Partial Site Plan - Dingbat 2.0 Palms Site

Saturday June 26th, 3 pm

LA Forum Events @ W.H.E.*
6518 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028

A panel discussion bringing together members of the architectural, political, planning and urban design communities to discuss the urban condition of the dingbat apartment building in Los Angeles – both existing conditions as well as proposals from the LA Forum’s recently completed Dingbat 2.0 Design Competition. This is the first of two panel discussions presented in conjunction with the Dingbat 2.0 Exhibition, which shows the work of both the competition as well as historic documentation of dingbat apartment buildings.

Panel Members

• John Chase, Author and Urban Designer, City of West Hollywood
• Alan Loomis, Principal Urban Designer, City of Glendale and Delirious L.A. founder
• Roger Sherman,  Principal of Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design,  and Co-Director at cityLAB
• Mott Smith, Principal of Civic Enterprise Development

The panel discussion will be moderated by LA Forum Board member Francie Stefan, Strategic Planning Manager, City of Santa Monica.

The second panel discussion, Dingbat as Cultural Icon, will be held on Saturday, July 17, from 3-6 pm, and will be moderated by LA Forum Board member Michael Osman, UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design.

The Dingbat 2.0 Competition & Exhibition are sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Enterprise Holdings Foundation, the Woodbury University School of Architecture, and the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Archinect is the media sponsor for the competition.

*Woodbury Hollywood Exhibitions.

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 Infrastructural City
Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles
Edited by Kazys Varnelis

This book features 11 essays by 14 authors, photographs by Lane Barden and maps by Leah Meisterlin.

Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures avoid being superfluous by joining this system as temporary containers for people, objects, and capital. This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture.

A project by the Network Architecture Lab and the LA Forum for Architecture & Urban Design featuring: Lane Barden, Barry Lehrman, David Fletcher, Steve Rowell, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Frank Ruchala, Matt Coolidge, CLUI, Warren Techentin, Ted Kane, Rick Miller, Roger Sherman, Deborah Richmond, Robert Sumrell.

Kazys Varnelis is the former President of the LA Forum Board of Directors, and directs the Network Architecture Lab (Columbia University) and the AUDC collective. For more about the book on the Network Architecture Lab website, click here.

The Infrastructural City is available on Amazon.com.

THE INFRASTRUCTURAL CITY: NETWORKED ECOLOGIES IN LOS ANGELES
Edited by Kazys Varnelis
Hardcover edition
March 2008
Published by: Actar
240 pages

Paperback edition
September 2009
Published by: Actar
256 pages

This project was made possible with support and funding from the Network Architecture Lab, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and the Graham 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

Thursday June 3 : Francois Perrin and Felicity Scott
at the Schindler House
835 North Kings Rd, West Hollywood 90069
Francois Perrin is an architect, instructor at Art Center College of Design, and curator of “Yves Klein: Air Architecture” currently on display at the MAK.
Felicity Scott is assistant professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine and a founding editor of the journal Grey Room.

Thursday June 10 : Roger Sherman
at the Sherman house
713 Ashland Ave, Santa Monica 90405
Roger Sherman is principal of Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design and studio instructor and Adjunct Professor at SCI-Arc and UCLA

Thursday July 1 : Barbara Bestor
at the Bestor House
1946 Cerro Gordo St, Echo Park 90039
Barbara Bestor is the founder of Bestor Architecture
Thursday July 8 : Heyday Partnership
at Habitat
348 Patton St, Echo Park 90026
Heyday Partnership is designers and housing developers Kevin and Hardy Wronske

Thursday July 15 : Wes Jones
at Hyperion Apartments & Office
2235 & 2225 Hyperion Ave, Silver Lake 90027
Wes Jones is the founder of Jones, Partners: Architects
Thursday July 22 : Lorcan O’Herlihy
at Vertical House
116 Pacific Ave, Venice 90291
Lorcan O’Herlihy is the founder of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects.

Thursday July 29 : Neil Denari
at Endeavor Talent Agency
9601 Wilshire Blvd, 3rd Floor, Beverly Hills 90210 [enter off Camden]
Neil Denari is principal of NMDA, Neil M. Denari Architects, Inc., Los Angeles

All lectures will begin at 7:30 pm. Seating is limited and reservations are recommended but not required (for reservations call 323-852-7145). Admittance is free for LA Forum members and $15 for non-members.

Neil Denari: July 29 [Forum photo by Kazys Varnelis]

Felicity Scott and Francois Perrin: June 3 [Forum photo by Steve Rowell]

Roger Sherman: June 10 [Forum Photo by Kazys Varnelis]

Wes Jones: July 15 [Forum photo by Dan Herman]

This condition of “post-sprawl” presents the architect with a new landscape of interrogation and engagement. The series will be held at the Southern California Institute of Architecture on February 3, 10, and 19, beginning at 7:00 P.M. 960 E. Third Street Los Angeles, CA 90013. Admission $5 for the general public. SCI-Arc students free.

