Los Angeles: Redesigned for the Arts

To a proper San Franciscan, assured of urban advantages that go back to Victorian times, Southern California’s ambitious new architecture for the arts comes as a shock and an omen. The tide of civilized life seems to be flowing south, like the north’s water, economic power and dwindling political strength. The Bay Area lately has done little to match the array of museums, symphony halls, theaters and galleries popping up from Santa Barbara to Costa Mesa to La Jolla, like Olympic venues of the mind.

In a single year Los Angeles has opened a Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), downtown on Bunker Hill, and a major addition to the County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard, conspicuously less handsome than MOCA, but nonetheless an improvement over the original complex that epitomizes all that was shallow and specious in official Los Angeles taste of the 1960s.

How far Los Angeles has come since then, architecturally and otherwise, should be revealed by the most resplendent project of all, the hilltop stronghold of the J. Paul Getty Center at Brentwood, a $2-billion institution four times richer than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The preliminary concept by Richard E. Meier, which includes a high-tech funicular taking visitors to the crest, is still in too early a stage of design to be judged as architecture but, potentially, the Getty could be the finest cultural facility of its kind in the world. The model shows stone-clad buildings massed, like a modern Tuscan abbey, around courts and fountains cascading down a cleft in the hill high above the San Diego Freeway, perhaps recalling the water gardens of the Villa d’Este near Rome.

For the first time the northerner feels something like envy, or chagrin, at the same time that UCLA draws even with Berkeley. UCLA may build an important museum of its own, far outclassing Berkeley’s and rivaling the Fogg at Harvard, if Norton Simon ever decides to move his brilliant collection, replete with Rembrandts, Degas dancers and Asian treasures, from Pasadena to Westwood.

In the meantime San Francisco pretty much holds tight, pleased with the past, content for the present to keep what it has, horrified by the technocratic future passing for “growth” in Los Angeles, which with few qualms roars ahead in the smog. Whatever this laissez-faire commercial mentality has done to overall environmental quality--among other things it has badly compromised the beauty of MOCA--there’s no denying the parvenu vitality and enormous wealth pouring forth cultural monuments as from a cornucopia.

One of the most costly so far is the $73-million Orange County Performing Arts Center, with a $60-million endowment, which has suddenly arisen--architecturally flawed, but fascinating acoustically--on what had been the Segerstrom family lima-bean fields in Costa Mesa.

Los Angeles is going to top that with a symphony hall that will relegate the adjacent Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to theatrical uses. Thanks to the Disney family, the philharmonic’s new home should be to music what the Getty Center promises to be for the visual arts. Not only is it intended to be the most splendid performance space of our time but its capacity will be reduced from the usual 3,000-odd seats to between 2,500 and 2,800, to avoid the mammoth size and blurred acoustics of almost all recent American concert halls; the less the better. The corresponding loss of revenue is the price of faultless sound and short, clear lines of vision in a relatively intimate room where no one will be very far from the stage.

Lillian Disney, Walt’s widow, has donated $50 million for this project, but more is needed since the building will cost more than twice that sum (and, for comparison, three or four times more than Davies Hall, the pseudoclassical 3,000-seat clunker in San Francisco). Yet these days in Los Angeles there is abounding confidence in finding enough money and selecting an architect of the first international rank to do a masterpiece.

That is, if Los Angeles allows him to do his best. So far, not one of the entries in the cultural sweepstakes has turned as well as it should have. The experience of the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a case in point. In spite of bitter kibbitzing by former MOCA trustee Max Palevsky, Isozaki managed in the end to do an inspired building, the most lyrical public building seen in Los Angeles since Bertram Goodhue’s Central Library was completed in 1926. But the prospect of truly great architecture, on the order of Louis I. Kahn’s Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, was thwarted by an unholy alliance of Mammon and museum financing--the very deal the city put together for MOCA to receive $23 million in mandatory art contributions as part of the mammoth California Plaza redevelopment project.

For Isozaki had to create a heart for one of the most heartless environments ever perpetrated in the name of urban renewal. California Plaza, even in unfinished state with more high rises to come, makes downtown Dallas appear humane. When built out in the 1990s, it will be the largest mixed-use development in the country, weighing in at $1.2 billion of construction; it is a pity to know that the ponderous design is by Arthur Erickson, a highly refined Canadian who has somewhat lost his touch in California. And facing California Plaza, on the other side of Grand Avenue, are two implacable buildings, originally built for Crocker Bank by the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, towers they would never be allowed to build at home.

