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.

The inaugural issue of Forum Annual is now available. It marks the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design’s first print periodical after a five-year absence. Forum Annual is our reaction to a void we perceive in the city. For if it is hard to imagine any contemporary city as closely observed as Los Angeles, it is remarkable that we lack a regular venue for critical writing on architecture and urbanism. Forum Annual gathers the most pertinent material from recent Forum Issues and online features to document our activities of the year and provide an arena for debating the most pressing issues concerning architecture, urban design and art in Los Angeles and beyond.

Annual 2004 – dedicated to Rose Mendez – is edited by Kazys Varnelis and includes essays on The Grove, Downtown, Grand Avenue, Dead Malls, Small Skyscraper, the Standard, and Dirty Realism among other topics by Helene Furjan, Robert S. Harris, Alan Loomis, Tom Marble, Steve Rowell, Paulette M. Singely, Kazys Varnelis and Peter Zellner.

Contents :

Introduction by Forum President Kazys Varnelis

Memorial for Rose Mendez

The Once and Future Shopping Mall by Alan Loomis

Twilight Capitol by Steve Rowell

Downtown… Again by Peter Zellner

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

Small Skyscraper by Chris Burden and Taalman Koch Architecture

Cathedrals of the Culture Industry by Kazys Varnelis

Lounge Core by Helene Furjan

Los Angeles’s Dirty Realism by Paulette M. Singley

Art and Architecture Portfolio Series curated by Tom Marble

Forum Annual Report 2002-2004 / Board and Sponsors

Download Low-Res PDF.

Mary Ann Ray and Robert Mangurian, Wrapper: 40 Possible Surfaces for the Museum of Jurassic Technology(William Stout Publishers, 2000)

Peter Zellner, Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture (Rizzoli, 1999)

Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A Users Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures (MIT Press, 2000)

John Kaliski, Margaret Crawford, and John Chase, editors, Everyday Urbanism (Monacelli Press, 1999)

Dave Hullfish Bailey, Union Pacific: Berlins Neue Mitte and the Fringes of Las Vegas (Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 1999)

Jack Burnett-Stuart, co-author, Shifting the View: Documentation of the Commonplace (Public Access Press, 1999)