Public Art : City’s Requirement to Set Aside 1% of a Project’s Construction Bill for Artwork Has Created Powerful CRA Panels and Stirred Controversy

R&T; Development Corp. had good reason to be happy--and relieved--at the recent ground breaking for its first project in downtown Los Angeles--a 24-story office tower at Figueroa and 8th streets.

It has taken the Japanese partnership about four years to get this far--considered fast these days for commercial development in the city’s center.

But in fact, R&T; was ready to start construction several months ago when its architectural drawings were finished, financing was in place and the City Council had approved the $160-million project.

Holding up the project, however, was a water sculpture. That’s right, a water sculpture, a massive artwork faintly resembling a marine bird and designed to be the focal point of the building’s courtyard.

While the developers were excited about this creation, they failed to win the required approval of the Arts Advisory Committee of the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) when they presented the art proposal in April.

Since then, R&T;’s architect and artist have been refining their proposals--for without an approved art plan, the developer’s 801 Tower could face even more delays, and possibly be denied a city occupancy permit.

“The entire approval process is absolutely frustrating,” lamented R&T;’s development consultant Tom McCarty. “There are so many opportunities for a project to get sidetracked,” he said. “We thought we had done our homework, but evidently we didn’t.”

Developers have long complained about having to contend with traffic-mitigation plans, special assessment districts, sewer fees and low-income housing allowances.

Now, one of the city’s newer and more controversial requirements is that 1% of a project’s construction bill be set aside for public art at most commercial projects in downtown Los Angeles, along with sections of Hollywood, North Hollywood and San Pedro.

By the end of this year, the 1% rule will be extended to every municipal project in the city of Los Angeles, following the lead of cities such as Seattle, Boston and Dallas.

The Los Angeles City Council also has passed an interim ordinance that, if finalized, would extend the rule to include every non-residential development project in Los Angeles worth more than $500,000--even mini-malls.

To help pass judgment on the art that must accompany new commercial projects, the CRA, which decides what will be built in downtown Los Angeles, has a Design Advisory Committee to review building plans, while the Arts Advisory Committee evaluates the art and cultural components of proposed projects.

“Developers have started taking art a lot more seriously,” said Tamara Thomas, president of Fine Arts Services in the Mid-Wilshire District, and one of a growing number of art consultants who are finding a new line of work doubling as development consultants.

“The hiring of art consultants has become very serious business because you’re dealing with serious money,” she said.

Many developers, Thomas said, have no idea of how to go about spending as much as $2 million on public art. Her job is to draw up the shopping list. For their services, most art consultants charge between 10% and 15% of the arts budget.

For most developers, the fact that they must add another 1% to their construction budget comes as “a huge surprise,” she said. So too does a formalized process that usually includes a handful of meetings with both the CRA’s arts and design advisory committees, written reports, budget projections and lots of time hammering out a program that the artist, architect, developer and city can all agree on.

Thomas has worked on projects such as the murals at downtown’s Home Savings of America tower; a wall of boulders at the soon-to-open 865 S. Figueroa St. tower and a private park at the center of a development planned by Pacific Atlas Development at 7th and Olive streets.

And at the foot of downtown’s soon-to-be-completed 52-story Sanwa Bank building, Thomas is coordinating the installation of a 35-foot-high creation of fire, water and xenon light by sculptor Eric Orr.

The piece will feature a fiery core of natural gas jets sheathed in a veneer of recirculating water. At night, Thomas said, the sculpture will double as a beacon of light piercing the air and beckoning pedestrians to contemplate the heavens.

Several engineers were hired to work on the sculpture, and the Federal Aviation Administration had to be assured that the nighttime beacon won’t interfere with air travel. Finally, the chairman of Japan-based developer Mitsui Fudosan had to personally approve of the details.

Despite the expense, many developers now believe that good art is good for business, and they’re taking a personal interest in how the art budget gets spent.

Incorporating fine art into commercial and residential buildings is increasingly popular with owners seeking to distinguish their properties from the ordinary. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to add a touch of class to otherwise pedestrian projects; it also looks great in leasing brochures.

Some executives, like Raleigh Development’s President George Rosenthal, are taking a personal interest in how the art budget gets spent.

At his Executive Life Tower in West Los Angeles and two new office buildings in Hollywood, art serves as both a reflection of his own taste and an “environmental amenity” that makes the buildings more marketable.

