Los Angeles Builds Up a Reputation Among Architects : Design: National group is coming here for the first time since ‘56, drawn partly by rising local stars.

Ever have a long-absent relative come to your home and snoop around, making judgments about your furniture, taste, cleanliness, finances and lifestyle?

Well, imagine all of Los Angeles County as your home and think about 9,000 of the most finicky guests coming to inspect the urban sprawl en masse for the first time in 38 years. That’s about to happen this week when the American Institute of Architects holds its annual national convention in Los Angeles, a city the influential organization has avoided since 1956.

After recession, riots, fires and earthquakes, this may not be the ideal time to show off Los Angeles to an out-of-town army of architects, planners, designers and insulation salesmen. But, the hosts are taking the long view.

With seminars and tours focused on, among other topics, Downtown skyscrapers, Malibu beach houses, ethnic neighborhoods and the unavoidable seismic safety, they want to display the incredible changes in L.A. over the past four decades--touting how a megalopolis grew up from oil fields and orange groves into a showplace of contemporary design.

“I think first and foremost is that Los Angeles is such a vital city. And since architects are deeply interested in the creation of cities, it’s a logical place to come and get a big-city fix,” explained William Chapin, a Rochester, N.Y., architect who is the group’s national president. “L.A. offers such a complexity of urban ills and benefits, the menu is so many pages long, that it is going to be very interesting and very surprising for the uninformed.”

The convention’s literature calls Los Angeles the “City on the Edge,” connoting Pacific coastline and earthquake faults as well as “the leading edge of a global culture whose movies, music, television, fashion, lifestyles and the arts all seem to spring from some mystical point just west of Beverly Hills.”

That attracted Charles Bullock, a semi-retired architect from Beaumont, Tex. He is coming to Los Angeles for the first time since 1958 and is planning to take tours of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed landmarks in Hollywood, of turn-of-the-century Pasadena bungalows by the Greene and Greene firm and of the newly restored and expanded Central Library in Downtown. His memories contrast sharply with today’s Southern California.

“It didn’t seem to me like a big city at the time,” Bullock said in a telephone interview. “I had been to New York and D.C., and Los Angeles didn’t impress me as being a real metropolitan area particularly.”

If the organization had a collective memory of its last Los Angeles gathering, it would recall a city that had few freeways, no Music Center, no Dodger Stadium, no County Museum, no Museum of Contemporary Art, no Bunker Hill skyscrapers and no Pacific Design Center. It would have encountered a county population about half the current 9.1 million and with far fewer Latinos and Asians.

“If you came here last 40 years ago, you’re just going to have to take your heart pills because it’s completely changed,” said Virginia Tanzmann, president of the architects group’s Los Angeles chapter. “One of the great attributes of L.A. in general is that constant and wonderful churning, some of which has problems related to it. But if you look at the overall picture, you should say, ‘I just can’t miss seeing it.’ ”

The current superstar of Los Angeles architecture, Frank O. Gehry, is scheduled to deliver the welcoming address to the American Institute of Architects on Friday at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where the three-day meeting is being held. Once the bad boy of American architecture because of his use of common materials such as chain-link fences, Gehry won the Pritzker Prize--design’s equivalent of a Nobel--in 1989 and now is in demand around the world.

A tour will survey such Gehry buildings in Venice as his home and the Chiat/Day advertising agency headquarters (most known for its giant binoculars sculpture out front) and will stop at his Santa Monica studio to see models of his Disney Concert Hall, under construction Downtown.

Other attractions include a hard-hat tour led by architect Richard Meier of his emerging Getty Center art campus in Brentwood and an inspection of Westside restaurants that stress interior design as much as food. A more down-to-earth itinerary is offered by “The Real L.A.,” which will take architects to Skid Row, Chinatown, East Los Angeles, Watts, Koreatown, Pico-Union and Florence and Normandie avenues, a flash point of the 1992 riots.

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Some architects, to be sure, are coming mainly to glad-hand for job tips in their badly depressed national market and to attend the many technical sessions. Seminars on seismic safety will be linked to excursions to quake-damaged areas in Northridge.

As a guest from tornado country, Gregory Newport, president of the organization’s chapter in Lincoln, Neb., said he is curious “to see some of the effects of the earthquake and the aftermath of the riots, how much has gotten rebuilt and how much hasn’t.”

Ironically, earthquakes were on the minds of architects at the 1956 convention, too. According to newspaper reports, speakers then suggested that seismologists in the future would be able to forecast earthquakes “as weathermen today forecast storms.”

That prediction hasn’t come true, but another one unfortunately has. One seismic expert told conventioneers 38 years ago that “we must expect a severe shock of great destructive potential at any time.”

Quake fear was not why the group stayed away from Los Angeles so long, officials said. The organization repeatedly chose San Francisco when looking for a Western meeting site because, they said, it is more picturesque and urbane. But the prominence of Southern California architects such as Gehry, Michael Rotondi, Eric Owen Moss, Barton Myers, Jon Jerde and others, plus the construction boom here 10 years ago made Los Angeles a more compelling venue.

Another reason was the expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center, which had been inadequate for big meetings like the group’s convention. The newly enlarged center opened last fall to acclaim from architecture critics. Further tying the building to this week’s events, its executive architect, Ki Suh Park of Gruen Associates, heads the local committee planning the convention. Park, a Korean American who has been active in post-riot rebuilding efforts, will be given the national American Institute of Architects award that recognizes social responsibility.

“Despite the fact that we had lots of events that were adverse to our image, such as the earthquake, civil disturbances, fire and flood, this is still one of the most exciting cities in the country and the world. . . ,” Park said. “This is a good time to look at what makes the city tick.”

Museums and galleries around the city this month have architecture exhibits and symposiums linked to the convention. The Museum of Contemporary Art will showcase innovative city planning and design projects in “Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm.” The Japanese American National Museum has scheduled a show about Asian American architects and California architects working in Asia. A photography exhibit at the Los Angles Central Library celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Parkinson architecture firm, which designed City Hall and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park offers exhibits about Downtown before World War II and about inner-city neighborhoods today.