City at a Crossroads : Architecture: Los Angeles has a choice: Should it remain true to its roots or pattern its development after New York?

Here are a couple of location shots from a Los Angeles movie scripted to give a quick fix on the dramatic contrasts of the city’s skyline:

Long shot: Seen from the brow of the Brentwood hilltop, Los Angeles sprawls toward the Pacific like a loosely woven quilt thrown over the rough brown back of the semi-desert landscape. The Wilshire Boulevard corridor runs like a dinosaur spine from downtown to the ocean, poking up high-rise spikes in the dusty evening light.

Close-up: At the corner of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards, glittering towers crowd the sky, grinding the person on the sidewalk into insignificance. Caught between the horizontal metallic crush of cars and the gleaming upright slabs, the individual feels like nothing more than a ghostly smudge in this hard-edged urbanity.

The first shot could only be taken in Los Angeles. Unlike any other major city, its scale is humane, loosely textured and emotionally unoppressive, offering an unequalled sense of spaciousness. The low-rise skyline, in which landscape and architecture are intimately woven together, epitomizes the Angelization of the American metropolis. The second shot, which could be taken in any major U.S. city, captures the claustrophobic Manhattanization of Los Angeles that has provoked so many Westside and Valley residents into a revolution against growth.

Angelization or Manhattanization--this is the profound choice Los Angeles faces as the city’s boundless commercial vigor and increasing cultural sophistication continues to attract waves of new residents from all over the the world. Shouldn’t the city enhance its inherent style rather than trash its heritage in search of an alien image now largely discredited elsewhere? “Los Angeles is up against the wall,” said Robert Harris, dean of architecture at USC. “It faces a challenge most U.S. cities have failed to meet successfully in recent decades--how to grow more densely populated without sacrificing a humane scale based on each man’s sense of belonging. At heart, it’s a question of identity.”

Like Harris, a number of L.A.’s prominent architects and urban designers have been pondering the problem in discussion groups, in forums and on their drawing boards. From this dialogue, debate and hands-on experience, some constructive ideas are starting to surface. They offer alternatives to the urban pathology that has consumed New York.

Downtown Los Angeles, Century City, Westwood along Wilshire, stretches of Ventura Boulevard and Warner Center in Woodland Hills have already fallen victim to Manhattanization. Other areas fear the heavy tread of approaching towers.

Defenders of the Manhattan model argue that the appetite for low-rise growth, which has covered the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys with so many suburbs since World War II, has gobbled up almost all the available land in Southern California. The suburbs are creeping into the Mojave desert at Palmdale and Lancaster, and chewing up miles of farmland in the Inland Empire. But that does not really answer the needs of people who want to live close to the best jobs.

In his book “The City as a Work of Art,” Vassar College history professor Donald J. Olsen demonstrates that some cities, such as London, Paris and Vienna, can be perceived as “works of art rather than instances of social pathology.” Manhattan, in Olsen’s view, is a typically “pathological” U.S. city shaped solely by the market, with only marginal intervention of the creative imagination committed to “set forth the grander and larger purposes of life.”

Downtown Los Angeles, the most Manhattanized section of the city, is a poor copy of the New York model that crowds commercial and residential towers in a cluster of clunky stalagmites. A pattern of skyscrapers set cheek-by-jowl, begun in the 1960s and ‘70s, today dictates the form of L.A.’s urban core.

At the crown of Bunker Hill, a phalanx of commercial, civic and cultural buildings creates a dense precinct along Grand Avenue. The core of this mini-Manhattan is the planned Disney Hall music complex, designed by Frank Gehry, and Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Linking them is the massive, partially completed California Plaza development, which, when completed in the mid-1990s, will include three office towers, a 440-room hotel and three high-rise condominium buildings.

“We need a density of building on Bunker Hill to justify the economics of development based on the very high price of land,” said Nyal Leslie, president of Metropolitan Structures West, the California Plaza developers. “Mid-rise buildings simply wouldn’t cut it.”

The commercial investment is so intense on Bunker Hill that there is no stopping the march of the towers. As far as Angelization goes, downtown is a write-off--a monster created by the profit motive and abetted by short-sighted municipal politics. But Los Angeles still has a chance to be true to its own home-grown destiny, said architect Jon Jerde. He believes “the eyes of the world are upon us in this endeavor. Every major city looks to Los Angeles for an urban style that offers an alternative to the Manhattan model, which has proven so unpleasant and essentially inhuman.”

‘Centers Concept’

L.A.’s first formal attempts to grapple with the nature of its unique urban character date to the late 1960s. Los Angeles adopted a “Centers Concept” that proposed restricting high-rise development, both residential and commercial, to about 45 areas ranging in intensity from downtown’s skyscraper cluster to less densely built-up cores, such as Warner Center and Westwood Village. By concentrating vertical growth in these centers, planners hoped to preserve the city’s low-rise, single-family neighborhoods.

Century City is the most prominent offspring of the Centers Concept. Popping up beside the pleasant, shady avenues of Beverly Hills, Century City’s towers have the air of overgrown and unsuitable guests who have long outstayed their welcomes. When location scouts for one of the sequels to the movie “Planet of the Apes” were searching for a backdrop that epitomized the inhumanity of the modern metropolis, they chose Century City.

“Century City is not the way for L.A. to go,” said architect Barton Myers. “Apart from the fact that such a conglomeration of skyscrapers demands a public transit system that would cost the earth to build, they run counter to the basic urban traditions of the city.”