Sponsored by the Southern California Institute of Architecture and Ted K. Osborn, AIA of Osborn Architects, Glendale.

February 3 Regarding the Suburbs

Introduced by Paulette Singley “Re:Framing the Suburban Project”
Dana Cuff “Re:Tooling the Suburban Metropolis” John Dutton

February 10 The Landscape of Suburbanity

Introduced by Patricia Morton “The American Lawn”
Alessandra Ponte “Suburb IS Landscape” Denis Cosgrove

February 19 Code
Introduced by Kazys Varnelis
[webmaster's note... last minute replacement by Mike Ferguson!]
Three Practices working in Suburbanity
Roger Sherman Mary-Ann Ray, Studioworks
Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Johnston MarkLee lectures

All lectures take place on Tuesdays at 7:30pm at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, 835 North Kings Road, West Hollywood. Admission is free for current LA Forum Members, $7 for non-members, $5 for students with ID. Cash or checks only. No reservations accepted, first-come, first-seated. Parking is available on the street or in the West Hollywood garage at the corner of Kings Road and Santa Monica Boulevard (8383 Santa Monica Boulevard).

July 30
micro/MACRO LA

an open forum on new practices with talks by Joe Day, Paulette Singley and Kazys Varnelis

As an introduction to this year’s “Out There Doing It” lecture series, panelists will survey a wide array of influences facing practice today. Media and technology, de-centralization and finance, and the historical lineage of L.A. modernism, frame alternative paradigms for navigating the landscape of contemporary architecture in Southern California. Returning to the original, conversational format of the LA Forum, overviews by the panelists will be followed by an open discussion regarding future prospects of design and practice in Los Angeles

August 6 Technology / Tectonics

Marcelo Spina : Marcelo Spina is the founder and principal of PATTERNS, a Design Research Architectural Practice operating in Los Angeles and Argentina which is focused on manufacturing artificially singular environments characterized by the active integration of its material substrates and constituent systems. Current projects include the International Competition for Pusan Korea’s Tower Complex and the Research project for Micro Landscape Systems and Materials

Warren Techentin / Henry Buckingham : Techentin Buckingham Architecture was founded in 2001 as a multi-disciplinary practice exploring issues of form and construction through an examination and interpretation of material conventions and meaning. Their work simultaneously seeks to integrate emerging technologies alongside older, sometimes forgotten techniques of construction.

August 13 De-centralized

Michael Volk : Michael Volk is a founding member of ‘Umbrella Organization’, an architectural practice operating as an extended network of resources striving to explore the nature of collaboration. Using both established partnerships and forging new relationships, U.O. is an evolving search for a method of practice embracing the complexities of contemporary life by tailoring specific collaborations and points of view to the dynamics of situation. Along with his own work recent projects include collaborations with Karl Peter Weber in Germany, Coop Himmelblau in Los Angeles, and a showroom for Cappellini with Piero Lissoni.

David Erdman : David Erdman is one of the founding designers in the collaborative Servo, which bases its four partners in Los Angeles, New York, Stockholm, and Zurich. Servo has exhibited work and published internationally. In 2001 Servo won the Young Architects Award and received an “International Artist Studio Program in Sweden” grant, and were recently included in the “Mood River” exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

August 20 Infrastructure

Scott Fajack : Scott Fajack is an architectural associate at the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. He is responsible for the design of facilities infrastructure for the L.A. Water System, and his principal concern is the placement of thoughtful structures into the fabric of the city while respecting the physical and social contexts in which they are located.

Roger Sherman: Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design, utilizes a multi-disciplinary orientation which allows it to pursue a wide range of projects, from parts of cities to pieces of furniture. Current projects at the urban scale include an end use plan for Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, NY; Railyard Park, a new public open space network on a brownfields site in Santa Fe, NM; and a Transit Oriented District Plan for North Hollywood, CA.

August 27 Media

Amy Murphy : Amy Murphy works concurrently in the disciplines of architecture and film. Since 1992 she has completed four films projects as well as numerous architectural design projects as the principal in her own firm, Amy Murphy Projects. Her architectural work has been widely exhibited and her films have shown in several US film festivals.

Benny Chan : Benny Chan founded ‘fotoworks’ after graduation from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) where he received the 1992 Paris Prize. His background in architecture provides a unique understanding of space and structure as it translates to photography, bringing complementary knowledge and skills to a wide range of clientele. ‘Fotoworks’ projects include extensive photography of architectural exteriors, interiors, set design, and product design.

The L.A. Forum would like to thank the MAK Center and FOSH for its hospitality. Joint memberships for the L.A. Forum, the MAK Center, and Friends of the Schindler House (FOSH) are available at the admissions desk, please inquire to either organization for more information.
lectures