City Designing: Chain Links and Classic Links

As a Los Angeles architect, my work is an expression of a city made up of a barrage of multiple, disconnected images. Yet, I find a virtue, something of value in those images.

I am a realist. If that is what Los Angeles residents like, if that is why they build, if that is what the culture builds, if that is what the culture is, then I am going to work within those boundaries.

Though I want my work to be accessible, I don’t want it to be too accessible. I want people to think. I don’t talk down to them--I try to teach. When I use materials like plywood and chain link, some people perceive that I am trying to be mischievous. I am, at times. I get angry at the world and it shows up in my work.

I can’t escape my locale, even if it is ugly. The attempt to bring the ancient Greek notion of marketplace, the agora, to Los Angeles is destined to fail because the agora didn’t have a freeway and traffic coming to it. How does Los Angeles create a sense of the agora? How does one create a place that deals with the traffic, the smog and the mess? One cannot. It’s like a truck racing down the hill at 70 miles per hour. If someone is going to stop it, they have to jump on it.

There is a simple reality about the craft of architecture: Architects must build through bureaucracy, through economic constraints. I have been trying to find a way to work within that system and turn it to my advantage.

Since I don’t believe that I can change the system, I try to work within it and comment upon it by using the capital and the materials available to me.

I hate chain link, for example. I don’t like it any better than anyone else does. However, I found it around every building I had designed, and I realized that if others are inevitably going to use chain link then I too must figure out how to use it.

I took some clues from artists that were working with similar materials and I began to explore and to use chain link. I started to see it as a fabric. Yet the moment I used it intentionally, everyone got angry.

The public looks at the chain link I use and cries out that it is awful. Yet people constantly use it. I am fascinated with that kind of denial.

My goal, as an architect, is to take the “culturally common” materials I see being used in huge quantities and transform them into something better. I want to understand the materials and to use them, since their use is inevitable anyway.

I do not believe that my work is difficult to understand. People understand it but accept it in differing degrees. My harshest critics understand my work. They just place a different value on the positive and negative aspects of it. They dwell on the negative side and say that I am being willful, pushing something into their faces that they don’t want to see.

My attitude toward critics is that if they are going to focus on what is negative in the world of architecture, they should look at the massive buildings and all the structures that presently make up the environment and get mad at that instead of my little house with the chain link. People often rail against their surroundings, using their preconceptions. They forget to see.

I cannot escape reality. When I try, architecturally, to escape reality, it appears contrived. It doesn’t fit the times. It looks like a cover-up.

Places like Disneyland have a purpose because people pay to go there and be disconnected from reality, just like they go to a movie. But when we deal with architecture we are dealing with daily reality. Serious architecture must address how the real world is working. I cannot disconnect from the real world. Whenever I see work that tries to disconnect, it feels like a cover-up, a lie.

Whoever looks at his or her environment, and makes some kind of statement about it, is interpreting the culture. That type of social commentary becomes interesting when the artist touches a chord with the audience, thereby connecting the viewer with the world.

City architecture now consists of bits and pieces placed here and there by different people. There is no overall system. It is all breaking down into bits and pieces.

The way one designs a building in the modern American city is to explore the context, find out what is good and bad about the surrounding environment. Though an architect must move within the perimeters of context, he or she can also modify the context through design.

Most architects start out designing with a contextual respect for the cornice lines of surrounding buildings. They look for things to hang on to, almost like a crutch. That notion of context comes from history. If architects build in Europe, they must respect the fact that the monuments won’t move. If they are building next to those monuments, they must respect the historic surroundings.

Classicism is a point of departure for much of my architecture. I don’t think classicism, in and of itself, stifles creativity or makes for conservative expression. Yet when it is copied directly, as in a lot of postmodern architecture, it denigrates and caricatures classic architecture. I have more respect for classical architecture than that.

I don’t see my work as a saving-the-world kind of crusade. Some architects have that God-like world view. I’m more realistic. For me, the process of designing a building is its own gratification.

At one time, I admit, I belonged to all the political causes. I used to march on Washington. I used to march on everything. Somehow, I never really felt I was contributing. I felt verbally inadequate. When I realized that, I backed off and focused on architecture, on what I do best. I have been successful, I think, because I focused on the little mud pie again, on the microcosm rather than the macrocosm.

I came out of architecture school with the liberal notion that designing houses for rich people was immoral, so I went to Harvard to study city planning. It was then that I discovered I couldn’t realistically design the grand city plans. They remained drawings and models that never got built.

I prefer to work with people who don’t need to prove something, who don’t want to create a house of excesses. I don’t like things to get too precious, pompous or monumental. I want people to be able to relate to the building, to feel as though they can touch it or throw their coats down on the floor. That doesn’t exclude elegance or beauty.