ARCHITECTURE : It’s No Day in the Country : MOCA’s newest exhibition, ‘Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Urban Realm,’ tackles the tough issues of contemporary urban design.

In its provocative new exhibition, “Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Urban Realm,” the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art solidifies its role as the West Coast institution most committed to the importance of the art and craft of architecture and the built environment.

Since its opening in the early 1980s, MOCA has presented half a dozen major architecture shows, the most successful of which was 1989’s “Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses,” curated by Elizabeth A. T. Smith and designed by Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung. Though marred by a numbingly awkward installation design by architect Arata Isosaki, the ambitious retrospective of the architecture of Louis Kahn was the fullest explication, to date, of that designer’s monumental achievement. Another high point was MOCA’s 1988 seductive presentation of “The Architecture of Frank Gehry,” organized by the Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis.

In what is surely to be one of its more controversial offerings, “Urban Revisions” tackles the difficult, elusive subject of contemporary urban design. “It is the peculiar tragedy of this visual art,” writes sociologist Richard Sennett in the exhibition catalogue, “that the urban designer has less autonomy than the painter, the sculptor or the photographer. Urban projects are realized only if the designer can cooperate at every step with banks, investors and government authorities.” He could also have included bottom-line developers and the no-less-determined clusters of special interest groups, neighborhood associations and individual property owners.

“Urban Revisions” investigates 18 very different types of projects in a variety of scales and locations from grand master plans to modest neighborhood interventions from all sections of the country. It also includes a team-designed plan for the Fauberg Quebec section of Montreal, Canada, and a plan for the town center of Esslingen, Switzerland, by the L.A.-based firm of Angelil/Graham. Three of the most compelling (and cost-effective) schemes fall within the virtuous Green category, emphasizing an intense reliance on trees, grass and plants: Balmori Associates’ Farmington Canal Greenway Project for Connecticut; Johnson, Fain, Pereira Associates’ Greenway Plan for Metropolitan Los Angeles, and Achva Benzinberg Stein’s Uhuru Garden in Watts.

Why would any sane art museum curator want to venture into such murky and dangerous territory? Thus far, few have even attempted it, and it is to MOCA’s credit that, despite the risks--and the resulting vulnerabilities of presentation--Elizabeth Smith has had the courage, the wit and the artistic sensibilities to make a serious stab at confronting such critical urban and architectural issues.

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When MOCA’s godmother, the Museum of Modern Art, opened in New York in 1929, its dual mission was proclaimed to be the presentation, on the one hand, of the history of the “modern movement,” and, on the other, the new, contemporary, less-established art that would constantly push the edges of the modernist sensibility. Most observers concur that while MOMA has succeeded gloriously in the first category, it has been absent or overly cautious in the latter. And it was this realization that made the founders of MOCA determine that, while chronicling the history of “contemporary” art since 1945, this museum would not lose its nerve in exploring the edges and dealing with that which had not yet been certified.

“Urban Revisions” exemplifies this commitment and demands an equivalent commitment on the part of the viewer. This is not an exhibition one glides through blissfully as one might do through a gallery of Impressionist landscapes. To get the full effect, the visitor must carefully read the texts, study the visuals, absorb the video components and interact empathetically with the projects, their designers and their users. It also helps to read the catalogue.

The reward is a richly heightened appreciation of the problems and possibilities of urban life and design. The collective power of the show is that it leads one, forces one, beyond the projects on the walls to the myriad situations, issues and landscapes not explicated in the museum. There should be something for almost everyone here, something that makes visitors think freshly about their own neighborhoods and cities and that forces them to seek, on the unwieldy landscape, other needy targets of opportunity.

If the psychological demands of this densely packed exhibition suggest a tedious viewing experience, that is happily not the case. Considering how boring most urban planning presentations are, the MOCA installation by ROTOndi Architects is engagingly hip. Combining raw, funky building materials with colorful visual effects into an image of skillfully controlled chaos, the show is a pleasure to experience with its varied attractions on the floor, the walls and even the ceilings.