“It’s almost like adding plants,” he quipped, in that art is used to spruce up what would otherwise be bland lobbies and boring hallways. Unlike plants, though, art can be controversial.

“Art is subjective and it does create certain tensions,” Rosenthal observed. “The controversy itself is good, but you don’t want it to become a potboiler.”

The fear of offending potential tenants and visitors to a building makes for a lot of bland art, said downtown developer Ira Yellin.

“We still have very few examples of good public art,” he said. By the time everybody involved with a particular building signs off on an appropriate art program, he noted, many good proposals will get axed.

“I’m not a believer in art by committee,” said Yellin, an avid art collector.

Another problem, he said, is that 40% of the 1% money is supposed to be paid to the Downtown Cultural Fund, established by the city to pay for miscellaneous public art projects.

That, Yellin complained, leaves developers with too little money to create anything that’s really good. The CRA should “let people do their own thing,” he said. With the city taking such a large share of the funds, “you’re not going to get anything of real value.”

Developers have the option of forgoing an arts plan and instead paying 80% of the 1% fee directly to the city. It’s an option few if any developers are expected to exercise, however.

Near and dear to Yellin’s heart are plans for Grand Central Square--a $25-million project designed by architect Brenda Levin to unify downtown’s historic Grand Central Market and the Million Dollar Theatre building.

Besides sprucing up one of Broadway’s most extravagant movie palaces, Yellin also intends to build a new parking garage at the corner of 3rd and Hill streets. A clock tower atop the garage will be the project’s contribution to the Los Angeles public art scene.

While the clock doesn’t quite match the city’s preference for pedestrian-level art, CRA planners are cooperating with the developer for the sake of some variety.

At the Koll Co.’s 550 S. Hope tower, art consultant Lonnie Gans has helped dream up a commemorative project for the Church of the Open Door, which formerly proclaimed its presence at the site with a mammoth “Jesus Saves” sign.

Now, Gans said, her aim is to turn the Koll office building into a “spiritual power center” along with the help of artist Lita Albuquerque.

They plan a giant sunburst set into the pavement at the intersection of Hope and 6th streets and a series of dots and lines designed to attract pedestrians to a garden in back of the building. Inside, a special room will commemorate the former church site.

“We wanted an environmental art program that related well to the building,” said Bradley T. Cox, vice president of marketing for Koll. “It helps us market and sell the building, (and) I think it’s good for the entire city.”

Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, agrees.

His department is working on plans to extend the 1% rule first to public building projects and eventually to all commercial developments in Los Angeles worth more than $500,000.

Since the CRA’s operations are restricted to downtown Los Angeles and a few other areas, a citywide program would likely fall under the purview of Nodal and his staff.

Nodal dreams of transforming Los Angeles into “a world center of culture.” That, he mused, means that “every mini-mall in the city should have a cultural program.”

Putting this ambitious plan into action won’t be easy, though, Nodal conceded. “Public art has developed a bad rap,” he said. To many Angelenos, public art evokes images of rusting outdoor sculptures or strange and seemingly inscrutable paintings with names like “White canvas with a black dot.”

Critics generally refer to such creations as “plop art,” maintaining that art shouldn’t just be plopped onto a wall or plaza.

The line between art that’s irritating and art that’s inspiring is a thin one.

“Public art isn’t about putting some weird monstrosity in front of a building,” said former museum director Nodal. “It isn’t about putting up your ego trip and calling it art.”

Rather, he argued, public art has to appeal to the people who live and work around it every day.

Before Nodal and other city officials can extend the 1% rule to the bulk of commercial development projects in Los Angeles, the plan must be approved by the city attorney’s office.

State law requires municipalities to justify new fees or taxes based on needs, not merely wants, and a legal analysis of the 1% rule is being completed to make sure it’s a lawful form of taxation.

Many developers are already claiming that such a levy on new projects amounts to an “unlawful taking” by the city. Other municipalities, however, have successfully enacted similar programs throughout the state with few legal challenges.

Developers have been generally cooperative about the 1% plan, Nodal said, “but I don’t expect everybody to love it.”

In fact, said Alan Sieroty, chairman of the CRA’s Arts Advisory Committee, “the developers mostly feel that it’s an exaction.” Still, “they’re smart enough not to come to us with a chip on their shoulder.” That only makes the CRA approval process longer and more turbulent, he added.

The Arts Advisory Committee includes a lawyer, artist, consultant and Sieroty, who formerly served in the California Legislature and now works as a real estate investor and city of Los Angeles cultural affairs commissioner.

