An Obscured City View

Some architecture exhibitions are valuable for their air of immediacy rather than for the depth of their scholarly research. They are meant to offer a snapshot of current trends, a fresh, uncensored view of what the profession is up to.

But “What’s Shakin’: New Architecture in L.A.,” the two-part show on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary and the Pacific Design Center, is not that show. Ill-conceived and generally unimaginative, the exhibition includes some splendid individual works, but it never weaves them into a compelling narrative about the state of architecture in Los Angeles today.

The exhibition is the first by MOCA’s new curator of architecture and design, Brooke Hodge, and it covers eight projects scattered across L.A., many currently under construction.

The Geffen portion of the show includes projects by such disparate talents as Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan, Eric Owen Moss, Gary Paige and the team of Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner. They range in scale from a small conference and meeting room to a 99,000-square-foot charter school planned for South-Central L.A.

The related exhibition at the Pacific Design Center focuses on two major downtown landmarks, both under construction: the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

The show never casts its net wide enough, nor does it burrow below the surface of L.A.’s fertile architectural soil. Even the title--an obvious reference to the Northridge earthquake--seems glib today, as if the city were still fixated on an event that took place more than seven years ago.

The installation opens with Koolhaas’ design for a Prada, a high-end Milan-based fashion house. One of the show’s few highlights, the design, now under construction on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and depicted here in two gorgeous models, explores themes such as voyeurism and desire--the twin engines that drive the fashion industry.

The design is conceived as three distinct horizontal zones stacked one on top of the other. On ground level, the shop is left entirely open to the street. A mechanized steel curtain rises out of the ground to shut the space off at night. Inside, a grand stair leads up to the second floor, whose form seems to hover above like a gigantic slab of steel. The third floor, encased in glass, rests gently on top of this slab.

To enter the shop, visitors will step over a series of large, oblong-shaped vitrines embedded in the ground, a play on the traditional shop window. But the heart of the design is the grand stair. Visible from the street, it will serve a series of functions: As an informal place to display and try on shoes, in effect, the stair becomes a public stage for the act of consumption, a place where shoppers will prance and pose for gawking pedestrians.

As you climb to the second floor, such voyeuristic thrills intensify. Changing rooms, set at the center of the second floor, are conceived as glass containers that can become opaque or transparent with the flick of a switch. Above, a VIP lounge is cut off from the Prada Sport department by a narrow, slot-like atrium, as if to heighten the disparity between the celebrity shopper and the common masses.

Other projects in the show seem tame by comparison. Greg Lynn’s design for the grandly named Uni-serve corporate headquarters, located in downtown L.A., is essentially a conference and meeting room set inside the building’s existing shell. Seen in plan, its curvaceous, translucent plastic skin, supported on a series of vertical plywood ribs, is beautiful to look at. It evokes the silhouette of a woman, her hip swinging seductively to one side. But the project is largely a formal exercise; its small scale prevents Lynn from pursuing his ideas further.

Similarly, the images of Maltzan’s design for the UCLA Hammer expansion seem torn out of the pages of a fashion magazine. The drawings depict stylish young couples posing inside the museum’s main courtyard. Nearby, an elegant lacquered fiberboard model depicts a stair and bridge structure that is a central component of the museum’s new courtyard, but the landscaping that will be so critical to the design’s success is barely represented. One can glimpse a theme here--the influence fashion trends exert on contemporary architecture--but the show does not pursue it.

In the midst of all this sex, the rough, crude forms of Moss’ “Pterodactyl” building should come as a relief. The combination parking structure-office building is the latest in a series of more than a dozen projects Moss has designed for developers Frederick and Laurie Smith in Culver City. Depicted here in two large-scale models, the offices evoke a cluster of geometric blocks that seem about to tumble over the edge of the low concrete parking structure. Together with the other Moss buildings, they form part of a hybrid landscape, as if the former manufacturing area had been invaded by bizarre parasitic vessels.

But at this point the exhibition falls apart. The final gallery includes the design of two schools: Marmol and Radziner’s Accelerated School in South-Central, which is slated for construction in 2002, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture’s new downtown home, which will be completed some time this fall.

The inclusion of the SCI-Arc building is the most puzzling. The project is essentially a straightforward renovation--what developers like to call “adaptive reuse.” Originally built in 1906, the quarter-mile-long building, supported on rows of heavy concrete pillars, was used as a freight depot until it was abandoned in the 1950s. It is an elegant engineering feat. But the renovation design by architect Paige is largely beside the point. Despite a series of new mezzanine structures and walkways that weave their way through the existing space, the design’s beauty ultimately stems from its restraint. It is not a compelling architectural statement.

Opposite this model, Marmol and Radziner’s design for the Accelerated School complex looks drab and conventional. Its slick, horizontal form, which wraps around two sides of a large outdoor court, recalls the streamlined Moderne structures of 1920s L.A. The design’s most interesting feature is its rooftop playground, but the notion that such a concept is in any way original--a claim made in the wall text--is farfetched.

Even a casual appraisal of current L.A. architecture, in fact, turns up more exciting projects. Architecture firms such as Morphosis, StudioWorks and Daly Genik have all recently designed schools in Los Angeles, many of them more compelling than those in the show. Clearly, it is a curator’s job to be selective. But the standards by which the projects included in this show were judged are hard to fathom. Quality? Building type? Scale? Generational shifts? None of the above seems to apply.

As for the related show at Pacific Design Center, there is one sparkling moment: a massive model of the interior of the downtown cathedral, designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo. Although the interior of the real cathedral downtown is partially complete, few have been granted the privilege of seeing it. This model hints at the nearly incomprehensible scale of the structure’s interior and at the elegance of its abstract forms. (The shipment of a similar large-scale model of the interior of Disney Hall from New York has been delayed.)

Such moments make the show worth visiting. But they cannot overcome its lack of curatorial insight. Los Angeles’ urban landscape is in the process of a radical transformation, from the construction of an array of new civic monuments to the increasing depth and complexity of its cultural fabric. Architects, both here and abroad, are playing a central role in re-imagining that landscape. Unfortunately, the MOCA show offers only a partial, distorted picture of those visions.

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“What’s Shakin’: New Architecture in L.A.” at MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., L.A., and MOCA at the Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults; $5 for students with ID and seniors; free for MOCA members and children under 12. Admission to MOCA at the Pacific Design Center only, $3. Through Dec. 30 in West Hollywood, Jan. 20 in L.A. (213) 626-6222.