ARCHITECTURE : Village Green Is a Garden State of Affairs Amid Urban Landscape

Standing in the middle of The Village Green, Los Angeles seems far away. Oaks, sycamores and fir trees are scattered around 20 acres of green lawns, bordered only by widely spaced, two-story buildings. There is no traffic, no stores, no noise. There are no big buildings, no parking lots, and no rows of fences separating everyone’s little slice of the outdoors. There is only green dotted with abstract, clean forms.

It is, as one resident put it, a little bit of New Jersey lost in L.A., an Edenic vision of the perfect suburbia carved out of Baldwin Hills.

Baldwin Hills Village, as this development of more than 600 units off of Rodeo Road was originally called, was in fact inspired by such garden suburbs as Radburn, N.J., and Greenbelt, Ohio. These communities were early attempts to create rational alternatives to both cramped urban apartments and wasteful suburban development by grouping small clusters of simply designed housing units around communal open space, while keeping cars and services tucked away in back yards.

These developments were not supposed to be subsidized housing barracks. Instead, they were supposed to offer progressive, well-to-do clients all the conveniences of apartment living combined with the open space of the country.

The Los Angeles version was designed by local architect Reginald Johnson, the designer of many a home for the Hollywood elite, with the help of Clarence Stein, who had pioneered the garden suburb movement on the East Coast.

Starting in 1941, Baldwin Hills Village offered sparse, spacious living units (more than 1,000 square feet on average) grouped together in buildings about 200 feet long. Two-thirds of the units had private patios, and all of them looked out over open spaces filled with greenery. Cars moved around the periphery of the complex, entering into garages. And laundry rooms were behind the buildings.

The design was simple: The apartments were rectangular boxes whose main design characteristic was strong, overhanging eaves. Balconies and setbacks provided a sense of rhythm, while the seemingly random grouping of buildings often arranged itself into symmetrical rows and ovals, which helped order the 80-acre “superblock” site.

The “Village Green” ran for almost 1,000 feet down the center, but was divided into three separate areas, while smaller green spaces crept off the sides to spread out over most of the site. A central entrance building provided an office and services like a message center and a staff of maids.

Today, the complex looks much the way it did in 1941. The apartments have become condominiums, many of the services have been discontinued, and the surrounding neighborhood has evolved from a white to a predominantly African-American middle-class suburb. The green spaces and simple shapes still house a mix of fairly well-to-do inhabitants who enjoy compact, economical living spaces lost in lushly grown-in gardens.

What has increased is the sense of isolation. Village Green, as the complex is called today, turns its back on the noisy city, focusing in on its oasis instead. There are no stores, schools or even many benches in those central spaces. People drive in, leave their cars on the service courts, carry their groceries a few hundred feet into their condominium, and enjoy their slice of nature.

Village Green never became a model for urban development, as its designers had hoped, mainly because the low density and the exclusion of services made it impractical. Yet the simplicity of its forms, the lushness of its landscaping, and the very idea that one could avoid the wasteland typical of many planned communities, makes all the more seductive this vision of what an urban suburb could be like.