Frontier Outlook Lives On in Valley, Architect Asserts

For architect Kurt Meyer, the San Fernando Valley will always remain the outer edge of the metropolis, free of many of the formal constraints that increasingly control the character of Los Angeles’ more central districts.

“The Valley still has a frontier feeling in which anything goes,” said Meyer. “I strongly believe that feeling should be honored. It should not be submerged under either a homogenizing impulse to overplan, or succumb to too much political and planning control.

“The frontier is our history and our continuing inspiration--and I hope it always will be there for all to see.”

In Meyer’s view, the Valley is not a shapeless, sprawling suburb or “slurb,” as critic Reyner Banham once wrote, but an urban form as valid as any other.

“The Valley is the section of Los Angeles that has come closest to fulfilling the American family’s suburban dream of a three-bedroom house with a two-car garage and good-sized yard,” he said. “Now the Valley is demonstrating that suburbs can evolve into cities without sacrificing their essential ideal.”

Meyer’s connection with the West Valley and Ventura County goes back 25 years.

His first Valley commission was the design of a Lytton Savings outlet on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Canoga Park in the early 1960s. Today the building is owned by Great Western Savings, and the commercial center that surrounds it is named Topanga Plaza.

Kurt Meyer Partners is engaged in a master plan for Simi Valley’s civic center, a plan for San Fernando’s central business district, and two projects in Thousand Oaks: a large mixed-use development called Ventura Gateway on Thousand Oaks Boulevard and a land-use study for a 21-acre site in the Rolling Oaks section of the city that will include housing, offices, restaurants and shops.

As an example of the San Fernando Valley’s urban evolution, Meyer points to the area’s often-derided “cracker-box” dwellings. Built in large numbers in a repetitive style in the post-World War II suburban housing boom, these homes have been personalized by their owners over the years.

“Today the original cracker box has been invariably added to and elaborated, to suit the owners’ tastes and to adapt to changing family circumstances,” he said. “Now you would be hard put to find two Valley homes built in the 1950s and ‘60s that are any longer exactly alike.”

Meyer added that the business areas of the Valley show a similar adaptability as they become more concentrated into urbanized commercial cores.

“Even in this change of circumstance the frontier feeling of ‘anything goes’ is expressed in the wide diversity of the architecture,” Meyer said.

But this diversity of design can also lead to visual confusion. “In the Valley there will always be a tension between a freedom of expression, which can include sheer bad taste, and the desire for a coherent built environment,” he said.

When Meyer designed the Lytton Savings building it stood alone in open farmland.

“The May Company store across the boulevard was just starting construction,” Meyer recalled. “The area’s developers believed that the population would follow, that the locality would eventually become as urbanized as it is today.”

It is typical of Meyer’s social sensitivity that he worked to create a sense of community in the savings building. A section of the high-ceilinged lobby was set aside for people to sit and enjoy coffee and cookies. An outdoor patio encouraged local retirees to gather and chat.

“I wanted to evoke an aura of the old country store in a Western frontier town,” he said. “The coffee urn was the equivalent of the cracker-barrel stove around which folk would get together to gossip, exchange local news and discuss the issues of the day. You must remember that Canoga Park had few such meeting places in those days.”

Looking back over the development of Topanga Plaza since the 1960s leaves Meyer with a tinge of disappointment.

“The place did not build upon this early attempt to create a sense of community,” he said. “There has been no concern for the coordination of the various commercial bits and pieces, whether socially or architecturally. A feeling of local identity has been lost. Topanga Plaza could be anywhere in the Valley, or in the Western U.S. for that matter. This is a truly great shame.”

Meyer blames this loss of local identity on the failure of planning officials to fully determine the local community’s wishes.

“In 1945 the Los Angeles County planning department came up with a Valleywide master plan based on the British ‘greenbelt’ concept,” said Meyer. “The idea was to cordon off the Valley’s 16 then-identified commercial districts--areas like Encino, Van Nuys, and Canoga Park--from their residential neighborhoods, with open parkland that could never be built upon.

“However, powerful developers challenged the plan in court and won their case. In the climate of the day, growth was king, and effective neighborhood associations were mostly a distant dream.”

The population of the Valley, once estimated to reach 900,000 by the end of the century, passed that level by the early 1960s. In this hectic growth all the greenbelts were overrun with housing subdivisions. Few of the original 16 centers could easily be identified from the surrounding development.

Meyer sees a similar, sad situation in the early history of postwar Thousand Oaks, where he has completed several major commissions, including Exxon’s western regional headquarters.

As developed by the Janss Corp. in the 1960s, the design of Thousand Oaks’ commercial core included little forethought for the infrastructure of road systems and services that would be needed as the city grew.

“Janss did not even bother to put the major power and telephone lines underground,” Meyer said. “And the roads the developers built into the original layout really screwed up the traffic circulation patterns.”

It took the incorporation of Thousand Oaks in the mid-1960s to remedy this lack of foresight. The young city has had to expend a great deal of energy and money to put its power lines underground and revise its core road systems.

Meyer believes that Thousand Oaks is an instructive instance of a one-time bedroom community that is evolving into a little city in its own right.

“Conejo Valley is looking forward to implementing those amenities that will make it a well-rounded community, beyond satisfying the basic needs of sleeping and eating,” he wrote in a text accompanying his Ventura Gateway submission to the Thousand Oaks planning department. “The ‘adolescent’ looks forward to the fulfillment of a rich community culture which is an intrinsic part of our civilized life.”

Meyer believes it is inevitable that certain centers in the Valley will become self-contained urban nuclei or mini-cities. And he already sees a social stratification in the Valley in which the “executives live in the hills and their staffs live down in the flatlands--a traditional L.A. pattern.”

The urbanized centers such as Warner Center, Universal City, Sherman Oaks and Topanga Plaza will become a “string of pearls” along major transit arteries such as Ventura Boulevard. Thousands of new jobs have been created in the past 10 years in Warner Center and Universal City. The great advantage of this proximity will be to cut down the kind of long-range commuting that contributes to Los Angeles’ traffic congestion.

The Swiss-born Meyer, 66, is a former chairman of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency board. He is president of the Urban Design Advisory Coalition, a group of prominent Los Angeles architecture and urban design professionals and academics.

Meyer arrived in Los Angeles in 1949 with $47 in his pocket and a youthful desire “to help build a better world.” Today he lives with his wife, Rosalie, in a custom-designed apartment that adjoins his Beachwood Village studio office, in the shadow of the Hollywood sign.

The Meyers’ passion is tramping the high reaches of the Himalayas. Almost every year they take off for several months to trek through the mountain nations of Tibet, Bhutan and Nepal.

“I got used to walking the trails in the Swiss army,” Meyer said. “We had to climb hills and cliffs with full military packs and weaponry. It was good training for a would-be mountain goat.”

To make time for traveling, and for the public service he considers a vital part of an architect’s function, Meyer has turned over much of his office operation to Cliff Allen, a young associate. Allen specializes in the master planning commissions and the multiple housing projects that are becoming a Kurt Meyer Partners speciality.

Meyer’s 20-person staff works on a range of projects across the Southland, from Simi Valley to San Bernardino. The San Bernardino County Government Center, completed in 1985, has won awards for an architecture that creates a sense of public identity while symbolizing civic democracy in the developing regions of the Southland.

“Though the Valley remains a frontier, we find today a strong and growing community spirit here,” said Meyer. “That spirit, if well-directed, could ensure the Valley’s evolution into a more complex and diverse urban environment that is still pleasant to inhabit and enjoy.”