A New Force on the Downtown Cultural Scene

Sometimes big dreams come in little packages--and sometimes the reverse is true.

Tucked away on the fringes of the USC campus, the Colburn School of Performing Arts once contented itself with training children with ambitions of musical grandeur. On Nov. 12, however, the school will break ground for a monumental new structure to be built on Grand Avenue next to the Museum of Contemporary Art, recasting itself as a major force in Los Angeles’ downtown cultural scene.

It is a bold undertaking for a little school, nearly doubling its enrollment to 1,500 children and cunningly positioning it for a future rapport with the nearby Music Center resident companies. The $23-million structure, scheduled for completion in 1998, will include a 420-seat chamber music hall that can be used for public concerts and a reconstructed version of violinist Jascha Heifetz’s 1946-48 music studio. As it rises between MOCA and the Music Center, the school’s new building will stoke fantasies about the future of the downtown strip that is the core of the city’s cultural agenda.

Founded in 1950, the Colburn School began with humble roots and has never had a secure home. It caters to children 2 years old through high school, and opened as an appendage to USC’s music school. In the ‘70s, children practiced in a barracks in the middle of a tarmac parking lot. In 1980, the school moved to its current site: a warehouse shared with USC’s television studio, where Colburn students now study in repetitive rows of dull green cubicles and only two of the rooms are air-conditioned. The only relief is the high arching roof above, covered in shimmering silver insulation and supported by old wooden trusses.

Administrators point to two reasons for the move to sleeker quarters: to escape both the congested site and the perception, fed by the 1992 riots, that the current neighborhood is not safe.

Money for the new building, conveniently, is not an issue: Richard Colburn, patriarch of the school’s founding family and an avid violist, decided more than a decade ago that he would pay for construction of a new home for the school whenever a suitable site could be found.

But the search has been an epic in itself. The school’s director, Toby Mayman, toured the city for 13 years looking for the ideal location--options included a funeral home and an old garment factory warehouse. At one point, plans were made to share a space along Fourth and Olive streets with the now-defunct Dance Gallery.

But as the economy stalled at the start of the new decade, and downtown’s appeal for big business waned, Mayman saw an opportunity for a more prominent site, and the school’s ambitions grew. In early 1993, she approached the Community Redevelopment Agency about the site adjacent to MOCA, and this month the school and the agency will sign a 99-year lease on the property. “We just requested it,” she says.

Inevitably, the site’s proximity to lofty works like Arata Isozaki’s colorful MOCA building and Frank O. Gehry’s flamboyant design for the Disney Concert Hall raised architectural ambitions. After a brief search, Mayman hired Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer--designers of the Robert O. Anderson wing at the L.A. County Museum of Art and of the expansion of downtown’s Central Library--to build her dream.

The firm’s Grand Avenue design is a lavish expansion of the school’s mandate: At 55,000 square feet, it is eight times the size of the USC facility. The vision that comes to mind is New York’s Juilliard School: a gaggle of the world’s most talented music students rubbing shoulders with the artistic elite of the city. “There are no plans in the works yet,” Mayman says, “but I know [the Music Center] is very eager to have us nearby.”

Planned for a lot that connects an elevated section of Grand Avenue to Olive Street two stories below, the entire Roman brick building will be set over a new multistory garage to give it a more aggressive presence. In the model, an enormous “lantern” with sloping zinc-clad walls--the roof structure of the chamber music hall--echoes MOCA’s roofscape, which is dotted with pyramids. And a narrow park between the two buildings will weld them together.

With its looming facade, the Colburn School’s design is aggressively monumental. Alongside the Isozaki building’s more languorous silhouette, which slips seductively into the ground, it appears almost self-consciously aware of its sudden importance.

Inside, the scale of the child and the scale of the city never engage each other fully: An entry lobby reaches from the street to the proposed garden in back, but the gesture lacks the power of the urban scale it mimics. The connection between the teaching studios and the chamber music hall is muted. And in the music hall itself, the giant roof structure is hidden above more intimate curved panels as if to conceal the bleakness of the void above.

It is a puzzling tension, and the mixed-up scale evokes a thought from “Alice in Wonderland”: “The first thing I’ve got to do is to grow to my right size again. . . . That would be the best plan.”

But that tension--between the scale of violin-wielding children and the enormity of the cityscape--also provokes dreams of what could have been. There are hints of a grander vision here, like the small garden that joins the museum and the school and the proposed extension of MOCA’s plaza. But they remain fantasies.

During the ‘30s, utopian-minded Soviets such as N.A. Milyutin proposed “linear cities” that arranged different urban functions--industry, housing, parks and culture--along endless parallel bands. It was an idea that had its roots in the assembly-line theories of Ford and Taylor.

Here, the bands of roadways, cultural institutions, green zone and housing suggest the possibility for a new urban form--one that is less rigid but weaves together all of the various elements necessary for urban life: passages that puncture the street wall and reach into unknown worlds, and secret gardens with the pattering feet of children.

Great architecture or not, the Colburn School will bring to downtown the raw energy of childish play and concentration, an energy that will shift the culture of the street for the better. For the children, it will neatly tie them into a larger artistic and musical culture. What is missing is a more radical design that embraces all the conflicting scales of the city.