Civic Triumphs, Great and Small

Since the opening of Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997, civic officials everywhere have been desperately searching for the one new architectural landmark that could give their city instant cultural clout. Few succeed. This year, however, there were three outright winners: London, Seattle and Las Vegas. Each city has made architecture a central feature of a minor cultural renaissance. And in each case, the quality of the design has the potential to reach beyond its immediate context and reshape our perception of the larger cultural reality.

The architectural scene in Los Angeles is shifting too, but in more subtle ways. This year, there were no great landmarks built; no revolutionary designs unveiled. But there are reasons to believe that architecture is creeping back into the public consciousness, and that may be a more important shift in the city’s cultural landscape than the completion of any single masterpiece.

Here’s how L.A. matched up last year:

1. Diamond Ranch High School

Designed by Los Angeles-based Morphosis, the Diamond Ranch High School recalls a seemingly forgotten era when the architects’ task was to combine aesthetic beauty with a deep sense of social mission. Carved across the steep slope of a Pomona hillside, the school’s zig-zagging courtyard is both a remarkable forum for intellectual exchange and a surreal landscape of shifting forms that vaguely recall an ice glacier. It is a landmark of Southern California architecture.

2. Science Center school

Another Morphosis creation, this one still in the design stages, the Science Center elementary school embodies a clash of two philosophies: one of absolute knowledge, the other of multiple truths. Partially hidden underneath a long, sloping berm, the low-slung building wraps around one side of the existing, 1920s-era brick Armory building in L.A.’s Exposition Park. Seen from the surrounding context, it practically disappears into its landscape. Once you enter, however, the forms break open to reveal a series of outdoor eating areas and courtyards, a perfect metaphor for architecture’s potential as a tool for liberating the captive imagination.

3. Camino Nuevo Charter Academy

In some ways the most inspiring of the three school designs, Daly Genik’s Camino Nuevo school is the most economical and least flamboyant. Created out of a former mini-mall in the MacArthur Park area, the design is packed with communal optimism. A second-story walkway becomes a place for students to loiter and socialize; a former parking lot is transformed into a playground; and what was once a derelict sidewalk is now a safe haven for the community. The school is a testament to how architecture, in the right hands, can achieve real social impact with limited means.

4. UCLA Art Center

Richard Meier’s homage to Le Corbusier’s 1959 Carpenter Center in Cambridge, Mass., the new art center design is a crafty renovation of the existing Dickson Art Center, which was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. While preserving the original building’s overall layout, Meier transforms it into an efficient architectural machine whose function is to link the art school directly to campus life, with a pedestrian ramp that allows students to cut right through the site as they cross the campus. Like Le Corbusier’s more famous precedent, the design combines ideas of urban flow and individual contemplation into a first-rate architectural composition.

5. Music Center and Grand Avenue

The Music Center’s master plan for the redevelopment of Grand Avenue is the best hope yet for sparking a downtown cultural renewal. In the design, the avenue becomes a curved, park-like grand boulevard connecting a series of cultural landmarks into a cohesive urban experience. But the most spectacular part of the plan is the most speculative: a 20-acre, nearly half-mile-long park that would stretch from the Department of Water and Power building at the crest of Bunker Hill down to City Hall. The park--a remarkably simple idea whose roots are in 19th century Beaux Arts planning--could single-handedly transform downtown from a depressing, urban eyesore into one of the city’s most picturesque--and genuinely democratic--urban experiences.

6. Hollywood Bowl

Hodgetts + Fung’s renovation of the famed Hollywood Bowl is not a faithful restoration of the building that has served generations of music lovers--and thank God for that. The design will clean up what is now a mess of outdated equipment and architectural clutter, giving it a clarity and aesthetic punch that it has not had since Frank Lloyd Wright’s second version of the bowl was torn down in 1929. The new design--with its elliptical shell and flanking fountains--is an example of how respect for the past does not mean having to live in a nostalgic haze.

7. Experience Music Project, Seattle

Frank O. Gehry’s latest landmark, the Experience Music Project rock ‘n’ roll museum is notable for its wild, unruly forms and gaping warehouse-like interiors. In some ways more radical an invention than his celebrated Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the building’s amorphous, colorful exterior recalls a crumbled blanket as much as the smashed guitar that Gehry claims inspired it. But it is the raw, unfinished look of the interior that gives the building its meaning: Functionally neutral, its strength is its acceptance of beauty for beauty’s sake--and that is a revolutionary idea nowadays.

8. Seattle Public Library

Rem Koolhaas’ audacious attempt to reinvent the public library for the 21st century. Scheduled to open in 2003, the building’s web-like copper-and-glass exterior--with walls that twist in and out like a distorted box--suggests a cage whose function is to protect the sanctity of the library from the marketing and advertising blather that rules contemporary life. To that end, the library’s towering interior is divided into horizontal concrete slabs--some several stories thick--that isolate the books in their own vault-like space while encouraging the free flow of information and a vibrant exchange of ideas. The design’s central premise is this: in a post-Utopian world, only direct, brutal honesty can save us.

9. Tate Gallery of Modern Art, London

One of the most genuinely populist models for a contemporary art museum ever built, the Tate Gallery of Modern Art transforms a massive 1947 power plant into a tough, no-frills urban landscape for viewing art. The building’s former turbine hall, with a new bridge crossing over its center, has been transformed into a massive public mixing chamber that serves to sweep the public up into the galleries, demolishing the boundaries between art and the masses. But what makes the building more than another art warehouse is the architect’s subtle use of materials: translucent walls, rough oak floors and tough concrete surfaces give the building a palpable sensuality. This is a structure you want to reach out and touch. London, a city that has long been mired in its own past, will never be completely the same.

10. Guggenheim, Las Vegas

Las Vegas? Yes, Las Vegas. Another Koolhaas design, the Guggenheim Las Vegas seeks to accomplish the unimaginable: create a meaningful architectural experience--and a home for first-rate art--amid the glamour and glitz of the former Sin City. Koolhaas’ answer? To build a gigantic, gaping industrial shed whose clean abstract form will not compete with the glitz, but offer a tough, almost crude alternative to it. In many ways, it is the Dutch architect’s riskiest design yet and could go far in giving Vegas the cultural credentials that it suddenly so desperately craves.