Architecture : L.A. Architecture: Trashy Sophistication?

The architecture of Los Angeles baffles easy definition.

It is at once sophisticated and tasteless, elitist and populist, glamorous and trashy. The buildings we see around us make up a crazy quilt of styles and mannerisms that somehow forms a whole cloth.

That was the general consensus of the panel of distinguished architects--Frank Gehry, Jon Jerde, Richard Meier, Eric Owen Moss and Cesar Pelli--participating in a day-long symposium titled “L.A. Architecture Comes of Age” at UCLA last Saturday. The event was organized by UCLA Extension and moderated by architecture pundit Charles Jencks.

In his introduction, Jencks characterized Los Angeles as “the most heterogenous city in the world” and “a pizza with all the trimmings.”

The remark kicked off a lively day of slide presentations and discussions about the current condition of Los Angeles’ architecture. Given that the designers on the panel represent a wide range of attitudes and styles, the discussions struck some fiery sparks.

In these exchanges, the architects’ conflicting views revealed startlingly different concepts of a designer’s role in our troubled, diverse and vigorous metropolis.

For Jon Jerde, who spoke first, an architect’s prime task is to create a public environment in which Angelenos can mix and mingle, can share a sense of common identity in a city where people seldom come together spontaneously.

Looking for a way to make this happen, Jerde came upon an obvious instrument: the ubiquitous shopping center. Shopping centers, he said, offer the only popular meeting grounds in our all-too-private and socially ghettoized urban environment.

“I found these places to be the starting pieces in an ambitious plan to create a sense of community,” Jerde explained. In several of Jerde’s major projects, such as San Diego’s Horton Plaza and the soon-to-be-opened City Walk in Universal City, the communal act of shopping has provided the engine to drive a social agenda in which citizens get together unself-consciously.

“Twenty-five million people a year now visit Horton Plaza,” Jerde said. “Surveys have found that more than half of them simply come to mingle.”

The kind of architecture that emerges from such hybrid mixtures of raw commercialism and social purpose tends to be brash and crude, Jerde admitted. But, he claimed, Los Angeles has always been far more creative as a source of popular “low” culture, such as movies, cars and rock music, than the “high” culture of the formal arts.

In Los Angeles, Jerde implied, it’s the whole tasty, crusty pizza that counts, rather than any rare and fancy trimming floating around on top.

“The one thing I’m sure of is that I’m utterly opposed to Jerde’s ideas,” said Eric Owen Moss, who followed Jerde on the platform. “I don’t think architecture is a crude and public act, in the way he means it.”

For Moss, architecture is essentially private. In his view, a designer absorbs what he sees around him and then creates his art out of what he feels and knows, not what others think is right or wrong. Only a designer whose architecture is as personally fragmented, diverse, vigorous and experimental as the city itself can honestly reflect the character of Los Angeles, he said.

“For me, architecture is taking things apart and then struggling to put them back together again,” Moss declared. “Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s life in our time.”

To reflect the tensions of this struggle to reinterpret the ambiguities of the urban environment in which he lives, Moss often puts materials in strange contexts against the grain of their conventional usage.

In the complex of Culver City industrial buildings he has renovated into offices and studios, Moss used sewer pipes as structural columns, panels of brickwork with no visible means of support and scraps of machinery that have no function.

“What I’m trying to say is that there are things architecture simply can’t say,” Moss said. In our place and time, the traditional notion that architecture is essentially lucid and coherent is dead, he suggested.

Ironically, Moss was followed by Cesar Pelli, one of the most lucid and coherent minds in the field of contemporary U.S. architecture.

Although his international practice is now based in Connecticut, Pelli spent a fruitful decade in Los Angeles in the 1970s, when he designed the Pacific Design Center, one of the city’s major landmarks. Recently, Pelli completed a commercial high-rise at 777 Figueroa St., downtown’s most sophisticated new skyscraper.

