L.A.’s Only Constant Is Change In Its Architecture

A recent issue of a national magazine cites an exchange between a local billionaire and the director of the Getty Museum during a tour of the new Getty Center in Brentwood, designed by architect Richard Meier. “This is too good for Los Angeles” the billionaire was reported as saying, finding the building complex somehow too solid and permanent to be appreciated in a city that is only “transitory.” The museum director defended the cultural complex by contrasting its solidity with Los Angeles’ previous history, implying that the Getty marked a new stage of the city’s civic maturity.

I mention this exchange not because I think the billionaire meant to demote Los Angeles as a cultural capital--he has supported too many institutions in the city to be misunderstood here--but because, taken literally, it evokes all too much of what L.A. means to its residents. On the one hand, there is the pervasive notion that the city is not quite “first class,” a late-comer to “Western civ”; a small player in the cultural-institutional stakes that measure the power of New York and Washington, let alone London and Paris. It is a glamorous but shallow city, arriviste to the hilt. On the other hand, there is the sense that it is precisely this condition that makes Los Angeles special, that what the Getty director had termed a “cultural structure built hastily out of recycled and sometimes cheap parts” is, in fact, OK, even to be celebrated.

Of course, L.A. artists, writers and architects have understood and worked with this particular quality for a long time--the temporary, the transitory, the recycled has become part of the cultural substance of Los Angeles. In these terms, that conversation at the Getty reflects a version of the West Coast vs. East Coast sparring match that has been going for more than a century and is probably to be dismissed as lightly as it was undertaken.

But on another level, the split of opinion over the Getty--a split that will be emphasized in the coming months with its opening--has far larger implications than those determining the self-image of Los Angeles. It reveals the difficulty of understanding the underlying processes that historically have joined architecture to culture and have forged “architectural cultures,” so to speak, for all modern metropolises, regardless of tradition or wealth.

First, it is clear that if the Getty if the Getty is “too good” for Los Angeles, it is not because the city has failed to appreciate great architecture or attract great buildings; from Greene and Greene in Pasadena, Rudolph M. Schindler on the beach, Richard Neutra in the hills and Frank Lloyd Wright in Hollywood, to Frank Gehry in malls, museums and, hopefully, concert halls, Eric Owen Moss in Culver City, Morphosis in houses and restaurants and now Meier at the Getty, Jose Rafael Moneo for the archdiocese and Rem Koolhaas for Universal--to mention only a few of those who have contributed to the city’s roster in this century. In this sense, no building is or has ever been too good for Los Angeles, or any other big city, for that matter.

It is equally clear that no culture is made purely out of whole cloth. In architecture, as in all other cultural activity, there is little that is not recycled, either literally, using the parts of one building to build another (as the construction of Baroque Rome meant ransacking the Roman Forum), or figuratively, in the revival of a historical style and, in the case of the Getty, abstracting qualities of many historical structures to recycle them on the top of the hill. Not to mention the long tradition of “outsider art” represented by Watts Towers, a triumph of recycling.

In this sense, to qualify the conversation between the billionaire and the director in this way is also to say something about the nature of Los Angeles, its architecture and culture, that throws into relief a quality of all urban agglomerations and their cultures.

For, despite every generation’s desire for permanence, for the enduring monument, metropolitan cultures have ever been transitory, often transient, following the fortunes of their nomadic, displaced and immigrant populations. Perhaps the only difference between European metropolises and Los Angeles in this regard is that where Paris, London or Rome were forced to build on themselves--using a previous urban fabric as the foundations of a new one--Los Angeles, at least till now, has had the luxury of continuous expansion. It grew outward, moving from one site to the next, so that the ruins of the past sit as uneasy reminders of the threat of impermanence beside the upstart structures of the present.

Here, what is hidden beneath the layers of an almost archeological site in the traditional city is laid out horizontally, so that history, and the inevitable decay and heterogeneity it brings, is displayed for all to see. And this is not simply the isolated case of a city that doesn’t know how to clean up after itself; entire megalopolitan realms from Asia to Malaysia are building and unbuilding at such speed that the life span of formerly “permanent” structures is reduced to years, even months--the cycle of obsolescence for architecture matching that for cars or computers. In this sense, Los Angeles is far from being the “city of the future” heralded by both its boosters and detractors. Rather, it is the present tense of this future: revealing now what will rapidly be the norm worldwide.

The special qualities of L.A. architecture have consistently reflected this process, imported and mingled, revived and revised, borrowed and stolen. The apparently universal “international style” of modernism--with its ubiquitous white stucco walls and reinforced concrete frames--easily entered into visual discussion with the Mission tradition and the Arts and Crafts practices of early modernism. These latter were seamlessly transformed using contemporary materials in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when woods honed by hand or machine were introduced to temper the mood of Art Deco and corporate modern in, for example, the work of Charles and Ray Eames. More recently, taking the metaphor of recycling literally, architects have turned to industrial “junk,” whether collaged roughly onto tradition, as in Gehry’s house in Santa Monica, or worked and welded, as in the prosthetic interiors of Morphosis.

Contemporary architects have begun to look on Los Angeles as an ever-transforming surface, a site formed of a crust of diverse materials deposited on its shaky geological underpinnings. Their interventions, such as those of Moss in Culver City, have taken on the aspect of geomorphic rifts, echoing the distant rumbles below. Meier’s Getty, with its resonances of high modernism and hill-town urbanism, takes in all these qualities and more, cutting and pasting the space and light of the entire metropolis in its kaleidoscopic complexities, in a work that is neither “too good” nor too “permanent” but one that has already felt the L.A. effect.

This L.A. effect, it is worth noting, is one no longer confined to Los Angeles itself. Following the lead of the movie industry, the city has emerged as a major exporter of architecture. Some of the best L.A. architecture is now seeded in the old cities of Europe, from Paris to Prague, and in the expanding cities of Asia, from Tokyo to Hong Kong. No example is as spectacular as Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, opening this month in Bilbao, Spain. The thrusting forms of its walls, covered with titanium scales, their rumpled surfaces reflecting silver, gray and gold, according to the light, sit surprisingly well in Bilbao, a rundown port city, scattered with the detritus of two centuries of industrial obsolescence. In that Old World city, an architecture developed out of the special conditions of Los Angeles finds common cause with a European town in desperate need of a recycling of its own.

The architecture of Los Angeles thus emerges as a direct response to its continuously changing culture. While it would be difficult to abstract a single model for urban architecture out of its multiple forms, or even to identify an “L.A. school,” the process by which Los Angeles has consistently taken in other architectures and made of them its own brand of expression remains instructive for all late 20th-century cities.