A Renaissance in the New Venice : Architecture: Award-winning trio of Steven Ehrlich structures enlivens the area, recalling Abbot Kinney’s vision.

Eighty-five years ago, silver-prowed gondolas, piloted by gondoliers imported from Venice, Italy, were docked in the Main Lagoon and Grand Canal of “Venice in America,” a fantasia carved from the tide flats of Ocean Park by developer Abbot Kinney.

Colonnades mimicking the Doge’s Palace lined the waterways in Kinney’s Venetian fantasy, a kind of proto-Disneyland conjured on the coast of Santa Monica Bay.

It was, as one contemporary wrote, “a magical transformation of the once-dreary expanse” where “surrounded by hot sands, salt water and Kansas farmers, the Divine Sarah (Bernhardt) did her stuff in ‘Camille’ and other masterpieces.”

But Kinney’s dream failed. The Main Lagoon and Grand Canal were filled in. The once-popular Race Through the Clouds roller coaster was dismantled. Venice became a slum that in the 1950s and ‘60s sheltered a community of beatniks and hippies and artists enjoying cheap housing with an ocean view.

Now, in the New Venice of the Yuppies, the Main Lagoon, transformed into a traffic roundabout named Windward Circle in 1929, has been spruced up by a trio of intriguing Post-Modern buildings by architect Steven Ehrlich that evoke the history of Kinney’s lost vision.

The Ehrlich designs--named Race Through the Clouds, Windward Circle Arts Building and Ace Market Place--collectively won a 1990 design award from the California Council of the American Institute of Architects as “an outstanding example of design excellence and innovation.”

The trio, which anchors corners of Windward Circle, the pivot of contemporary Venice, sets the tone for a second generation of local commercial street architecture. That tone is more urbane and sophisticated than the trashy strip buildings that have long occupied the gaps between the relics of Kinney’s Venetian colonnades.

Described by their designer as “an animated container” for Windward Circle, each of the three buildings is distinct in appearance. Yet they share a common vernacular that Ehrlich says “aims to capture the energy of the past without regurgitating history.”

Race Through the Clouds features a sinuous, galvanized steel-and-neon stair that recalls the roller coaster that once occupied the circle’s southern corner. With shops below and offices above--including Ehrlich’s own studio--Race Through the Clouds skillfully exploits the simple geometries of a square and a circle to evoke a feeling for the site’s history.

Across the way, the Ace Market Place, a three-story retail center, enlivens its basic building form with the Constructivist jeu d’esprit of projecting metal arms topped by wheels threaded with cables.

This playful feature, which derives its inspiration from steam-driven dredger shovels that excavated Kinney’s original canals, “acts as an identifying marquee for the market and expresses a metaphor of old Venice,” Ehrlich explains.

The Windward Circle Arts Building, on the site of the old Antler Hotel, is the most sober design of the Windward Circle trio.

Above the sidewalk shops are two floors of studios intended for resident artists. To express this semi-domestic character, the building’s front facade is capped with miniature peaked roofs above an asymmetrical collage of square windows and glazed terraces. The Venetian motif that Kinney introduced in his original colonnades is mimicked here in the spiral, metal-faced pillars exposed on the ground floor.

In his imagination, Ehrlich sees his buildings reflected in the memory of the Main Lagoon. For Ehrlich, the ghostly gondoliers that Kinney imported still ride at anchor, calling to passers-by that, in the words of the old sign, “Everybody in Venice rides in a gondola. Why don’t you?”

“Much as the water mirrored the old buildings and doubled their size by reflection, the metaphoric mirroring of the new architecture in its history deepens the feeling of presence and meaning,” he says.

Ehrlich, 44, formerly of New Jersey, acquired his poetic dimension during a spell in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s. It took him to Morocco, and, later, on his own initiative, to Nigeria. There, Ehrlich designed a theater and workshop for Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria built of mud, thatch, bamboo and concrete. The building fused indigenous architectural forms with modern materials.

Africa gave Ehrlich a profound respect for architectural simplicity; he later expressed that in a series of striking Los Angeles home designs.

In the 1981 Kalfus Studio in the Hollywood Hills, his first locally built project, the manipulation of natural light through subtly shaped glass walls seems to be the main architectural element.

Seven years later, Ehrlich’s design for the nearby Miller-Nazarey house uses sliding Japanese shoji screens to filter the hot, white Los Angeles light. That creates a feeling of deep domestic refuge within the all-white interior.

While a desire for serenity governs the mood of Ehrlich’s houses, his non-residential architecture seeks to express a more energetic mode.

The Shatto Recreation Center west of downtown, now under construction, is a muscular building marked by a single dramatic curved roof made of galvanized metal. The textured concrete block exterior walls have an integral rough-grooved pattern designed by artist Ed Moses. The patterning is intended to discourage graffiti yet to accept the inevitable without seeming defaced.

In the Windward Circle buildings, Ehrlich is concerned to express “the urban edge, where the city meets the sea.” He feels, as do many architects, that seaside metropolitan regions, such as Venice, act as transitional zones between the mysteries of nature and the contrivance of the city; thus, they should echo both realities.

The Venice trio also represents a transitional style for Ehrlich between the severely orthodox late-Modernism of his houses and a new Post-Modernism enlivened by playful historic references.

Some of Ehrlich’s professional colleagues comment that this very Venetian injection of playfulness may be just what he needs to lift his already considerable reputation a notch. The sense of fun that characterizes the work of Frank Gehry and Morphosis, without compromising its seriousness, could leaven Ehrlich’s all-too-scrupulous style, they say.

Ehrlich answers such comments with a statement about his belief in the inevitability he seeks in each of his design solutions.

“Architecture is all about the discovery of the inevitable,” he says. “There might be many different ways to do a building, but only one is the truest of them all. There’s no mistaking that one true solution once you find it.”