THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Building Up L.A.’s Image : Many have given up on the City of Angels, but not architect John Kaliski. Some say this young urban philosopher has the right ideas for making Los Angeles great.

Time magazine recently named John Kaliski of Los Angeles one of this country’s 50 most promising leaders under age 40. A quick spin through his resume makes you wonder why.

Here’s a guy, 38, trained at Yale, all the right credentials, allegedly a force in the architecture world--and without a building to call his own.

Question: “Mr. Kaliski, isn’t it odd that you’re a respected architect, yet you haven’t designed or built a thing by yourself?”

“Untrue,” he says with a smile. “I did the small courtyard outside my own house and the addition to a house in Laurel Canyon.”

Besides, Kaliski explains, “architecture is an old person’s game.” Big jobs usually go to those in their 40s and 50s. And he isn’t exactly misspending his youth.

Kaliski has delved deeply into the history of cities and what makes them great. He has taught urban design and architecture at Houston University and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He has lived in Los Angeles for 10 years and studied its “incredible grid of boulevards” and diverse neighborhoods as if they were bugs under a microscope.

As principal architect for the Community Redevelopment Agency from 1988-93, he dealt with a Byzantine swirl of building codes and conflicting opinions on how to revitalize such down-and-out places as Hollywood Boulevard, Adams-Normandie and parts of South Los Angeles.

On this circuitous route toward his long-term goal of “making buildings,” Kaliski unwittingly carved a national reputation as a respected philosopher of urban design--and as a bard of the “fantastic possibility” that is Los Angeles.

He believes in small changes: Improve the city spot by spot, enhance the urban landscape with small-scale buildings and lots of trees that delight the eye and preserve the existing “California-ness.”

Even his admirers aren’t so sure about that approach.

“John looks at change from a microscopic perspective. But smallness equals smallness and can add up to insignificance,” says Kaliski’s friend Stefanos D. Polyzoides, an architect, urban planner and associate professor at USC. “My sense is that change happens in all kinds of increments, some small and others quite big.”

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“The era of heroic architecture is over,” Kaliski says in his soft voice as he pours tea in the woodsy, loftlike Santa Monica office he shares with architect Aleks Istanbullu, whose firm he joined in 1993. Together, they are creating the Chatsworth Station Depot and Child Care Center for the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

“Designing is not just an individual aesthetic act,” Kaliski says. It is a chance to make a positive contribution to the culture.

And what the culture of Los Angeles needs, he believes, are not high-density housing projects and monumental structures, but smaller, personalized buildings that preserve the idyllic “city in a garden” mystique for which Los Angeles is known.

The massively elegant new Central Library in Downtown, for example, has “symbolic value as a temple of learning and a part of history,” Kaliski says. But he might have spent the $200 million earmarked for the project differently.

“In an ethical framework of trying to enrich as many people as possible, what probably should have been done is to simply restore what was originally there by rebuilding a fantastic Downtown branch,” he says. “Then use the rest of the money to help create much better branch libraries throughout the city.”

Or the money could have been invested in the information superhighway, to buy a network of personal computers at about $1,000 each. That way, people throughout the city could link up with the Library of Congress and other information sources.

“We need to start improving many places simultaneously if we are to have a positive impact on more people’s lives,” Kaliski says.

He would be happy to start making those improvements right in his own neighborhood, he says. He and his wife, Lorraine Wild--a graphic designer whom he met and married while both were at Yale--plan to raise a family and grow old in their two-bedroom Mediterranean-style house. It’s set on a 50-foot-by-100-foot lot south of Hancock Park.

Far from considering the property small--which it certainly is, by upscale housing standards--the couple imagines adding a handsome Kaliski-designed rental unit with its own garden out back.

It would provide ideal living quarters for a student, extra income and security for the Kaliskis in their old age--and increase everyone’s sense of community, he explains.

“When my income drops, which it surely will when I’m old, I’d like to be able to stay in the house, have it nurture me as an old person as it does now when I’m young. That’s the type of American dream that’s been denied to a lot of us. We have to move when we get older.”

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But the rental unit is a pipe dream, he says. Zoning ordinances prohibit such additions in his area. And when bureaucrats hear his unorthodox ideas for increasing density in such sacrosanct single-family neighborhoods, shivers of horror ensue. They accuse Kaliski of wanting to “Manhattanize” the city.

But he believes most young people would applaud his views. “It’s a generational thing,” he says. “Older people cling to the ideals of the ‘50s and ‘60s,” when lots of land, space and separation were considered appurtenances to the successful life.

“People my age and younger generally don’t think like that. We, too, value privacy and space--but we don’t define it the same way. And we do not value it at the expense of a sense of community.”

Kaliski’s vision for neighborhoods like his involves adding small multiple-unit dwellings--designed to look like private homes, with individual gardens--to underused land near corners where residential streets connect with boulevards.

“It wouldn’t change the way a neighborhood looks, because nothing that exists would be removed or altered; something attractive and valuable would be added to what’s already there,” he says. “You never improve anything by destroying it.”

Kaliski’s ideas apparently have wide appeal. He lectures nationally on urban planning and architecture to professional groups, universities and museum councils.

