine would run north/south along Main and Spring. That was early. Sometime around the forties, fifties, or sixties, there was an idea that actually the main civic axis should swing east/west up Bunker Hill. What is there now is a kind of failed mini Washington Mall – the National Mall. It’s very clear that at some point that was the conception – the Department of Water and Power is where the Capitol is, City Hall is the Washington Monument, and, I guess, City Hall East is the Lincoln Memorial? I don’t know what’s at the other end but there was clearly an idea of an axis and of a big open space. Right now it’s incomplete. There is a public space between the two county buildings that is owned by the county. It is public but it’s totally walled off, unlike the Mall in Washington, which is visible and accessible from all sides. Unless you’ve been a juror recently for a county trial, you probably don’t even know that that space is there. One block down, between the Archives Building and the County Law Library, there’s another space which is optimistically called El Paseo de los Pobladores de Los Angeles [The Route of the Settlers of the City of Los Angeles], and it is as mean a public space as you are likely to find in any American city. Hot, concrete, unused, unloved, but on axis. And finally, at base, right in front of City Hall is, well, perhaps it’s symbolically appropriate that there’s actually a private parking lot. That is what is currently arrayed along that axis. That’s what’s there now – a part of downtown that is uniquely dedicated to the functions of government, and particularly the bureaucratic functions of government – a government ghetto.

My particular task was to develop a concept for framing the Civic Center conceptually, that would tie together open space, public space, linkages for pedestrians. We came up with the name of the ten-minute diamond. The ten-minute diamond says: at least let’s finally complete the vision and create a continuous public green space up the hill. Some see it as a great lawn; some see it as a botanical garden. The idea was to link time and space: the diamond was the shape of the space that is defined by walking ten minutes in any direction from the rotunda of City Hall. It’s an enormously elaborate space – truly a civic space. It’s a symbolic space, symbolic of government and symbolic of representative democracy. And it sits directly underneath the tower of City Hall, which is our Washington Monument, our obelisk, our marker in space of some central point of meeting.

We debated long and hard, well, is the civic center a government center? It’s been in the historical plans and it was referred to as the administrative Center. Is it administration, is it government, is it civic, is it cultural? And while it is monumental in scale, and enjoys some attractive open space and green space, in my view it is deadening to civic life. Not just public life generally – animation in the streets, cafes, stores, hotels, all the excitement of urban life – but is also deadening to civic life, to the responsibilities of citizenship.

Why is that? Well, there’s almost no place for the citizens to gather and express the views and responsibilities of citizenship. And what we have in a representative democracy, instead of spaces for citizens to gather, are rooms in which laws are made. That is the City Council Chamber. The one truly significant space, in all of the Civic Center, is the City Council Chamber. Many of you probably have never even been in it, you probably don’t know where it is within the city hall structure, yet that is the space where your democratic representatives make the laws which affect civic life. So, the idea of a civic square is enshrined in the ten-minute diamond plan. We can talk long and hard about where it should be and what it should be, but it was always seen as part of a pair.

The idea is that civic gardens would go up the hill to the music center, along the axis from City Hall, past the county buildings, and terminating with the Department of Water and Power. That is a symbolic space of enormous power: city government at one end, water and power at the other. There are very few European cities or Latin American cities that have such an absolutely clear statement of where power is concentrated as in the metropolis of Los Angeles. Electricity, water, and government. Oh, by the way, on the corner is the Los Angeles Times. So, the idea was that that much space was appropriate for civic gardens because of the topography. We talk about locating a civic square on the west face of City Hall, but in the history of the building itself… from the opening day of City Hall, the south face, the narrow south face – if you look at City Hall from the west, it’s wide and massive, but the view from the south is tapered (much closer in form to an obelisk) – that’s where the opening ceremonies of City Hall are. That is where mayors are inaugurated, on the steps. That is where janitors, who feel they are unfairly paid, gather to protest, and where other groups protest.

So, there is already a civic space and it’s called City Hall Park, unofficially. I assume you all know about City Hall Park. It’s that little space directly south of City Hall. And it is supposed to function in ways that I think the civic square is intended to function. Let me close and let others talk and we can come back to this in our discussion. But for the idea of the civic square, that space was insufficient. One, it’s mostly grass; two, it’s blocked by trees; three, there’s a statue right on the axis – and it’s completely unused as civic space except on rare occasions. The idea was that by taking the block south of City Hall where the Caltrans building is now, and removing it, we could open up the space that would truly serve as the central, symbolic, and civic space of Los Angeles for all Angelinos. This isn’t just any civic space, the idea is that this would be the civic space… where New Year’s Eve is celebrated, where Presidents come to visit and address the public.

Julie Eizenberg : I’m not sure if that’s being really characteristic of LA… the idea of authority and belonging to that big a group… isn’t a compelling way for how I see myself in the city. So, I never saw the civic layer until you mentioned it, Doug. I’m completely confused by what the purpose of this “park” as a zone is, and what you were talking about as public space. Because I feel that a lot more of this place belongs to me, no matter what the actual ownership is.

I don’t know if anybody looks at those 1789 Nolli maps when they study architecture anymore – what they did was they colored all the space that was considered public space black, and everything that was considered private space was white. And black space included the streets and it extended into the churches. Now, I would extend that into the stores, into the libraries, I would extend it into a number of things like that – but for me that’s what public space is. So, that’s my response to “what do you mean by public space?” I think it’s everywhere. It’s not to do with who owns it, it’s to do with if you’re allowed to use it, and there’s a sort of implied contract that you can go in there and use it… that’s public space.

John Given : I’m going to focus my initial remarks to my own journey in public space in Los Angeles. As a native Angelino, my first introduction to Los Angeles, truly, was a walk down Broadway and Spring Street in 1980. I just was blown away, because there was this amazing city and an amazing public space, which was Broadway. That a native could grow up here and completely miss it – was a tremendously new perspective on Los Angeles that has fueled me ever since.

One of my next ventures was in ‘80s, trying to figure out the framework for a residential community originally conceived in 1972 by The Silver Book [a plan for downtown sponsored by business leaders and the precursor to the central business district redevelopment plan]. The Silver Book proposed South Park as a community formed around a nine square block park with a lake in the middle of it. It’s that same area that the football stadium was being talked about, this last year. That was an impetus to the central business district re-development project, and an impetus to the concept of creating a community in downtown. It dwindled to what I think was a very real and practical concept of Hope Street as a great civic space. It’s this wonderful street that ties all the way up to one of the most beautiful buildings in Los Angeles, which is the library.

Later on, Roger Sherman and I met, trying to create a grand civic space for the West Hollywood Civic Center in West Hollywood Park. It was fostered by the vision that a city needed to have a great space, a very great space. So, what do you do when you build a park in a city that’s starving for open space, and everybody wants to use it, and everybody wants to use it for purposes that probably are going to drive another group of people crazy? And how do you deal with a small amount of space, given those constraints? And yet the need to use it and have it be a success? What we learned is that perhaps that no matter how grand the vision was, that really wasn’t where the people of West Hollywood were at and the project didn’t go forward for a number of reasons. But I think it does raise that question of open space being Mom and apple pie for everybody. One can promote endless projects and endless visions around the need to have more. You can always have more of it, there’s never enough. We can do studies about whether there’s a need for it or not, and there’s never enough. We never really quite know what it is we need the open space for, and it’s often civic space that’s attached to that. We all conjure different ideas about what civic space is.

Back to Forum Issue 6: A Note on Downtown

“Disney Hall finally puts Downtown on the map and gives Downtown something of substance that was missing. Still, we have to ask: should the focus Downtown be on creating monuments or connective tissue? Downtown needs walkable streets, green spaces for loitering and for children, better transit linkages to Bunker Hill and the historic core. The lack of resources results in a focus on attracting developers, rather than on articulating an overall vision.” Ayahlushim Hammond, Community Redevelopment Authority

The Walt Disney Concert Hall is a daring building and a dazzling object that the rational mind understands as inert of stone, steel, and glass. But we instinctively react to the Concert Hall as if it were energized with something akin to a life force. It bursts onto the scene with such vivacity that it creates a continual urban celebration, like a Fourth of July municipal fireworks display with a limitless supply of incendiary devices. Reflected light radiates in all directions from its stainless steel cladding, with walls that cant up and out, moving away from plumb in multiple directions and at different angles. The building pushes against the confines of its corner lot, seeming to elbow its way onto the sidewalk and into the intersection. Walt Disney Concert Hall brings life to the streets from which it rises with a shining burst of optimism in the future of Los Angeles as a city. It causes us to think, as we perhaps have not thought collectively in a long time, about Downtown Los Angeles and the ways in which it represents not only the communal joys and advantages, but also the frustrations and challenges, of living in a metropolis that is one of the fastest growing and most environmentally precarious in the world.