Typical of ROTOndi’s mordant humor is the stacking of five boxes of weighty environmental impact reports (like so many Warhol Brillo boxes) in the midst of Los Angeles’ controversial Playa Vista project. The exhibition is also relatively easy to navigate. Rather than a straight-and-narrow path from which the viewer must not deviate, there are directional options that give one choices without the possibility of missing a crucial section. One exception to the show’s generally lucid explication is the practice, apparently fashionable in museums these days, of placing small-type, hard-to-read texts out of convenient eye range. There is no excuse for forcing viewers occasionally to squat or bend deeply to read texts that are nearly at floor level.

Such burdens are ameliorated, however, by the insouciance of the installation, in which ROTOndi was aided by ADOBE LA, an organization of Latino artists, architects and designers who observe and document the Latino physical presence in Los Angeles and create works that express and enrich that presence. In this exhibition, ADOBE LA has positioned specially decorated street vendor carts and poignantly composed roadway “shrines” throughout the galleries.

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In the installation’s most potentially controversial element, colorful explosions of artfully crafted graffiti splash the walls and ceilings of the usually white MOCA spaces. In this regard, the north wall of the main gallery is particularly stunning. While some viewers will enjoy such effects and will respect their connection to the show, others may have more trouble with the group’s defense of graffiti and “tagging” on the actual L.A. landscape of public and private spaces.

Such practices, ADOBE LA argues in their statement in the catalogue, “reflect and respond to the particular socio-cultural conditions and aspirations of urban Latino youth. Graffiti is not merely a reflection of social dysfunction, but more importantly a sign of creative resistance, spiritual tenacity and a cohesive, coherent and positive self-identity. In the context of ownership and appropriation of space, tagging is often used by gangs to delineate territory. Tagging is meaningless to mainstream culture because it is a code which is inaccessible.” But does ADOBE LA not acknowledge the need and right of each and every citizen to define, present, decorate and defend his or her own spaces free from the intrusive tagging of others?

“Urban Revisions” is accompanied by a useful and attractive catalogue edited by Russell Ferguson and designed by April Greiman Associates. Elizabeth Smith’s cogent introduction is followed by four essays of uneven quality. Pieces by sociologists Richard Sennett and M. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly offer valuable insights but fail to focus sufficiently on the business at hand. The essays by critic-historians Gwendolyn Wright and Mike Davis, however, provide incisive tie-ins to the discussion of contemporary urban design.

In “Inventions and Interventions: American Urban Design in the Twentieth Century,” Wright makes the welcome observation that “architectural historians have often disparaged American modernism for its parochialism and lack of rigor, charging that this country’s architects failed to grasp the true social and formal meaning of the modern movement. This template assumes a single, universal orthodoxy, obscuring the variety of national, regional and individual interpretations that in fact existed. . . . These alternatives should not be seen as deviations, but as vital evidences of modernism’s real complexities.”

Davis’ “Cannibal City: Los Angeles and the Destruction of Nature” is one his freshest essays to date. It provides a beautiful rationale for several of the exhibition’s Green proposals.

The revitalization of abandoned rail corridors and under-utilized water channels is the key element of Johnson, Fain, Pereira Associates’ Greenway Plan for Metropolitan Los Angeles, a welcomed reaction to the alarming fact that “only 4% of the total area of metropolitan Los Angeles is dedicated to public open space and recreational facilities, contrasting with San Francisco and Boston’s 9% and New York’s 17%.” From existing urban infrastructure, such as the former Pacific Electric’s abandoned rights-of-way and the under-utilized basin of the Los Angeles River, the planners hope to synthesize a grid of public, green, open space and to give added structure and cohesion to the city with connected systems of commuter and recreational bike trails, walkways, jogging paths and linear recreational park spaces.

Dramatic “before and after” photographs and drawings suggest ways in which dull wastelands can be enlivened and where even the environs of such landmarks as Watts Towers can be greatly enhanced. The planners offer a winning rationale in their citing of the role of public open space in the traditions and social patterns of a number of L.A.’s diverse ethnic cultures and in their reminder that conversion and maintenance of such areas could provide a steady source of jobs. This plan seems so obviously valuable for all the citizens of Los Angeles and so relatively feasible and affordable that one wonders why it has taken so long for someone to come up with it.

