The Planners Who Disdain Style

“Feel this paper,” Stefanos Polyzoides insists, opening a brand new notebook, his favorite kind. Made in Germany by a company called Sennelier, it looks like an old-fashioned American composition book, but the cover is green and black instead of white and black. Stefanos has filled almost 30 of these notebooks with drawings and ideas and notes from places he has traveled to--internally and externally.

In Elizabeth Moule’s office, next door to Polyzoides’, a white plate with a neatly sliced, brilliant-red half of a tomato sits on the 17th century Danish desk.

Architects are notoriously stylish. They dress well. They arrange things beautifully. They have unique signatures. The architects in the Pasadena firm of Moule & Polyzoides are no exception. But something else is going on in this 1927 house designed by the Southern California architect Wallace Neff, known for reviving the Spanish Colonial style in Pasadena and Santa Barbara. Smooth plaster walls, sautillo tile, dark wood and terra cotta make a quiet workspace for 25 young architects to design buildings, neighborhoods and cities that are changing the face of Southern California and the Southwest.

“No, no no,” says Polyzoides (born in Athens, Greece, he is nothing, if not emphatic). “It’s not about style. The essence of architectural expression is not style. The more important thing is place.” The two architects, who have been married for 11 years, are sought after both for their ability to think large scale--helping cities to rethink urban centers--and for their work on a more human scale--creating residential complexes centered around internal courtyards.

Polyzoides is given to gestures. He talks, even in general conversation, like a visionary. Moule is blond and six months pregnant with the couple’s third child. Of the two, she is often the calm, practical voice. When they disagree with something you say, they will take turns hammering it into the ground until it is dead, Moule with facts and practical notions, Polyzoides with large, irrefutable ideas.

Moule, 40, and Polyzoides, 54, met in 1989, working at his downtown firm, DeBrettville and Polyzoides. They talked, they exchanged ideas, they felt, Polyzoides says, like urban pioneers. A few years later, in 1992, they teamed up with four friends to start a think tank to discuss the tenets and applications of New Urbanism, a practical movement for a practical art form, a political art form. New Urbanism is also an optimistic view of a new potential for cities--a plan to make urban centers more livable . . . “We saw the surge of growth in cities and we wanted to be prepared for it.” This think tank became the Congress of New Urbanism.

New Urbanism, which has its origins in the planned community of Seaside, Fla., designed by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in the early 1990s, is about living on a human scale in nature. It is about, Moule says, “giving people choices about how they want to live that transcend economics and aesthetics.” Today there are 3,500 members nationwide of the Congress of New Urbanism. They meet once a year. “It has been gratifying to see that the things that have moved us in our field, living habits we’ve noticed in human behavior that pass from generation to generation, for example, resonate with the average citizen,” Moule says.

The pair practice a kind of urban planning inspired by visionaries such as Frederick Law Olmsted, who is best known for designing Central Park in New York. The couple is often asked by city governments to draw up long-term, large-scale plans for reinvigorating, reorganizing and rethinking urban neighborhoods. This kind of work may not result in immediate construction; it takes a different kind of orientation and a different kind of ego.

A passion for parks and open space (the foundation of Olmsted’s philosophy as well that of Moule and Polyzoides) has sparked enormous battles between developers and urban planners across the country that have come to a head in the last five years. Los Angeles, often used as an example of development run amok in the past, has been in the forefront of these debates over open space, in places like the Los Angeles River, in discussions over the redevelopment of industrial Los Angeles, to the south and east of downtown and in the Cornfields site near Chinatown. There has, in Los Angeles, always been more interest on the part of architects in creating single buildings than there has been in creating neighborhoods.

“Los Angeles is trapped between two fateful poles: architects making monuments and achitects with too much historic nostalgia,” says Polyzoides. “We are not in the business of building monuments. We are not in the business of repeating historical mistakes. We try to learn from a region’s history.”

“The dominant development model has always been slash and burn,” says Moule. “It involves denying the past and our cultural heritage. Building razing is in. You wake up one morning and there’s a new building next door.”

“Like a virus,” Polyzoides agrees, disgusted.

A Strategic Plan for Los Angeles

In 1997, the city of Pasadena commissioned a civic center urban design report from Moule and Polyzoides. Four years earlier, the city of Los Angeles asked the firm to help create a strategic plan for the city’s long-term development, including new building codes. The city of Albuquerque has asked Moule and Polyzoides to make a similar report to help them visualize the future as sprawl threatens to turn the city into a miniature version of Los Angeles.

