ART : This Project Isn’t by the Book : The Central Library revitalization enlists 11 Los Angeles-based artists to help restore its soul and spirit

Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, the architect of Los Angeles’ Central Library, liked to think of himself as a team player. At work in the early 1920s on the pyramid-topped building that would become one of downtown’s most treasured landmarks, he called himself a member of a “designing triumvirate.” The architect’s duty, he wrote in a letter to librarian Everett R. Perry, was “to make a good plan with a good mass and then entrust the ornament just as far as possible to other able and artistic intelligences--sculptor or sculptors, painter or painters, who will work in harmony with him and have a thorough understanding and appreciation of what they are doing.”

Goodhue died in 1924, before the Central Library was completed. If he could see his Los Angeles masterpiece today--in final stages of a $213.9-million renovation and expansion financed with about $35 million in city funds as well as a variety of private contributions--he would surely be gratified by the restoration of the historic structure and its vintage artworks damaged by two fires in 1986. In these days of fiscal pain, conservators have lavished as much care as budgets allow on the centerpiece of the Los Angeles Public Library system.

Andrea Rothe, paintings conservator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, has served as a volunteer consultant, while independent conservators Tatyana Thompson, Rosamond Westmoreland, Tony Heinsbergen and Scott Haskins have cleaned smoke and years of soil from murals and painted ceilings. Glenn Wharton and Jim Grant, who are supervising the project to ensure that conservation work meets national preservation standards, have enlisted professional help to clean and repair sculptural elements, including tiled drinking fountains, glazed railings and iron gates.

Conservators have removed acidic soot, old surface coatings and well-aged wads of bubble gum from sculptures, including a pair of marble and bronze sphinxes and a massive figure of “Civilization” on the north stairway. Wax coating will protect the sculptures’ surfaces, while new maintenance manuals will enhance the future of all the historic artworks.

The library is getting respect. It is also acquiring a new wing, which descends deep into the ground on the east side of the old building. Goodhue’s reaction to the gleaming new addition is anybody’s guess, but he would surely be pleased that the collaborative spirit he advocated is alive in 1993--with a little help from a city requirement that 1% of the construction budgets of new public buildings be spent on the arts.

The library’s new architect, Norman Pfeiffer, a partner in the firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, is working with 11 Los Angeles-based artists to extend Goodhue’s vision into the realm of contemporary art and architecture. Five artists--David Bunn, Ries Niemi, Renee Petropoulos, Ann Preston and Therman Statom--are producing artworks that are expected to be in place for the building’s opening on Oct. 3.

About $548,000 has been spent so far on new artworks, funded by the Community Redevelopment Agency, a city bond issue and developers. A portion of that sum has paid for the design of works by six other artists--Ralph Bacerra, Susan Mogul, Stephen Prina, Buzz Spector, Mitchell Syrop and John Valadez--who are awaiting an additional $675,000 in funds to be raised privately by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Their works will be produced and installed as money becomes available.

“From the beginning we have tried to stay in sympathy with the architectural collaboration in the original building,” Pfeiffer said. “The geometry of the spaces, the colors, the form and symbolism of the zodiac chandelier in the rotunda and many other elements provided underlying criteria,” he said. “The clues (to new design) were already in place in this project. Bertram Goodhue put them there. We didn’t have to invent a metaphor. We had the metaphor of the building, and we let it tell us what to do.”

The metaphor contains a rich mix of styles, images and inscriptions that has offered the artists dozens of choices in their quest to create works relevant to the library and, in many cases, functional. Goodhue combined Mediterranean, Roman, Hellenistic, Byzantine, Islamic and Egyptian influences in a fortresslike edifice enriched by decorative elements. Sculptor Lee Lawrie, who worked closely with Goodhue, produced a stunning array of reliefs and free-standing works including a historical panorama of poets, prophets, philosophers and teachers, and a multicultural parade of scribes.

Inscriptions about wisdom and learning appear throughout the building’s interior and exterior, often labeling sculptures and marking portals. Murals painted by several artists portray scenes from literature and California history, while ceilings are decorated with geometric designs and shields bearing insignias of explorers, rulers and religious orders. Indeed, artistic elaboration is so extensive that it is difficult to separate art from architecture--and that’s exactly how Goodhue wanted it.