“The Los Angeles visual context is so varied that architects have two very different ways of fitting in a new building,” Pelli said. “Buildings here can differentiate or they can connect.”

The PDC, Pelli explained, was originally an act of deliberate differentiation. There was simply no other strategy for fitting such a huge structure into its small-scale surroundings of modest bungalows and Melrose Avenue commercial strips. In the 1970s the “Blue Whale,” as the PDC came to be called, was designed to be a monster mammal floating in a sea of sardines.

However, when Pelli was commissioned to design the PDC’s green addition in the late 1980s, the visual context was very different. Now surrounded by the new city of West Hollywood, and by a proliferation of design boutiques its presence had spawned, the expanded PDC needed to connect with its context rather than differentiate.

“An architect must take many strictly non-architectural factors into account,” Pelli insisted. “There is always a social dimension to buildings, and you can’t look at them as design expressions alone.”

Richard Meier, designer of the $400-million Getty Center in Brentwood now under construction, explained that the context of the San Diego Freeway was a major influence upon the layout of his plan. The freeway, which runs at the foot of the center’s ridge, bends as it passes the site, and that bend gave Meier the double axis of his design.

At the scale of a project as large as the Getty Center, only the L.A. freeways are visually powerful enough to provide such design “clues,” Meier said. Along with the Santa Monica Mountains, the freeways are the city’s large-scale markers.

The last speaker was Frank Gehry, Los Angeles’ leading architect. Winner of many prestigious national and international awards, Gehry has been mainly responsible for the high reputation Southern California’s avant-garde architecture now enjoys all over the world.

Gehry epitomizes the eclectic nature of Los Angeles architecture in several interesting ways. Arriving in the city from Toronto at 17, he attended USC and then tried a number of different architectural styles before evolving his own unique mannerism.

In his earlier projects Gehry tried out the styles of Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph. In all of these manifestations, he admitted, his architecture was mundane, even mediocre.

After a period of personal and professional crisis in the early 1970s, Gehry gave birth to the distinctive style that has won him fame. Influenced by local artists, he generated the high-art populism of cheap materials artfully used.

In such projects as the remodeling of his own house in Santa Monica and the Cabrillo Marine Museum in San Pedro, Gehry used chain-link fencing and drywall with exposed framing to express the ad hoc realities of Los Angeles. He made a virtue out of trash and, like the Pop Art painters and sculptors he admired, made trash art.

Gehry’s brand of populist elitism is quintessentially Angeleno. It follows in the architectural tradition of Neutra, Charles Eames and a host of other modernists who yearned to design for the “common man” yet only found clients among the city’s wealthier citizens. Such architecture was, and is, too radical for the populace at large.

At the same time, L.A.’s most innovative architecture has often also proved to be too radical for the city’s conservative cultural establishment, whose unsympathetic attitude is reflected in the poor coverage given to architecture in the leading local media, several of the panelists said.

“It’s a disgrace that the Los Angeles Times, for instance, treats architecture like a poor relation,” Gehry said. “For years now many of us have begged The Times to get serious and hire a full-time architecture critic.”

This attitude of the city’s cultural leaders has led to the curious fact that Los Angeles’ best architects are honored everywhere at the highest levels, except in their home town. This is a mark of the essential provincialism of Los Angeles, several panelists suggested, a clear indication that the city really has not culturally come of age, despite its vaunted new art museums.

Gehry, in fact, is the first local designer in this long Angeleno tradition of populist elitism to be given a major public commission: the proposed Disney Concert Hall on Bunker Hill.

During the discussion that concluded the symposium, Pelli summed up his view of the city’s architectural maturity: “I’d hate to say that L.A. has come of age, or ever will,” he said. “The city’s eternal adolescence has given our designers a rare freedom to experiment, free of the burdens of a false maturity.”

If L.A.’s architecture has actually come of age, that means we could be stuck with the stuff we have, Pelli said.

That would really be sad, he implied, for we would be condemned to chewing forever on the half-baked stylistic pizza we now have sitting on our plates.