Round About the Venice Traffic Circle

There is, of course, more to Venice than the motley, moveable carnival that is funky Ocean Front Walk, the city’s premier pedestrian promenade for exhibitionists and sightseers.

Venice also is a diverse, patchwork community of some pleasant, modest streets and a few unpleasant, immodest ones, with a smattering of architectural attractions and distractions blessed with a brisk ocean breeze.

Bounded roughly on the south by Marina del Rey, the north by Santa Monica, the east by Lincoln Boulevard and the west by the Pacific, the area is very much a singular urban village, seemingly adrift in a not always friendly sea of change.

These thoughts came to mind recently standing with local architect David Ming-Li Lowe in the middle of a raw traffic circle at the confluence of Windward Avenue, Main Street and three other streets, across from the Venice post office. The circle is marked by a mottled piece of vanity sculpture someone abandoned there a few years ago.

Lowe and local historian Tom Sewell are trying to drum up support for an architectural and design competition to realign and recast the forlorn circle into an attractive and appropriate focal point for Venice.

“What we have here now is an insult to those of us who live and work in the area,” Lowe said. “Given its central location, given the need in Venice for public space, a sitting and meeting area--Ocean Front Walk is for the tourists--the circle could be marvelous.”

Seventy years ago the traffic circle was the Grand Lagoon, the focal point of a romantic web of canals lacing the seaside community of Venice--then being fashioned with imagination out of an expanse of marshy tidal flats by real estate developer Abbott Kinney.

According to old maps and photographs, on the site of the post office was an ornate viewing pavilion; to the south an amusement park featuring a roller coaster; to the north a bath house; to the west welcoming steps leading to a fairway; and to the east a complex of bungalows. In the middle of the lagoon stood a five-story tower.

By the late 1920s the discovery of oil in Venice, competition from other amusement parks and the incorporation of the city into Los Angeles had taken their toll. The lagoon and most of the canals were filled in and the buildings lost to fire, the banks and wrecking crews.

A glimpse of this early history of Venice--from amusement park to oil fields, and Kinney himself--can be seen in a fine, but fading mural by Edward Biberton on the south interior wall of the post office.

Also within strolling distance of the post office and traffic circle are glimpses of Venice’s recent architectural history, including some innovative as well as self-advertising efforts.

A block south at 308 Venice Way is Lowe’s steel-framed and metal clad studio, a respectful and sensitive nod to the machine aesthetic.

To the west, at North Venice Boulevard and Pacific Avenue is Rebecca’s, an overwrought restaurant designed by Frank Gehry in a vain attempt to marry art and architecture. Happily, the most successful elements of the design--the white onyx frame of the door and the tin-collage door itself, the later crafted by Tony Berlant--can be seen from the street.

A few blocks south, at Ocean Front Walk and 25th Street, is Gehry’s Norton House, a seemingly chaotic stack of varied building materials. The concoction, including the silly use of logs as a sun screen, is accented by a study in the form of a lifeguard tower. Studied it is.

More subdued and successful is the Gargosian Art Gallery and apartments above, just north of Windward, at 51 Market St. It was designed by Craig Hodgetts and Robert Mangurian, in a well-composed updated Moderne style.

Across the street is 72 Market Street, a restaurant designed by the firm of Morphosis in the form of a self-conscious architectural happening. A few of the arbitrary details can be seen through the window and by glancing toward the ceiling. Nearby on 19th Avenue west of Pacific Avenue is an earlier, relatively more modest effort by the firm, an addition sheathed in corrugated aluminium.

Corrugated metal, along with a variety of other inexpensive materials very much exposed to view and debate, distinguish the Spiller House at 39 Horizon Ave., designed by Gehry. A few steps away at the southwest corner of Horizon and Pacific is Michael Lipson’s playful design for film producer Tony Bill.

Despite these structures being “different,” they all in an odd way fit relatively comfortably into the chaotic context of Venice, indeed a few even seem to be swallowed up in it. Whether they are comfortable structures is another matter.

Meanwhile, those interested in the competition to redesign the Venice traffic circle are asked to contact Lowe at (213) 823-3552.