His committee occasionally meets jointly with the CRA’s Design Advisory Committee, a group of prominent downtown business people charged with reviewing architectural plans.

Neither committee can kill a project, but their opinions weigh heavily with the CRA’s voting board.

An example of the Arts Advisory Committee’s power is illustrated in the difficulty R&T; developers Ryoshin Fudosan Co. Ltd. of Tokyo and Takenaka Corp. of Osaka have had as they labor to obtain an acceptable arts plan for the 801 Tower on Figueroa Street.

Each of the Arts Advisory Committee members turned down R&T;’s elaborate courtyard proposal and urged some changes.

“The feeling was consistent that the proposed art plan didn’t work well with the building,” Sieroty recalled. “There didn’t seem to be a harmony--it was as if the artwork was to be stuck on the face of the building.”

The process by which the Arts Advisory Committee reached such a conclusion is a troublesome one for Design Advisory Committee member and real estate broker H. Carl Muhlstein, executive vice president of Wilrock National Inc. in downtown Los Angeles.

“The two committees have had some frustrating meetings together,” Muhlstein recalled. The design committee was in fact quite satisfied with R&T;’s plans, he said. “We have unanimously approved projects,” he said, “and then they (the Arts Advisory Committee) rip it to smithereens. I think they have too much power.”

Then too, quipped Muhlstein, “you pick one stack of boulders versus another stack of boulders. Who’s to say which stack is really the best?”

The essence of the CRA’s 1% program is not to finance a stack of boulders, said its arts planner, Mickey Gustin, but in “creating a place where people want to be” and “bringing artists into the design of our cities.”

Her favorite example of this kind of collaboration is Biddy Mason Park, adjacent to the Broadway Spring Center parking garage.

Created under the direction of the CRA and a nonprofit group called the Power of Place, this outdoor courtyard features a wall illustrating the life of Biddy Mason--a strong-willed former slave who became a Los Angeles pioneer and local heroine.

The Power of Place designed Biddy Mason Park as a tribute to her life and charitable works, much in the same way as the Koll Co. plans to commemorate the old Church of the Open Door.

Attention to history “is the sign of a maturing city,” observed Patricia Fuller, a Boston-based art consultant hired to study implementing a citywide arts fee for the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

Although lacking in a long history, Fuller said, Los Angeles can now establish itself as a world center for fine art and architecture by heralding cultural diversity.

And, she added, allowing a 1% art fee to fund cultural facilities, services and other less-than-traditional forms of art, will go a long way toward fostering a climate of creativity on the West Coast. The key, she said, is good planning.

“Art is not something that is just plopped on the ground,” concurred Los Angeles art consultant Kathy Lucoff-Saunders. Her company is responsible for creating Poets’ Walk--a mixture of arts and letters at Citicorp Plaza on Figueroa Street between 7th and 8th streets.

Poets’ Walk is perhaps best indicative of the conflict of opinions that public art generates: Some people love it; others refer to it as junk.

The ongoing project teams up artists and poets to create vignettes set in eight granite posts alongside one of the plaza’s office towers. One post features an etching of a four-poster bed with a five-word poem that reads:

World’s

Still Got

Four

Corners

Another aspect to the project is Portals to Poetry--featuring rusty steel door frames topped by a salvaged ocean buoy and highlighted with poetry such as:

Don’t try to open the door.

The child you were once

Will come out with eyes blindfolded

And disappear in the lunch time crowd.

Some pedestrians complain that these works are ugly and intellectually obtuse. Lucoff-Saunders, however, defended them as highly provocative and open to a wealth of interpretations by each person.

“We’ve seen people notice and read and take interest,” said Lucoff-Saunders. “It’s made the community much more exciting.”

While some people are quick to criticize the project’s rusting sculpture, she said, they should instead recognize that “something of great spirit can be made of any material.”

“We selected every artist for a particular reason; it wasn’t haphazard,” Lucoff-Saunders said.

About $1.3 million is being spent on art at Citicorp Plaza, she said, and every decision has involved extensive planning and the approval by the owners. When it comes to selecting art that will reflect a development’s spirit, she added, “you don’t want to put yourself or your client at risk.”

Ultimately, art and architecture are both very subjective endeavors, Lucoff-Saunders observed. “There are not a lot of people with vision. Many people just want what’s chic and trendy.

“Only time will tell what is interesting and what is not.”