ENCORE! CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF THE MUSIC CENTER : The first good public building in Los Angeles was probably the Central Library. The first great public building is yet to be built, hopefully it will be the new home of the Philharmonic : In Pursuit of Cultural Greatness

Architecture and accessibility. Power, money, vision. Artists and audiences. These are the critical elements for cultural greatness. For most cities, cultural greatness comes after centuries of gradual growth. Some, not without hubris, like Los Angeles, attempt to achieve it in half a century.

In the beginning there must be architecture, for the presence of great civic and public buildings defines the taste and vision of those in power and the aspirations of the community. A great building can provide not only a home for art and artists, but also elevate the quality of what is placed or takes place inside.

A great building should give one pleasure to see, be near, touch and pass by, as well as enter. It should cause the spirit to soar and the eye to rejoice, perhaps even shock, so that we become freshly aware of our surroundings. In Paris, Notre Dame and the Asemblee Nationale are examples of the first category, Beaubourg and the Pyramide du Louvre exemplify the second.

Even great public buildings, however, must be on a human scale, celebrating, not diminishing man. (The worst public building in the United States is probably the Kennedy Center in Washington. It is monumental, arrogant, isolated and inhuman; more appropriate as a monument to Mussolini than to J.F.K.)

The first good public building in Los Angeles was probably the Central Library. The first great public building is yet to be built, hopefully it will be the new home for the Philharmonic, designed by Frank Gehry.

The existing Music Center, for all its good intentions, is still elitist, sterile and isolated from its neighbors. The new Disney Hall, by its use of plazas, glass, green spaces, light and changing scale, relates to and does not ignore its neighbors; it welcomes and does not intimidate the public. If the design is not compromised by conflicting pressures from the City, the County, the Community Redevelopment Agency, donor decisions and Music Center politics, it will set a standard for what great architecture should be in Los Angeles.

In Paris, office, apartments, stores and theaters, daytime businesses and night-time pleasures intermingle in the same neighborhood. In Los Angeles, this rarely happens. True “mixed use” development remains more of a planning theory than a neighborhood fact in Los Angeles, but Disney Hall and the projected Craft and Folk Art Museum development on Wilshire Boulevard are two important steps in the right direction.

The Los Angeles Theater Center offered this promise, but the CRA couldn’t deliver and the project remains three performing spaces of varying quality in a renovated building in a run-down neighborhood, trying to figure out its mission and connect with its neighbors.

For a number of years conventional wisdom and the mandate of the CRA have linked cultural endeavors and real estate development together with an exclusive focus on downtown Los Angeles. It is a fatal mistake to focus so exclusively on one small area. It is time for the CRA, the City Council and the Board of Supervisors to recognize that Los Angeles is indeed a group of urban villages. The remaining years of this century should be spent reinforcing the global/urban village character of Westwood, Pasadena, Glendale, Mid-Wilshire, Sherman Oaks and Santa Monica.

The Lewitzky Dance Gallery felt it had to be downtown for prestige, for power, and above all for access through the CRA to developers’ pocketbooks, but the Dance Gallery could have perhaps come into being quicker and better in Santa Monica or West Los Angeles--closer to its audience, less expensive and a catalyst for quality in surrounding neighborhoods.

Great culture requires mass and density. Art doesn’t happen in isolation and easy access is a requirement for developing audiences. Paris offers mobility, safety and cultural attraction in every arrondissement . New York offers a similar degree of mobility if not of safety. Los Angeles offers safety but insufficient mobility. The city’s weak point remains transportation: Metro Rail is more a symbol than a solution. Buses, trams and neighborhood shuttles remain the only practical remedy. It makes little sense to ask the Music Center to do audience outreach for ethnic groups, the elderly, the young and people of lower incomes, if the targeted audiences can’t get there.

Architecture and infrastructure are important prerequisites for cultural greatness, but they must be preceded and followed by personal vision and political will.

The Music Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mark the true beginning of Los Angeles’ great leap forward. Dorothy Chandler, occasionally arrogant and sometimes excessively social, was exceedingly stubborn: she willed the Music Center into existence. With a lot of help from her friends, she bullied, bribed, seduced and shamed the city leadership into providing the Los Angeles Philharmonic with its first permanent home. Not all of her decisions were good ones: The decision not to allow California Institute of the Arts to be part of the Music Center unless it was totally subservient to it caused that institute to move to Valencia, creating a distance between young artists and practicing professionals that is unhealthy for both. The fact remains that without stubbornness and conviction neither the Museum nor the Music Center would have been built.

It is worth noting that its entry into a new house was also the occasion for the Philharmonic to raise its artistic ambitions and the time when it began to ac- quire an international reputation. Similarly, only with the building of a new art museum in the ‘60s did Los Angeles begin acquiring important collections.

It is neither ironic nor coincidental that two of the most important acts of cultural philanthropy in recent years came from the same couple. An individual who made his fortune and his fame by bringing quality to popular culture, Walt Disney conceived and left a major portion of his estate to found the Cal Arts, and it is his widow, Lilly, who 20 years later donated from this estate the funds to build Disney Hall. If this generosity is matched in even a small way by those in the entertainment industry whose fortunes are equal, then the future cultural greatness of this city is almost guaranteed.

Artistic leadership is another central ingredient for cultural greatness. Individuals such as Gordon Davidson and Ernest Fleischmann were responsible for transforming attractive but empty buildings into centers where art is made and shared. Both began by taking enormous risks in their programming. Risks which were increasingly difficult to justify, given the economic preoccupation of later boards of directors. The difficult task that they and their boards face in the coming years is choosing their successors, for there is another generation born in this half of the century that must define Los Angeles’s cultural future.