The Concert Hall is the result of longstanding dreams to make Downtown the symbol of the city’s collective enterprise, by locating flagship buildings for government, commerce, and culture there. And, in the face of equally longstanding processes of metropolitan decentralization and disintegration, these dreams continue to drive hopes that the Concert Hall will have a regenerative effect on Downtown. To understand what the Concert Hall might mean to the hopes for the renewal of Downtown, we must revisit past proposals for revitalizing Los Angeles’s urban core. Of particular interest are those schemes that have failed, been controversial, and only partially succeeded. Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic for the New York Times, recently urged readers to take unbuilt designs for the urban sphere seriously, as “special causes . . . links in the chain of causality that produces, sustains, and transforms major cities over time.” [1] In the belief that public familiarity with the history of visions for remaking Downtown Los Angeles might strengthen the groundswell that the opening of the Concert Hall has occasioned, it seems an opportune moment to review the special causes relative to improving Downtown Los Angeles that have been put forward during the twentieth century and that proponents of a revitalized Downtown passionately support today.

“Downtown has to make itself more physically appealing – beyond the first blush of enthusiasm – in order to reach the second and third level of residential growth. There is a friction generated by the needs of the indigent and homeless Downtown and the emerging residential community there. Catalytic projects like Disney Hall have to be seen in that context.” John Kaliski, Urban Studio

In the early twenty-first century, Downtown is a microcosm of the “prismatic metropolis” that Los Angeles has become. [2] In the city of Los Angeles, the US Census 2000 reported a population of approximately 3.5 million, of which 40.9 percent are foreign-born and 57.8 percent speak a language other than English at home. Developing a unitary “civic center” with buildings of symbolic shared civic values is more challenging today in increasingly heterogeneous Los Angeles, or, for that matter, in any other globalizing city. Competing, or at least multi-present, centers represent a number of ethnicities Downtown. Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and Koreatown have all achieved the physical status of Downtown enclaves. The Latino population of Los Angeles, although strongly represented Downtown in an entrenched retail district along Broadway, still has not established an honorific core there – unless one counts the El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park (where the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture has considered relocating), which is organized around the early nineteenth-century Spanish colonial Los Angeles Plaza and includes the commercialized and touristic Olvera Street district. Downtown also boasts a financial core of skyscrapers; a convention center with a relatively new sports arena; a market district specializing in flowers, produce, groceries, toys, small electronics, clothing, and other wholesale goods; a district of historic theaters and commercial structures; and several districts of new housing added over the last forty years.

Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles : "Administration Center for the City and County of Los Angeles" 1924 (published in Symphony: Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall)

Walt Disney Concert Hall takes its place in the Los Angeles Civic Center, the group of monumental government and cultural buildings that was erected after decades of struggle and controversy on Bunker Hill, Downtown’s most conspicuous land mass. [3] The Concert Hall was sited very consciously on Bunker Hill in relation to a number of existing arts venues: the Central Library (Bertram Goodhue, 1926), the three theaters of the Music Center (Welton Beckett and Associates, 1964), Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA, Arata Isosaki, 1987), and the Colburn School of the Performing Arts (Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer, 1998). The Concert Hall stands here both as the result of a persistent consensus that Downtown should boast a concentrated, contiguous cultural district and as a new rallying point for the achievement of that urban goal. However, since the Concert Hall is prominently associated with what many see as the current resurgence of larger Downtown, it is worth surveying the urban context beyond Bunker Hill to learn what is at issue for the city’s core.

Walt Disney Concert Hall’s Genetic Code for Urban Revitalization

The Walt Disney Concert Hall Committee insisted in the 1988 competition brief that competing architects demonstrate an “understanding of the Walt Disney Concert Hall as a ëbuilding block’ of the city.” [4] Thus a genetic code for stimulating urban renaissance was written into the conception of Disney Hall from the outset. Frank Gehry won the commission, in part, because he understood better than his competitors the life-enhancing effect on Downtown that such genetic material could have.

One telling Gehry drawing vividly communicates his grasp of the urban possibilities. It is a plan drawing in black pen on white paper, worked in Gehry’s full, swift line that was produced as a study during the competition stage of the project. Significantly, he drew concentric wave patterns around the hall that radiated from its welcoming lobby, which he insightfully described on another drawing as a “living room for the city.” The waves are perhaps transcriptions of sound flowing over the street, and they break across the terrace and sidewalk, billowing out across Grand Avenue from the Concert Hall site toward the empty blocks. Importantly, this key process drawing signifies Gehry’s conception of Disney Hall’s role as a primary instigator in the urban renewal process.

However compelling Gehry’s response, the mandate for the Concert Hall’s urban challenge lay with the building’s clients. Walt Disney Concert Hall was intended to enlarge the Music Center – officially, the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County. The construction of the Music Center atop Bunker Hill in 1964 had developed formerly “empty” land that had been razed at the end of the 1950s to address Downtown “blight.” Sited on a parcel that had been cleared almost thirty years earlier, the Concert Hall continued that urban renewal trajectory. Thus, it is not surprising that the Concert Hall Committee’s instructions urged not only that Concert Hall “convey a unifying theme . . . [and] compliment the Music Center,” but that it also “strongly influence the quality of design and construction of adjacent projects . . . [and] create a major cultural corridor on Grand Avenue.” They also joined a century-old civic discussion about the ways in which the physical environment of Downtown – its streets, buildings, parks, and landscaping – could serve as prominent symbols of aspirations to promote the common good.

Lloyd Wright : "Grand Boulevard Typical Section" from "Civic Center proposed for the City of Los Angeles, California" 1925 (published in Symphony: Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall)

Back to the Future of Downtown Los Angeles

The earliest concerted effort to rebuild Downtown Los Angeles took place in the first decade of the twentieth century, when Angelenos commissioned Charles Mulford Robinson to prepare a plan for the recuperation of the city’s center. One hundred years ago, the stimulus for urban renewal in Los Angeles and other in United States cities was the enhancement of Washington, DC. The 1902 scheme, known as the Senate Park Commission Plan, reorganized the National Mall as a luxuriantly planted field that would provide a suitable ground for the classically-inspired temples of science, history, art, and democratic governance. The publication of the Senate Park Commission Plan stimulated the nascent City Beautiful movement, a national drive for urban improvement in the face of increased industrialization and immigration, and “civic improvement expert” Charles Mulford Robinson was its foremost proponent.

The progressive political and social tenor of the era is captured in the book published by Los Angeles preacher and settlement-house worker Dana Bartlett, The Better City, a Sociological Study of a Modern City (1907), which promoted addressing the needs of the city’s immigrants, orphans, elderly, and working poor through organized societies and other community efforts. Bartlett’s “better” or “greater” Los Angeles was to be a city that would “concentrate thought upon the ethical ideal – believing that a city may become noted for its righteousness, its morality, it social virtues, its artistic life as for its material resources.” [5] In the same year that Barlett’s book was published, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Commission invited Robinson to give advice about a “better Los Angeles.” Robinson’s published report Los Angeles, California: The City Beautiful (1909) called for the “redemption of Los Angeles, its rebuilding along splendid lines . . . to pull together for the city’s good.” [6] First, he recommended a transportation nexus around a new union railroad station to enhance the experience of entering and leaving the urban core. Second, he planned an administrative or civic center, to centralize the buildings housing civic government and, thus give prominent visibility to the city as the locus of democracy. Third, he envisioned a cultural center to magnify the effect of what was then known as Central Park – today, Pershing Square – by locating a new library and art gallery nearby. Each of these districts was to make apparent to all who worked and lived in Los Angeles, as well as to those who visited there, that the urban environment offered the best of modern amenities. Even more important, the symbolic value of the whole was more than the sum of these separate districts, because their aggregate effect was to persuade citizens that building the city anew was a necessary and noble undertaking.

Just as the 1902 Senate Park Commission Plan was adopted as a guide for the building the core of Washington DC, so a consensus formed around Robinson’s 1909 plan for Los Angeles which resulted in the eventual development of a cultural center, a public transportation hub, and a civic center. Only the cultural center arose in the exact location that Robinson recommended. It began to take shape when Bertram Goodhue’s boldly geometric Central Library (1926) was sited, as Robinson had suggested, at the southern foot of Bunker Hill. The library, which is one of Los Angeles’s most important early twentieth-century buildings, sowed the seeds of the blossoming Grand Avenue cultural corridor that the Concert Hall now crowns. The library’s impressive tower looked expectantly across Fifth Street toward Bunker Hill, and its eastern wing containing the children’s reading room and courtyard garden stretched toward Grand Avenue. Walt Disney Concert Hall renews the currency of Robinson’s plan for Los Angeles – not in its details, but rather its special cause of prominent focal points within the core linked by landscaped boulevards. The Concert Hall makes a sweeping urban gesture to the northeast with its entrance plaza that opens diagonally to the center of Grand Avenue and First Street, where the Music Center meets the Civic Center.

