City of Smiles : Architecture: Function follows fun as fourth-graders design the Los Angeles they’d like to see. Naturally, there’s no shortage of pizza parlors.

How might post-riot, urban Los Angeles look if 10-year-old architects rebuilt it?

One answer to that question came in an 8-foot by 8-foot model constructed by a group of fourth-graders from Utah Street Elementary School in Boyle Heights. They were assisted by students and staff at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, a private school with a reputation for theoretical innovation and experimentation.

SCI-Arc, some of whose graduates have become noted avant-garde architects, worked in concert on the project with Inner City Arts, a private nonprofit organization that provides arts education at public schools in some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods.

The school was founded in 1972 by Raymond Kappe, chairman of the design department at Cal Poly Pomona, and a small group of other teachers who found large university environments too restrictive. The school, which was on Berkeley Street in Santa Monica for nearly 20 years, moved last January to a new facility off Jefferson Boulevard near Marina del Rey.

The three-dimensional model was displayed at SCI-Arc Tuesday for students and faculty to see. It twisted the architectural platitude “function follows form” into a new variation: “Function follows fun.”

Constructed from polystyrene and scraps of wood, metal and paper, the fourth-graders’ rendering of Los Angeles was a fanciful composition of multicolored buildings, a freeway with a roller coaster next to it, a Los Angeles River full of water, fish and houses on stilts, and, not surprisingly, an abundance of pizza restaurants.

There were ample spaces between buildings and numerous parks. Most of the buildings’ signs were in Spanish. One child’s aspirations were apparent in her two-city-block design, where she erected a movie marquee boasting: “Linda, the movie star.”

Mike Davis, a teacher of urban theory at SCI-Arc and author of “City of Quartz,” a modern history of Los Angeles, praised the children’s vision.

“Obviously, the city would be better off if we had kids designing buildings instead of architects,” he said. “They have a better sensibility of the real street-level vitality of the city and a basic sense of fun.”

Dubbed “L.A.’s Urban Fortune,” the project started eight weeks ago when 32 young students, most of whom live in the Aliso Village housing project east of downtown Los Angeles, were shown videotapes of the news coverage of the spring riots. SCI-Arc students then asked the children to rebuild a community that would meet their needs.

Under the guidance of three SCI-Arc students, the fourth-graders built their 64-block city with scrap material.

One of the three supervising students, Shelley Santo, said the students were encouraged to give their imaginations free rein.

“They were so uninhibited--putting a roller coaster in the middle of an urban area, things we’d never do,” she said. “These kids are more creative than us. Their city is obviously more energetic and colorful, but (it) provides for the needs of the people.”

Santo said the project was every bit as beneficial to the architecture students as to the children.

“As architects, it is ideal that we get exposed to other areas and other cultures, not just the Westside,” she said. “If we don’t know the needs of the community, we can’t meet them as architects.”

Classmate Cecile Sandan, 25, agreed.

“They built things in a city that I could not see being there--like an arch that had no meaning to the surrounding area but was decorative. And they put a cemetery in the middle of a busy urban area that kind of symbolized peace and serenity.”

Asked if she thought she might borrow any of their ideas, Sandan said: “Possibly. I’m not sure, but I do believe that it is up to these children, who are the future, to decide how their city will be.”

SCI-Arc director Michael Rotondi said he thought Peter Ueberroth and others associated with the Rebuild L.A. effort could get some valuable tips from the young architects.

“I just drove down Slauson and it has bits and pieces of all this stuff (in the 4th grade rendering), but it lacks imagination,” Rotondi said. “When I came down here and saw this model, I thought, ‘Why don’t the adults ask the kids what they want in their city?’ They live in the city. Their feet are on the ground, they know it, and I am always in my car.

“There’s probably half a dozen kids here who have profound ideas about how to rebuild this city,” he said. “They help our students get in touch with dormant parts of themselves--the naive optimism that anything you imagine is possible.”

Carlos Zubieta, 27, the third SCI-Arc student involved in the project, said the children’s ideas about creating more space between buildings and filling the Los Angeles River with water were particularly worthy of serious consideration.

“The children seemed to be saying: ‘We need more room and we need more space, things to play on and greenery,’ ” he said. “It’s a message they are giving us as architects.”