Building on Street Smarts

“Ornament is crime,” wrote the great Modernist architect Adolf Loos, but Loos had never been to Hollywood. In Hollywood, urban reality has always been disguised under a veneer of fantasy. The elaborate painted facades of 1920s-era theaters like Mann’s Chinese and the Egyptian denote the fragile line that often separates the two.

So the Hollywood Orangeland retail complex seems at first an apt addition to Hollywood Boulevard. The $20-million, 30,000-square-foot development--which breaks ground this spring--will stand on one of the most coveted sites in the city, a corner lot alongside Mann’s famous theater. Designed by RoTo Architects, the retail mall will house Hollywood Souvenirs and the Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie museum, the kinds of tawdry businesses that have long been staples of the boulevard. But instead of decorating the complex with another themed facade, the architects have wrapped it inside a web of ramps, walkways and plazas. Street life here is the ornament.

Using street life as decor can be read as a shrewd commentary on Hollywood’s superficiality. But the irony is that, despite its loftier ambitions, RoTo’s design ultimately lacks the boulevard’s urban complexity. When the project opens, sometime in 2001, the public may breeze by RoTo’s ornamental streetscape in favor of the real thing. Given the prominence of the site, that would be an unfortunate blow to the cause of serious architecture.

That the project is happening at all is reason to celebrate. The site is owned by the Hollywood Orangeland development corporation, which unveiled its original scheme four years ago. That plan’s main feature was a 42-foot-tall cartoon replica of the Hollywood sign. Looming over the boulevard, it was no more than a cheap parody of Hollywood’s gaudy image. But the developers had a change of heart when they were faced with local opposition. They scrapped the original plan, hiring RoTo, the firm founded by Michael Rotondi, the former dean of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

The developers chose RoTo largely on the merits of one building: a 600-foot-long warehouse set on a pier in Nagasaki, Japan, and capped by a rooftop garden and a 3-story-tall orange ball meant to function as an exhibition hall. Completed last year, the warehouse is a clever blend of public and commercial worlds.

The new Hollywood Orangeland design pretty much follows the same approach. Its intent is to offer shoppers an escape route from the unbridled urge to consume. A curved plaza faces Hollywood Boulevard, echoing Mann’s forecourt next door. A covered arcade slips between the two buildings, running from the boulevard to the future home of the Academy Theater in back. Two stairways--one at the corner of the plaza, the other in the arcade--lead up to a walkway that overlooks the boulevard and ultimately leads to the roof. The idea is to lure pedestrians along in a vibrant urban procession, where they can rub shoulders with strangers and ogle passing pedestrians.

That procession also allows the architects to explore the uneasy balance between a developer’s hunger for profit and the public’s desire for social interaction. At Orange and Hollywood, for instance, the building’s exterior, which will support an enormous perforated billboard, is angled back to face oncoming cars. The walkway passes between the screen and the second-story shop windows, a sandwiching of advertising, life and consumption that is a sly parody on consumer culture.

Once on the roof, however, a spectacular view opens up to the Hollywood Hills, and presumably the world of consumption will fade away, subsumed by a purely communal space. Metal panels fold down to shelter one side of the deck. If it rains, a Teflon canopy--supported on a light, skeletal frame--can be unfurled like the wing of a giant bird to enclose the space. From the main deck, visitors step up to a catwalk that runs along the edge of the building so that they can peer down at the crowds milling around in front of Mann’s.

Compare the project to Trizec Hahn’s mammoth $385-million development under construction on the other side of Mann’s Theater, and you get the point. Covering two city blocks, the development is organized around a tight, open-air court that functions much like the interior of a conventional mall. Once sucked inside, you are confronted with a world whose principal goal is to turn a profit. To avoid that kind of manipulation, RoTo’s design carefully separates social and commercial zones.

But good intentions only get you so far. What RoTo’s design may ultimately lack is the conceptual clarity that makes for powerful architecture. The walkway has little functional relation to the shops, and it’s too flimsy to support the bustling street life it’s meant to mimic. The roof deck--despite the elaborate canopy--is a bland space, its flat, elliptical form an idea that has yet to be fully developed. It is unlikely that the view--and the tiny outdoor cafe that will serve the space--will be enough to drag Los Angeles’ reluctant pedestrians out of their cars and up two stories.

Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid have all done a better job of integrating large-scale urban themes into their works. Among the most relevant examples is Koolhaas’ inspired 1992 design for the Kunsthalle in Rotterdam, a public art gallery in which the scale of the building and the scale of the city are aggressively intertwined. An outdoor ramp, for instance, bisects the galleries, leading down to a bucolic public park. The enormity of the ramp and the translucence of the building’s surfaces suggest the movement of masses of people.

But there is no need to book a flight to Rotterdam, nor is it necessary to look to the work of such an original architectural talent. Underneath the cheap glitz of Mann’s Chinese Theater lies a powerful--if formulaic--urban model. Taken together, the theater, forecourt and streetscape constitute a sequence of communal experiences that resonates with the public. The forecourt serves as a public room that binds the intimacy of the theater with the chaos of the street.

With a little more imagination, RoTo could have accomplished that goal. Imagine broad walkways, where pedestrians are displayed like the lingerie-clad mannequins inside Frederick’s. Or the oval roof terrace as, say, a giant suburban lawn, a field of neon-green tranquillity floating above shimmering lights.

The mind reels. But then, it should. This is Hollywood.