Los Angeles architect Rick Keating, of the firm DMJM Keating, designed the much-praised Gas Company building in Downtown. He also hired Kaliski at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, where the young architect worked immediately after college. “He was unusual,” Keating recalls, because he was so grounded in reality. “Too many architects are into deep bull, with an intellectual approach that’s awfully highfalutin and is almost impossible to translate into everyday terms.”

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Kaliski’s down-to-earth approach is perhaps even more surprising given his privileged upbringing in Wilmington, Del. His father, a Yale graduate and DuPont executive, was the family breadwinner. His mother spent much of her time chauffeuring her son back-and-forth to sports and school.

His Yale experience was peppered with achievement. Eminent art historian and Yale professor Vincent Scully recalls that he selected Kaliski as a teaching assistant because he was “so very bright” and extremely alert to “the shifts in architecture away from heroic modernism to a much less pretentious and gentler kind of design.”

After college, Kaliski took the predictable architect’s path. In four years at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill--first in Houston, then in Los Angeles--he collaborated on a wide range of projects, from skyscrapers to homes and small commercial buildings. He soon realized, however, that he wanted more.

“I didn’t just want to build things. I wanted to understand the fundamental forces that cause them to be built. I wanted to understand how cities are made.”

He got his wish when the Community Redevelopment Agency came hunting for a chief architect. Kaliski won the job, he believes, because of his versatile experience as an architect, teacher and writer. “I’d proved I could communicate,” he says. “At the CRA, you have to bridge the gap between politicians, developers and citizen activist groups--all of whom may have differing opinions on any project.”

Even more attractive, perhaps, was Kaliski’s positive passion for Los Angeles.

Where some see the city as a maze of clogged freeways leading to interchangeable communities, Kaliski sees it as an amazing circuit board of “those fabulous boulevards.” He will rhapsodize at length about the potential virtues of such surface streets as Victory, Van Nuys, Roscoe, Hollywood, Wilshire, Olympic, Pico and Lincoln.

“The future of the physical form of Los Angeles lies in those boulevards and depends entirely upon what happens to them.”

He has walked, driven, photographed and drawn maps of hundreds of boulevard miles in his attempt to understand how these streets sustain Los Angeles, and how they might propel it into the 21st Century.

He is about to wrap up a project, funded by a $15,000 grant from the National Education Assn., detailing his suggested improvements for half a mile of Van Nuys Boulevard. He zoomed in on that slice of L.A., he says, because it encompasses not only much of the city’s history, but also its economic and social diversity.

This and other “porous corridors” in “Boulevard City,” as Kaliski sometimes calls Los Angeles, define our urban life. They are our passageways to shops, markets, malls, schools and freeways. They are our source of escape, our way home. And they feed our gathering spots, such as the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles and Old Town in Pasadena.

Kaliski envisions many more of these pedestrian-oriented streets dotting our neighborhoods, allowing us to set out on foot rather than by car.

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Margaret Crawford, chair of architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Kaliski teaches, says Kaliski “believes in Los Angeles, which is something very few people do these days. Most architects want to change the city into something that it isn’t. John wants to make it into more of what it really is.”

In his five years at the CRA, which has long been dogged by political squabbles, Kaliski says he witnessed the demise of the much-hoped-for revitalization of Downtown.

He blames city officials for allowing Broadway and Spring Street in particular to languish. “Make no mistake,” he says. “If the leaders of Downtown don’t put their energy into those two streets, then they should just kiss Downtown goodby.”

The urban core’s problems are immense, Kaliski says. The area has become a clash of cultures and values. “In my years at CRA, we were absolutely unsuccessful at building bridges between the people using Broadway and Spring and those who own the land there. Or between people who occupy (Bunker) Hill and those who occupy the flats,” Kaliski says.

He thinks Downtown revitalization can occur if the city helps create a diverse residential population--”Just building residences for swinging singles won’t cut the mustard,” he says--and if the city changes zoning laws and forcefully backs renovation of existing buildings to create a vibrant atmosphere that is culturally inclusive. “It has to be a kind of ladder, with rungs on which everybody can move up.”

Kaliski laments the building of monumental malls, gated communities and fortress-like hotels such as the Bonaventure, all of which distance the haves from the have-nots.

Even the official city plan, called “Concepts Los Angeles,” feeds into that, he says. Drawn in 1974, it proposes creation of a few high-density population pockets to be served by rapid transit, leaving urban and suburban residential areas relatively untouched.

“That’s not how people want to live,” Kaliski says.

And he’s hopeful they won’t have to. Deep down, the mythical city-in-a-garden of ancient literature is possible right here. “We’ve got it all. We just have to put it together.”

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John Kaliski Age: 38

Native?: No. Born in Wilmington, Del. Lives in Los Angeles, just south of Hancock Park.

Family: Married to Lorraine Wild, a graphic designer and teacher at Southern California Institute of the Arts.

Passions: Gardening (“I love it but I’m terrible at it.”)

On South Los Angeles: “The leadership of this city never decided something significant should be done there--it’s just that simple.”

On Downtown’s Bunker Hill: “They can build all the skyscrapers they want there. People won’t come and visit as long as Broadway and Spring Street are falling apart.”

On his own 1,100-square-foot home: “I’m proud that I live in a tiny house and that I’m connected to all the other people in L.A. who are hanging on by the skin of their teeth.”