How Today’s Student Architects . . . : . . . See Tomorrow’s Southern California

At the end of the last spring semester of the 20th century, the next generation of architects and city planners is putting the finishing touches on the future of Southern California.

With one eye on the millennium and the other on their grade-point averages, college students are completing class assignments that sketch out the great what’s-ahead in metropolitan life.

Their ideas--immense and modest, serious and silly--are being hatched on drawing tables and computer screens at such campuses as UCLA, USC, Southern California Institute of Architecture, or SCI-ARC, Woodbury University, Cal Poly Pomona and the Otis College of Art and Design. With a freedom denied their elders, these students are using Southern California as their personal urban laboratory.

Envisioning the future is a tricky business. After all, if 1960s predictions had panned out, people would be commuting in spaceships and using picture phones by now. Few anticipated the impact of bioengineering or the Internet.

But whether any of the student projects gets built is not the point, said Margaret Crawford, urban design professor at SCI-ARC. Imagining new possibilities, she said, “changes the way people think about things. And that is the first step to doing something different.”

Not surprisingly, the students show a youthful disregard for real-world limits of financing, zoning, politics and building codes. They have, however, an optimistic sense of what may make a better, 21st century Los Angeles.

“The nice thing about school is that the students don’t have to pay too much attention to be realistic, they can fly around,” said USC architecture professor Roger Sherwood. “They push the envelope a lot against what is realistic. They’re supposed to dream.”

Besides, Southern California encourages experimentation, said architect Eric A. Kahn, who teaches a course on future trends at SCI-ARC.

“I think Los Angeles allows rapid changes to whatever forces win out,” he said, citing the freeways, and the water projects that created a city in a desert. “Other cities like Manhattan are more fixed. They have more of a sense of history, and the terrain is much more sacred in a way.”

Some young people, particularly foreign students, are appalled by the region’s urban sprawl and dependence on cars. They are some of the strongest advocates of change, sometimes planting conceptual seeds from other countries into the adaptable California landscape.

The result is an eclectic sweep of ideas to remake Southern California. A sampling:

* Several projects recycle historic landmarks into icons for the Information Age.

Michael O’Bryan, a Woodbury University architecture major from Montrose, wants to make over the Hollywood sign. What began as a real estate advertisement on the mountain separating Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley mutated into a film industry icon. Why not change it again, he asks, into an “actual piece of what it symbolizes?”

He proposes building structures behind the sign, in the shape of its letters, to house a digital film and video Library.

A building on the hill’s Valley side would display huge pictures from movies and TV to residents below. An aerial tram would provide access.

O’Bryan, 26, insists it is feasible, but likely to enrage preservationists. “People think I’m completely crazy or they think it’s a great idea,” he said.

*

Cal Poly Pomona student Brian Holland proposes a seven-story addition above the east wing of the downtown Central Library for an Internet library linked to other great libraries around the world. In stacks of private pods, researchers would see digitized images on screens.

This International Library 2000 would encourage a sense of “a global identity,” yet keep the historical setting of downtown, said Holland, 23, of Glendora.

The future, he said, is “about information and who has access to information.” Everyone one day may have unlimited access from their home laptop, Holland said, but for now, “it seems a good in-between step.”

*

Assigned to imagine a new future for the 12-story Capitol Records tower in Hollywood, Woodbury University student Badia Asaad also relied on movies. She would convert the circular office building into a film complex and tourist hot spot.

Several interior floors would be removed for “a spiral theater,” with viewers walking up ramps past a series of film screens. The top two stories would become an Imax amphitheater.

The most unusual feature would be a curvy liquid-glass screen trussed around half the building like an outer skin. Audiences could watch movies from inside or on exterior platforms. And, surely provoking Caltrans protests, the big screen would face drivers on the Hollywood Freeway.

Asaad, a 22-year-old from Saudi Arabia, concedes the plan has many hurdles, including cost. School, she explains, is the place “to do things we won’t be able to do after we graduate.”

* Students looked for ways to bolster public spaces and parks.

Koray Duman, who came from Turkey to attend UCLA’s graduate program in architecture, considers beaches here the most important spots for people of all sorts to share turf. He became intrigued by oil storage tanks on Vista del Mar across from the beach and just north of Manhattan Beach houses.

Duman, 23, suggests taking the roofs off those 30-foot-tall tanks and building recreational structures that could hold a cafe, skate and bicycle rental shops, dressing rooms, lifeguard stands and a place for surf clubs.

Not exactly Utopian, he said, but “I think it can be done.”

*

Cal Poly Pomona student Carol San Antonio would convert the Los Angeles River between 4th and 6th streets into a center for such extreme sports as bungee jumping, rappelling, skateboarding, in-line skating and kayaking.

Daredevil ramps, a 160-foot steel tower on a bridge, and zip lines that can carry riders across the river would form this urban play land. Locker rooms and a cafe would be built on the river’s concrete banks.

The plan would give more people access to sports normally limited to mountains and wild rivers, said the 24-year-old from Cerritos. San Antonio, an in-line skating enthusiast, hopes to spur interest in the river while keeping the walls to provide protection during flooding.

“People really have this bad connotation of what the river is,” she said. “That’s because it was made to look less like a river and more like a sewer.”

* Whatever the future brings, people always need decent places to live, shop, grab a cup of coffee and have a night out.

Surrounded by the city’s asphalt and concrete, Liz Falletta imagines gardens and parks on the roofs of supermarkets. With the necessary structural reinforcements, the new green spots would allow shoppers to fulfill food needs and the desire to enjoy a slice of nature, said the SCI-ARC graduate student from North Carolina.

