How to Keep Children Alive and Swimming

Waving placards emblazoned with slogans like “Save the Wetlands” and “Frog Murder,” the 50 or so protesters gathered outside Frank O. Gehry’s office in Santa Monica last month seemed oddly incongruous. Gehry, one of the world’s most celebrated architects, has long carried the mantle of the old-style liberal, a friend of the common man. How could he be seen as an enemy of the environment?

The cause of the rally was Gehry’s involvement in the massive Playa Vista development, a 1,087-acre residential and commercial project set amid the Ballona Wetlands near Marina del Rey. Last month, developer Robert Maguire hired Gehry to design a master plan for a 60-acre parcel at the site’s eastern edge, on a lot that was once home to the Hughes aircraft plant. Gehry is also designing four buildings for the project, and he is planning to move his offices from Santa Monica to a 45,000-square-foot structure once used for manufacturing helicopters.

To Gehry, the commission seemed innocent enough. The design is limited to a small section of the site that has been zoned for industrial use since the 1930s. It will have no direct effect on the existing wetlands. What is more, Maguire and Gehry have a professional relationship that dates to the early 1980s, when the developer asked the then-unheralded architect to take part in an unbuilt proposal for the redevelopment of downtown’s Grand Avenue. Gehry saw Maguire as a rarity among developers: someone whose ambitions rose above the bottom line--who understood architecture’s value as an important component of the built environment.

But for those who oppose the project, Gehry’s participation seemed indefensible. The issue was not the quality of the buildings, but the fact that they are going to be built at all. The Playa Vista project stands at one end of the largest remaining parcel of open land in L.A. Gehry’s reputation lends the entire project an air of respectability. In effect, he gives Playa Vista the imprimatur of the architectural and artistic establishments--communities one traditionally associates with high ideals.

The controversy crystallizes a long-standing debate over architects’ role in shaping the urban landscape. Most architects are, by nature, optimists. They are acutely aware of man’s relationship to the physical world. And since the birth of the avant-garde a century ago, many have seen themselves as agents of social change. Yet despite their image as social engineers, architects have little control over the broader issues that determine how we live. Where, then, does the responsibility of the architect actually begin?

There was a time, not so long ago, when architects contented themselves with a more limited role. In 15th century Florence, when Filippo Brunelleschi took on the task of designing the dome for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, it would not have crossed his mind to challenge the dogmas of the Catholic church. Nor did neoclassical architects think to question the meaning of the monuments they were erecting in 19th century Paris. Architects were craftsmen. As such, they were mostly content to do their patrons’ bidding. The importance of their work was measured by its aesthetic beauty.

The notion that architects could change the world is relatively recent. It was born out of the ideals of an avant-garde that saw the technological advances of the 20th century as a means of advancing a better society. To those early Modernists, architecture was more than the embodiment of that goal, it was a tool that could be used to re-engineer the social landscape.

That faith held firm until the collapse of the Modernist movement in the 1970s, when it became apparent to most that those utopian dreams led nowhere. In America, the signs of that collapse were first seen in the massive inner-city housing projects, which quickly became incubators for crime and poverty. Even the best of these projects could not overcome harsh economic and political realities.

The result for architects was a painful realization of the profession’s limits. As the late Italian historian Manfredo Tafuri put it, the position of the avant-garde architect was absurdly untenable--he was a social revolutionary who made his living fulfilling the desires of a rich, powerful elite.

In truth, by the time the architect arrives on the scene, most of the critical decisions about a building’s place in the larger urban fabric have already been made. Typically, a client chooses the site and what is going on it. A budget is set. The client then has final veto over all of the fundamental decisions regarding the building’s form. The architect’s task is limited to fusing these disparate, often conflicting elements into a coherent social and aesthetic statement.

More recently, that sense of powerlessness has been exacerbated by a culture obsessed with self-promotion. To many clients, a design by a high-profile architect plays the same role as a commercial ad campaign. Even Nike likes to give its products the air of social conscience. That only makes its products seem more hip. Star architects such as Gehry are in a double bind. Their names alone give projects instant recognition. A Gehry building is not just a work of architecture; it is a cultural event--one that will be pictured in glossy international magazines and fawned over by the media.

The architect who has probably negotiated this ethical maze with the most skill is Rem Koolhaas. Koolhaas’ strategy is simple. Before embarking on a project, he undertakes an aggressive, often critical analysis of its identity and function. But even Koolhaas cannot choose his projects. He can’t set out to build social housing, for example, if a client doesn’t approach him with the commission. As with most star architects today, his bread and butter are museums, hotels and a few civic buildings. The best he can do is imbue such projects with some kind of social and cultural meaning.

Gehry’s solution, by contrast, has been to just say no. He has often turned down projects because he felt he would not be able to control the outcome of the design, that the restrictions placed on him by clients would result in the kind of mediocre building he won’t abide. As recently as a year ago, he walked out on a $1-billion project for a hotel-casino complex in Atlantic City, N.J., for just that reason.

At Playa Vista, however, Gehry saw a genuine opportunity. The buildings he is designing there are conventional by most standards. The commission called for generic, low-budget offices. Gehry’s challenge will be to try to find out if he can create important architecture despite such limitations--to prove that even a low-cost, large-scale development doesn’t have to be a blot on the city’s landscape.

Gehry is also right in stressing that his project will have little effect on the ultimate fate of the wetlands. The site it occupies has 10 existing buildings on it, all of them with landmark status, including the gigantic Hughes hangar that once housed the Spruce Goose. Those 60 acres stand apart from the main development, which calls for the creation of 13,000 houses on the 1,087 acres. There, construction has already begun on the first phase of 1,600 homes.

But in the short term, Gehry cannot avoid the fact that his name will lend credibility to a development that will do irreparable harm to the city’s natural environment. Wetlands are a critical part of the city’s ecosystem--the baby nurseries for birds and fish. Los Angeles, a city that has historically promoted itself as a natural Eden, has a pathetic ecological record. Ninety percent of its wetlands are already gone, and Ballona is the only remaining coastal wetland between Long Beach and Malibu.

So what should Gehry do? It is too late to simply walk away from the project. He has already completed the design of three buildings; he is under contract to design the fourth. But Gehry could still abandon his plan to move to Playa Vista, an act that would give powerful ammunition to the environmentalists’ cause.

If not, Gehry’s best hope is that over time his designs will stand on their own merit, that the accomplishment of transforming what might have been a mundane development into something of lasting cultural value is enough. Finally, he can pray that an educated public doesn’t take his association with Playa Vista as a ringing endorsement of the controversial housing development going up next door, let alone of the destruction of the fragile wetlands underneath it. It’s a loser’s game.