Failing a Landmark

Good intentions don’t always lead to good results. That’s the message behind a recent decision by the Los Angeles Unified School District to build a $12.9-million elementary school between Vermont and New Hampshire avenues at First Street, at the northern edge of Koreatown.

Belmont Elementary School No. 6, is part of the first phase of a plan to build 80 schools over the next four years in an effort to ease overcrowding in the district. Ultimately, Los Angeles Unified anticipates a need for 112,000 new seats over the next decade. The school will accommodate 1,200 year-round students in grades K-5, many of whom are currently being bused to schools as far away as the San Fernando Valley.

Designed by the Chicago-based Perkins & Will, the school aspires to be a building of some civic stature. Its clean lines and elegant proportions raise it above the often mundane standards of current school design.

But the plan has a glaring deficiency: its site. In order to build it, the school district plans to demolish a significant architectural landmark, the 1936 KEHE Radio building, designed by Stiles O. Clements. That decision, which was approved by the school board in February and is under review by the school district, underscores the difficulty faced by a district that has struggled to make conscientious design a part of its mandate. What it reveals is a planning process that may not be capable of producing the kind of creative solutions that are so critical to a city’s cultural health.

As architecture, the importance of the KEHE Radio building is hard to dispute. In the 1920s, while a partner at Morgan, Walls & Clements, Clements designed some of the city’s most celebrated landmarks, including the 1926 El Capitan Theatre, in Hollywood, and the 1931 Pellissier Building, which houses the Wiltern Theatre.

Car Culture Sentiments

Clements succeeded in inventing an architectural language that was deeply attuned to Los Angeles’ emerging car culture. By the time he set out on his own, in the early 1930s, he was beginning to strip his designs of unnecessary ornament, creating a cool, streamlined aesthetic.

The KEHE building is an example of such work. Long and low, the building’s blank concrete facade is pierced by a series of inset windows. A two-story tower marks the building’s entrance, its soaring lines acting as a counterpoint to the building’s horizontal thrust. The idea was to reflect the unbroken vistas of L.A.’s boulevards while catching the eye of passing motorists.

Clements went on to complete a number of similarly evocative designs, but few survive. The 1938 Coulter Dry Goods Co. building, a massive concrete structure anchored by a glass block entry tower on Wilshire Boulevard, was demolished in the 1970s. A 1941 studio-office building for dance instructor Arthur Murray, with a billboard-like tower that became a Wilshire Boulevard landmark, was torn down a few years later.

According to L.A. Unified officials, the decision to demolish the KEHE building was due to a variety of constraints at the site. The district initially planned to demolish the entire city block to make room for the school. But after discussions with community advocates, it agreed to preserve several existing apartment buildings on the block’s northwest corner in order to minimize the number of local tenants that had to be displaced. As a result, the size of the lot was reduced from an original 3.9 acres to 3.1.

The new school is essentially designed in the shape of a U that opens toward the north, framing a large internal courtyard. A low, L-shaped classroom building will extend the length of First Street and part of New Hampshire, and a library and multi-purpose room will face Vermont. The KEHE building, which extends north from the site of the multi-purpose room, will be demolished to make room for a playing field and basketball courts.

In purely architectural terms, the design is competent, if somewhat dull. By breaking the school down into discrete structures, the architects have given the complex a human scale. Clad in stucco and corrugated metal, these structures frame a number of interconnected, outdoor rooms. A kindergarten playground extends along one side of the main courtyard, set slightly below grade to give it a more intimate feel. A smaller, contemplative garden separates the library from the classroom building.

Faced with opposition from preservationists, meanwhile, school district officials have been working on a compromise plan that would preserve a portion of the KEHE building’s facade without altering the school’s basic design. In this version, the facade, supported on a heavy steel frame, would act as a barrier between the basketball courts and Vermont, shielding them from street noise.

But the notion of saving only a segment of the KEHE building’s facade represents a perverse attitude toward preservation. It treats architecture as a superficial endeavor, and would transform an important monument--one that could again function as a part of the city’s living fabric--into an empty memory of the past. One could make a convincing argument, in fact, that saving part of the facade does more harm than good, in that it reinforces the cynical position that architecture does nothing more than provide pretty packaging.

Alternatives Overlooked

The real problem is that other alternatives were never fully explored. The decision to demolish the KEHE building was made by L.A. Unified planners before Perkins & Will was hired, which means that little effort was given to developing the kind of creative solution that could have saved the building without sacrificing the needs of students.

Such a solution is not as improbable as school officials might think. A 1999 design for the International Elementary School in Long Beach, for example, faced similar constraints. The school accommodates 774 students on a 2.4-acre site. By comparison, Belmont No. 6 will house about 915 students on 3.1 acres.

But the Long Beach facility, designed by the Santa Monica-based Morphosis, is a more radical departure from the conventional urban school. A large courtyard is carved out of the building’s core. From there, a grand stair leads up to a stunning rooftop playground. Protected by enormous, canted steel screens, the playground offers sweeping views of the surrounding cityscape.

To attain that level of invention, the school district would have to go back to the drawing board. That would cost significant money and time, and given the politics of school construction and the dire need for more classrooms, it is probably beyond the realm of possibility. But at the very least, L.A. Unified should learn a valuable lesson from what was ultimately a muddled process.

The agency should have begun by acknowledging that Clements’ landmark was an irreplaceable part of the city’s legacy. It could then have commissioned a range of architectural talents to come up with competing proposals for the development of the entire block, plans that took into account a complex mix of school, housing and preservation issues. It might have come up with a solution that reflected a deeper respect for the past while offering a more valuable model for the future.