Learning’s Halls, Hallowed Again

Los Angeles’ civic institutions may be in a state of upheaval, but don’t blame the architects. That’s the message behind the newly completed Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, a project of such surprising beauty and intelligence that it instantly reaffirms one’s faith in architecture’s ability to address deep social issues. It proves that public buildings can be more than symbols of civic pride, they can serve as models for a decent society.

Designed by the Santa Monica-based Morphosis, with Thomas Blurock Architects, Diamond Ranch reflects a belief in an architecture that combines aesthetic experimentation with a social conscience. The $28-million school eventually will house more than 1,800 students in a string of shimmering, metal-clad forms overlooking the 60 Freeway and the city below. Seen in the context of the region’s troubled educational system--with its overcrowded schools and failing students--the project is a beacon of optimism. It also confirms Morphosis--whose penchant for fragmented forms and structural gymnastics came to symbolize the vitality of L.A. architecture in the 1980s--as one of the most creative practices in America today.

But the building also signifies an important shift in the cultural landscape of Southern California. Like the Getty Center before it, the project tells us that even with the problems facing the region, Los Angeles is emerging as a thriving cultural capital, and architecture is leading the way. But unlike the Getty, whose monumental, travertine-clad buildings were inspired by distant Italian hill towns, Diamond Ranch’s raw, jagged forms directly evoke the unstable soil of Los Angeles itself.

The complex is organized as two rows of interlocking buildings set tightly on either side of a long central courtyard. The courtyard cuts across the face of the hillside like a razor. A gym, cafeteria, auditorium and classrooms frame the courtyard’s upper edge, with the football field resting on the hillside above. Administrative offices, the library and more classrooms line the courtyard’s other side, overlooking the soccer field and tennis courts below.

Seen from the football field, the project strongly evokes the Utopian schemes of the 1930s. The field faces a viewing stand whose stark concrete benches, punctuated by a series of block-like stair towers, vaguely recall the rigid geometry of Werner March’s 1936 Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Seen from below, three parallel classroom buildings cantilever out from the edge of the hill toward the lower playing fields, their taut stucco facades and narrow strip windows emblems of classical Modernism.

But as you approach the complex from the long entry drive, that sense of a highly ordered world is nowhere to be seen. The complex’s distorted roofscape--clad in corrugated steel panels--folds and bends like a series of shifting geological plates. Once you reach the top of the narrow entry stair, the walls around you seem to part, as if the earth had suddenly split open. On either side, the building’s facades tilt forward or twist back, giving the space a remarkably animated feel.

That sense of a landscape in flux is reflected in the structure of the buildings. Along the courtyard, the library’s metal facade is cut away to reveal its underlying steel frame. The roof of the gym--which folds up and down like an origami sculpture--is supported on a steel truss that cuts diagonally across the ceiling and rests precariously on two towering columns. It’s as though the entire building were set slightly off-balance, its form distorted by invisible forces.

Various images come to mind: an earthquake-ravaged landscape, the instability caused by the region’s rapidly changing ethnic mix and booming population growth. But the complex’s dynamic form also raises archetypal themes such as the ageless battle between masculine and feminine, chaos and order, conscious and unconscious worlds. It suggests a landscape that has suddenly burst open to allow the creative spirit to spill through.

Once you travel deeper into the complex, however, a new order emerges. By breaking the buildings apart into discrete forms, Mayne is able to create a hierarchy of communal spaces. From the courtyard, a grand stair--flanked by a narrow ramp--leads down into a lower plaza that opens onto the cafeteria and adds to the courtyard’s visual depth. Other paths open up between the buildings, leading to the various classrooms. A series of smaller courts--open to the sky--are set between the classroom buildings, creating a series of cozy meeting places and flooding the spaces with natural light. Long, underground corridors link the various buildings, setting up a wonderful architectural rhythm between inside and out, darkness and light, study and play.

Such formal elements reflect a complex social organism. Upper and lower grades are separated on opposite sides of the courtyard. Classrooms are divided by discipline, each cluster connected to its own outdoor garden. The hierarchy of small and large gathering places allows for a wide range of social groupings, from insular little cliques to huge school assemblies. The idea is that a range of human values can comfortably coexist here.

The tension--between a world fragmented by cultural upheavals and a world bound by a sense of communal responsibility--sums up a long-standing theme in Morphosis’ architecture. What Morphosis retains from Modernism is a belief in architecture’s obligation to fulfill a social contract. But the architects are equally aware of the failures of Modernist planning strategies, the rigid idealism they embodied and that often proved suffocating to the human spirit. Utopia, too, can be a prison. In Morphosis’s view, social freedom and the creative imagination are the forces that will liberate us.

This is particularly fitting at a time in Southern California’s history when students still attend classes in beat-up trailers laid out over asphalt parking lots, or when officials bicker over whether a toxic dump is a safe site for a school. Coming from a society that invests less and less in its public institutions, the message that adolescents need to take responsibility for their own lives, along with the endless moralizing about sex and drugs, smacks of hypocrisy--a trait that any adolescent can sniff out instantly. Many of these students already feel they have been cast aside by mainstream culture.

Diamond Ranch High School flies in the face of such alienation. It reminds us that the buildings we create are powerful symbols of what our society values. The school digs deep into Los Angeles’ cultural and social landscape and finds gold. It tells us that the radical changes that define us--shifting ethnic makeup, an open cultural identity, even the instability of our landscape--are realities that can be forged into an inspired future.