Petropoulos, the only artist commissioned to create a new work for the Goodhue building, is painting the vaulted ceiling of the street-level lobby, a square room with entrances on all four sides that will serve as an orientation center. Taking her cues from decorative motifs on the library and other buildings, she has used the concept of decoration as subject matter. Vividly colored rings, starbursts, checkerboards and names of Los Angeles novelists intertwine on the 36-by-36-foot ceiling. As a counterpoint to the building’s symmetry, she has knocked her design off center and created a sense of movement that provides an active viewing experience.

Petropoulos has painted many walls, but working on a curved and angled concrete ceiling that was cast to resemble rough wood is a new experience. Working with assistants, she used the old-fashioned method of perforating and pouncing--a technique of tapping powdered pigment through perforated lines of a drawing--to transfer her plan to the ceiling. Unlike Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, she hasn’t lain on her back to paint the ceiling, but she had to learn to drive a scissors lift and to use its platform as her studio.

Not far from Petropoulos’ lobby, Bunn has transformed two public elevators into a conceptual artwork, conceived as a Jules Verne-like journey to the center of the library. Visitors who use the elevators will ride in cabs lined with Dewey Decimal System index cards that were cast off when computers took over. Traveling from floor to floor, elevator riders can look out a window into a shaft and see additional examples of cards that once catalogued the library’s immense holding.

Bunn had so many cards to work with that he probably could have papered the entire new wing. Confined to the elevators, he decided to recycle cards for books whose titles begin with “The Complete” and “The Comprehensive.” Neat rows of cards mounted under plexiglass in the cabs include such titles as “The Complete Commentary on the Holy Bible,” “The Complete Boston Terrier,” “The Comprehensive Guide to Buried Treasure” and “The Comprehensive Book of Self-Defense.” Cards in the shafts correspond to the subject matter of nearby books.

The notion of preserving library history in his multilayered artwork appealed to Bunn, as did using discarded library materials as his medium. The cards also offered “a way of representing the structure of what a library is,” he said. The amusing range of titles “collapses the high and low sense of what is available in the library--the library embraces everything,” he noted.

Niemi also considered the scope of the library’s collection in a series of metal gates and grills, created for the East Courtyard and the Children’s Courtyard, off 5th Street. His outdoor, functional artworks combine sunbursts and geometric motifs with various styles of script spelling out subject matter categories--biology, languages, philosophy, literature, technology, history--and quotations from literature.

His work was inspired in part by inscriptions on the Goodhue building. But instead of repeating lofty sayings that have implored library visitors to read wisely and learn well during the last 70 years, Niemi selected what he calls “archetypal quotes” in six languages: English, Spanish, Arabic, Korean, Hebrew and Armenian. Working in his Inglewood studio, where he produces a line of metal furniture and custom architectural artworks, he has cut letters and characters of various alphabets into sheet metal. One can read such statements as “Knowledge is the prime need of the hour,” from African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune, on metal works that serve both as decorative barriers and informative enticements.

Preston and Statom, who were commissioned to design light fixtures for the new wing, have explored the traditional association of light and learning that pervades the historic library. A key image on the Goodhue building is a ray-encircled book above the Hope Street entrance, bearing the Latin inscription “Lumen Pedibus Meis . . . Lumen Semitis Meis” (a lamp to my feet . . . a light to my paths). Among the imposing figures that Lawrie carved in relief are eight “Seers of Light”--David the Psalmist, St. John, Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe, Plato and Dante--who encircle the library tower.

Dealing with real light in functional pieces, Preston and Statom have let their minds wander from traditional imagery. Statom, who is working on three massive chandeliers for the new wing’s soaring atrium, used the library’s historic zodiac chandelier as his point of departure. Designed by Goodhue Associates and modeled by Lawrie, the 2,000-pound light fixture was conceived as a solar system, with a blue glass “Earth” encircled by a bronze ring of zodiac signs. Lights surrounding the globe are positioned like stars, while additional stars, a crescent moon and a sunlike canopy hang from chains that suspend the massive fixture above the rotunda.

