‘Clouds of Steel’ : Los Angeles’ proposed answer to the Statue of Liberty is a multi-media, giant sculpture that would sit astride a downtown freeway. A combination of huge aquarium tanks, park areas, a museum and wildly angled structural beams, it has drawn immediate and loud criticism.

One week ago, in the afterglow of his triumph, architect Hani Rashid sipped a celebratory cocktail and gazed upon his inspiration--the heavens above Los Angeles.

“I was looking at these incredible clouds,” the 30-year-old New Yorker recalled. The sun was setting, turning the clouds to shades of gold and red, pink and purple. “It’s the dream of every visionary architect,” Rashid said, “to build clouds.”

So far, Hani Rashid’s “Steel Cloud” has been designed, but not built. There is a good chance that his avant-garde monument, proposed to rise above a downtown stretch of the Hollywood Freeway, will never be built. Not a single dime has been raised toward its construction, not a single politician or government agency has given it the green light. Even so, “Steel Cloud” has become a cumulonimbus of controversy.

Rashid’s audacious design for that improbable location was unveiled Monday as the winner of the international “West Coast Gateway” contest, an endeavor inspired by Mayor Tom Bradley’s quest for a monument to celebrate Los Angeles’ role as the nation’s primary point of entry for immigrants. Selected from a field of 150 entries, here at last, patrons said, is a bold, innovative, horizontal icon for a bold, innovative, horizontal city, a marvel of architecture and high technology to serve as Los Angeles’ answer to such signature monuments as the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty.

But in the days since, lay critics have snickered, satirizing Rashid’s machine-like design as resembling the crash of an airliner, a giant metal grasshopper, L.A. after the Big One and just plain junk.

“Unbelievably hideous, grotesque and monstrous” is how one newspaper columnist described it.

“It’s stressful just to look at the drawings,” Councilwoman Gloria Molina said.

If “Steel Cloud” was a stage play, it would have closed after the first curtain. But because it is architecture, Rashid and his partisans seem not the least discouraged. For one thing, they say, there has been a favorable reaction in another important arena--the international architectural community. For another, the controversy here is encouraging.

“It was what we hoped would happen, in a way,” Rashid said in a telephone interview. “We’re hoping to get something that would cause a bit of excitement and exuberance.”

Hostility, Rashid said, is the typical first reaction for “any radical work, anything breaking new ground. . . . But time and again, when those things are given the benefit of the doubt, they tend to prove themselves quite fantastic.” The Eiffel Tower and a modern Paris landmark, the high-tech Pompidou Center, are two examples of works that endured vitriol to become popular symbols.

‘It’s So Bold’

Rashid’s complex scheme is a collage of engineering, high technology, film and other elements with such details as a “musical forest” in which the sound of cars whooshing by below would be synthesized into music.

“The worst thing would be a project that has people saying, ‘Well, it’s nice,’ ” said Nick Patsaouras, chairman and chief fund-raiser of the Gateway project. “The fact it’s so bold has created a debate. . . . I know that the (architecture) critics around the world will receive this project very well. People are interested in talking about it more than once.

“There is no precedent for it, so it will take time for the public to understand it,” he said.

Be it ridiculous or sublime, “Steel Cloud” still has many earthly obstacles to overcome.

The cost, projected for the purpose of the contest at $33 million, is widely expected to be much higher. Moreover, that cost does not include the leasing of air rights from Caltrans.

Fund-Raising Plan

According to the plan, all of the money will be raised from private individuals and corporations. Patsaouras, a longtime civic activist and current RTD board member who raised $2.5 million for Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign, pledges that no public money will be solicited or accepted.

The project will also have to navigate a maze of government agencies and political reviews. Caltrans officials say every aspect of the project would be reviewed to ensure that it does nothing to harm transportation, including long-range plans to double-deck the freeway.

Neither the money nor political approval can materialize unless proponents swing the amorphous beasts known as “public opinion” and “public will” to their favor--especially the latter.

To be sure, Rashid’s startling design is not of the love-at-first-sight ilk. Rising from steel girders planted in the freeway median, stabilized by struts, it presents an elaborate network of museums, theaters, movie screens, restaurants, plazas, gardens, aquariums and a computerized library suspended above the freeway from Alameda to Broadway. At its tallest point it is about one-third the height of City Hall. Patsaouras likens it to a squadron of jet fighters; it gives the feeling of motion as it just stands there.

Love-at-first-sight is not Rashid’s goal. Appreciation comes more slowly and more deeply, supporters say, but with an understanding of the plan’s purpose and meaning. The competition specified that the project would have to provide a pedestrian link over the freeway to unite Chinatown and El Pueblo State Historic Park with the Civic Center and Little Tokyo., But “Steel Cloud,” its fans say, is more about a celebration of the possible, about making dreams come true.

Indeed, the Cairo-born architect said it is by oversight that the title “Steel Cloud” survived. He had meant to change it to the friendlier “Bridge of Clouds.” The bridge represents the connection of cultures, he said. Like clouds, the monument will continually “be retrieving, collecting, dispensing . . . only in the humanist sense.”