Grand Avenue Committee : "Grand Avenue Looking South" 2003 (published in Symphony: Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall)

Greening the City’s Core on Bunker Hill

Decisions about the location of the Civic Center and the Music Center in relation to Bunker Hill mark the second historical phase of Los Angeles’s Downtown renewal process and opened the site that Walt Disney Concert Hall now so compellingly occupies. Although citizens who worked to improve the city were determined to build a civic center, they could not agree on its location. Their disagreements were exacerbated by the fact that the city’s commercial center was developing rapidly to the south, away from the historic Plaza. One position generally favored Robinson’s idea that the Civic Center should be inflected toward the Plaza, along a north-south axis. The opposing position supported a Civic Center along an east-west axis in relationship to Bunker Hill and with connections to the “new” Downtown. In 1924, the Allied Architects Association, a group of Los Angeles professionals who joined forces for the purpose of securing civic commissions, gave form to that vision, submitting a plan for an “Administration Center for the City and the County of Los Angeles,” which proposed building a civic acropolis atop Bunker Hill.

In the minds of many early twentieth-century urban improvers, Bunker Hill, a once leafy, prosperous Victorian neighborhood, was ripe for redevelopment, since it had been effectively strangled when prestigious downtown commercial development moved around its perimeter to the south and west, and as early as 1900 tunnels were cut beneath it to carry traffic to burgeoning West Los Angeles. By the mid 1920s, the predominant image of Bunker Hill was as a zone of increasingly derelict, degraded buildings and entrenched poverty. The basic concept of the Allied Architects’ plan was the greening of Bunker Hill. It envisioned wide swaths of multi-block parks stretching west from the Plaza up the slope of Bunker Hill and covering its crown – from the Central Library on the south to historic Ft. Moore (dedicated 4 July 1847) on the north. The perimeters of these parks were then designated as sites for buildings in which the public business was to be conducted. The plan thus predicted the razing of Bunker Hill as the potential site for buildings that would embody the city’s metropolitan image, and it envisioned that the Los Angeles City Hall would be built at the crest of Bunker Hill. Although City Hall (John C. Austin, John and Donald Parkinson, and Albert C. Martin, 1928) was built instead at the bottom of the hill on Main Street, the Allied Architects’ plan had an important urban legacy in the development of the eastern slope of Bunker Hill, where, today, public buildings line the terraced Civic Center Mall between Main Street and Grand Avenue.

The Allied Architects’ special cause was that of a landscaped “heart of the city,” through which key institutions, monuments, and destinations were to be linked by pedestrian-friendly greenways. It is a goal that is still promising today, but remains incompletely realized. At either end of the Civic Center Mall, two stirring works of civic architecture are situated. Below, City Hall opens broadly toward the Bunker Hill acropolis through its celebrated bronze doors, its walls emblazoned with the quotation, “The city came into being to preserve life; it exists for the good life.” Brought back to prominence in 2002 through the citizen-sponsored Project Restore, this gleaming, off-white Beaux-Arts civic skyscraper boasts a 452-foot tower in the ancient tradition of a lighthouse – the symbolic beacon of a port city. On the ground level, it is a crossroads building, as its portals, which open to the four streets surrounding the city block that it occupies, symbolically gather to it all comers from the urban territory it surveys. Above, the John Ferraro Building of the Department of Water and Power (DWP, Albert C. Martin, 1964) is an almost pure exercise in mid-century modernism, with horizontal reinforced-concrete slabs and vertical steel supports. Its open-bay floors emit light through at night, and it shines out above downtown like a gigantic lantern. Yet both the DWP and City Hall preside over a Mall that is largely used only from nine to five, Monday through Friday. Understandably, the growing numbers of homeless in Los Angeles have found their way to the public landscape of the Civic Center, and makeshift fencing and routine purges by law enforcement officers are a deplorable response on the part of the city.

Walt Disney Concert Hall promotes the resuscitation of the Civic Center Mall and encourages the opening of its green spaces to the city beyond. Brilliantly, Gehry struck the hall’s axis diagonally through the block, pointing its open-cornered entrance toward Grand Avenue and the Civic Center Mall, rather than orienting it exclusively toward the Music Center. Here, the Concert Hall’s volley takes aim at the defensive dike that urban accretions such as entrances to underground parking garages and various measures against encampments of the homeless have thrown up around the mall. Cognizant of the promise of the Concert Hall’s urban position, the Music Center sponsored a workshop in December 2000, in which architects Frank Gehry, Arata Isosaki, and Rafael Moneo, landscape architect Laurie Olin, and real estate developer and Music Center Board member Stuart Ketchum participated. As a result of the workshop, the Grand Avenue Committee, a public/private partnership, was formed in 2001. They propose to transform the twenty-acre Civic Center Mall into a lively, twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week public space, which Committee co-chair Eli Broad refers to as Los Angeles’s new Central Park. Their plans connect the Civic Center Mall at long last with Grand Avenue, from which it is currently screened by a drop in elevation and a massive retaining wall that contains spiral ramps leading to the County’s parking garage under the Music Center and Mall itself. In the scheme, a wider sidewalk on the Music Center side of Grand Avenue, created by shifiting the roadbed to the east, offers an improved environment to pedestrians. A pedestrian bridge over the garage ramps mitigates their obstructive effect until the time when funds may be available to move the ramps to the edges of the park. An outdoor amphitheater sited between the County Hall of Administration (Stanton, Stockwell, Williams, and Wilson; Austin, Field, and Fry, 1956) and the County Courthouse (J.E. Stanton, Paul R. Williams, Adrian Wilson; Austin, Field, and Fry, 1958) accomplishes a visual and physical passage from the Music Center plaza into the park. However, unless Downtown housing provisions are made – whether homeless shelters, or single-room occupancy and low-income units – and commensurate social services are provided, the promise of City Hall’s message is empty, and the Central Park that the Grand Avenue Committee has mobilized to achieve will fail.

Moule & Polyzoides : "Downtown Strategic Plan" (courtesy Moule & Polyzoides)

Accommodating Rapid Transit and Making Places for People on Bunker Hill

Another scheme for the Los Angeles Civic Center – also produced during the period when its location was under consideration – advanced special causes that are pertinent today as well. This was the 1925 project of Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright’s oldest son, who lived and practiced in Los Angeles from 1919 until his death in 1978. [7] Like the Allied Architects’ plan of the previous year, Wright’s plan emphasized the symbolic resonance of public buildings sited atop the Bunker Hill. Wright’s plan presciently devoted sites along Grand Avenue to buildings housing the fine arts, from the Central Library grounds to the crown of Bunker Hill that is now newly occupied by Rafael Moneo’s dramatic – and yet serene ñ Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (2002). However, the contribution of Wright’s plan that is relevant now lies in the realm of transportation planning. In suggesting complex, layered, and separated movement systems for vehicles (including airplanes!) and pedestrians throughout the Civic Center site, Wright’s plan acknowledged that increasing congestion were deeply problematic issues for cities. His excavated, rapid-transit throughways predicted the freeway troughs that would be cut around Downtown in the 1940s and 1950s, but Wright discretely buried his vehicular “speedways” under broad terraces where pedestrians had the rights and pleasures of passage.

Wright’s concept of three-quarters of a century ago holds out hope today, and the Concert Hall provides the impetus for redesign and remedies for the discontinuities of the Downtown street fabric created by freeways and tunnels. Yet, the Concert Hall itself requires accommodation along Grand Avenue, which the Grand Avenue Committee’s proposals have also addressed. Their plans for curving Grand Avenue and enlarging the sidewalk aprons at the Music Center and the Concert Hall would not only enhance pedestrians’ experience of the street but would also give the Concert Hall additional breathing room.

Sweeping north from the Central Library, past MOCA, the Colburn School, the Concert Hall, the Music Center, and the Civic Center, Grand Avenue reaches the Cathedral and the ignominious freeway crossing that separates Downtown from one of Los Angeles’s most magnificent urban vantage points – the outcrop on which Fort Moore once overlooked the Plaza. Buildings formerly housing the Los Angeles Metropolitan High School and, most recently, the Board of Education currently occupy the site. Visionary efforts spearheaded by Eli Broad are afoot to create a new magnet high school devoted to the arts, on the model of the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York. A limited competition recently named the Viennese firm Coop-Himmelb(l)au the winner of the commission to develop pieces of the project tangential to Grand Avenue. According to plan, the whole site will be returned to a more public use, which will include exhibition and performance spaces. It is expected that tens of thousands will be attracted every year to this spectacular overlook, with its most impressive panoramic view of the Cathedral and the city.

Anticipating this project, the Grand Avenue Committee has explored designs for widening the Grand Avenue bridge over the Hollywood Freeway to complete the extension of the arts and culture promenade from one side of the Bunker Hill acropolis to the other. In tandem, the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) has commissioned a public arts project for the bridge. The price of realizing these dreams is dear. The Metropolitan Transit Authority and Caltrans have contributed funds have contributed funds for improving Grand Avenue between Second Avenue and Temple Street ñ from the Concert Hall to the Cathedral ñ and work is underway, but no one knows where financial support will be found for reworking the street beyond this two-block event.

