Still Hovering : ‘Steel Cloud’ Thrills S.F., Waits for L.A. to Make Up Its Mind

Inside a building tucked beneath the western arc of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, a miniature model of the Big Idea that would enliven, reflect, symbolize, unify and celebrate Los Angeles awaits . . . Los Angeles.

One observer describes it as “a jungle gym for adults.” Another likens it, admiringly, to “an artificial heart . . . to replace the old one.” A third says: “If I were an immigrant and this was the greeting, I’d turn around and go home.”

The Big Idea is “Steel Cloud,” the controversial, $33-million monument proposal that might someday rise above the Hollywood Freeway in downtown Los Angeles as a kind of West Coast answer to the Statue of Liberty.

Like theater too avant garde to open on Broadway, an updated model of architect Hani Rashid’s “Steel Cloud” is having its first run not in Los Angeles, but in a little-known, year-old exhibit hall in San Francisco.

The foot traffic is light. But, for the most part, San Franciscan cognoscenti, notorious haters of things Angeleno, are giving it a suspiciously friendly response.

Put it up, they say; you’ll love it.

“The first reaction, generally, is that it’s pretty neat,” said architect

Mark Horton, a director of the Art & Architecture Exhibition Space, where the model is on display. “The second reaction is: How the hell are they going to build the thing?”

As depicted in the model--and dressed up with little plastic palm trees, pedestrians and not nearly enough cars--”Steel Cloud,” in its fullest expression, would be a huge amalgamation of forms propped up on an elaborate grid of exposed steel beams. It would house such attractions as museums, restaurants, open-air theaters, plazas and giant aquariums. Its sides would be adorned with multimedia display screens flashing an array of words and pictures.

At the Art & Architecture Exhibition Space, trendily known as 2AES, the patrons are primarily progressive-thinking architects and designers. For “Steel Cloud,” this represents an especially favorable audience, Horton said. Architects in tradition-bound San Francisco are envious of Los Angeles’ taste for experimentation.

“To me, it symbolizes the openness of L.A.,” Horton said of the design. “This wouldn’t have even been considered here. It wouldn’t have gotten this far.”

Opposing Interpretations

One day last week, two academics studied the model and engaged in a duel.

Antonio Lao, a UC Berkeley architectural instructor, suggested the design is “cynical, fragmentary . . . reflecting the fragmentary character in which we live.”

C. A. Debelius, a professor of architectural history at the University of North Carolina, countered that it is “romantic . . . a collage that reflects the pluralism of Los Angeles.”

Be it stormy or misty, “Steel Cloud” is not dissipating the way its early critics had hoped. When it was unveiled six months ago--chosen in an international competition--the ambitious design struck many people as being so bizarre as to be unreal. Although ridiculed by some as a train wreck or earthquake devastation, it won some backing from influential patrons of Los Angeles’ artistic community.

Today, the “misunderstood” proposal is progressing nicely, say proponents of the project.

“We’ve been moving very fast. It just takes time to put all the ducks together,” said Los Angeles civic leader Nick Patsaouras, chairman of the private West Coast Gateway Committee, which is trying to build the monument. “You have to build public support. . . . Let the idea be absorbed by the community.”

City Hall Showing Planned

Critical acclaim is helpful. Architectural journals have written up the work, and the San Francisco exhibit has stirred interest. Soon, Patsaouras promises, the updated “Steel Cloud” model will face a much larger and tougher audience: the public of Los Angeles. Details for a public display at City Hall, probably sometime in June, are being worked out, Patsaouras says.

“People have begun to take the work more seriously,” Rashid, the 30-year-old architect, said in an telephone interview from his New York studio. “Most of the criticism was pretty shallow . . . . It’s not so much a one-liner joke any more.”

Despite the ridicule, the original concept is “surviving nobly,” the architect said. “Nick and the committee have been entirely supportive.” Some compromises are inevitable, he added, but, “We’re going to resist any mediocriticizing of the work.”

Patsaouras, an RTD director and ally of Mayor Tom Bradley, has been trying to build political support for the project. “Steel Cloud” grew out of Bradley’s desire for Los Angeles to have a immigration landmark of its own. (“A grievous case of monument envy,” one art critic called it.) Patsaouras, himself a Greek immigrant, was asked by Bradley to spearhead the effort.

Almost from the start, the project has been subject to ridicule. Titters began in February, 1988, when Patsaouras specified the unlikely freeway location.

Patsaouras stolidly defends the location and insists that the controversy over Rashid’s design has been helpful in attracting international attention. More recently, he has been trying to build a political constituency by portraying “Steel Cloud” as a modern extension of Olvera Street, the city’s birthplace.

Courting Latino Leaders

In talks with state park officials, Patsaouras has suggested that many artifacts unearthed at Olvera Street that are now warehoused could be displayed in the so-called “Time Museum” on the pedestrian bridge. Similarly, Patsaouras is cultivating Councilman Richard Alatorre and other Latino leaders who are looking for a site for a proposed Latino cultural museum. What better location, he asks, than next door to Olvera Street?

At the very least, Patsaouras says, the first phase of “Steel Cloud”--a pedestrian bridge across the Hollywood Freeway, linking Olvera Street to the Civic Center--is “inevitable” because of a host of development schemes, such as office towers near Union Station and a proposed expansion of the Children’s Museum.

When public support falls into place, Patsaouras said, a fund-raising drive will begin. Officials estimate that $33 million is needed, but the figure would fluctuate significantly depending on how much of the project would be built.

In any case, San Francisco architect Michael Harris, a fan, suggested that the Los Angeles public change its thinking that monuments, first and foremost, should be pretty to look at.

“It clearly isn’t here to look nice,” he said. “It’s here to make people think about it . . . . I really hope it gets built.”

Even if it is, in his view, “a bit excessive.”

Harris, who works in a studio next to the exhibit hall, recalled that the fragile model had been broken in transit. He liked it best, he said, when reconstruction was half complete.