ART / CATHY CURTIS : A Non-Walk Through World of Orange County Architecture : Development in Orange County discourages pedestrian traffic. Instead, commercial centers seem to strive to be islands unto themselves.

The fields of art and architecture are pretty close buddies, for all their obvious differences. The outward signs include the increased popularity of architecture exhibits at art museums and controversial art museum designs proposed by noted architects (most recently, Renzo Piano’s scheme for a new Newport Harbor Art Museum building and Michael Graves’ proposal to expand the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.)

In recent decades, a flurry of attention to works of art designed for specific public places (from Richard Serra’s hotly debated--and ultimately removed--sculpture, “Tilted Arc,” in New York to Tom Askman’s design for a fountain for downtown Laguna Beach) has called into question issues about how these spaces are designed, how people use them, and what happens when aesthetics butts heads with pragmatic matters ranging from circulation patterns to public taste.

This is all by way of noting that, from time to time, this column will step outside the world of art to look more broadly at the architecture and urban design of Orange County as it affects our daily lives.

This year, the theme for the Orange County American Institute of Architects awards was “Architecture in Context.” As Corona del Mar architect Keenan Smith wrote in a recent issue of Memo, the AIA OC newsletter, that topic sounds pretty loaded. “As even the most casual observer can see,” he wrote, “buildings rarely seem to relate to anything but their controllable surroundings.”

Indeed. Orange County is a place where residential and commercial developments might as well be little dukedoms, so little do they concern themselves with the surrounding community. Frequently, housing tracts are surrounded by monolithic walls that shield residents from the life of the street and turn streets into blandly anonymous thoroughfares with no provision for foot traffic.

The very idea of being a pedestrian seems out of place--downright pedestrian-- in vast sections of the country where the automobile holds sway. I remember the strange looks I got from passing cars when I first moved down here and set out to walk from my Huntington Beach apartment just off Beach Boulevard to a market a half-mile away. A visiting architect on the jury panel remarked with some bemusement that someone who wished to walk from the Meridien Hotel in Newport Beach to an office building in nearby MacArthur Court had to make do without a sidewalk.

With the exception of residents of older cities like Fullerton, Santa Ana and Orange, Orange County people accomplish the bulk of their errands at malls, where cars are abandoned in sprawling parking lots, and shoppers glide through sterile, sparsely peopled environments of canned music and artificial lighting.

That’s a far cry from European and East Coast city life, where the sidewalks are full of pedestrians of widely differing backgrounds, tastes and professions. In cities, everybody goes about his business--shopping, keeping appointments, strolling, panhandling, gawking, schmoozing, selling food or other wares--in an environment peppered with diverse sights, sounds and smells.

Part of the fabric of this close-knit life is the buildings themselves. Whether they blend in or stand out, they are obliged to carry on a “conversation” with the buildings next door and across the street.

In smaller towns, people still meet each other as pedestrians on downtown or neighborhood sidewalks. There are central unofficial meeting places where people expect to exchange news and gossip. And when they do step in their cars, their routes are bordered by an ever-changing array of homes, schools, shops and other distinctive building types recognizable as landmarks. Surely this is the way life was meant to be. But how can it work in the car culture of the West?

Orange County is a still-ungainly blend of rural, city and suburban areas, set off by what Smith calls “a constellation of vibrant and commercially important nodes or ‘activity centers.’ ” The county has more than a dozen of these commercial centers, all within a mile of a major freeway (Koll Center Newport, South Coast Plaza Town Center, Irvine Spectrum and so forth).

These centers are important, in Smith’s view, because they represent the county’s highest architectural profile--both literally and figuratively--and because they’ll be the stopping points for the various public transportation schemes of the future (light rail, monorail, commuter rail) that are still on the drawing boards.

But I keep thinking of what planning consultant William Whyte said in his wonderfully eye-opening book, “City: Rediscovering the Center” (Doubleday), about what a good model the conventional town is--for people.

As he remarked, a big problem with the new growth areas--the corporate parks and suburban “village” complexes--is that they don’t encourage pedestrian use. Buildings are strung out in an unrelated way, with no central core and without promoting “the kind of interaction that is the hallmark of an urban center.” Translation: you can’t walk from here to there and maybe meet someone you know while en route. Without proper paths and sidewalks--and somewhere specific to walk to --walking isn’t safe or inviting.

Last month, the night before the architecture awards were announced, the four judges met with local architects at the OC/AIA offices in Costa Mesa and held an unbuttoned, wide-ranging discussion about the quality of life in Orange County’s newer cities and developments.

One architect brought up the notion that the tender loving care paid to the central areas of housing complexes--oasis-like private realms of grassy knolls and plantings and babbling brooks--be applied to the edges of the project, the public realm that passersby see.

He noted that government regulations determining the number of living units in a project, street design, permissible types of parking facilities and so forth can throw up roadblocks to more livable communities. When a city determines that the fewer intersections a street has, the more efficient it is, something important gets lost in the process.

And something is definitely awry, he charged, when dreaming up fanciful names for a housing development is a higher priority than making it respond to the landscape and the built environment that already exists.

Robert J. Geering, a principal with Fisher Friedman Associates of San Francisco, who served as a juror for the contest, said the driving force in Orange County expansion is “the Western mentality--the individual on the horse, the Marlboro man--versus a collective vision. Developers say, ‘I don’t want my building to look like the building next door.’ That’s just in the way it is. (Irvine Co. Chairman Donald) Bren as the modern-day Medici.”

What about the “mission-ization” of Orange County, one audience member wanted to know, referring to the ubiquitous red-roofed buildings favored by Orange County developers.

Juror Robert Frasca, a principal with Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership (ZGF) of Portland, Ore.--which won the 1991 American Institute of Architects “Firm Award”--replied that “good architecture transcends style--it goes beyond one version or another of the Taco Bell.”

He reminded his listeners that “layers of (successive) civilizations” have to leave their mark in order to create the rich complexity of the great towns and cities of the world. “California is only 200 years old. This is just the first layer--don’t worry!”

The planned community of Irvine came in for considerable abuse from architects. Residents are “frightened to death to leave,” said San Francisco designer and jury member Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. “They come here looking to be individual and build themselves a wall to hide behind.”

A woman in the audience invoked the name of Levittown, an early planned, mass-produced housing complex. The first Levittown, built in Hempstead, Long Island, between 1946 and 1951, became a national symbol of suburbia. These communities did start out as cookie-cutter houses, the woman remarked, but decades later they actually developed personalities of their own, as the owners settled in and made changes to suit themselves.

Someone else pointed out, however, that these earlier communities weren’t subject to Orange County’s strict citizen review boards and the “covenants, conditions and restrictions” (CC&R;’s) that perpetuate design details by making rulings on such things as appropriate paint colors and permissible additions.

“We need to educate the general public that things aren’t supposed to stay the same but age with time,” someone suggested hopefully.

Irvine did have its defenders, from someone who reminded listeners that other areas of the country are eager to produce Irvine clones to a person who claimed that Irvine was more accessible to the arts (presumably, arts venues like the Orange County Performing Arts Center and Newport Harbor Art Museum) than the so-called “arts community” of Laguna Beach.

The most astounding defense came from one member of the audience who professed to enjoy the serenity of life in Irvine better than his former residences in some of the great cities of Europe.

And amid all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about Orange County, Geering struck a cheery note. “Why do you have 2 million people here? Someone must like it!”