The Concert Hall’s urban prospects along Grand Avenue are also dependent on the critical “empty” lots on Bunker Hill that are its immediate neighbors. These lots – County-owned Q and W2, directly east of the Concert Hall, and City-owned L and M2, on its south – were razed by the CRA in the late 1950s. Since Lots Q, L, and M2 all border Grand Avenue, they are of crucial concern to the Grand Avenue Committee, whose goal is to initiate and guide their development. Millions of square feet will be devoted to multiple uses. Lots L and M2 are zoned by the City primarily for housing, with some entertainment and retail functions. While offices are expected to predominate in the 1.5 million square feet of mixed use space that has been permitted on Lot Q, it will also support residential, cultural and entertainment spaces. A workable team approach is needed – rather than cutthroat real estate practice and fractious City/County politics as usual. The CRA’s wholesale destruction of the historic residential district atop Bunker Hill has long been the subject of controversy, and housing activists have demanded an accounting for the lost when Bunker Hill was demolished – 10,000 were left without homes ñ and the addition of new housing in any redevelopment scheme. Indeed, it is possible that civic pride in the Concert Hall will help lay this controversy to rest, but only if the issue of providing affordable housing downtown is finally addressed.

Doug Suisman : "Los Angeles Civic Center, the Ten-Minute Diamond" 1997 (published in Symphony: Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall)

Master Planning and Organic Redevelopment

If there has been almost a century of consensus regarding the desirability of the clustering of public institutions around a cultural center and a civic center in Downtown Los Angeles, there has been far more ambivalence about the urban fabric that supports such building groups and endeavors. The decision to create an acropolis of monuments on Bunker Hill can be traced to master-planning schemes of the City Beautiful era. It was furthered by planners who shared visions of a downtown characterized by a monumental center and notable ensembles of business buildings. This was the prominent position advocated in planning documents such as the Preface to a Master Plan (1941), but also by citizen task forces – such as Greater Los Angeles Plans, Inc. and the Central City Committee – and by Calvin Hamilton, the City’s Director of Planning from 1965 to 1985. However, these initiators and their initiatives recognized the necessity for regional planning on a metropolitan scale, and they also furthered the “centers concept” of multiple, high-density centers dispersed from the core, to which lower-density residential neighborhoods would be tethered. The builders of the Music Center, for example, accepted that its theaters would rely on patrons, who would commute Downtown to events. While the persistence of this “acropolis complex” may have produced the Concert Hall at its site on Bunker Hill in the late 1980s, it is widely understood almost fifteen years later that the hall’s long-term survival as a cultural nexus depends in large measure on the vitality that will swirl around it twenty-four hours a day. Walt Disney Concert Hall is a rallying point rather than a solution.

The seeds of revitalized Downtown housing were sown in the master-planning days of 1970s, when CRA’s “Central Business District Redevelopment Project” (1972) – known as the “Silver Book Plan” because of the color of its cover – guided renewal. The plan emphasized the achievement of a “balanced environment” through political and economic provisions for low- and moderate-income housing, which has been the CRA’s mandate since its founding in 1949. Detractors of the Silver Book Plan have argued, however, that although it guided the clearance of “blight,” it saw too little below-market-rate housing replaced, leaving downtown more housing-poor and income-segregated than ever.

If voters are to be engaged in planning and architectural issues, they must be presented full documentary portfolios that include images as well as words and numbers. Intelligently and persuasively, the two committees who undertook major planning efforts for Downtown in the wake of the Silver Book Plan published comprehensive sets of images of their proposals. The special cause of the packaging of both these plans was the dramatic illustration of the gains for Downtown that they could achieve. Robert Harris, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Southern California, co-chaired the committee that produced the first, the “Downtown Strategic Plan,” which was unveiled in 1993. This plan originated in initiatives undertaken during Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration (1973-1993), and emphasized a newly invigorated street life in the core, born of residents who would be attracted by the renewed and more appealing cityscape. It emphasized connectivity among ten mixed-income Downtown neighborhoods and districts, establishing an improved pedestrian environment through the greening of streets and the expansion of open space and parks. It further proposed sixteen catalytic projects in order to create focused nodes in these districts. Not to be forgotten for his support of the Downtown Strategic Plan is developer Ira Yellin, a member of the plan’s steering committee who died in September of 2002. A passionate advocate of Downtown and its historic architecture, Yellin renovated key buildings that strengthened the plan’s redevelopment nodes, including the Bradbury Building (1893), the Million Dollar Theater (1918), Grand Central Market (1987-1995), and Union Station (1939). A prime example of the plan’s proposed interventions was the renovation of the Broadway Spring Arcade Building (1923). The seductive perspective drawing published in the plan showed the arcade with renovated loft floors providing a live-work environment in the midst of historic buildings and theaters, transit networks, and nearby cultural activities.

Downtown developer Tom Gilmore, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1989, when the Downtown Strategic Plan committee began its work, has been both the beneficiary of their pictorial bible and the prophet of their dogma. From his company’s offices in a sector that he has christened the “Old Bank District,” Gilmore works to replace housing that was lost in the razing of Bunker Hill and other Downtown neighborhoods with loft conversions of commercial structures. He practices what might be called “organic redevelopment,” urban renewal that differs from that of an earlier era of master-planned redevelopment not only in its incremental approach, but also in the types of projects undertaken, which focus on infusing existing viable industrial and commercial districts with housing. He calls for “indigenous retail” and “full-spectrum housing,” as well as the coherent, enlightened social policy planning that is necessary to achieve it. Yet he struggles to produce the legislated affordable housing quotas without the massive subsidies that were at the CRA’s disposal during the Silver Book era. If he is successful, his consuming dedication to the creation of residential space in the northeast quadrant of Downtown will transform that area, which may well become a model for other sectors of the core.

In 1995, during Richard Riordan’s administration (1993-2001), the Civic Center Authority, which had been dormant since the 1980s, was revived and, perhaps inspired by the Downtown Strategic Plan, returned to an intense study of the heart of the heart of the city. This committee produced the “Civic Center Shared Facilities and Enhancement Plan,” which the authority issued in 1997 (and reissued in 2000). Its crowning achievement was a richly visual document that relied on brilliantly concise and revelatory imagery to convey its vision and a “marketing” synopsis of sorts cleverly named the “Ten Minute Diamond.” Chief among the visionaries were Doug Suisman, architect and urban designer, who served on the consulting team, and Daniel Rosenfeld, who as the City’s assets manager was conducting a study of City-owned real estate for the Department of General Services. The Ten-Minute Diamond took City Hall as a compass point and drew an imaginary diamond-shaped perimeter around it, such that any point on that perimeter would be no more than a ten-minute walk from its rotunda. The sine qua non of the Ten-Minute Diamond plan was the creation of a system of variously designed public open spaces for pedestrians – linear garden paths – that encouraged habitation. It sectioned the Civic Center into four quadrants – Hillside, Old Pueblo, New Town, Riverbed – and detailed what ought to be done to bring each into being. This idea of naming Downtown districts was a stroke of genius, since it created a framework for making places where, essentially, there were none. It was a corporate identity campaign for the body politic. Suddenly the city became knowable; the planners’ goal, however, was not signage per se but signage used as a tool for sensitivity training. Cynically, one could make an analogy to the mapping of Disneyland – Main Street, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland – and Suisman acknowledged that he worried about “coaxing reluctant imagery” from the city’s history and its system of corridors. [8] Yet the Ten-Minute Diamond forged a Civic Center zone of intensity and focus in which many of Downtown’s most prominent public buildings and historic sites were located, providing nodes of intrinsic utility and interest to Angelenos and visitors alike. It brought Downtown into relief and, with intelligent sincerity, countered what French sociologist Jean Baudrillard found in Los Angeles in 1986: “no intimacy or collectivity, no streets or facades, no centre or monuments…an extravaganza of indifference.” [9]

The Ten-Minute Diamond clarified the locations where new projects of civic import might best be sited. The Caltrans District 7 Headquarters building – designed by Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis – is rising on the block bounded by First, Second, Main, and Los Angeles streets, directly across from the site proposed in the plan. Mayne diagonally juxtaposed the building to City Hall, incorporating to the design a public gathering space that enjoins the open-arms embrace of City Hall. The California Endowment’s new headquarters designed by Rios Associates, Inc. (now Rios Clementi Hale Studios) will articulate a neglected zone on Alameda Street between Union Station and City Hall in the Old Pueblo Quarter. Anchoring the Riverbed Quarter, the proposed Children’s Museum designed by Morphosis and Central Avenue Art Park designed by Michael Maltzan will fill the block in which the MOCA Geffen Contemporary and the Japanese-American National Museum now float in a sea of parking lots. These new interventions would, in turn, create a transitional zone to the emerging Arts District near the Los Angeles River. Just outside the Ten-Minute Diamond, this more bohemian district – in contrast to the “high” cultural district atop Bunker Hill – is coalescing around the independent architecture school Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), which took up residence there in 2001 in a former freight depot. SCI-Arc’s director, architect Eric Owen Moss, and Dan Rosenfeld, currently Principal of Urban Partners, LLC, which he co-founded with Ira Yellin, are contemplating the construction of housing, which would return a sense of urbanity to the area and would involve the school as a key player in the development of Downtown.

