More Is Less : Renovation of Central Library Diminishes Once-Dominant L.A. Urban Icon

Compared to most major American cities, Los Angeles has few civic buildings of great distinction. The city’s best architecture is private, not public.

Among the few distinguished civic buildings, the three most prominent are City Hall, Union Station and the Central Library. City Hall, for decades the tallest building in Los Angeles, has since been upstaged by a host of downtown skyscrapers. Union Station has faded into the background with the decline of rail travel.

Only the Central Library, designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and completed in 1926, has fully retained its role as an architectural landmark, and there are several obvious reasons for the library’s continuing importance in our urban landscape.

First, the library is one of the pivotal buildings that lift the tone of Los Angeles’ modern downtown. Second, it continues to be a prime symbol of the city’s claim to cultural sophistication. Third, the old structure is an original and compelling act of architecture.

Now, after five years of planning and six years of construction, having weathered two devastating fires and an earthquake, having survived controversies over its design and its role in the city’s struggling public library system, the reincarnated Central Library opens today.

Rehabilitated, expanded and refitted at a cost of $214 million, the Central Library has a new east wing, named for former Mayor Tom Bradley, that more than doubles the floor area of the old facility.

Given its historic importance, the expanded library must be judged for its achievement as a design, particularly in the way in which the new wing relates to Goodhue’s original building.

The building must also be judged its ability to continue to act as a visual pivot in the heart of downtown, and as an enduring symbol of the city’s civic pride.

It must be critiqued, too, as a functioning library that must satisfy the staff that operates it and please the public who use it.

Sad to say, the long-awaited new Central Library fails to live up to its promise in any of these categories, except the last. The responsibility for this disappointing remake of one of the city’s favorite public buildings must be shared by the architects, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates; the planners who shaped its surroundings, and politicians and power brokers who arranged the deals that financed the library’s expansion and renovation.

The architects are responsible for the mediocrity of the design of the new east wing. The wing’s exterior is too bland and confused in its composition to match the coherence and symbolic force of Goodhue’s building. This boring and clumsy addition blurs the impact of Goodhue’s muscular original and diminishes its civic grandeur.

The city’s planners and politicians are responsible for the way in which the new Central Library’s stature as a visual pivot in the heart of downtown has been significantly diminished.

This diminution in the library’s urban role is the outcome of the complex and tricky process of financing the project, a process that has resulted in the once-dominant library building becoming overshadowed by a host of towers whose bulk was increased by the need to generate funds for the library’s expansion and rehabilitation.

Where the new library comes into its own, and splendidly, is as a functioning facility. Compared to Goodhue’s layout, the new east wing promises to be a delight to operate and a pleasure to use.

Goodhue’s library, bounded by Grand Avenue on the east, Flower Street on the west, 5th Street on the north and, on the south, a passageway crossing the top of South Hope Street, was a contradiction. On one hand, it was a powerfully symbolic design, created in a quirky yet affecting style by its eccentric architect. On the other hand, it was, in the opinion of most of the librarians who worked there, a mess--stuffy, its stacks hard to access, its entrances awkward.

And the old library was a fire hazard. It had no sprinkler system, so two major arson fires in 1986 caused $22 million in damage to the books and building. In 1987, the Whittier earthquake damaged the old building severely.

Architecturally, however, the old building is extraordinary, though its style is odd. In a letter written a month before his death in April, 1924, Goodhue himself described the library’s style as “strange.” The library was Goodhue’s last design, and he did not live to see it built.

The Central Library that Goodhue created is a concrete mausoleum relieved by bas-reliefs, statuary and portentous cultural mottoes carved in stone, topped by a glittering tiled pyramid and a bronze fist brandishing a torch at the sky. At the core of this more or less symmetrical pile is a 64-foot-high rotunda covered with vivid murals from which is suspended a chandelier shaped like a globe.

Above all else, Goodhue’s design had presence--a rare quality in 20th-Century architecture. Among the host of largely anonymous buildings that surround it, the old library stood out as a distinctive and visually stimulating landmark in the downtown landscape.

In the new east wing that strong sense of presence has been blurred. The addition lacks personality and its modesty is no excuse for its weak character.

Compared to the compact, broad-shouldered energy of Goodhue’s building, the new wing, designed principally by architect Norman Pfeiffer, is shapeless and diffused. Its massing--the way its segments fit together--is clumsy. Its facades are scrambled chunks of stucco punctuated with too many different-sized windows, alternated with panels of green terra cotta that have no relevance to the original building’s style.

Pfeiffer, it must be noted, was forced to alter his original concept for the east wing after critics, especially the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission, complained that his first design tended to overshadow the Goodhue library. The architect was ordered to reduce the bulk of his addition and tone down the materials he had chosen to clothe it in.

“The earlier design challenged Goodhue’s architecture,” Pfeiffer told The Times in April, 1988, after his revised scheme was accepted by the Cultural Affairs Commission. “This time around I decided to take my clues from Goodhue and continue his unique Modernist Beaux-Arts style. This is a less radical and more traditional approach, but it creates fewer problems for me, and for everyone else.”