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On a much more modest and localized scale, Achva Benzinberg Stein’s proposal for Uhuru Garden, at Grape and 103rd streets in Watts, seems equally therapeutic, appealing and practicable. Conceived as a two-and-a-half acre demonstration public garden project, the site is adjacent to Jordan Downs, the largest public housing project in Los Angeles.

Uhuru includes a community “victory” garden for 60 individual family plots, a market garden with street merchandising outlets, a horticultural teaching area for the Watts drug rehabilitation program, a recycling and composting area, an herb garden and orchard, and a demonstration garden of drought-tolerant plants native to Southern California, Latin America and Africa. To encourage job training for work in various Green industries and to reinforce the idea of purposeful service to one’s community, access to Uhuru Garden and its satellites and successors will be limited to those who work, volunteer or study on the site. It is another idea that should have happened already.

In vibrant counterpoint to these refreshingly practical “green” plans, MOCA is to be commended for bravely reopening the “Steel Cloud” controversy. In this high-tech winning entry in a 1988 city-sponsored competition for a West Coast Gateway immigration monument, the New York-based firm of Rashid/Couture designed an elegant metaphor of the late 20th-Century (post-) machine age that would occupy the air space over a major downtown freeway--a living monument accommodating galleries, libraries, cinemas, parks and plazas “that are intersected by the fluid and transient space of the city.”

“Shifts in funding priorities” and the heated controversy over the winning scheme’s appropriateness determined that the “Steel Cloud” would unfortunately not be built. While it struck some as “chaotic” and even “threatening,” and was portrayed in the media as a “monumental folly,” others defended it as a “deeply poetic concretization of the nature of its site and moment in time.” Smith reintroduced it into the current exhibition because she believed that the polemic obscured “one aspect of the project’s potential role as connective tissue within the urban fabric by its reclamation for pedestrian, cultural and recreational usage of an otherwise dead zone of space over a sunken freeway in a city center.”

Certain projects in “Urban Revisions,” such as Agrest and Gondelsonas’s “Vision Plan” for Des Moines, Iowa, seem overly schematic and dauntingly opaque. Others, such as Studio Works’ wry “Conceptual Master Plan for Grand Center, St. Louis” are, like most of that firm’s work, beautiful to experience as works of art though difficult to read as realizable urban design. In fact, most of the exhibition’s entries have liabilities as well as assets, the former of which the MOCA curators have been nonjudgmentally reluctant to criticize.

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A partial exception comes in the presentation of the much-disputed Los Angeles Playa Vista project of Maguire-Thomas Partners. Planned for the last sizable area of open land in the L.A. coastal region, Playa Vista is intended to house 25,000 people in a densely developed tract. Praiseworthy features include the containment and treatment of its own waste water and the ostensible “restoration” of the adjacent Ballona Wetlands, one of the few remaining tidal marshes in Southern California. In his catalogue essay, Mike Davis observes that “even giant developers like Maguire Thomas have learned to speak impeccable Green--if only, in the cynical view of some, to better despoil the last remaining wetlands.” The ecologically progressive intentions of the planners and the commitment to “affordable housing” by their team of architects (generally characterized as “Post-Modernist” and “Neo-traditional”) go far, in the view of curator Smith, to counterbalance “the historicist and vernacular impulses of that movement’s urge to re-create community on the model of a turn-of-the-century American town.”

Perhaps Smith does not go far enough in lamenting the fact that the turn from the 19th to the 20th Century is the architectural model for a development occurring as the world now turns from the 20th into the 21st Century. With the exception of designs by such members of the team as Ricardo Legoretto, the problem with Playa Vista is its generally regressive architecture, its pastiche of historicist vocabularies parading as a “model community.” In looking at its models and drawings of mimetic quotations from the past, one wonders what such stuff is doing in a Museum of Contemporary Art. Since most “post-modernist” architects are said to admire “theme parks” and especially Disneyland, one wonders if Playa Vista could not include a Tomorrowland that would engage progressive architects and provide alternative visions for the 21st Century.

The chance and the motivation to raise such questions is the ultimate payoff of “Urban Revisions.” While encountering the projects, you reassess old values, old positions, old solutions, and when you leave the museum, you look at life, and the city, differently.

* “Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown . Through July 24. Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. (213) 626-6222.