Another major ground swell of revitalization on the edges of the Ten-Minute Diamond is the establishment of a new state park – as yet unnamed – in the area just north and east of Chinatown and Union Station, which the plan identifies as the Alameda District. Formerly known as the Cornfields, this thirty acre parcel on the western bank of the Los Angeles River represents the triumphant acquisition in 2001 of open space for notoriously “park-poor” Los Angeles. Led by the Friends of the Los Angeles River, a consortium of activist organizations dedicated to the special cause of reclaiming the river along its fifty-one-mile path through the metropolitan area achieved this landmark goal. From Charles Mulford Robinson’s plan of 1909, which proposed to link the disparate sectors of the city by planted parkways, to the Ten-Minute Diamond of 1997, which made the heart of the city legible through the green weave of a Civic Garden and landscaped paseos, the purchase of the Cornfields marked the culmination of a century of movement toward a Downtown humanized by the interweaving of the built environment and parklands.

One of the largest contiguous metropolitan areas in the world, Los Angeles is immense. Its built fabric is ubiquitous. Given the sweep of the landscape across which Los Angeles spreads, any building that would have a fighting chance of contributing to a sense of urban identity must assume a powerful form equal to the staggering beauty of the conjunction of ocean, plain, and foothills. Downtown Los Angeles is visibly marked on the skyline by an impressive cluster of skyscrapers and clearly circled by a ring of intersecting freeways, so that, from afar, the center of the city is palpable. Within the heart of the city, however, this clarity and cohesion dissipate. Mindful of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that urbanity demands a center, we can observe Angelenos struggle to promote a shared urban consciousness through the last century’s failed or only partially successful attempts to create a strong image of the core. [10] The center is not only in need of landmarks but also of sustained planning and building that will make it a place where the city’s diverse population can live, work, and take their leisure. This is the socio-topographical imperative of Los Angeles, which Frank Gehry understands. It is also why the Walt Disney Concert Hall is so important to Los Angeles both as a singular form and as a refractive lens through which the needs of Downtown are brought sharply into focus. Wrapped in raised gardens and balconies, the Concert Hall provides a dramatic podium for surveying Downtown Los Angeles and its breathtaking setting. Yet Gehry also believes in the power of civic architecture to strengthen human connections, not only to places but also to one another. Gehry’s desire that the Concert Hall be a “living room for the city” takes shape particularly in the billowing lobby so open to Grand Avenue, where passersby can stroll at will in and out during many hours of the day and night. In Los Angeles, Gehry has achieved the social diagram that he found compelling in his chief precedent for Walt Disney Concert Hall, Hans Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonie (1963): “It’s a wonderful place to be because the place puts people together and makes it easy . . . the building allows and engenders and encourages in some miraculous way, a kind of interaction.” [11]

Morphosis : "CalTrans District 7 Headquarters" (courtesy Urban Partners, LLC)

Notes

[1] Herbert Muschamp, “A See-Through Library of Shifting Shapes and Colors,” New York Times (19 January 2003): section 2, p. 35.

[2] Lawrence D. Bobo et al., eds., Prismatic Metropolis, Inequality in Los Angeles (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000).

[3] William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1981, rev. ed.).

[4] Carol McMichael Reese and Thomas Ford Reese, “B–hm, Gehry, Hollein, and Stirling in Los Angeles, Zodiac 2 (1989), p. 157.

[5] Dana W. Bartlett, The Better City, a Sociological Study of a Modern City (Los Angeles: Neuner Company, 1907), Preface.

[6] Charles Mulford Robinson (Report of the Municipal Art Commission for the City of Los Angeles), Los Angeles, California, The City Beautiful (Los Angeles: William J. Porter, 1909), n. p.

[7] See “Notable Civic Center Scheme,” Los Angeles Times (30 August 1925): pt. 5, p. 4; see also Los Angeles Examiner (26 November 1926): Calendar Section, p. 2, for Wright’s “City of the Future.”

[8] Interview with author, 6 December 2002.

[9] Jean Baudrillard, “America,” in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture, a Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 224.

[10] Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1996), p. 208.

[11] Mildred Friedman, ed. Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process (New York: Rizzoli, 1999), n. p

This essay is dedicated to Ernest Fleischmann, Managing Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, 1969-1998, and lifetime member of the Board of Directors, and Frederick M. Nicholas, Chair of the Walt Disney Concert Hall Committee, 1987-1994. Without their devotion to the arts, artists, and Los Angeles, Disney Hall might well not have been built.

Adapted/edited from the original publication Symphony: Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Los Angeles Philharmonic, 2003)

Carol McMichael Reese is associate professor of architecture at Tulane University. Her books and articles focus on contemporary architecture and urban planning in the Americas. In 1985 Reese was commissioned by the Getty Research Institute to document the building of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Back to Forum Issue 6: A Note on Downtown

interface (project by achim wollscheid)

Thomas Guide page 634 F-4

The Los Angeles H* Urban Bureau (LAH*UB), an L.A. based collaborative of artists and architects, actively experiments with modes of research in downtown Los Angeles. In the last year, we have focused almost all of our resources on the Civic Park Proposals project, which will culminate in an exhibition at Gallery 727 and ultimately a publication that investigates public space in downtown Los Angeles. Our broad research about urban space led us to the city’s plan to create a Civic Park just south of City Hall. This park would be a part of the city’s master plan to link all of the downtown civic buildings through the creation of green spaces – a plan dubbed the “ten minute diamond.” This diamond would allow city employees and visitors to navigate between City Hall and the other city buildings in the area through a network of footpaths. Both the ten minute diamond and the park itself are in very preliminary stages of development. Yet these plans suggest a desire on the part of the city to generate pedestrian activity and to link the city’s bureaucracy to the supposed revitalization of downtown. When LAHUB learned of this potential for the creation of a civic (public) space in the middle of downtown, it seemed the perfect opportunity to engage with the kind of narratives of conflict that we uncovered in our research. If a civic space were to be constructed as a park, how would this site be designed? How would diverse perspectives on the nature of public space play out in the process of this urban design scheme? And to what degree would the city make an effort to include ‘the public’ in thinking about the creation of a space that is, by definition, supposed to serve the needs of those who inhabit the city?

Downtown Los Angeles seems to be undergoing radical shifts, both visible and invisible. The blinding curves of the nearly complete Disney Hall seem like a vivid externalization of city’s palpable, nearly pathetic desire to be considered once and for all a cultured metropolis. The recently completed Cathedral’s grandeur reads, in part, like a shameful reminder of the endless, psychodrama that is the Catholic Church’s ongoing sex scandals. Councilmember Jan Perry’s moves to outlaw unpermitted meals for the homeless suggest a political and economic interest in paving the way for more upscale development. The heightened sense of security around City Hall resonates with the national trend towards an increased military presence in urban spaces. Construction is visible along Grand Avenue and at the site of the new Caltrans building between Spring and Main streets. But what is invisible in downtown? What exists in downtown that can’t be easily registered as cause or effect? A proposed park offers the opportunity to consider what is not visible: The fantastic. The absurd. The implausible. The speculative. The imagined. The excessive.

There seems to be some link between the mythology of the contemplative space of an urban park and the utopian dream of a liberating imagination. As if no matter what one encounters in the city, a park might lift us from the drudgery of daily existence and propel us into the lofty space of dreams. And often the park is a restful, slowed down space; one that Angelinos can experience outside of the automobile. It’s a kind of container for what does not fit into the parameters of home, work, or commute. But often the urban park becomes a container of excess of the unruly sort. Maybe it smells faintly like piss. Perhaps you’re afraid for your safety rather than daydreaming contentedly. Often you’re anxious rather than relaxed. Maybe the shade of green you hope to see looks more like a dull brown. A proposed park allows or perhaps encourages a re-investment in the utopian impulse behind the desire to create a park. LAHUB hopes to cultivate an investment in the potential for public space without losing the critical distance to see that a public site might easily become a dystopian reality rather than a utopian dream.

Without ‘permission’ from the city and with rather unstructured guidelines, LAHUB announced the Civic Park Competition in the fall of 2002. Participants were asked to create a 4 3/4″ x 4 3/4″ booklet of any length and a two-minute video in CD format. There was to be no winner and there were no prizes. All participants were offered was a chance to think critically or speculate playfully about the future of downtown by offering ideas for this site. We posted announcements on the web and spread the word among our peers, trying to generate as diverse a collection of proposals as possible. By January of 2003, we received almost fifty proposals from all over the world. In some ways, the proposals become a kind of index of contemporary artistic and architectural practice. Together the proposals form a disharmonious, almost unruly conversation about the future of downtown and public space in general. It is this very unstable collection of voices that we imagine in some imprecise way mirrors the dynamics of public space itself. (The very word ‘public’ is itself an unstable signifier, subject to contestation and multiple meanings.) Can we suggest then, that by offering a ’space’ for individuals to consider this site and the potential for a Civic Park, we have created a kind of quasi-public space that wrestles somewhat uncomfortably with the dynamics of difference?

revolution (project by t. robin hennecke)

If there are any consistent themes among the proposals, however difficult to tease out, it seems that notions of difference, flexibility, and transformation surface and re-surface across many of the projects. Almost by default, many of the proposals function as critique. That is, in the proposals what doesn’t work in the urban spaces of Los Angeles is made evident by the alternative strategies that are employed. Many of the proposals recognize that the park is a social space and aim to address questions of sociality in complex and abstract ways. If social space is the location where fantasies get acted out, then within Civic Park Proposals fantasy becomes a way to engage a potential social and political space. Some of the proposals encourage active interaction on the part of those who will use the park. Are participants wary of the master plan and perhaps looking for ways to allow the site to evolve after the park has been designed?

