The Age of Minimallism : First a Gas Station, Then a Minimall--This Is What L.A. Calls Progress

THERE ARE CERTAIN words that, if spoken from the stage of a comedy club, are almost Pavlovian cues for laughter: airlines, TV commercials, 7-Elevens, traffic, minimalls. Aside from “Hey, how ya doin’?” the most predictable phrase uttered into a microphone in front of a plain brick wall these days is “Can you believe these minimalls?”

The word itself is comedically perfect because it is just as ugly as the thing it describes. In addition, it’s a fine word to say. The way it runs from the lips to the tongue and back again makes it just about the most fun your mouth can have pronouncing a word without a K.

Complaining about minimalls--sharing the horror at the way these dandelions of commerce pop up--is also one of the few experiences that truly brings Southern Californians together.

And yet, and yet . . . there are things to be said in praise of minimalls. To begin with, they’re ours. For reasons best known to real estate developers, this particular system of grouping businesses is more common here than in any other major city. As an article in this magazine once pointed out, the lower-than-normal rents of these quaintly named mock plazas serve as an entry point for immigrants into the world of retail. And since the advent of these structures, L.A.’s women have probably never had better-looking nails.

But the biggest contribution minimalls have made to our community is, in fact, their general ugliness. The garish colors, the bargain-basement borrowing of the most obvious cliches of postmodern building decoration--it has all been worthwhile because, like the junior-high prankster, it makes us look.

Minimalls have been our Introduction to Architecture.

Aside from the rare residential masterpiece tucked away in a canyon and the self-promoting glass boxes of our many fine downtowns, we have lived in a city without Architecture. Structures were either so outrageously amusing (the giant doughnut, the giant hot dog, the giant ice cream cone) that they seemed to be pieces of a cartoon landscape come to life, or they were so plainly functional that they slipped right past any attempt to notice them.

That sort of unaggressive unattractiveness was characteristic of the gas stations that, in so many cases, minimalls replaced. Yes, a Unocal station in Beverly Hills has a modernistic swooping wing, and Chevron had a couple of tile-and-adobe gasoline cottages on PCH. Otherwise, gas stations weren’t so much designed as assembled from a catalogue of standard (or Shell) equipment: pumps, canopies, driveways, lube rooms, offices, bathrooms. You weren’t supposed to notice anything about them except the big trademark sign in front, or, in the case of an off-brand station, the prices.

In short, we have been living in Stage One of human settlement: Man clears the brush and erects simple structures in which basic needs are met. The minimalls mark our bittersweet journey into Stage Two: Forget about the mountains and the trees; look at the buildings. Gaze, if you will, upon the glass pyramids of Olymp-Arado Square.

We’ve started to look, and with the few exceptional designs at certain influential intersections, we don’t like what we see. Not coincidentally, we’re noticing other things. We’re beginning to cherish, as they disappear, the wacky little car washes and coffee shops that were the occasional decorative punctuations at the end of our functional days. And we’re beginning to appreciate the few undemolished movie palaces that are still among us.

Every new pile of neon-encrusted stores with pastel banisters creates in its wake a new node of neighborhood activism, groups sworn to keep their eyes open to prevent similar disasters from ever happening again. Once opened, those eyes will--like the 24-hour coffee shops of the ‘50s--never close. When Stage Three--it’s called Important Architecture--arrives, a city full of critical watchers will be waiting.

In the meantime, Stage Two has also introduced us to the idea of recycling first-growth buildings: warehouses reborn as lofts, railroad stations retrofitted as seafood grills. It’s a familiar pattern in older cities. Here, it’s an impulse just beginning to compete with “Aw, hell, tear it down and start over.”

Recycling will become a way of life, as those vigilant neighbors make it increasingly hard to tear anything down. The man who wants to replace La Neona Plaza with something Important will have a hell of a fight on his hands. And in 30 years, when we’re all flying in and out of Palmdale, the Delta terminal at LAX will probably have been transformed into Excess Baggage, a hip and huge new eatery.