Skyline Outgrows Its Own Skyscrapers

This is “Architecture Week,” so designated by the city, county and state.

“We want the week to stimulate public awareness,” declares Fernando Juarez, the president of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

But given the accelerating growth of Los Angeles, the increased competition among architects and their clients for attention, and the heightened concerns of neighborhoods that they are being overwhelmed by development, every week seems to be Architecture Week, for both better and worse.

Nowhere is this more evident than downtown. Viewing its construction intermittently from the parking lot at Dodger Stadium or from the parking lot that the Santa Monica Freeway has become during rush hour, reveals an emerging and increasingly more interesting skyline.

What is slowly happening is that a critical mass of buildings, happily overwhelming some less-distinguished designs, is developing to lend visual drama to the skyline and a focus to the sprawling surrounding communities. It is a case where the total exceeds its parts.

From an architectural design point of view, downtown is beginning to resemble a real downtown, and not a random collection of varied buildings deposited like empty boxes on a raw lot astride a freeway ramp.

Remember, in its formative years Los Angeles was never meant to be a city of soaring high-rises, such as New York and Chicago. Rather, it was to be an Arcadian collection of small towns centered on a relatively modest downtown in the style of a mid-size Midwest city. After all, that is where most of the settlers had come from.

Until the 1950s, structures here, except for City Hall and the Federal Building, were limited to 13 stories for aesthetic reasons, and not because of earthquakes, as generally believed. Los Angeles was viewed protectively as a horizontal city, with lots of elbow room where people could see the ocean, mountains and sky, not high-rises.

While the ban was lifted, unfortunately remaining was a Midwest mind-set among the city fathers toward architecture.

Despite some singularly designed private homes and a few scattered public buildings, most of the city’s commercial and civic designs of the last 30 years have been uninspired, certainly not reflective of the city’s size, spirit and aspirations.

A problem is that many of those buildings sprouted in the cold, corporate, Modern style of the 1960s and ‘70s. These include the boxy Union Bank, designed by Albert C. Martin & Associates and the bulky World Trade Center, by Conrad Associates, both on Figueroa Street, and the nondescript First Interstate Tower, by Charles Luckman & Associates, on 6th Street.

More interesting was the Martin firm’s design of the well-detailed and sited Arco twin towers, and the Wells Fargo building, both on Flower Street. In the last decade, downtown was given some architectural verve by the granite-clad, polygonal-towered Wells Fargo Center complex on Bunker Hill, designed by the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM); the Post-Modernist concoction of 1000 Wilshire Boulevard by Kohn, Pedersen & Fox, and the varied recycling and restorations of select historic landmarks.

Less successful has been the Citicorp Center, by Bruce Graham of SOM, at 8th and Figueroa streets, and most recently, the Home Savings of America Tower, on 7th Street, by Tim Vreeland of the Martin office.

Both prominently located, the center looks like an old computer punch card and the French Chateau-styled Home Tower, as inappropriate as the recent rash of similarly overstuffed residences in Beverly Hills and beyond.

However, in time the view of them from the freeway should be blocked by the engaging designs of Cesar Pelli, of the second tower in Citicorp Plaza, and Michael Graves, of the mixed-use Metropolis development adjacent to the Harbor Freeway at 9th Street. On the boards also is a welcomed, modest design in red granite by the Martin office of 865 South Figueroa.

The list goes on and on. Nearing completion is the crown-topped, circular, 73-story First Interstate World Trade Center, on 5th Street, designed by the New York-based firm of I. M. Pei & Partners. A few steps to the east will be the Southern California Gas Center, designed by Richard Keating of SOM in what appears to be a composite of the slick designs with which he dazzled Houston.

Whether, because of demand for more distinguished designs by a more sophisticated market, or simply out of an edifice complex, an array of major architects is now at work in Los Angeles. Their presence, in turn, isenergizing local firms to try harder and to be more imaginative in attempting to merge function and aesthetics. All this is to the good.

But while towers with fanciful tops, glistening facades and sculpted shapes, sited to play against one another, may be engaging, the bottom line of architecture is how a building functions for the people who work, live, shop, play or visit there.

And for downtown, as important as the buildings are, more important is the space they create between them and how it relates to the street. After all, the streets are the connecting tissues of a city. It is there that architecture is tested, not from viewing it from afar.

If there has been a problem in architecture lately as designers strive for individuality, it has been the treatment of buildings as isolated objects or, worse, as photo opportunities.

My hope this Architecture Week is that as downtown Los Angeles begins to look like a real downtown with an emerging, interesting skyline, the architects shaping that skyline also be concerned that downtown also begins to work as a downtown.