A sampling of Civic Park Proposals

Level Design submitted a proposal entitled Strategies for the Vacuum: re-examining the notion of civic space in los angeles. One of surprisingly few proposals from Los Angeles, Level Design begins with the assumption that “Bucolic parks that attempt to bring nature to the city are not of Los Angeles.” And further that the “only civic space that is appropriate for Los Angeles is one of solid, not void.” The solid is proposed as the topography for the Civic Park is a series of zones; each relating to a particular issue or material. These zones, although distinct, form an entity that in the words of Level Design is “intended to be read as a holistic event.”

T. Robin Hennecke proposes Revolution. Structuring a proposal around the notions of adaptation and expenditure, Hennecke subverts common associations by literalizing the term revolution and proposes the Civic Park take the form of a cylinder that rotates one degree per day, thus completing a turn over the course of a calendar year. In a hand-drawn, elaborately constructed foldout book, Hennecke plays out a fanciful narrative that moves through technical considerations, philosophical musings, and cultural analysis.

Achim Wollscheid takes up the question of user interaction within the context of Civic Space in his proposal called Interface. Essentially a suspended grid of panels that responds to movement below, Interface is thus constantly constructing and reconstructing the park environment depending on its use. Responding to the formal plan of the city, Wollscheid creates a centerless grid that “might learn not only to accompany individual movements, but also create patterns or changes that react to ‘duos,’ ‘trios’ or groups, and include considerations about the relative stability of gatherings or movements.”

The three proposals discussed here are not representative of the project as a whole nor are they indicative of specific agenda on the part of LAH*UB. Rather they form a small collection of diverse images and ideas within the much larger matrix of the project. Civic Park Proposals proposes a kind of reflection that acknowledges the permeability between the world “out there” and interior, imaginary ruminations. If for a moment we believe that the city is constructed through an accumulation of psychic projections and the residue of conflicting desires, the charged dynamic of the proposals confronts that (inevitably) partial fantasy that we might otherwise begin to cultivate as truth. Likewise, when we see the city as a material stage that precedes social dynamics, we are confronted by an onslaught of playful suggestions that jar our stale investments in static notions of public space. To investigate our own observations, idealizations, preconceptions, even our own utopian solutions for the city is meant to open up space for movement.

strategies for the vacuum (project by level design)

Results of the Civic Park Proposals competition will be exhibited at Gallery 727, 727 South Spring Street, Downtown Los Angeles from May 31 to June 28, 2003.

Ken Ehrlich is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. His installations have been featured at Side Street Projects, Beyond Baroque, and California Institute of Technology. He is the co-editor (with Brandon LaBelle) of Surface Tension: problematics of site (Errant Bodies Press, 2003). He received an MFA in Writing and Integrated Media from CalArts, where he co-founded and edited the journal Trepan. He teaches writing and art, most recently at U.C. Irvine.

LAH*UB [www.lahub.net] is Ken Ehrlich, Avi Laiser, and Liz Falletta



Back to Forum Issue 5: Parks

In September 1996, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles proclaimed its intent to abandon the historic Cathedral of St. Vibiana and construct a new cathedral complex at Temple and Hill Streets in Downtown. Much excitement pervaded the City of Angels as the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo was selected to design the new building. [1] Simultaneously, much debate ensued over the future of the historic building, the extent of its damage from the Northridge Earthquake, and the cost of its repair. Today, almost five years after the announcement, the new cathedral complex is ambitiously progressing towards its completion, while the historic ruin faces an uncertain future. In their proximity, they engage in a complex dialogue of history, ethics, and controversies.

The new cathedral is a reincarnation. It is the social and spiritual re-embodiment of the historic cathedral of St. Vibiana. On its construction site, the bold, poured in place concrete form emerges with a bell tower that will rise a hundred and fifty feet high, a stark symbol of its spiritual ambitions. [2] It will be cool within its thick concrete walls and dark in its catacombs. But “sacred light” will diffuse into a ninety foot high holy space that will eventually seat over three thousand devotees, many of whom will be the same Angelinos that not so long ago worshipped in a much older cathedral, one whose history goes back 1859, when Los Angeles was chosen as the seat of the Monterey-Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese.

But this first cathedral resembles a ruin. It stands today as an embalmed artifact in Downtown, inaccessible to one who may pause outside its walls to recall its significance in Los Angeles history. The initial siting of this first Mother Church was proposed on Main Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets, but its distance from the population center led to its eventual groundbreaking on Second and Main Streets, where it stands today. Built in 1876, an imposing edifice of brick and wood construction, it was modeled on the Church of the Peurto de San Miguel in Barcelona, with a basilica plan of a nave and aisles. Its tower, tripartite in organization, was designed by Ezra Kyzor, considered Los Angeles’ first professional architect. It was first altered in 1922 by the prominent Los Angeles architect John C. Austin, when the ceilings were changed, the north and south exterior side walls plastered, new art glass panels placed in the windows, the original brick façade replaced with Indiana limestone, and the front portion extended to the sidewalk with an adjoining baptistery. Limited interior alterations followed Vatican II, reflecting the new liturgy. Then following the Sylmar and Whittier Earthquakes, further repairs were implemented. Sometime before the end of the nineteenth century, a rectory was constructed on the corner of Second and Main Streets. It was demolished in the 1930’s and replaced by the current Spanish Renaissance styled rectory, cloister, and garden designed by architects Montgomery and Mullay. In 1948, architects George Adams and Burgess J. Reeves designed a new International Style Education Building, replacing an earlier built one on the site. The complex suffered damage in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake and was finally abandoned in 1996. [3]

The abandoning of this site raises significant questions about the values society attributes to historic places. In his essay “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” Alois Riegl delineates three value types to exemplify the differences – use-value, age-value and historical value. [4] Use-value is a pragmatic perception. It points to the practical advantages of re-inhabiting the special place or building, given that the place must be repaired and safe. It supports reincarnation over the ruin. Age-value is an intellectual perception. It is derived from the ideological aesthetic that the place portrays through its decomposition in time. It considers the ruin superior to the reincarnation. Historic value is a social perception. It stems when a place transcends its rhythms of use to become a symbol of special societal ritual. Here, restoration overlays authenticity.

Thus the value of the historic cathedral may be subjective. To some, it may be what Riegel calls an “intentional monument,” representing a human creation erected for a specific commemorative purpose. But to others it may have taken a new guise through the journey to its desolation. No longer measured by the rhythms of its commemorative uses, its peeling plaster and slow crumbling may make it less like a special edifice and more like a sculpture of sacred shapes and forms. It may be an abstract object that mysteriously carries the weight of the city’s history, delivering a skewed message from a bygone era. It may be perceived as what Riegel notes as an “unintentional monument,” its special status determined not so much by its makers but by our modern perceptions.

One might argue that once damaged, the historic cathedral lost its authentic meaning and no restoration effort would give it back a legitimate life. Should it, therefore, be razed to the ground, or revered as a historic artifact? Consider for instance the case of the Campanile of St. Mark’s Piazza, that had, since the eleventh century, sustained the sacred, civic and symbolic values that represented Venice herself. When it collapsed in 1902, was the event to be accepted as an irrevocable historic destiny, consigning the monument to memory? Was it ethical, even obligatory for the Venetians, to restore their symbolic icon to its former glory? Or was it appropriate to stage a competition to seek a contemporary talent who would reinterpret the tower for a new age? In the case of the St. Mark’s Campanile, it was duly rebuilt in its prior form. Neither intellectualizing the gloom of the ruin, nor perturbed by the in-authenticity of its reincarnation, the Venetians simply chose to restore the missing link in their skyline. The power of a symbolic cultural icon was so embossed in their urbanity that the simple indispensable will of a people clearly overrode the intellectual dialogue about restoration and value. [5]

Thus, cultural and personal prejudices do affect the way we perceive ruins and reincarnations. The ruins of the Acropolis, Machu Pichu, Giza, and Angkor Wat may be too mythic for conventional dialogue, too archeological for casual travel, and too incomplete through their decomposition for an objective assessment. Other places may not be about their qualities of form as much as the stark memory of an event associated with them. In Pompeii, though one can trace the morphology of the townscape, the intensity of the place is more about the association of the catastrophe that struck it. In Hiroshima, the ruin is both the monument and the conscious linkage to the tragedy of World War II. Some places, however, may transcend preservation and embrace transformation through the unpredictable force of human will. At Lucca, the oval urban void is both the evidence and memory of the ancient Roman Coliseum that was transformed into urban housing. Such places retain linkages to an abandoned past, through traces of forms, materials, and symbols, but reincarnate themselves through a new use.