Squeezed between the demands of his critics and the requirements of the librarians, Pfeiffer produced a compromise that seems to have damned his design. Whatever else it is, Goodhue’s building was no compromise, and that’s what gives it its enduring power as an urban icon.

Another compromise has prejudiced Pfeiffer’s attempt to match the drama of the old library’s grand spaces in the new east wing’s interior.

The character of the east wing’s interior was shaped by the basic decision to line up its top cornice line with the old library’s main parapet level. This was done to reduce its visible bulk and retain the original main tower’s dominance. Lowering the profile of the east wing, however, has meant that half of its eight floors had to be buried underground.

To bring light into the sunken building, Pfeiffer organized the wing around a dramatic glass-roofed atrium. This high, narrow, eight-story atrium runs from the old library’s east wall all the way to the Grand Avenue frontage. Entered from the street level of the original building, the atrium plunges down a series of escalators four floors below ground and rises another four floors above street level.

Below ground, the atrium is flanked on both sides by stacks and reading rooms. Above ground, the stacks are limited to the south side of the long, open space. To the north of the atrium, flanking 5th Street, is the relocated Children’s Courtyard and a new 250-seat auditorium. This layout allows the atrium, courtyard and auditorium to be accessible as public areas even when the library is closed.

A series of massive green terra-cotta columns, marching down the atrium’s north wall, emphasizes the depth of its descent under ground. The effect is dramatic but disconcerting, as if the proportions of this huge public space were indefinably off-key. The scale seems overblown for its purpose, and at the lowest level, where the colonnade ends, there is a real sense of anticlimax.

Looking down this long, deep valley you expect something more than just a dead end. Perhaps the artwork planned for the atrium, but not yet funded, will lighten its somber atmosphere and humanize its massive scale.

The most successful areas of the new east wing are the reading rooms. Looking out into the atrium through floor-to-ceiling glass walls, the reading rooms are airy and well-lit and provide very agreeable places to browse.

The interior of the old building has been freshly painted and its murals and decorative ceilings have been cleaned of years of grime and fire damage. Lost lamp fittings have been replaced with reproductions and the reading rooms have been fitted out with new furniture that picks up the character of the originals in a contemporary style.

To the west of the library, along Flower Street, the existing landscaped terraces were dug up for the construction of a five-level underground parking garage for 900 cars. The restored terracing, designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, has more or less reproduced the fountains and cypress-lined alleys of the original.

A restaurant has been added to the West Lawn, to attract more people to use the pleasant place. However, the restaurant’s design--not by Pfeiffer--is inept. Resembling a cross between a truncated Mayan temple and a 1950s savings-and-loan branch, it makes an half-hearted attempt to imitate Goodhue’s heroic style. One can only hope it will soon be obscured by planting.

As an act of architecture, the new east wing is a disappointment. As an act of urban design, the expanded Central Library is a failure for reasons beyond the architects’ control.

To fund the library’s rehabilitation and expansion, budgeted at $130 million in the early 1980s, the Community Redevelopment Agency worked out a financing arrangement among developers, politicians and power brokers. In fact, the library deal can be considered, along with the financing of the new Convention Center, as the last cadenza of the expansionist Bradley era.

The deal, Byzantine in its complexity, included these major components: a transfer of about 1,650,000 square feet of development density--so-called “air rights”--from the library site to two commercial properties across 5th Street and one on Hope Street; below-market-rate construction loans to the developers of the adjacent commercial properties, and tax credit and lease-back arrangements derived from the library’s status as a historic building. (The federal government allowed owners who restored such landmarks to write off the expenditures against their taxes.)

The most visible impact of this deal, which has still fallen some $80 million to $90 million short of fully funding the library project, has been the sprouting of three massive high-rises: the 77-story First Interstate World Center, the 52-story Gas Co. Tower and the 40-story 555 Hope Street building.

Like gawky nephews looking down upon an aged uncle, the bulk of these graceless skyscrapers now dominates the library, diminishing its impact as a downtown landmark.

This overwhelming of a fine old public building by its commercial neighbors is symbolic of the market-driven, largely uncoordinated burst of development that created Los Angeles’ new downtown. Dazzled by visions of glittering high-rises, the Bradley-era movers and shakers seemed to have had little grasp of how to create an urban environment that offers more than just a daytime buzz for corporate office workers.

If the role of the expanded Central Library had been planned as part of a truly orchestrated urban development, the skylines of its surrounding buildings to the north would have been stepped back to rise up toward Bunker Hill in a coherent pattern, to give the library’s iconic tower room to breathe.

The pedestrian environment would have been given presence over traffic, and Hope Street above 5th Street would have connected straight into the rotunda level of the original library, as Goodhue intended, giving the building a more ample setting worthy of its civic importance and architectural pedigree.

The enlarged Central Library is a monument to the massive failure of Los Angeles’ civic imagination. With a better designer and a more visionary political leadership, we might have had another masterpiece. What we have is an architectural mediocrity that diminishes one of our few truly great public buildings.