These urban traditions include the ample, low-rise, tree-lined character of most of our older districts or “urban villages.” These urban villages are threaded together by the sinews of “linear downtowns,” such as the 17-mile stretch of Wilshire Boulevard between Bunker Hill and Santa Monica. Los Angeles invented the car-oriented linear downtown in the early 1930s, beginning with the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard that runs past Bullocks.

The widely admired urban design pattern that L.A. best embodies is dubbed the “multi-citied city.” In this model, the metropolis is made up of a “constellation” of urban villages interconnected by common concerns. These self-centered districts are not focused on a Manhattan-style urban core that massively dominates the economic, social and cultural life of the entire city.

“Los Angeles grew in a unique way as a collection of small towns that knitted together to create the metropolitan region we inherit,” Myers said. “This is our tradition, which we must embrace and enhance, rather than import alien models that have failed elsewhere.”

Myers is fond of pointing out that cities don’t have to be built high to be built densely. As the head of the design review committee for the proposed $1-billion Hollywood Redevelopment Project, Myers advocates a mid-rise solution for Hollywood Boulevard and its environs rather than a row of skyscrapers.

Meyers has prepared a series of studies that demonstrate that, by covering an area with horizontal buildings instead of sticking a free-standing tower on an empty plaza in the middle of each lot, you can achieve the same density of population while keeping the skyline low and honoring the established street patterns.

The population of many L.A. districts could be doubled, many designers say, by building low-profile “in-fill” housing, which would add units to the deep back yards of existing single-family houses. This would enable an area to accommodate more people without radically altering the essential character of settled neighborhoods.

Such a program could have a substantial positive impact on L.A.’s housing shortage without changing the city’s “look.”

Another urban model favored by many architects is based on the traditional American college campus. In this model, seen locally at UCLA in Westwood, low- to mid-rise buildings are integrated with park-like public spaces, which gives a sense of spacious shelter.

‘An L.A. Layout’

“UCLA is a densely populated mini-city of 50,000 daytime inhabitants who seldom feel oppressed by their built environment,” said Richard Weinstein, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. “The layout is very L.A. in its unrigid free form that is simultaneously complex, easy to understand and pleasant to be in.” The pressure of population density and the press of development bears down differently on each of L.A.’s diverse neighborhoods. While the Westside, downtown and sections of the Valley are coveted by developers, South Central and East Los Angeles are thirsty for dollars to revive run-down neighborhoods and provide affordable housing.

A border area between these separate realities is the district now known as Central City West, which is on the west side of the Harbor Freeway opposite downtown. Central City West’s 150 acres, home to a number of legal and illegal immigrants, is poised on the verge of massive redevelopment.

“Our aim is to find visual and human clues that are intrinsic to the nature of one of L.A.’s oldest neighborhoods,” said Cliff Allen, the architect in charge of planning Central City West. He hopes to avoid creating the kind of overbuilt high-rise scenario that discourages a sense of community and depresses the soul of urban man.

“As we go along, we will try to strike a balance between a democratic, participatory process and the need to shape the district as a humane environment. We hope it will be a model for reviving run-down sections of the city to accommodate more people.” While these examples demonstrate how L.A.’s existing districts might be developed to greater density without Manhattanization, several major projects on virgin land are attempting to express a uniquely Angelized city form.

The 900 acres of Playa Vista, between Westchester and Marina del Rey, will be carved into coherent mini-neighborhoods, each with its own village-style stores, parks and public squares based on a pedestrian’s pace and an active street life.

Playa Vista will be laid out in two- and three-story residential clusters; no commercial building will be taller than 10 stories. Instead, the emphasis of the plan will be on its public, rather than private, spaces, including streets, plazas and parks.

“Rather than develop raw real estate without concern for the quality of life,” said developer Nelson Rising of Maguire Thomas Partners, “we see this as a chance to create a real community from the ground up, complete with all the vital civic and commercial services.”

Jon Jerde has designed a unique $2-billion “Entertainment City” planned around the studios of Universal City. Jerde’s innovative idea is the creation of a vast, low, dome-like development on the crest of Universal’s hill that mixes entertainment areas, including the popular Universal Studios Tour, with offices, shops and housing. Meandering avenues lined with sidewalk cafes link plazas and parks, and offer open views of the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountain ranges.

Skyscrapers are not entirely alien to Los Angeles. We have a home-grown tradition of tower buildings, such as City Hall, the Capitol Records building in Hollywood or Sunset Tower--now the St.James Club--on Sunset Boulevard. But the architectural character of truly Angeleno towers depends on their being spaced far enough apart from one another so that each one reads separately on the skyline.

Scott Johnson, designer of the prominently isolated Fox Plaza high-rise in Century City, explains that towers spaced far apart is the model Frank Lloyd Wright proposed for his ideal American city plan, called Broadacre City.

“Wright saw the skyscraper as an archetypal American construction that could enjoy the spaciousness of our cities, especially in the West,” he said. “Clustering them close together in the usual Century City way is un-Angeleno.”

“When did Los Angeles abandon its aspirations to be one of the great cities of Western civilization and settle for just being large?” asked Kurt Meyer, a prominent architect who is a former chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency. “We saw in the special way we handled the 1984 Olympics that we have a dynamic urban environment that has capitalized on its geography and its human talents to make L.A. a truly world-class city, in its own unique style.”