In January 1997, the Los Angeles Conservancy commissioned the University of Southern California School of Architecture to direct a reuse study for the damaged cathedral of St. Vibiana. [6] Sixteen participating firms produced nine scenarios, identifying a range of potential programmatically and financially feasible uses. They ranged from government and commercial uses to cultural museums and housing. The study concluded that demolishing the hundred and twenty five year old cathedral, one of the oldest structures in Downtown Los Angeles, and one of its few native nineteenth century urban artifacts, would be an irreversible loss to its history and culture. Seismically retrofitting and rehabilitating the forsaken cathedral could be both an economically viable architectural asset to the city, as well to the lives of generations of Angelinos. Today the site has been sold to a leading Los Angeles developer, state funds have been secured for the project, and its rejuvenation as a performing arts complex is under discussion. [7] The historic edifice will not be forsaken for long. It will be brought alive through a new use, retaining its historic form.

But will it retain the sacredness of its place? Perhaps urban space cannot be understood in terms of a society’s pragmatic needs alone, but as the consequence of its relationship with a past that it has to understand and perhaps even accept. The Ise shrine in Japan is famous for its thirteen-hundred-year-old reconstruction tradition, the “Shikinen sengu,” in which the sacred structures are painstakingly rebuilt every twenty years. [8] Though this renewal is remarkable for the preservation of an extremely susceptible wood construction technology, the meaning behind this ritual goes beyond notions of preservation into keeping alive the mythic linkage to the sacred forces of a culture. Ise is holy ground. Every interaction on this ground is sacred – manifested in the fact that the participating construction workers wear white, a color associated in Shinto with a sacred activity. Thus, the very nature of a profane act becomes transformed, through the perceptual sacredness of a place.

Thus, one may add to Riegl’s three “value types” a fourth ? “Holy value.” For religious man, space is not homogeneous – it is experienced through the qualitative difference that distinguishes the “sacred” from the “profane” that surrounds it. The conscious act of consecrating a “sacredness” to a place is one of the most instinctive and ancient acts of human will, a revelation that makes it possible to obtain a fixed point, and hence acquire a perceptual orientation in the chaos of urban homogeneity. A sacred place may be deemed inviolable through its “Holy value.” It may engender a meaning so strong, that it may determine the basic environmental images of a people, making them feel that they belong to that one same place. Hence, the genius loci in many cases has been a sacred center powerful enough to dominate any political, social and cultural change. [9] For example, Florence, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Srirangam – cities characterized by a particularly pronounced sacred genius loci

For Los Angeles, then, is the ground where its first cathedral stands sacred space – the meanings of which might transcend the subjective “monumental value” of its buildings? What if there had been other scenarios? What if the St. Vibiana Cathedral had been painstakingly restored and ambitiously expanded to generate new sacred space? What if the new cathedral had been built on the historic cathedral’s holy site in such a way that it would neither compromise the historic status of the existing building, nor the sacredness of its place? What if both the old and the new cathedrals together acknowledged that the land they stood on had attained a sacred significance that would transcend urban ambitions?

The dialogue is thus fraught with cultural and ideological dilemmas. Amidst them, the new cathedral will be complete and Los Angeles will enter a new phase in its urbanity. Perhaps the historic cathedral will still be remembered, perhaps not. But through this transition, Los Angeles has acknowledged the dictum that for a city seeped in its own culture, it grapples between the predicaments of the historic and the sacred. The two cathedrals are symbols of this urban phenomenon. The historic cathedral embodies a mythic sacredness. The new cathedral represents a subconscious resurrection of the city’s spiritual soul, in a new form, for a new time. The old cathedral awaits a new future. Though the scepter has been passed, they will continue an urban dialogue about the dilemmas that have made, and will continue to make the city – Los Angeles as a ruin of what it once was, Los Angeles as a reincarnation of what it had once been.

Notes:

[1] Following the announcement of a new cathedral project, several potential sites were considered both within and outside Downtown Los Angeles. After the selection of the site along the 110 Freeway on Temple and Hill Streets in Downtown, an invited competition was held leading to the eventual selection of Rafael Moneo as the architect for the new cathedral complex.

[2] Comments on the new cathedral are the result of information gathered during a guided tour of the construction site in May 2001 with the project’s Executive Architect Nick Roberts of Leo Daly.

[3] Between 1994 and 1996, the historic cathedral was still in use. The Downtown Strategic Plan for Los Angeles prepared by Moule & Polyzoides and Robert S. Harris and adopted by the City of Los Angeles and the Community Redevelopment Agency in 1994 proposed that a revitalized St. Vibiana Cathedral complex serve as the anchor for a new residential community in Downtown. After the announcement to abandon it in 1996, the Los Angeles Conservancy initiated the historic building’s preservation and reuse effort.

[4] See Riegel Alois, ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments : Its Character and its Origin’ in Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982), 25-51.

[5] For an elaboration on this episode, see Porphyrios Demetri, ‘Restoration and Value’ in ‘Porphyrios Associates ? Recent Work’ (Andreas Papadakis Publisher, 1999

[6] See Jeffery M. Chusid, AIA ed., ‘A Reuse Study for the Cathedral of St. Vibiana’ (Architectural Guild Press, University of Southern California School of Architecture, 1997). This publication was prepared following a public exhibition of the nine conceptual design reuse scenarios for the historic Cathedral of St. Vibiana, at the USC School of Architecture in March 1997.

[7] Thank you to Ken Bernstein of the Los Angeles Conservancy for this information.

[8] For an elaboration of this tradition see Adams Cassandra, ‘Japan’s Ise Shrine and Its Thirteen-Hundred-Year-Old Reconstruction Tradition’ in Journal of Architectural Education, Vol.52, Number 1, September 1998, MIT Press. ‘Shikinen sengu’ literally means the ceremonial year of moving the ‘kami’s’ ( deity’s) body to a new shrine. Scholars believe that these rituals developed either from the pragmatic need for periodic repairs or from the religious desire to show reverence to the deity by revitalizing her abode.

[9] ‘Genius Loci’ is a Roman term implying ‘The Spirit of a Place’ (Genius ? Guardian Spirit, Loci ? Place). It also extends into philosophical notions of ‘what a thing/place is’ and ‘what it wants to be’.

Photographs by Chaitanya Peshave. Illustrations of Latino Museum of History, Art, and Culture – a reuse scheme for the historic cathedral of St. Vibiana – courtesy of Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists.

Back to Forum Issue 2: Gehry and Moneo Under Construction

What happens when the currency of the late twentieth century and now the burgeoning twenty-first, the “real” telescopes back in on itself? When the all the Osbornes and Survivors and Anna Nicole Smiths lose the sardonic smirk and implode in a morbid feedback loop?

This is what I wonder as I wander in and out of galleries, plastic glass in hand (half-full with cheap Chardonnay) on Chung King Road, Chinatown. A pleasant art-filled Saturday evening in Downtown Los Angeles; just me and a hundred grungy socialites.

At least, this is what I wish I was wondering. It’s what comes to mind now that the sweetly sour taste has faded some months after the fact. What was really on my mind was “Why is their hair so greasy and messy, yet so artfully arranged?” But now I’ve given up taking pot shots at the jaded, Fred Segal shoppers and it’s time to reflect. I’m disturbed by the ease with which these tableaus nest. One ironic reality fits snug inside another, and another and another ad infinitum, as if you are staring at your image in the funhouse mirrors of the Prada men’s shoe department. (Location: Prada Store, New York City, Rem Koolhaas/OMA; in the basement behind Kazuyo Sejima’s packaging installation.)

Chinatown is a place with multiple historic layers dating back a century. For Los Angeles, it is simply ancient. Also, it proves to be the perfect case study to illustrate my line of questioning. One earnestly ironical “real” moment in time tucked within another.

With a nod to the Eames’ film, Powers of Ten, there’s an equation to graft the exponential growth or decay curve (the warped space, the geographic projections) of these realities. First establish the variables. C equals Chinatown, our case study. “Real” equals a wry, disposition in which the everyday is worn as a sarcastic badge of honor.

C=C0 Rx

C= Chinatown, a function of the original Chinatown multiplied by the real, or where we are at a given time
C0= original Chinatown
R= real
X= the exponent of reality in time

So, where does the curve end?

-

EQUATION 1:
C=C0 R1

To find the end of the rainbow, we need to track the development of Old Chinatown. Located in downtown Los Angeles, Chinatown was built in the 1870s along a short alley, Calle de Los Negros, block long between El Pueblo Plaza and Old Arcadia Street. It’s presumptuous to label the jumble of buildings occupied by Chinese agricultural workers, laundry men and hired hands anything but a moment in itself. An immigrant culture, plunked down in a potential Arcadia, does not build in an attempt to create an “old-world lifestyle.” The decorative motif ape what is brought from the motherland producing a life just cobbled together. The self-conscious nostalgia comes later when it becomes part of the cultural production. When we start to consume and reconsume its image.

