Building Boom Thinks Big

Amid showers of welders’ sparks, clanking hammers and lumbering earth movers, flashy new cultural and commercial landmarks reared skyward in 2001 throughout Southern California.

The unusual number of big construction and restoration projects--shopping centers, a railroad line, a theme park, a beloved city hall--was propelled by the affluence of the 1990s and reinforced the region’s place among the world’s great urban centers, experts say. But the darkening economic picture and the battle against terrorism may cut back on such projects for a while.

“It’s an exciting time to be an architect, no matter what level you practice at,” said Michael Hricak, president of the American Institute of Architecture, California Council. “It’s refreshing and gratifying to see talent in our building environment getting the respect we’ve paid people involved in the entertainment industry for decades.”

Though unfinished, the high-profile architectural projects included downtown’s colossal adobe-colored Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral, designed by Madrid-based architect Jose Rafael Moneo, and, just two blocks away, Frank Gehry’s dazzling, tilting forms of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Both attracted slack-jawed visitors to their construction sites during the year.

Ready for business were the eclectic collections of stores and restaurants at Hollywood & Highland, home of the new Kodak Theatre in Hollywood; Paseo Colorado in Pasadena; and Downtown Disney in Anaheim, where Walt Disney Co. also opened its adjacent California Adventure theme park.

In the world of public works projects, the immense $2.4-billion Alameda Corridor is four months shy of realizing its aim to speed freight along rail lines linking the nation’s busiest port complex and Los Angeles’ train yards.

The first segments of a Foothill Freeway extension, which may be the last major urban freeway in the state’s foreseeable future, opened in Rancho Cucamonga. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California switched on four 6,000-horsepower generators at its mammoth reservoir near Hemet to produce enough electricity for 9,750 homes.

The 73-year-old Los Angeles City Hall is looking spiffier than ever. A long-unused revolving beacon was installed on its peak in September, capping a three-year, $299-million face lift and earthquake-safety retrofit for one of the city’s most recognizable buildings. Soon afterward, however, security concerns blocked visitors from its main ceremonial entrance on Spring Street.

The Watts Towers, a handmade Los Angeles monument to folk art, were also accepting visitors after a seven-year, $1.9-million seismic retrofitting and restoration since the Northridge earthquake.

Most of those projects were conceived after the economic doldrums and historic earthquakes, fires, floods, riots and crime waves of the early 1990s. They are coming on line after the conclusion of the most prosperous decade in American history and the start of an economic recession.

The question now, a little more than three months after the terrorist attacks, is this: Will the building boom last?

Hricak believes it will, for several reasons.

“There’s an incredible pent-up demand for improving the quality of our environment,” he said. “Beyond that, the amount of schools--kindergarten through university--that must be built statewide over the next decade could alone fuel the renaissance.

“There’s no turning back; good design begets good design,” he added. “Even the tragic events of Sept. 11 have shined a spotlight on many of the things we value most, including our buildings and cities.”

Architect Aleks Istanbullu agrees. Admiring downtown Los Angeles’ most dramatic work in progress, the Disney Hall, which is scheduled to open in 2003, he said: “It looks to me like the beginning of something wonderful.

“Los Angeles has always been known for its residential work, but it has produced little in the way of exuberant, inventive civic structures--until now,” said Istanbullu, an active member of the American Institute of Architecture and a former faculty member at USC. “The Disney Hall makes us feel like the city is soaring, and that feeling is infectious.”

Others are not so sure.

Urban planner William Fulton sees only “aspirations of greatness” in the region’s newest signature structures.

“These things are clearly testaments to Los Angeles’ stature as a world-class metropolis, but not as a great urban place where things connect,” said Fulton, who is based in Ventura. “Take downtown Los Angeles, where you swoop into specific entertainment edifices for specific things, then leave.”

Hricak said Fulton misses the point.

“The Disney Hall, for example, is only three blocks from some wonderful restaurants,” he said. “It’s all a matter of scale. Three blocks in Los Angeles is a whopping hike for some people. But in New York, it would be next door.”

In any case, he added, “new shops and restaurants will eventually crop up around it.”

It’s not just Southern California. In the Napa wine country, the buzz of sophisticates even in this season of economic uncertainty was Copia, a $30-million corrugated metal-and-glass museum devoted exclusively to America’s appreciation of eating and living well.

In Redding, the creation of one of the world’s most innovative footbridges--a harp-shaped, $20-million span across the Sacramento River--has reshaped civic identity.

A second wave of imposing new structures and projects, meanwhile, is already on the drawing boards.

In mid-November, a competition-winning design was unveiled for a $171-million Caltrans district headquarters building in downtown Los Angeles.

A month later, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art chose a radical and adventurous design by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas that will transform its Wilshire Boulevard site. The design for the 2,000-seat, $200-million Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center was unveiled in October.

About 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles, the city of Cerritos plans to convert a medical building into a museum, and to enhance its parks with ambitious landscaping and bigger, deeper lakes. The museum will be just a few blocks from the city’s nearly completed titanium-clad, $23-million Millennium Library, which will house 300,000 books and 200 computers.

“These are uplifting projects that will pay us back by making Cerritos a better place to live,” City Councilwoman Gloria Kappe said, “and by attracting new business.”

In terms of sheer scale, none of Southern California’s latest structural wonders comes close to its largest--and stealthiest--public works project ever: the Alameda Corridor. The below-ground railroad system required 50,000 tons of steel reinforcing bars, the removal of 4 million tons of dirt, and the relocation of 2,000 lines for sewer, gas and electricity service.

At the bottom of the corridor’s concrete trench, which is 33 feet deep, 50 feet wide and 10 miles long, workers were recently applying final welds to the project. It is scheduled to open April 15, on time and on budget.

From then on, 100 trains a day will move $100 billion a year in imports at speeds of up to 70 mph. Below ground level, the nearly invisible rail line will allow around-the-clock service uninterrupted by the traffic flow in 26 communities from Long Beach to Vernon.

Standing on a stretch of tracks slicing through a heavily industrialized part of Compton, Tim Buresh, the project’s director of construction and engineering, marveled: “It’s a miracle the Alameda Corridor got built at all.

“It will service two ports that are fiercely competitive with two railroad companies--Union Pacific and Burlington--that have been rivals for over a century,” he said. “It also goes through nine political jurisdictions with long-standing issues.”

To be sure, not every new project has proceeded as smoothly. Take the 10-month-old California Adventure, which has managed to double its number of daily customers by using discounts and a revived Electric Parade to boost lagging attendance.

But many architects and builders are counting on the economy to improve.

“Much of what you see being built today was born out of the despair of the early 1990s,” said Michael Bayard, an economist and urban planner with the Urban Land Institute in Washington. “In the early 2000s, people will again begin preparing new initiatives to move to a higher plateau.

“Great ideas come out of bad times,” he said. “It is part of the human nature of great cities to want to retain their greatness, and to scale even greater heights.”