Statom is known as a glass artist, but he had never made a chandelier--let alone a trio of fixtures, each measuring 18 feet in diameter and weighing 1,750 pounds. “I was very leery of my chandelier-making ability,” he said. “You don’t get to try again with a project like this. You either hit it or you don’t.”

Having survived a challenging process of design and engineering, Statom is steaming along with an audacious plan for three Baroque concoctions that represent the natural, technological and metaphysical spheres of human existence. Each of the circular, tiered structures will be festooned with nine fiberglass sculptures. An angel, a heart, a pair of eyeglasses, a turtle and a life-size self-portrait of the artist are among the three-dimensional images to be attached to the chandeliers. They are being fabricated at Peter Carlson Enterprises in Sun Valley, where Statom is painting the sculptures and working out colors, finishes and textures. Preston’s work--also in process at Peter Carlson Enterprises--is a set of seven identical 13-foot columnar light fixtures, four of which will be installed on balcony floors before the library’s opening. (The three others--to be constructed when private funds are raised--will be stationed alongside an escalator that descends into the new addition’s subterranean floors.)

The basic concept behind Preston’s project is the notion of the library as a source of illumination. “It has been important to me that this building is a library--the central library of the city of Los Angeles, at a time when we read about libraries closing,” Preston said. “I thought about the idea of a library--the library as learning, and learning as light.”

In designing a form to fit the concept, she devised an image of an illuminated head. Each fixture is made of 24 identical pieces of sheet aluminum that fan out from the center, forming a cylindrical profile of an upside-down head. Lights set into the base of each fixture will be reflected in mirrors near the top. The fixtures are not portraits--and most visitors won’t even see them as heads because Preston has merged biomorphic and geometric forms--but Preston conceded that the heads bear a certain resemblance to hers, simply because artists’ depictions of human forms naturally look like their creators.

Among the artists awaiting funds to complete their commissions, Bacerra has planned a tile-and-plaster design for the entire south wall of the atrium. Prina plans to install a clock that will use synchronized chimes based on popular songs. Syrop has designed “portals” to identify the library’s seven departments, using color photographs, transparencies and text. Three murals also are planned for the library: a depiction of the history of the written word by Valadez, on the east wall of the atrium; a “book sculpture” by Spector, in the new boardroom, and a collaborative painting by Mogul and a group of schoolchildren, on a wall adjacent to the children’s puppet theater.

In keeping with Goodhue’s view of art’s role in public places, $350,000 worth of art also has been commissioned for a park--designed by Lawrence Halprin and funded by Maguire Thomas Associates--on the west side of the library. Jud Fine has created a 185-piece multimedia work, called “Rif” after the library’s “Reading is Fundamental” slogan. Laddie John Dill and Mineo Mizuna have designed a collaborative glass-and-ceramic work for a circular fountain.

With several artworks in process and others in the offing, the library’s art story is a continuing saga. The public debut of the building will conclude one long chapter that began several years ago when library officials discovered that they must not only restore historic artworks, as planned, but commission new ones to conform to the city’s “percent for art” regulation.

A committee composed of Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Ann Goldstein, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, architect Pfeiffer and commissioners from the Library Board, the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Cultural Affairs Department met over a period of two years to identify spaces that might be enhanced by artworks and to suggest artists. After an initial list of 300 names was pared to 35, artists were asked to submit slides of their past works and proposals for the library. Eleven artists were eventually commissioned for the project.

“Ideally, the artists would have been involved with the architecture at an earlier stage, but their work meshed nicely,” Fox said. “It was important to maintain the coherence (of art with architecture) that was part of the original Goodhue design.”

The artists’ plans have gone through so many transformations and the process has been so lengthy that the artists have had reason to wonder if their projects would ever be realized. But now that the first group of works is nearing completion, they say they are extremely pleased to have been included.

“This may sound corny, but having a chance to participate in a collaborative sense with your culture is very exciting,” Preston said. “As artists we often feel like cultural bag people,” she said, noting that the nature of artistic creation and the rarefied world of galleries and museums tend to ostracize artists from the public. “This is a different arena. We are playing by different rules,” she said.

“The Central Library is really a public building--the kind that people visit all over the world,” Petropoulos said. As for being prominently represented there, she summed up her feelings in a single word: “Wow.”