The individual on foot, like an ant on graph paper, feels crushed by the colossal abstractions of granite and glass. But Isozaki, in an insight key to the whole design, saw that he could establish human scale, and exalt the human spirit as it seeks expression in art, by breaking up various elements of the museum--not a very large building to begin with--into intelligible fragments that would look like “a small village inside the valley created by skyscrapers.”

Yet the village is an intellectual palace where Plato might converse with a Zen master. These are no haphazard shapes but pure geometric forms--cubes, pyramids, the perfect half-circle of a vault--combined in different configurations on either side of a suave piazza that could never be mistaken for an unruly village square. The proportions are ideal. They could have been determined by the ancient geometric ratios of the golden section, which this profoundly Westernized architect, much given to historical allusions, understands as well as the Japanese system of dimensions that fixes even the size of tatami mats.

In any case a classic European order prevails, enhanced by an intuitive freedom of color and texture that somehow seems very Southern Californian. Isozaki is a painterly architect whose prints are as subtly elegant as his buildings; at MOCA he has chosen a palette of quietly rich materials that are simultaneously delicate and strong. The low, horizontal blocks of the museum--almost unbroken by windows except in the office wing on the north--are clad in a warm reddish sandstone from India, tailored by Japanese stonecutters, and meticulously laid up in bands that, for once in Los Angeles, do not look like sleek veneer but genuine masonry bonded to concrete walls.

How well the porous sandstone will withstand the toxic atmosphere is anyone’s guess but so far it is an unqualified success. The roughened surfaces respond eloquently to changing light and shadow and they should react more dramatically still to the mad chiaroscuro enveloping MOCA when it is totally hemmed by high-rises. The sandstone is handsomely complemented by large green panels of painted aluminum, diagonally laced with thin lines of pink that emblazon the office wing with a minimalist frieze.

The exceptional quality of detailing continues throughout, in stainless steel trim and hardware, paving of dusty red granite with inserts of slate on the stairs and quite wonderful use of translucent materials--from glass blocks of Japanese manufacture to golden-veined onyx screens that filter light into the vaulted library perched on columns above the “ceremonial” entrance to the museum.

But it is not a main entrance at all, and this is the first of MOCA’s deceptions. What seems to be a grand portal is merely a grandiose canopy for a ticket booth. The visitor senses at once that something is wrong--if not already disheartened by a daunting ascent from a reeking garage, up an elevator, through the netherworld of a still-vacant retail mall and around the bland sides of the museum to a puzzling set of choices on the plaza. Most people first try the entry to the museum gift shop or the lecture room across the plaza before finding the real entrance to the galleries down a flight of stairs in a sunken court.

Why Isozaki opted for this baffling arrangement can be explained only by the Faustian pact between MOCA’s founders and real-estate developers. This consigned the galleries below street level, in what is essentially an underground museum. To provide unobstructed views for the inmates of the surrounding high rises, MOCA was squashed beneath an arbitrary height limit; only the pyramidal tips of the skylights--protruding above the roofs almost as toy buildings--reveal the presence of large spaces below. a

What’s more, the developers insisted that the above-grade portions of the museum be literally split into two buildings, connected beneath the plaza by a corridor that doubles as an auxiliary gallery. The full effects of this decision are not yet discernible, because the plaza will be reduced to the role of a forecourt for a hotel to go up directly east of MOCA on currently open land. Designed by Jon Jerde, who did Horton Plaza in San Diego and surpassed that middlebrow monument with the Westside Pavilion shopping center in West Los Angeles, this hotel could turn out to be a disaster for MOCA and a tragedy for Isozaki.

Hence Isozaki’s village metaphysics. He miniaturized MOCA as an ingenious solution to an otherwise insoluble problem of civic design. He could have designed a street-level entrance for the galleries but it may have seemed philosophically right to enter the museum through a “silent center,” a term borrowed from Zen.

It matters little that the sunken court is a busy place, filled with tables and parasols next to the charming lunch room. But all of Los Angeles is enormously busy. And Isozaki himself, not at all disparagingly, has thought of the city--which is not a true city, at least not a city like San Francisco--as a vast nothingness, a Zen blend of real and unreal, whose secrets may only be known through art. Part of the answer may be in the lovely galleries he created against difficult odds, to be discussed in a later article together with the new galleries of the County Museum of Art, where in different ways Southern California’s architecture is striving to vindicate cultural reality.