Gehry Has His Head in Sand for Giving Credibility to Playa Vista
What a score! What a coup! Garbo talks! Gehry builds!
One of the least savory building projects in all of Los Angeles manages to land as its poster boy one of the most renowned architects in all the world.
Signing up Frank O. Gehry to design an office park in a grotty corner of the last, vastest piece of empty real estate in Los Angeles--it’s like getting Placido to sing in your church choir, like getting Magic to coach your high school team.
No, come to think of it--it’s more like persuading Erin Brockovich to cut the ribbon on your new nuclear waste dump.
The coin of this realm of L.A. is celebrity, baby. And the developers who want to build the biggest real estate project in the city on top of the Ballona Wetlands know that very well. And they know that, whether it’s soda or sneakers, Britney or Michael, the syllogism of consumerism goes like this:
“Hmm: I like Frank Gehry. Frank Gehry doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with building at the Ballona Wetlands. Therefore, I shouldn’t think there’s anything wrong with building at the Ballona Wetlands.”
Landing a big fish like Gehry instantly vaults this nettlesome project onto the world stage, over the heads of the whining enviros, of the petty locals crabbing about traffic and pollution. This was Frank Gehry who had come aboard. This was about architecture, about art.
And in the meantime, it was about Valerie Sklarevsky’s broken heart.
Valerie got arrested for the 46th time last month. She was hauled off to the Santa Monica pokey for lashing herself with bicycle cables to the doors of Gehry’s Santa Monica studios to protest his designing buildings at part of the Playa Vista project.
She was already 10 days into her hunger strike, so the jail’s mystery-meat meal didn’t much matter. And the jail did have a copy of “Nature’s Voice” with an interesting piece about Gandhi, so it wasn’t an evening totally wasted.
There was a time when Valerie says she didn’t have to pull stunts like that to get Frank Gehry’s ear. Twenty-five and 30 years ago, they were friends. They had good times, and good talks.
Both were working on a model community in Maryland, but Valerie quit after the developer put up a mall on a bird sanctuary, and Gehry came to California, and with one thing and another, the years came and went and they lost touch. And then Valerie heard that Frank was going to design buildings at Playa Vista and move his offices there.
Now here in L.A., in the midst of plenty and plenty of it, are people who drive crummy cars or work at crummy jobs so they can be free to sit in trees to stop chain saws, or lie down in the mud to stop bulldozers, or picket about not dropping bombs or not eating animals.
Maybe it’s not your cup of tea; maybe it’s even a bit much for mine. But it’s more laudable than we who congratulate ourselves on saving the world by keeping the tires on the SUV fully inflated to save on gas mileage.
Valerie is that kind of person, and she thought Gehry was too. So she telephoned him. Old friends, maybe they could connect where others failed.
As she remembered their talk from her notes, he told her he’d just driven up from San Diego and saw more wetlands than he’d seen 20 years ago. Why, he asked, wasn’t she protesting for the Malibu wetlands? (She does.) When she talked about the perils of methane gas at the Ballona site, he’d said, What do you think, I’m an idiot?
She said Gehry told her he’d never heard a word of opposition until he announced the deal; “I thought, ‘Where has he been?’ ”
There was more, of course, but Valerie came away discouraged. “Why does he want to build there? He’s always been fascinated with airplanes and airplane hangars.” And this project would be on the 60-acre site where some of Howard Hughes’ old airplane works were built. “I guess now,” says Valerie, “he needs the Spruce Goose to hold his ego.”
I like much of Gehry’s work. His Disney Hall gets my heart going. His Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is so beautiful it doesn’t need any paintings in it. I’d been rooting for Gehry to get the downtown cathedral job; it went instead to a Spanish architect, and, seen from the freeway and from Broadway, it looks as scary as a prison.
One politically savvy parishioner told me that her family calls the cathedral “Taj Mahony,” a monument to the cardinal. When Gehry was in the running for the commission, he spoke of the city’s “yearning for some spiritual place, a sanctum.” There is peace to be found beyond girders and cladding. There are “books in the running brooks, and sermons in stones.” When it comes to the Ballona Wetlands, Frank Gehry’s own best monument to himself could be the beauty of building nothing at all.
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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com