Michael Rotondi, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture and a member of the jury that chose Rashid’s work, suggests that the construction of “Steel Cloud” would inspire not derision and laughter, but amazement and awe.

Place of Innovation

“It will show what our aspirations are, what we’re capable of achieving,” Rotondi said. “The significance of a project like this is it’s going to show everybody around the world that Los Angeles is a place of innovation, that Los Angeles is a place where you can pursue your ideas and be very passionate about it.”

Rashid responded to criticism with equanimity, lacing his comments with humor. “I, for one, believe it has nothing to do with crashed airliners,” he said with a laugh.

A former student of, and collaborator with, architect Daniel Libeskind, Rashid has gained a reputation for his “forward-thinking” designs. He has exhibited designs throughout Italy and in Canada and New York, though he can claim few built projects of his own. His primary collaborator on “Steel Cloud” was 29-year-old Lise Ann Couture, who has studied under and worked with leading Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry.

Within architecture circles, Rashid said, “the whole world is watching” the Gateway project. “Whether it’s built or not built, it will go down in history as a kind of important work,” he said.

For the moment, however, the monument is just some drawings and a model inside the offices of Gruen Associates, the Los Angeles architecture firm that help Rashid develop his concept.

Construction is planned in four phases. The target date calls for the first phase to be open in 1992. If it is built at all, it seems possible that it could be delayed after any phase.

The first phase offers the pedestrian link between El Pueblo, the city’s birthplace, and the Civic Center. People could enter through an elevator outside Olvera Street into a air-conditioned “Museum of Time” that would celebrate the history of the United States, arriving in the civic heart of the modern city. The existing, sub-street level Los Angeles Mall surrounding the Children’s Museum would also be remodeled during the first phase.

Other Phases

Phase 2 would be built to the east to Alameda as a kind of cavalcade of high technology. The interior would include a computerized library of genealogy, an emporium of international foods that Rashid calls the “Little Dipper” and administration offices. The exterior would be flanked with large “liquid crystal display screens” that would display text and images for viewing by motorists and pedestrians.

Phase 3 would be built west to Broadway, encompassing an immigration museum, a “Park of Peace & Unity,” a pair of giant oscillating aquariums (one representing the Atlantic Ocean, the other the Pacific Ocean) and movie theaters that would feature sail-like projection screens that could be seen by motorists passing by below.

Phase 4 would be the top level, arching roughly between Spring and Los Angeles streets. It would include a large theater Rashid has dubbed “The Sphinx,” a restaurant he calls the “Big Dipper,” a sculpture garden, a painting gallery and the “musical forest.”

The “musical forest” illustrates one way that Rashid proposes modern technology can transform the seeming inhospitable piece of airspace into a valuable commodity. Patsaouras chose the freeway location for the competition because of its high profile and potential in maximizing the future development of the urban center.

Source of Debate

The unlikely site is a continuing source of debate.

Actor George Takei, a member of the jury that selected Rashid’s design, described Rashid’s treatment of the location as “quintessentially Los Angeles. . . . It says energy, it says action, it says movement.”

Others aren’t so sure. “I’m not sure we want to monumentalize the freeway,” said Richard Keating, design partner for the Los Angeles office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which had no role in the Gateway competition. Within his own office, he said, there is spirited debate. “Several people think it’s absolutely the right idea. Some think it’s terrible. I’m somewhere in between.”

Caltrans airspace director Richard Robison said anything that might prove too distracting to motorists--a movie screen, perhaps--is unlikely to pass muster.

‘It’s Getting Stranger’

Supporters believe that the project’s technological cornucopia would help win over the public. But some people view it with incredulity.

“It’s getting stranger as it unveils itself,” Councilwoman Molina said, lacing her words with chuckles. “I mean, tanks of fish? . . . Liquid crystal display screens? . . . Take the sound of the freeway and turn it into music?”

Rashid wants motorists passing below “Steel Cloud” to “have almost a ‘Blade Runner’ type of experience,” referring to the motion picture set in a strange, futuristic Los Angeles.

“It’s really in the spirit of progress and of man. It’s in the idea that this could be a kind of architecture that brings us into the 21st Century. . . . And there’s a lot of jealousy here in New York that Los Angeles might get on to it first.”

Contrary to some initial reactions, Rashid rejects suggestions that “Steel Cloud” reflects Deconstructivism, an architectural mode that has been described as “an architecture of disruption and dislocation, of displacement and distortion.”

‘Architectural Polemic’

“I would just say it’s contemporary, like listening to a piece of contemporary music,” Rotondi said. “It reflects an architectural polemic that is very current.”

Although the jumble of angles that make up “Steel Cloud” is a far cry from the clean, graceful lines of the Eiffel Tower, Rotondi contends that the parallel is valid. An even better comparison, he said, is Pompidou Center, which incurred so much wrath as a proposal but now receives 25,000 visitors a day.

Rotondi suggests that, for all the talk, a large, important segment of the population has not been heard from.

“I’d bet if the children had a vote, they’d approve this project,” Rotondi said. “I showed my 12-year-old son this project and his reaction was, ‘Radical!’

“And that’s a total thumbs up.”