Arts Impresario Paints Tracts as Future ‘Trash’

The talk was hardly the type normally heard in the boardroom of the Hon Development Co., but then Peter Sellars, the impish arts impresario with the punk haircut, had never attended one of its executive sessions.

Addressing the powerful development company’s top brass, Sellars, known for his ability to shock, predicted that in as few as five years, housing tracts like those blanketing much of modern suburbia would amount to “just trash, just nothing.”

People who inhabit the “usual uninteresting series of tract homes . . . have some sort of strange blankness in their lives,” he told executives of Hon and Foothill Ranch Co., its subsidiary.

“The bad side of the American suburban existence,” continued the nationally recognized stage director of highly unorthodox theater and opera productions, “is alcoholism and loneliness because the basic suburban daydream is to wall yourself up in your castle and then there’s nothing between you and your liquor cabinet.”

Hon and Foothill, however, are creating an unusual master-planned community in Saddleback Valley that, if all goes as intended, will teem with public artworks and offer performing arts festivals. Sellars, director of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival of the arts, was invited to Hon’s office here Wednesday to give his advice as details of the project are being ironed out.

And, by all accounts, he made a hit.

“L.A. is blessed to have you,” said Gerald E. Buck, Hon executive vice president. And Sellars had nothing but praise for what Hon is endeavoring to do.

Foothill Ranch, the company’s $2-billion, 2,700-acre planned community to be developed over the next 10 to 15 years in South County, is expected to include 3,900 housing units, commercial and industrial development, a 1,100-acre park, a fire station, a library and schools.

Hon also wants to make art a part of daily life at the urban village with the Foothill Ranch Urban Arts Program. Through fees the company is charging most builders of the community’s homes and businesses, several millions of dollars will be generated for up to 200 public artworks to be sprinkled throughout the development, and for arts education and live festivals.

The arts program is particularly unusual, perhaps unique in California, a state public art expert has said, because its fees-for-art are being imposed by Hon, a private developer, rather than a government agency, which is typically the case. Hon, developing some of the land itself, will also contribute funds for art.

“Wow,” said Sellars, 32, gazing at a map of Foothill Ranch.

“Congratulations,” he told Buck, an art collector who had the idea for the art program. “A lot of people have thought very well of this.”

Hon’s effort to work against the cookie-cutter style of planned communities to “give a place character is tremendous,” Sellars said. “This (is) one way to combat the image of this area as a wasteland.”

Sellars, an iconoclast who is highly regarded in the arts community, nonetheless had plenty of suggestions.

To create a strong sense of community--instead of the isolated, alienating life style of much of suburbia--Sellars said Hon should commission artworks that make people interact: “Art that’s hard to understand, that’s confused and that generates passion and controversy so a discussion goes on and you move beyond the passivity that’s indicative of most developments.”

Interaction with non-Western cultures is another road to vital community life, said Sellars, who has vowed to include only arts from countries that “touch the Pacific” and have “no European works at all” in next September’s multidisciplinary Los Angeles Festival. “We need to rub shoulders with people different from ourselves.”

Many recent immigrants to Orange County, particularly from Southeast Asia and Latin America, are “master artists unfortunately working as maids and chefs,” he said. Integrating them into the community and employing them as artists would “make a tremendous difference in the quality of everyone’s life and give a sense of justice to people in their new-found country.”

Architecture that is designed collaboratively with artists--a plan Hon already has in mind--will ensure the worth and longevity of Foothill Ranch, Sellars also said.

“Involve craftsmen and artists in every dimension of the building plans so that art is inseparable from what is finally made,” he said.

Citing the lasting cultural presence of Florence, Italy, and other great European cities, he asked: “One hundred years from now, in 10 years, in five years, what are these tract developments going to be? Just trash, just nothing.”

While three residential developers of Foothill Ranch have already agreed to pay several hundred thousand dollars in art fees, Buck said after Sellars’ talk that he is “stumped” on how to persuade them to build more individualistic homes.

By way of solution, Sellars said: “You have to appeal to the businessman not just as a businessman, but as a human being, and ask them, ‘Do you realize what you’re bringing into the world and do you care about it?’ ”