Stores might sell herbs, flowers and vegetables grown there, or offer an hour of supervised child care on the roof park while parents shop. “It could be a marketing tool,” Falletta, 28, said.

Los Angeles, she said, encourages futuristic thinking much more than other cities she has lived in: “Everything seems possible here. People don’t immediately say ‘That can’t be done.’ ”

*

USC student Carol Chacon, 23, wants to create a new neighborhood on Terminal Island. The so-called Fish Harbor area is now occupied by aging warehouses and oil storage tanks. “The worse conditions are, the easier it is for me to imagine something different,” Chacon said. “I really get excited when you let go of the grim circumstances it is in now and say: ‘Wow, what a location!’ ”

Her plan calls for a 25-story luxury apartment building at the water’s edge and 30 blocks of family housing in low-rise courtyard structures. Warehouses are turned into markets, offices and living lofts. Ferries link the mini-city’s 5,000 residents to San Pedro’s Ports O’ Call Village across the channel.

Chacon, who grew up near USC, knows that not everyone wants to live so close to shipping lanes and tankers. But many would appreciate the dramatic vistas. “I think the statement I have is not to let the land go to waste. Let’s not let it be just a dump,” she said.

*

Corina Gallardo, a student at Otis College of Art and Design, grew up on the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador, where she knew nearly everyone in town. She misses that sense of community in Southern California’s urban sprawl.

So, she has designed a coffee shop to stand flush against the street, enclosing the sidewalk and forcing passers-by to walk through the cafe. Seating would be arranged for a more communal atmosphere.

“My idea is to force people to interact with each other,” said Gallardo, 26. “One of the things I noticed about L.A. is that everything is way too fast, too much fast food. Too much fast driving. You drink your espresso and run. I wanted a place where people step back and relax for a while.”

*

USC graduate student Blair Duque surveyed Southern California’s ethnic centers, but found one missing: a Little Manila for local Filipinos. “There’s a real need for it,” said the 29-year-old Filipino American from Northern California. He proposes using the site of St. Vibiana’s Roman Catholic cathedral in downtown Los Angeles. The 123-year-old church, which suffered earthquake damage and faces possible demolition, is now closed.

Under Duque’s plan, buildings surrounding the cathedral would be replaced by two-story structures built to look like traditional Filipino village houses. Think corrugated metal roofing, stucco walls, banana trees and lots of terraces. Those would contain shops and restaurants linked by walkways. The church would be restored, with a new plaza along Main Street, for use by a Filipino Catholic congregation.

The project would “complete the ring in downtown of ethnic centers” that include Chinatown, Little Tokyo and Olvera Street, Duque said. “I expect a lot of different people to dive in. That’s California, that’s the world,” he said.

* In the land of freeways and a new subway, transportation gets some rethinking.

*

James Sink, a Cal Poly Pomona student, has designed an unusual attraction that he calls an “urban crawler.” Resembling a giant bug with five legs, it would be a vehicle capable of holding 30 passengers. The crawler would move along streets and over buildings of downtown Los Angeles in a slow-motion tour: “In a day you could travel from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to the library and back.”

At points, it would hoist itself up between adjacent skyscrapers, attached to walls by suction cups or hydraulic legs. Sink, 23, from Claremont, conceded that “a lot of technical issues are unsolved.”

Still, he said, “Instead of going into some office where you might have a view of Los Angeles, you are in Los Angeles and moving within Los Angeles. Whether it’s a business meeting or a classroom, what’s better than going through downtown? And kids would get a kick out of it.”

*

Getting out of cars is at the heart of a scheme by Lasse A. Halvorsen, a visiting Norwegian student at SCI-ARC. He wants to link a new subway station near Barnsdall Park in east Hollywood to the Griffith Observatory via an aerial cable tram 90 feet above Vermont Avenue. Twenty enclosed gondolas, each holding 10 passengers, could complete the three-mile route in 10 minutes.

Halvorsen, 25, is amazed how few people explore Griffith Park’s upper hills. “This would activate people to use nature, not emphasizing the car,” he said.

He bases his idea on an existing system in Barcelona. Passenger fares and sales of advertising space on gondolas and support towers may help offset construction costs. He believes the ride would attract tourists. “I think seeing L.A. from the air would be a good experience,” Halvorsen said.

*

High speed transit would link ethnic centers and help create round-the-clock entertainment zones in a proposal by Young Rhee, a graduate student at SCI-ARC.

A Korean American from Atlanta, he has studied Los Angeles’ Koreatown and believes the neighborhood and others like it will rely more and more on outside visitors seeking culture and entertainment. So he proposes 24-hour ethnic zones, with restaurants, clubs and hotels. An expanded subway or tram system would move visitors from, say, an African American district in Leimert Park to a Chinese center in Monterey Park.

“You could go there, do anything any time of day. It would challenge how we live time-wise,” he said. Since Internet connections will make time zones obsolete, nonstop neighborhoods will have extra hours to make money.

* The future is not all fun. Some students are planning for emergencies.

One sure bet for the 21st century is that big earthquakes will rattle Southern California, according to SCI-ARC graduate student Jason Ruperto. The 26-year-old from Florida thinks the region should prepare 40 or so portable emergency centers equipped with medical equipment, electrical generators, water supplies and communications linked to satellites. Each unit would be about the size of a house but light enough for helicopters to tote them where needed. The centers’ hydraulic legs would balance on broken terrain.

Earthquakes, he said, present many challenges to Southern California’s economy and psyche: “I don’t think we can deal with it other than just hitting the remedies when it occurs and trying to sustain life and reestablish the city. Relocating 15 million people is not the answer.”