Let’s Go Back to the Drawing Board

The City of Sprawl is booming again. Vast housing developments are filling the last tracts of open land at the city’s edges. Apartment complexes are filling in the city’s remaining empty lots. Clusters of coastal mansions are being constructed to satisfy the needs of the new twentysomething Information Age magnates. But architects aren’t smiling.

The reason is that once again the profession’s creative elite has been relegated to the sidelines, designing scattered landmark residences while the majority of new housing remains in the hands of corporate developers. The break between the worlds of first-rate architecture and conventional home building--never close in the first place--is now a chasm. Architecture schools rarely focus on housing issues. And even the most theoretical firms have had little success with new models for the way most of us live--once a central concern of 20th century design.

To some, the neglect of architectural talent in the housing business may seem inevitable. Developers, by nature, have always been a pragmatic, even conservative breed. Their goal is marketable housing, with an emphasis on the bottom line. They see high-end architects as lofty visionaries cut off from real-world experience, and the most theoretical work as potentially scary to clients.

It is the public, however, that is losing. Simple market practices produce conventional, cookie-cutter designs. What’s missing is the creative intelligence that once made this city a center of innovative residential design.

Not so long ago, a generation of renowned Los Angeles architects saw the city as fertile ground for exploring new forms of housing that would serve the needs of a growing middle class. Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1923 proposed development for a hillside site on the Doheny Ranch in Beverly Hills, for instance, was a stunning, if costly, interpretation of Los Angeles’ peculiar realities. The design’s low masonry homes and narrow roadways were conceived as a unified composition--shelter, car and nature inextricably bound together. Wright, however, could never find a developer for the project, and he eventually left Los Angeles in a huff.

Others had better luck. Gregory Ain’s 1946-48 design for the Mar Vista development is an eloquent West Coast interpretation of Modernist themes, with 53 standardized, L-shaped houses that were arranged in various configurations to enclose private and semiprivate gardens. Inside, sliding partitions allowed families to adapt the 1,500-square-foot houses to their changing needs.

And then there were the famed Case Study houses of the 1950s, whose clean, steel-frame industrial aesthetic, marked by large expanses of glass, were meant as affordable prototypes for a more open, “transparent” society. The program, sponsored by the now-defunct, Los Angeles-based Arts & Architecture Magazine, produced eight houses for a variety of open-minded clients, each house a shining example of technological efficiency.

But such experiments never infiltrated the larger development community, and by the 1970s Modernism in general was in crisis. In more dense urban centers like New York and Chicago, the public perception of Modernist housing was a cluster of sterile towers rising out of a dead plaza. In Los Angeles, where the single-family home remained the predominant housing type, Modernism simply went out of fashion. Serious architects, under attack, largely gave up on the notion that they could have any impact on the mass market. Even the rise of new brands of architectural thought--many of which emerged from Los Angeles in the ‘80s--did little to change that. East Coast magazine editors logged thousands of frequent-flier miles searching for the newest Los Angeles architectural sensations. Houses by architects such as Eric Owen Moss, Frank O. Gehry, Thom Mayne and the late Frank Israel received national recognition. But these were made for the odd individual, and local developers took little notice.

As it turns out, the failure of contemporary architecture’s great talents to tap into housing was a particularly American phenomenon. In Berlin, Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza designed a 1984 apartment block whose undulating facade, delicately sculpted stairways and external corridors created an elegant sequence of public spaces on a limited budget.

In Nimes, France, Jean Nouvel’s 1987 Nemausus project remains a model of affordable apartments for a nomadic, industrialized culture, with enormous airy lofts and garage-like doors that open onto long, sweeping decks evoking the image of a landlocked ship. The success of such projects--mostly commissioned and paid for by government agencies--is a testament to what can be achieved even with limited means.

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In America, meanwhile, developers began to rely on focus groups and questionnaires to figure out how to adapt designs to the changing needs of clients. The Los Angeles-based Kaufman & Broad, among the country’s largest builders of low- and moderately priced homes, now has more than 1 million surveys logged into its database, with statistics detailing home buyers’ preferences when it comes to fireplaces, master baths and front-door details. A prospective buyer is presented with half a dozen possible floor plans and then offered a series of upgrades, including terra-cotta roof tiling or facades ranging from Spanish Mediterranean to French Norman, all responding to survey results and for the most part ignoring a century’s worth of architectural ideas.

That same strategy can apply to multimillion-dollar developments or entire neighborhoods. At Capital Pacific Homes’ Oceanfront development, now under construction in Palos Verdes, clients can purchase a $4-million house and then add $1 million to $2 million in upgrades, down to ashtrays and bedside-table reading. At the Playa Vista development, the 1,087-acre planned community at the edge of Marina del Rey, the development team conducted thousands of interviews and focus groups, which helped it shape a neighborhood plan sprinkled with public parks and internal courts. Although the project’s promoters are marketing the mixed-use development as a new kind of model community, as architecture the development remains conventional.

There is no reason to doubt that such strategies stem from a real desire to respond to people’s desires. None of these projects, however, embrace the kind of creative vision that could raise housing standards to a higher level, often with a minimal impact on cost. What skilled architects could provide is the ability to use the raw material of home design--light, structure, the relationship of indoor and outdoor spaces, to name a few--to create powerful compositions that reflect the realities and values of their own age.

The deeper, more elusive problem with current survey-driven development formulas is that home buyers cannot choose what they haven’t been offered. Instead of thoughtful designs that grapple with contemporary life, the public is left with nostalgic references to the past and boring variations on a handful of themes. The result is a building industry that can guarantee architectural mediocrity, but not much more.

What’s needed is a leap of faith, from developers and architects. Developers would have to take a chance on visionary design. Architects, meanwhile, would have to crawl back out of their academic sanctuaries and address the very real, often conflicted desires of American home buyers.

Never has there been a more critical time for such thinking in Los Angeles. The city is facing the biggest population boom since the post-World War II years, with a projected growth of 34% by 2020. That will mean a level of urban density the city has never seen, and it demands the invention of entirely different housing types. The increase in density will also mean a melting away of ethnic boundaries, which in turn will require a reexamination of our communal infrastructure.

Finally, the house will have to be re-imagined to reflect shifting family structures, a mobile population and a society in constant flux.

The good news is, architecture seems as well-equipped as ever to fulfill its part of the task. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Herzog & De Meuron’s Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin--these are important civic landmarks that also challenge conventional notions about our relation to the world. They reassert architecture’s role as a powerful cultural force. Los Angeles, meanwhile, can now boast more architectural talent than any city in the country, spanning several generations. To neglect that talent now would be, quite simply, a crime.