THE URBAN LANDSCAPE : A Westside Wish List to Build Bridges Toward Better Future

I have a few wishes for the Westside in the New Year:

I wish that all the communities in the area realize the importance of connection rather than isolation. Instead of building fences, we should be building bridges. That means opening ourselves up to public transportation. I wish we would carry out the visionary plans for light rail or monorail along Santa Monica and Exposition boulevards; for a Metro subway beneath Wilshire Boulevard, and for electrified buses. Such projects would create a cultural and economic lifeline for our city. We also should have shopping areas that open onto the street--rather than lining the sidewalk with blank walls--and houses that contribute to the life of the sidewalk with open courtyards and plantings, rather than hiding their riches behind perimeter walls.

I wish for housing and open space. Those are the only things we still need to build on the Westside. I wish that Playa Vista could be a great park, for instance, and that we could convert some of the vacant office buildings that dot the Westside and turn them into housing. I wish for forms of communal housing that give us all lots of space, though not by creating wasteful and isolated single structures. I wish for parks where there are now vacant lots. I wish for an architecture that connects and defines our existing structures. We don’t need more buildings; we just need to make better use of what we already have.

I wish for a Westside that looks at itself and learns form the simple forms out of which it is built. From the bungalows and bungalow courts, we can learn how to make flexible spaces that express how they are made. They show us an architecture that is no more than the scaffolding on which we can build our own lives together. I wish for more bungalows. From the rambling ranchos of the 1920s and 1930s, we can learn how to make complicated shapes that are shot through with sheltered spaces; where the eye is caught by luscious details isolated on plain surfaces; and where the building completes itself in both the man-made and the natural landscape.

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I wish for more courtyard housing. From the modernist architects of the 1950s and early 1960s, we can learn how the humble elements of mass production can be used to create buildings as powerful as the signs with which they have to compete. I wish for more modernist buildings.

I wish for a place where we can all learn about, discuss and experiment with architecture. It is hard to believe that a city of our size has no architecture and design department at any of its museums, no significant archives of local architecture, and no place where architecture is discussed on an ongoing basis. If we want to make the Westside a better place for all of us to live, we need to understand its forms, its structure and its history. To do that, we need to collect information, store it, process it, discuss it and disseminate it. I wish for someone who cares enough about the place to make that possible.

I wish for work for all the talented architects in this city who never get a chance to contribute. Good architecture means architecture that does not merely repeat the ways of making buildings that confirm us in our ideas about ourselves, our communities and our city, but opens up new spaces of exploration. In the words of architect Wolf Prix, “an open architecture, of the open heart and the open mind.”

I wish that we can all help each other build a better Westside.