At the elite’s altar

The past few years have been bountiful ones for American architecture. It is hard to name a major American city that doesn’t have a significant civic project in the works, most by big-name talents. Art institutions, philharmonic boards and universities have turned to architects to raise their public profiles with flamboyant new buildings. The newly minted rich commission houses by cutting-edge talents as a way of achieving the cultural status they crave.

What is more, the stylistic range of these works makes this one of the most creative times in recent architectural history. Free of Modernism’s once dogmatic formulas, architects continue to push the limits of aesthetic experimentation. The dynamic, futuristic forms of Zaha Hadid, the stoic mysticism of Tadao Ando, the aggressive conceptual constructions of Rem Koolhaas -- such visions and others represent a remarkable range of competing values. Each is leaving its mark on the architectural landscape.

But if architecture’s creative resurgence has once again caught the attention of the American public, that resurgence has also been relatively shallow. Half a century ago, architects could believe, with some justification, that they were drafting the cities of tomorrow, and that the work they did would have significant social impact.

Today, architects working in America are confined to serving a relatively small and entrenched elite -- the corporate kingpins and aging philanthropists who typically make up the boards of the country’s major cultural institutions. The success of the conservative political agenda has meant that the kind of visionary public works projects that remain possible in Europe are no longer part of the public dialogue here. The nation’s faltering economy, meanwhile, has resulted in cuts in philanthropic spending.

The result is that architecture risks being reduced to a purely aesthetic game -- one that offers the veneer of progress without its substance. At best, the high end of the profession is able to produce the occasional transcendent masterpiece. At worst, it functions as a mere plaything for the rich and their institutions.

“It is a time when everything seems possible but nothing is,” says Koolhaas, architecture’s reigning radical voice. “There is this cult of the masterpiece and the rest -- a generic, unimaginative landscape. The middle ground is lost.”

Culture and commissions

The shift away from work that serves a broader public is not essentially the fault of architects. They do not set the country’s political agenda, nor can they create commissions out of thin air -- someone has to pay for them. But the explosion in high-profile cultural commissions has produced a sort of feeding frenzy among many architectural firms, which regularly vie against one another for the most prestigious -- and lucrative -- jobs. And that new focus has turned attention away from issues that once were at the heart of the profession.

The greatest monuments being built in America today are part of a cultural rather than political agenda. British high-tech Modernist Norman Foster, for example, is completing a major addition to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; Daniel Libeskind, the designer of Berlin’s celebrated Jewish Museum, is working on an addition to the Denver Art Museum; Koolhaas’ Seattle Public Library is under construction; and Ando’s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth opens later this month.

Other projects are conspicuous emblems of American affluence. Richard Meier, the designer of the Getty Center, is completing two shimmering glass condominium towers overlooking Manhattan’s Hudson River. Most of the apartments have been snatched up by such celebrities as Calvin Klein and Nicole Kidman. (Plagued by insider trading accusations, decorating doyen Martha Stewart is reportedly trying to unload her duplex for $8 million.)

Meier has also designed a stunning house in Malibu for billionaire Eli Broad. The house’s pristine, sharp-edged white forms evoke the precision of a fine-tuned Swiss watch. In Napa Valley, the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron is completing a residence for the art collectors Richard and Pamela Kramlich. The project’s undulating glass walls, set underneath a swooping faceted roof, evoke the intricacy of a Faberge egg. Koolhaas’ most recently completed design is a $40-million Prada boutique in Manhattan’s SoHo district.

Such commissions have made these architects international celebrities. Their names are regularly sprinkled across the pages of glossy magazines; the unveiling of one of their buildings is often a major media event.

What that popularity has not given them, however, is access to the kind of large-scale public projects that could have a deeper social impact in this country. The American nuclear family, for example, has undergone a seismic shift in its identity in the postwar years -- including the growth of single-parent households and gay marriages. These shifts raise profound questions about housing design, yet architects have barely begun to explore them. Big commercial and retail developments, meanwhile, are typically entrusted to mainstream, commercial architects who churn out the same formulaic atrocities.

No American city reflects this condition more pointedly than Los Angeles. The city has embarked on a number of major civic projects, from Jose Raphael Moneo’s recently completed Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, scheduled to open next fall, and Koolhaas’ plan for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, currently in design stages. (Koolhaas’ project is now on hold after voters defeated a bond measure to fund the building.)

These are all significant designs, and their addition to the city’s civic landscape is invaluable. But the location of these projects is telling. The most visible cultural complex completed here over the last decade -- the Getty Center -- looms over one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods, on a hilltop overlooking the 405 Freeway in Brentwood. Disney Hall and the cathedral are located downtown amid a mix of corporate towers and government offices that civic boosters are seeking to make palatable for tourists and middle-class suburbanites.

The notion of a similar civic undertaking being built in the Latino enclave of Boyle Heights or the predominantly African American neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles, by comparison, seems as likely as Steven Spielberg holding a premiere party in Watts.

Meanwhile, a bond issue that would have raised nearly $200 million for the expansion of two of the city’s most important cultural institutions -- the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History -- failed to pass in November. Another bond measure, which will provide $2.1 billion for the creation or renovation of up to 134,000 units of public housing in California, was approved. Yet state officials have no plans to explore how the new housing could fit into a larger conception of the region’s growth, nor have they given any thought to how imaginative architecture could contribute to the lives of its inhabitants.

