Looks Cool, Makes Money

Only six years ago the Hayden Tract was one of the Los Angeles area’s most infamous eyesores: A narrow, half-mile-long abandoned rail corridor in Culver City, the unsightly swath of dirt and weeds was home to only junked cars and shuttered aerospace warehouses. Today those warehouses--converted into architecturally bold and increasingly fashionable work spaces for digital filmmakers, advertisers and other creative professionals--have vacancy rates under 4%. The transformation is continuing proof that urban aesthetics lures economic success.

The Hayden Tract is one of many boldly designed developments encouraged by Culver City leaders. They are guided by the quirky but ultimately practical vision in a plan that the Culver City Redevelopment Agency crafted nearly three decades ago.

The success of the Hayden Tract and other industrial redevelopments approved by Culver City shows how creative architecture and smart urban planning can bring small, neglected patches of land to life, helping otherwise crowded communities grow without degrading quality of life.

Such success is also quieting the plan’s critics, mostly local builders who complain that it saddles them with slow permitting processes and needlessly expensive mandates. For example, the city requires that many large parking lots be landscaped and that architects allude to regional history in their building designs.

Environmental Protection Agency head Christie Whitman and other national leaders are increasingly embracing so-called “infill” development as a solution to suburban sprawl.

As many other cities tried to lure big-box stores and car dealerships in seeking sales tax revenues, Culver City set out to reinvent its urban identity. It encouraged architects to avoid what the cultural critic Michael Sorkin calls “the architecture of Anyville.” Most of the city’s large-scale building projects, designed by architect Eric Owen Moss and financed by the husband-and-wife developers Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith, buck the prevailing trend in the Los Angeles area by emphasizing, not bulldozing, history. The Hayden Tract, for instance, highlights Ballona Creek, once a meandering stream where Native Americans fished and which now has been unearthed from its concrete sheath. Nearby is Conjunctive Points, 16 free-standing buildings whose dark colors and soaring lines evoke a stealth bomber, alluding to the important role the aerospace industry had in Culver City’s past.

Contrast this with the gap-toothed strings of ugly low-rise boxes and mini-malls that scar too many of Los Angeles’ streets. Preservationists are belatedly trying to save some significant theaters and office buildings in L.A.’s core, and City Hall has been gorgeously restored. But all around it is civic blandness.

This is not to say that Culver City doesn’t have its own share of unproductive politics and failed redevelopment plans. It is still trying to bring pedestrians back to its often-deserted downtown, for instance. Still, the commercial and artistic gain of its industrial development clearly shows that history is alive, even in Los Angeles, and that smart aesthetics can be good urban economics.