In 1998, Polyzoides and Moule rebuilt a five-block neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, at Slauson Avenue and 164th Street. They are building a new “town square” in the Beverly Hills business triangle. And they built Civano, a new town near Tuscon that is seen as a model of sustainable development in a desert environment. Each of these projects is intended to turn around “mindless, ugly, disorienting urban sprawl.” Each tries to use sustainable energy alternatives that are low-tech and labor intensive, each tries to give an alternative to car culture. By providing more public spaces, each seeks to use native materials and landscaping to achieve a balance with nature.

On a smaller scale, but using the same principles, Polyzoides and Moule designed the Metrolink Bus Plaza at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, the Blue Line’s Del Mar station in Pasadena south of Old Town, the South Pasadena Station at Mission Street and Meridian Avenue, UCLA campus housing for 2,000 students, an athletic facility on the Scripps College campus in Claremont, and three courtyard housing projects (among them, the 24-unit Harper Court luxury housing in West Hollywood and two in Pasadena). They are also restoring the Huntington Library’s art galleries to bring the buildings up to current seismic code.

“The kind of world we invent is not just buildings,” Polyzoides says. “Architecture in the mid- to late-20th century has been reduced to a series of style wars. We are trying to find a better way of dealing with humanity than Modernism, which has become an orgy of personal expression. For every genius, every Frank Gehry, there are 10 idiots who can’t cross the street. We live in an eclectic society, which mainstream architects are unwilling to admit. We are multilingual in architectural styles as well as language and culture. Modernists care more about freedom of expression, about art and style”--he spits out the word style--”than they do about human beings. The object is more important than the occupant. Modern critics have an antipathy to traditional architecture and the market is driven by these negatives.”

When most people think of New Urbanism, they think of towns, such as Seaside or Celebration in Florida, places where all the principles of New Urbanism were brought to bear. Celebration, a full-fledged community built by Disney Co., has been criticized for its stage-set feel, like an old-fashioned town dropped in the middle of the 21st century. Polyzoides and Moule feel strongly that the movement is not just about towns, that its essential principles can be applied to single buildings as well.

“You have to think about a neighborhood when you build a building,” she says. “You have to think of the purpose of that building in the larger world.” “Cities shouldn’t be built by Disney,” she says by way of response to criticism about Celebration. “They grow up over long periods. They involve many players. We should be making cities with real character, not just a veneer of character. We should be creating town squares where people can mix with and develop a tolerance for people different from themselves. This is not,” she insists, “an overly romantic notion.”

Both Polyzoides and Moule are longtime residents of L.A. Moule was born here, but left for a while for college at Smith and Princeton; Polyzoides came to the U.S. from Athens in 1965, at 19. He went to Princeton, then came to Los Angeles in 1973 to teach at USC. Both talk about the lack of political will that has kept Los Angeles from evolving architecturally in recent years.

In 1992, Polyzoides wrote a book, “Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles” about high density courtyard housing in Southern California. They have started a development company to reintroduce housing around courtyards, a feature of some of southern California’s most beautiful buildings.

“We have come,” Stefanos says,”to the end of horizontal Los Angeles. This occurs in cities when people can no longer imagine the horizon. The travel and time costs of getting to the center become prohibitive. And there are geographical borders. We cannot sprawl beyond the edges of the basin, the mountains in the north and the east. We’re already half way to Las Vegas! The solution is higher density housing--25 dwellings per acre.”

“It’s part paradise and part hell,” Polyzoides says, “but there is enough evidence of the way it should be. We have,” he says almost proudly, “the most mature sprawl in the country. It began early in 1950s and ‘60s, and we are now ready to enter a whole new phase of reconstruction.”

“Where others see sprawl, we see promise,” Moule agrees. “New Urbanism is a metropolitan phenomenon,” she says. “We hope to set an example here that can be exported.”

Their ideas are grand, but the two haven’t lost touch with the fascination for details that absorb so many architects. As I am leaving the office, reaching for the door handle, I can’t help but notice how it feels, how it turns and stays in the palm as I move out into the street. It was designed by Wallace Neff. Polyzoides notices that I admire it. “You have to understand the whole world,” he says, “in order to open a door. This,” he adds, “is a particularly beautiful door.” And, we might add, stylish.