Knocking Down Walls

In New York, there’s Silicon Alley, the downtown district where old factories and warehouses, transformed once into artists lofts, are now home to a booming new-media industry. In San Francisco, there’s Multimedia Gulch, the once-decaying industrial area where computer wizards and creative talent are now driving a similar urban renaissance.

In Los Angeles, there’s . . . Culver City?

It seems far-fetched. But developer Frederick Samitaur Smith believes that creative architectural make-overs of old industrial spaces can help transform this unglamorous Westside enclave into a much-needed focal point for the new-media industry in Los Angeles.

That’s a tall order. The ineluctably sprawling nature of Southern California means the Web designers and software companies and Internet entertainment firms that make up this new industry will never be as concentrated as they are in New York and San Francisco.

Several other parts of Los Angeles County--including Santa Monica, Marina del Rey, Hollywood and the Pasadena/Glendale/Burbank corridor--already boast a large and growing number of new-media firms. USC recently opened a high-tech business incubator that it hopes will jump-start the “Figueroa Corridor” between the university and downtown.

But Culver City has a number of important assets. And even if, as seems likely, it ends up becoming just one new-media center among several, the efforts underway there offer an illuminating look at how and why industrial communities take root.

It’s an issue of no small moment for Los Angeles. New media is, proverbially, the industry of the 21st century, the business that will provide hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs and help Southern California sustain itself as an economic powerhouse and a world entertainment and media capital.

New York and San Francisco will certainly get their share. Internet businesses related to publishing and advertising, for example, have a natural home in the Big Apple. More technology-intensive enterprises--those that make Web search software, or new types of multimedia computer languages--are likely to live mostly in the Bay Area.

For the entertainment-related products and services that are likely to be at the center of the next big wave of new-media development, though, Los Angeles is poised to dominate. There’s a great deal of activity underway already, and since the Internet won’t reach its potential as an entertainment medium until it’s capable of handling video on a broad basis--still a decade or so away--the best is yet to come.

But the absence of an identifiable new-media district is a real issue. Theory holds that cyberspace and modern communications are making distance and location irrelevant--and what industry would be more subject to such a change than the new-media industry itself? But in the real world, it’s just the opposite.

Young computer geeks and creative artists want to hang out and drink coffee and go clubbing with their contemporaries. The raucous parties in the lower-Broadway loft space of Jupiter Communications founder Josh Harris are central to the identity of Silicon Alley; one need only stroll around Multimedia Gulch at lunchtime, amid swarms of twentysomething hipsters who hope they’re on to the next big thing, to see why young companies gravitate to the area.

By comparison, Culver City’s industrial district, with its dusty streets and warehouses and shuttered aerospace manufacturing facilities, is still a veritable ghost town. But here and there, in some cases almost hidden unless you’re looking for them, are buildings that Smith and his design partner, the renowned architect Eric Owen Moss, believe represent the future.

The new spaces Moss has created are airy and dramatic, with brick and wood and metal and even sewer pipes cut and combined into an arresting pastiche of neo-industrial forms. So far, about 15 buildings with 360,000 square feet of space have been renovated, and several hundred thousand more square feet are on the drawing board.

Smith has some rather exotic theories about the relationship among architecture, industry and creativity. He explains, for example, that certain basic geometries in nature lie at the heart of science and technology, and those forms stimulate creativity.

“I realized if I could build buildings with those same geometries,” he says, “I could attract the high-tech guys.” The staircase of one building, as an example, is a double helix.

The building designs are really the work of Moss. But Smith has plenty of his own design principles too: “Art is created by tension, so the idea is to create an environment with a certain tension. . . . I want to apply chaos theory to social interaction: Small areas of order can control large areas of disorder.” Pretentious as this might sound, when you wander about the buildings you kind of see what he means.

Indeed, though Smith often gets carried away with his talk of “Joycean” spaces and “binary systems,” the underlying idea--that creative work spaces stimulate creative work--is simple and sound.

“The buildings all violate rules--they don’t have right angles, you’re always discovering something new,” says Michael Moscha, co-founder of W3-design, an innovative Web design firm that has rented space in one of Smith’s buildings. “That enhances creativity--it’s not just a cubicle plopped in here.” Clients tend to be impressed too.

Ray Rocuant, founder of Metaphor Imaging, a digital-imaging firm with 18 employees, observes that “architecture is really the environment for the interaction of workers. We’re going through a transition in work methods, learning to work more interactively, and Moss’ architecture contributes to that sort of environment.”

It helps, of course, that the price was right. A big reason that Multimedia Gulch and Silicon Alley have evolved the way they have is that the industrial spaces were not merely conducive to creativity--they were also cheap. Innovative architecture is generally expensive, but Smith has cut some generous lease deals in the early phases to help build a critical mass of tenants.

Occupancy numbers are important. Moscha, Rocuant and others stress the centrality of community to the creative process--having other people in similar businesses nearby, or even in the same building. Rocuant says a big part of his decision to locate in Culver City was the belief that “this could be the next frontier of techno-creative companies.”

They’re mostly betting on the outcome. Already, though, there are about 1,400 people employed in Smith’s buildings. There have been some important renovations elsewhere in town, notably in the central Culver City area along Washington Boulevard. Sony Pictures Entertainment, a vital anchor and lure for the Culver City new-media scene, is, like many movie studios, outgrowing the confines of its venerable lot.

The city government has played an important role in the redevelopment--even agreeing, after much heated debate, to allow Moss’ architecture in one case to qualify as art, thus exempting Smith from a 1% public art subsidy. The fact that Culver City is small in itself makes many a bureaucratic obstacle easier to manage--though several of Smith’s projects are actually just over the city line in Los Angeles. (The developer is effusive about the responsiveness of city officials there too.)

Of course, none of this would matter if Culver City were not blessed with a strategic location. It’s near the Westside, where much of the entertainment and media industries have been steadily moving for years. It’s close to Hollywood and downtown. Even Pasadena and Burbank are accessible.

The combination of these elements--a creative developer, a good location, effective government and lots of underused industrial space--is what makes it all work. Smith and Moss have big plans for the future--they’re even hoping to build parks and a sort of aerial city, with buildings on stilts, along the abandoned railroad right-of-way that snakes through town. And if they succeed, they’ll have effected a transformation that could hardly be more telling about Los Angeles: from aerospace-based industrial district to center of techno-creativity.

Ultimately, the most important lesson here has less to do with the competition between Culver City and Santa Monica or Burbank than with the contrast between the Culver City efforts and another would-be new-media center: the DreamWorks SKG development at Playa Vista, which now appears to be coming apart.

When the DreamWorks project was announced, it was hailed by many civic leaders as a milestone development that would, among other things, become an entertainment technology and new-media hub. The city of Los Angeles offered rich financial incentives to help it along. Yet it was never clear how the creation of very-high-end office space next to a new movie studio was going to nurture the development of up-and-coming creative technology companies.

Rather than gold-plated projects enjoying special subsidies on land that’s already very attractive, what Los Angeles needs is more organic, bootstrap efforts by innovative entrepreneurs, cutting-edge architects, adventuresome tenants and responsive public officials. Not only the new-media industry, but anyone with a stake in revitalized urban centers, will benefit in the end.