‘Clouds of Steel’ : Avant-Garde Design Tops Entries for L.A.’s Gateway Monument

The idea was simple: Design a monument that will provide a physical and symbolic center to sprawling Los Angeles. But the catch was it had to be suspended over the Hollywood Freeway between Broadway and Alameda Street downtown.

After reviewing more than 150 designs, the West Coast Gateway Committee, a blue-ribbon group appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley, announced its winner Monday.

A 30-year-old New York architect, Hani Rashid, and his associate, Lise Anne Couture, designed the winning entry: an avant-garde series of geometrical metal shapes housing theaters, museums, cafes, walkways, a genealogy library and other cultural amenities--all growing out of the median strip of the Hollywood Freeway.

The design, which looks in its working model as if it were built with an erector set, branches out over two lanes of freeway on both sides in what Rashid calls “clouds of steel,” metal alloys that will “reflect and absorb” the sky.

The Gateway is expected to cost $33 million and will be financed by private donations.

Committee chairman Nick Patsaouras said he must raise $12 million for the first stage of the Gateway, which he hopes will be built by 1992--the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to America.

“It is not a monument in a the conventional sense,” Patsaouras said. “It will have a metaphorical sense of uplifting and inspiring those who look at it, of exhilaration, pride and a grand feeling of soaring, the same feeling you get when our astronauts go up.”

Ethnic Communities

The concept of the project is not so much a drive-through sculpture garden as an attempt to get both Los Angeles residents and visitors to get out and walk between downtown’s diverse ethnic communities, including El Pueblo Historic Park (Olvera Street), Chinatown and Little Tokyo.

The first phase of the project will be a new bridge connecting Olvera Street north of the freeway with the Children’s Museum south of the freeway.

The two-level bridge will have a landscaped plaza walkway and an upper level with a museum showing Los Angeles’ immigrant history.

One portion of the project will eventually house a Park of Peace and Unity that will be green and landscaped. On each side of the park will be a giant walk-through aquarium containing undersea life of the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Atlantic on the other.

“The park will be a metaphor for America,” Rashid said.

The competition was financed with the help of a $100,000 contribution from Japanese-owned Shuwa Corp. Thirteen judges from seven countries unanimously selected the winning design, Patsaouras said.

Among projects rejected were a giant baseball glove, a four-block-long dollar bill and a giant bird submitted by an Estonian designer that Patsaouras said was runner-up.

Patsaouras, a veteran fund-raiser, said he will take the project to the Los Angeles City Council next year to get “input” for the design. He said the project will be underwritten partly by an endowment set up by contributors, much the same way the 1984 Olympics were financed.

“I don’t expect everybody to like it,” Patsaouras said of the design. “Obviously it’s going to be a debate. . . . But I truly believe it will happen and happen quicker than anybody thinks.”