This Vision of Future Covers Old Ground

Playa Vista, the controversial development that is being marketed as a model for the urban neighborhood of the future, looks a lot like a rehashed vision of the past. With construction set to begin on the first 1,600 homes sometime this summer, the 1,087-acre residential-retail-commercial community is emerging as a parody of small-town America. And like most sentimental dreams, the design forsakes true imagination for the illusion of security and social stability.

Set at the base of the Playa Vista Bluffs just south of Marina del Rey, the housing development will rank among the largest in Greater Los Angeles since the delirious postwar booms of the ‘50s. If it goes ahead as planned, it will eventually include 13,000 residences and more than 5 million square feet of commercial space.

But unlike the often monotonous tract houses of that earlier era, Playa Vista aspires to laudable environmental and architectural standards. Battered by years of fighting with local environmentalists over the fate of the wetlands site, the project’s developer, the Playa Capital Co., has zealously labored to present itself as a defender of the environment, setting aside 340 acres as a natural preserve and even creating a visitors center with exhibits on the site’s history. In terms of the architectural design, it has hired 13 teams to realize what it touts as “a new philosophy in urban living.”

In fact, the residential development is modeled on the kind of neotraditional town plans that were first devised more than a decade ago by a loose-knit group of architects and planners dubbed the New Urbanists. Their idea was to re-create the comforts of small-town America with a blend of historic architectural styles, cozy front porches and shady pedestrian streets. The best-known of these projects--Seaside and the Walt Disney Co.’s Celebration, both in Florida--are communities shaped by the desire to escape urban chaos and suburban isolation.

Playa Vista seeks to replicate that communal, pedestrian ethos here. And there is no doubt that the project is a genuine improvement over the kind of bottom-line developments scattered across much of Southern California. In an effort to promote a degree of economic diversity, the project provides rental apartments and housing types that range in cost from $200,000 to $1 million. It also seeks to balance residential and retail components with a healthy dose of nature--in addition to the wetland preserve, there are 40 parks in the plan.

But as a model for the future, or even the present, Playa Vista is less than convincing. As architecture, the development never rises above the ordinary. As an urban plan, it rejects the historical role of the metropolis as a place of cultural frictions. What it mostly draws from New Urbanism is its soothing quality, in which traditional streetscapes serve as symbolic barricades against a world in constant social flux.

The development’s first phase will include four residential districts, anchored by neighborhood parks and a community center. Eventually, a range of housing types--apartment buildings, condos and single-family homes--will be scattered though 14 districts organized on a standard urban grid. Each district will have a mix of architectural styles, some loosely modeled on the works of legendary architects, others on historical California precedents.

Among the apartment buildings in Phase One, for instance, is a four-story complex inspired by the work of Irving Gill. A master of scale and proportion, Gill is best known as the Los Angeles architect who bridged Mediterranean historicism and a more abstract early Modernism. But his architectural compositions were also a masterful blend of solitude and communal interaction. In Gill’s 1921 Horatio West apartments in Santa Monica, for example, the entry sequence leads from a shared central court into a variety of indoor and outdoor semiprivate spaces.

The Playa Vista version lacks that kind of deftness. The plan, by Thomas P. Cox Architects, packs 214 units into a banal housing block. As in most of the development’s designs, parking is buried underground and elevators take you up to repetitive corridors, bypassing the internal courts, which are carefully shut off from the street. In a particularly telling gesture, the complex’s most flamboyant feature--an entry court marked by a reflecting pool and fountain--leads straight to the leasing office.

Other designs are equally unimaginative. The low-slung, overhanging roof of the KTGY Group’s Playa Vista Community Center, meant to be the development’s social focus, evokes early Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie-style architecture. But underneath its Wrightian decor will be an array of conventional, box-like rooms. The free-flowing spaces and masterful use of light that make Wright’s architecture so potent are nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, the confusion over how to foster communal interaction has led to some odd innovations. The Van Tilburg, Ban Vard and Soderbergh-designed Court Homes, for instance--decorated in the pseudo-Spanish style that remains a favorite of L.A. home buyers--are designed with two front doors, one in back and one facing the street.

Guests will enter via the street; residents through an internal alleyway, private garages and foyers. The idea is to eliminate the street-front garage that to some remains a symbol of low-class suburbia. But the result is to create the illusion of a connection to the street that isn’t really there. The garage, in fact, has long functioned as an important social component in a landscape shaped by the car.

In another questionable attempt at originality, the Scheurer Architects’ Mansion condominiums come complete with their own faux historical narrative. The idea is that three luxurious Spanish homes--the developers claim they are modeled on the late Gianni Versace’s Miami mansion--have been broken up over time into a series of smaller dwellings, presumably after their original owners squandered the family fortune. Of course, all of the happy accidents that a real history would have created--shared entrances, awkward spaces, unplanned communal corridors--are missing. Underneath the gloss, the structure couldn’t be more conventional.

In fact, once inside, few of the Playa Vista residences offer any surprises. Most of them are equipped with in-home offices. Many have balconies or terraces, a welcome luxury in the Land of Sunshine. What’s missing, however, are the essential elements of first-rate design, the ability to fuse light, material, scale, a sense of space and flow, into a meaningful composition.

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But it is as an urban planning scheme, not as architecture, that the project sums up how much interconnectedness the developers are actually willing to tolerate. The bulk of the site will be framed by the remaining Ballona Wetlands to the west, the Playa Vista Bluffs to the south, and Playa Vista’s planned commercial development to the east. Main access will be from the north, along Jefferson Boulevard. Only four of the six existing cross streets will be extended across the boulevard, further isolating the development from the rest of the city. The majority of the retail shops--the kind of everyday services that real communities live on--are tucked deep inside the site. There, a limited amount of short-term metered parking will encourage pedestrian movement but discourage visits by outsiders, reinforcing the notion of a self-contained community. The rest of the city is carefully kept at bay.

Clearly, the project’s strongest communal element is its urban parks. Moderately scaled, the parks are a truly generous public gesture. And the developers have tried to give each a unique--if somewhat silly--identity: the Bark Park, for instance, for dog walkers, and Spyglass Park, which overlooks the wetlands. But these will be privately maintained sites, subject to private regulations, the details of which have yet to be worked out. In a positive sign, the development team plans to include public toilets in many of the parks.

In the end, what’s striking about Playa Vista is its reluctance to genuinely engage the euphoric chaos of urban life. What does that tell us about the future of Los Angeles? That our urge to form a more cohesive city, a true cultural melting pot, has strictly defined limits. That community is easiest within a group of carefully screened citizens with shared values. That the rapid social changes that define the modern metropolis still terrify many of us.

Since the Enlightenment, a large part of architecture’s task has been to invent new urban models that reflect the social and cultural realities of the modern condition. That requires a willingness to look at the future head on, without sentimentality. Los Angeles is undergoing a boom in population that will dramatically increase its density and require a variety of new housing types. It is also a city loaded with fresh architectural talent. But its builders have so far been unwilling to tap that wealth of creative imagination. A decade from now, we may look back and wonder what might have been if that imagination had been set free.