It is the rise and fall of Old Chinatown as a fin-de-siecle tourist destination that determines the first degree on the Reality Curve. The exotic restaurants, shops full of oriental bric-a-brac and eastern temptation conspire around 1900 to lure thrill-seeking white Angelinos. Opium dens, perhaps real, perhaps a fabrication set up for American chiniose visions, marks the crest between the apex and nadir of Chinatown. Questioning whether the scene in front of you is actual or forged anticipates demise and locks in cynicism. When the guise of authenticity slipped from the shop windows and onto the unpaved streets of Old Chinatown, what had seemed alluring to Western eyes was now seedy and corrupt. By 1910 the area was abandoned by all but immigrants and considered worthless. In 1913, property was sold for development to Southern Pacific trackways. In 1931, the California Supreme Court approved the construction of Union Station on the site of Old Chinatown.

-

EQUATION 2:
C=C0 R2

So here we stand in the second creation of Chinatown. New Chinatown, 1938. One part pagoda, one part Portland cement. Reality is squared.

New Chinatown didn’t rise phoenix-like from the ashes of its own demise. It wallowed for years as one developer’s speculation after another failed to light a flame. Two years passed after the Supreme Court authorized Old Chinatown as the site of the new Union Station before the thought of a new “Old Chinatown” was bandied about.

But why a New Chinatown as such? Couldn’t the Chinese community just settle into the great American melting pot like the rest? The reasons for autonomy are as much about economics as about heritage. Built into the architecture is an appeal to the American tourist. “The buildings would be most modern and airy, correctly engineered for earthquake, fire safety, and sanitation. The streets would be wide for an open, safe look. Thus the area would be palatable to the casual American tourist as well as fellow Chinese. The new community would eliminate potential houses of vice, such as gambling,” write Suellen Cheng and Munson Kwok in the Los Angeles Chinatown Fiftieth Year Guidebook.

“Erle Webster and Adrian Wilson were the architects who worked successfully to combine the elements of Chinese designs on essentially modern buildings. Economy and a limited budget dictated that the structures be kept simple rather than exactly authentic,” they continue. Is the architecture American posing Chinese or is it Chinese posing American? Simple concrete construction delineates a hutong, the historical city alley or lane typical in Beijing. Chinese characters announcing each store and restaurant are rimmed with neon, translated into English with matching brush strokes.

The nostalgia is not yet dripping from the eaves, but there is a celebration of otherness – of the Far East – and a celebration of California’s precarious position balanced on the Western edge of the continent. It’s Nathaniel West territory: a collision of dreams, forms and cultures. As he writes in The Day of the Locust (1939), “But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon. Their desire to startle was so eager and guileless. It’s hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh.”

With a sigh, New Chinatown is exactly what one would expect from Los Angeles: commodity, fantasy, Forbidden City storefronts and imported baubles next to the imported authenticity of oddly-perfumed herb shops and grocery stores. It’s a projection of the Orient made palatable to Western eyes.

And where Old Chinatown stood? Union Station. The building, designed by architects John Parkinson & Donald B. Parkinson and finished in 1939, is as much of a visionary view of the American West as Chinatown is a Western view of the East. To the degree that Chinatown is decorative and marginalized, Union Station is majestic. Rancho Supreme, mission moderne describes the vast courtyards, tile roofs and faux wood-beamed ceilings. A three-storey tall archway spills out promise across the LA Basin. It is dust bowl sublime built to accommodate the migration from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas that preceded its construction.

EQUATION 3:
C=C0 R3

Equation 3 takes us back to quasi-real-time Chung King Road. Saturday night gallery hopping. Back to an opening sponsored by the movie Dogtown and Z Boys, drinks hosted by Absolut. Lit by strings of faded paper lanterns, the crowd is beautiful. It’s a happening.

And why is it a happening? Perhaps it’s because the crusty storefronts make cool justification for mediocre art and fashion? In Los Angeles, anything that gives the semblance of history has value, especially if it gives just that – a semblance. Not much is actually for sale. The art is more display than commerce – galleries set up to win cred, to win authenticity. The R cubed is the paradox between knowing one’s own shallow roots are grounded in hyperreality and the need for something deeper. The depth found in or a Parisian cold water flat is coveted. So it is re-created into a New Urbanist Citywalk for hipsters.

“Unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy or in the beyond, but in the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself,” writes French theorist Jean Baudrillard, in his 1976 essay, “The Symbolic Exchange and Death.” Following Baudrillard’s thought, this Chung King Road happening and, by extension, much of Chinatown’s ad hoc gentrification, is not a dreamy recreation of bohemian cafe society, but a parody of itself. The trust-fund galleries (and gallery owners), hawking more attitude than art, establish their “realness” by carrying over the names of now defunct establishments. Black Dragon Society, China Art Objects, Fong’s the signage reads with a smirk. The clever recycling leads not to a happy-go-lucky bricolage, but to something darker.

“Reality itself flounders in, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably though another, reproductive medium, such as photography. >From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced thought its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal,” again writes Baudrillard. Hence, retail architecture is the medium of reduplication. This changes how to read the Chinese shopkeepers pulling down the rolling metal shutters over the display windows at dusk and scurrying past the arriving jet set. Perhaps it’s not because of a lack of business acumen that they abandon their territory, but because they catch a whiff of the smell of death and are fleeing ghosts.

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EQUATION 4:
C=C0 R4

The chatter and drum-and-bass co-mingle and it seems that all the equations, variables and integers map out a grim path towards destruction – reality implodes, one layer of visibility pancaking on top of another like the dual towers at the tip of Manhattan. Does all matter turn to toxic pixie dust?

Searching for the art space, C-Level, it looks like Baudrillard’s prophecy is true. Sketchy directions taken from their website take me down an alley just behind Chung Kind Road. Chinese restaurants that face Hill Street also share the alley. Their engorged dumpsters aren’t quaint, although the stink is damn authentic.

C-Level is about ten yards down the alley, identified by a left-hand stoop with an open red door. Steps lead down to the basement. This is the space; it’s under Chung King Road, a literal representation of the “underground.”

Although I brace myself for more of the aboveground underground attitude, what I find is a hodgepodge of computer equipment and threadbare couches. A couple members of the cooperative are playing video games and another is programming something. The seven members (Christina Ulke, Cyril Kuhn, Eddo Stern, Jason Brown, Mark Allen, Michael Wilson and Peter Brinson) are self-proclaimed on www.c-level.cc to be “artists, programmers, writers, designers, agit-propers, filmmakers and reverse-engineers.” The space is a studio and lab for virtual explorations.

It’s here, where subterranean rompus room meets high tech, that Baudrillard’s endless reproduction comes back into play and, in turn, is questioned. He writes, “Thus art entered the phase of its own indefinite reproduction; everything that redoubles in itself, even ordinary, everyday reality, falls in the same stroke under the sign of art, and becomes aesthetic. The same goes for production, of which one can say that today it is commencing this aesthetic doubling at the point where, having expelled all content and finality, it becomes, in a way, abstract and nonfigurative. It begins to express the pure form of production; it takes itself, like art, as its own teleological value.”

While the work could fall under the above definition, an understanding of what constitutes the “art” is slippery. C-level is more about creating a social network through lectures, screenings and performances than about autonomous art production. Events are produced, and cynicism aside, there is hope here in the basement gloom. A community of sorts is formed around production without the added “real” aesthetic.

Communal art projects tend manifest in interactive events. For example, the following Cockfight Arena and Tekken Torture Tournament happenings are described with all the gusto of a World Wresting Federation referee:

“A one-night parade of sweat and adrenaline pitting viewer against viewer in brutal virtual cockfighting theatre. Audience volunteers will don custom-made game controllers with full sized wings and feathered helmets. Combatants will step into an arena to control their life size game avatars through vigorous flapping and pecking, competing for blood and birdfeed while rapaciously inflicting onscreen bodily harm. Cockfight Arena is free and open to the public. Gambling and smoking will be permitted. No animals or humans were injured in the production of this event.

“Tekken Torture Tournament is a one-night event combining the latest video game technology, untapped public aggression and painful electric shock. Willing participants are wired into a custom fighting system – a modified Playstation (running Tekken III) which converts virtual on screen damage into bracing, non-lethal, electric shocks.”

Eddo notes that the “lack of slickness is deliberate.” There’s an odd logic to their oppositional stance against the gentrified art scene going on above them: it actually helps them to create community. Peter, from his musty couch, raises his voice if not his fist in solidarity. “Decide what kind of culture you are interested in and then manufacture it. We don’t need those galleries to validate what we do.”

So, it is where you least expect to find reality – in a virtual reality, net art, digital space – the most hyperreal places on the planet, that the Real is able to re-emerge from the staticy feedback. C-level authenticates the unreal. Production, in this case the production of community alongside the technological, is not subsumed by its own self-consciousness. Instead, it sidesteps notions of authenticity. The work may not look great. It may not be slick or pretty. It shows each pixel, every puppet string of production. The “shock of the real” is real and the sarcasm is left in the alley. The shocks dealt in the Tekken Torture Tournament underscore that the goal is to reiterate life, rather than wallow in Baudrillard’s fascination with decay.

Back to Forum Issue 4: Consuming the City