Bright Lights, Big City OK With This Fan in Sky

It’s night in Los Angeles, and I am working late in the 26th floor of a downtown office tower. I see the lights of other towers, and the headlights on the freeway winding their way into the distance like a silver carpet.

Leon Whiteson, who wrote “City at a Crossroads,” (Nov. 2) would be shocked.

But I felt quite at home.

Perhaps I haven’t listened hard enough to the architectural critics in their great wisdom.

But I notice something exhilarating about being in a place like downtown or Century City, with skyscrapers leaping upward as far as the eye can see. And I see something prosaic about the various low-rise strip centers and small office buildings that dot this city.

Whiteson seemed to take almost as a matter of faith that high-rise buildings are lousy places to live and work. In my experience, I much prefer to work in high-rise buildings; my favorite work location, by far, is Century City.

This is not to say that Whiteson doesn’t have a point in some of his arguments. Transportation is indeed a problem. But note that the low- and mid-rise developments in El Segundo create just as bad a traffic problem as the high-rises in Century City and downtown. If we increase density in any way, we will create traffic.

I’d like to see a truly responsible, unbiased analysis of the low-rise vs. high-rise issue. Whiteson’s article was irresponsibly biased towards his world of relatively low density low-rise buildings. All I know is that I love the tall buildings.

DAVID DENNIS, Pacific Palisades