American architecture was not always so lacking in idealistic fervor. In the 1930s, when Frank Lloyd Wright first began promoting his Usonian houses, his intent was to offer a radical model for the American middle-class way of life. The houses’ modest scale, horizontal profiles and free-flowing interiors evoked an Emersonian vision of man in harmony with the natural world. About the same time, inspired by the grand urban schemes then being proposed by the European avant-garde, Wright designed Broadacre City, a theoretical suburban arcadia of single-family homes and sweeping landscapes punctuated by the occasional skyscraper.

In Los Angeles, faith in architecture’s transformative powers survived through the early 1960s, when mainstream developers were churning out suburban middle-class housing tracts whose streamlined appearance, two-car garages and humming appliances were held up as an emblem of America’s unwavering faith in its own future.

That faith collapsed in the 1970s, when it became apparent that Modernism could not solve society’s ills; at its worst, it contributed to them.

“The Modernist Utopia was only achieved in a negative way,” Libeskind says. “In the name of helping people, they only created dull, conformist environments. And that was the end of ideology in architecture.”

But broader political forces were also at play. By the 1980s, the social activism of New Deal-era America was beginning to fade, picked apart by the advances of free-market capitalism and corporate globalism.

In architecture schools today, it is still possible to find programs like Auburn University’s Rural Studio, which designs and builds low-cost homes for Alabama’s poor. But such programs are limited in ambition, and students now are far more likely to be engaged by issues like “corporate branding,” as if the profession’s function were no different from that of a national advertising firm -- to create slick, captivating images for high-profile clients.

“I think that the most important change has been the rising adulation of the market,” Koolhaas said, “and the disappearance of the state. It has reduced everything [in America] to this question of profit and consumption.”

That assessment only gets bleaker when compared with what architects have been able to accomplish in Europe over the past decades. While Americans were loudly proclaiming the death of the Utopian dream, Europe went on tinkering with the old models, fine-tuning them, lowering -- but not abandoning -- expectations.

In the 1960s, for example, groups like the London-based Archigram and the Italian collaborative Superstudio were producing a stream of theoretical projects that sought to transform Modernism’s increasingly limiting formulas into a less oppressive vision of the future. Superstudio’s 1969 “Continuous Monument,” for example, proposed gargantuan rationalist glass-and-steel structures that would have extended endlessly across a medieval European landscape and were meant to function as refuges from commercial culture.

Such projects were essentially theoretical fantasies, but their impact was felt nonetheless. With its scaffolding-like exterior of steel pipes and transparent tubes, Paris’ Pompidou Center, for example, was a direct descendant of Archigram’s Fun City proposal. Both were conceived as flexible frameworks for a more spontaneous culture.

A decade later, French President Francois Mitterrand launched one of the most ambitious building programs in recent Parisian history, creating half a dozen major civic monuments, most of them in the city’s working-class eastern sector. The idea was to rectify the imbalance between the city’s traditional core, packed with historic monuments, and an area of the city that had none.

In preparation for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the Spanish government devised a plan that created a vast range of new public spaces, significantly enriching the city’s civic identity. The scope of the development also spawned a major revival in contemporary Spanish and Portuguese architecture, uncovering a range of new talents like Alvaro Siza, Carme Pinos and Enric Miralles.

And in the Netherlands, a more egalitarian country than the U.S., government planners have created hundreds of thousands of new units of social housing in the past decade, asking many of the country’s emerging architectural talents to come up with a humane vision for their design.

Clumped in a core

It is not hard to imagine the impact such strategies could have had on a city like Los Angeles. Rather than concentrating the majority of our civic and cultural institutions in a single civic core, they could have been dispersed across the city -- a Latino museum in East L.A. or a LACMA branch in South-Central. (Vague promises of extensive new development in South-Central, in fact, were made after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but they were never kept.)

Similarly, L.A.’s Catholic archdiocese might have considered building a network of parish churches in the city’s most blighted areas rather than concentrating all of its resources on the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The cathedral is a monument to the church’s power; the smaller churches might have signaled a more egalitarian spiritual vision. (In Rome, Richard Meier is completing just such a project, a stunning church whose gleaming white forms act as a spiritual beacon in an otherwise bleak landscape of decrepit housing blocks.)

Such an approach could have given these communities a deeper sense of cultural identity. It could make invisible communities suddenly visible, weaving them into the city’s broader cultural fabric. But the idea was never discussed.

Like other architects who have struggled with how to recapture architecture’s social relevance, Libeskind claims the answer is not to abandon hope, but to return to a more humanist vision of architecture’s role.

“A life without utopian dreams would not be worth living,” he says. “But I think the ethics now evolves from dealing directly with the human condition. Architecture should be thought of more like surgery than mathematics.”

Pipe dreams? Maybe. But architecture and city planning in this country could use an infusion of idealism. We are the richest country in the world. Our architects rank among the most creative. Why not invest some of that creativity where it is needed most?

Nicolai Ouroussoff is The Times’ architecture critic.