The bold school try

Think small. That, at least in architectural terms, was the mandate delivered to the Los Angeles Unified School District as it struggled to come to terms with obscene levels of overcrowding in the city’s schools. In November, voters approved a $3.35-billion bond issue for building upgrades, $2.58 billion of which was earmarked for completing work on up to 120 new schools during the next three years. The figure has turned out to be barely adequate -- enough to build the schools but not enough to create anything of real architectural substance. For that, the LAUSD would have to draw on other resources.

Few current school projects sum up the tricky nature of that process like the planned Performing and Visual Arts Academy at 450 Grand Ave. in downtown L.A. Originally intended as a traditional high school, the project was reconceived on a far more ambitious scale after billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad intervened. Since then, the original architecture firm, AC Martin, has been replaced by the high-profile Vienna-based Coop Himmelblau. Construction, once scheduled for completion by summer 2005, has been delayed by at least a year. And the project’s cost has swollen by more than $20 million -- to a current price tag of $87 million.

To some, Broad’s involvement is evidence of the continuing erosion of the wall that once separated public and private realms. LAUSD officials concede that some of the design’s features will have to be paid for with private donations. Whether the money comes from Broad or someone else has yet to be determined. (Broad’s foundation recently committed $1.9 million toward the school’s operating budget.)

But the new design, though still in its early stages, goes a long way toward justifying such political meddling. Crackling with new ideas, its blend of pop imagery and communal idealism is a powerful statement about the vital role schools can play in a city’s cultural fabric. It is also a challenge to those who see the high arts as something elitist, a distraction for the rich that is of marginal social value. At a time when local governments are struggling to provide even the most basic public services, this is a significant accomplishment.

Communities collide

Covering 9.8 acres, the complex will stand just across the Hollywood Freeway from the city’s so-called “cultural corridor,” which includes the Music Center, the Colburn School of Music and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, scheduled to open in October. The brooding concrete shell of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels faces the site across the freeway; a sprawling Latino neighborhood and Chinatown flank it to the north.

In an effort to hold down costs, Coop Himmelblau was forced to retain aspects of the original AC Martin plan. Most of the structures, for example, will still be set along the periphery, with classrooms along Grand Avenue and Cesar Chavez Avenue, and the gymnasium and playing fields at the southern portion of the site.

But while the original scheme was a model of banality, Coop Himmelblau’s captures the energy that can be created when such varied communities collide. A shimmering glass-and-steel lobby will anchor the corner of Grand, with a 900-seat theater and an events space extending along the edge of the freeway. Along Cesar Chavez, a grand stair leads up to a large internal court and a sleek, cone-shaped library building.

The idea is to establish a strong visual relationship between the school and Grand Avenue’s civic buildings. The glass lobby will resemble an enormous faceted crystal, a piece of jewelry built on an urban scale. The events space -- perched atop the theater’s concrete fly tower -- juts out toward the freeway like a futuristic periscope. Elevators zip up and down the tower’s facade; a ramp spirals up around its base.

Together with the cathedral’s soaring campanile, these sculptural pieces will create a portal for downtown’s cultural zone, a cluster of vertical markers rising out of L.A.’s famously horizontal sprawl.

The school’s tower, in particular, is loaded with symbolic meaning. It loosely recalls the odd-shaped bell tower of Le Corbusier’s 1953 Monastery at La Tourette, France -- a landmark of Modernist design. In evoking such precedents, Coop Himmelblau is asserting art’s spiritual value. Art now occupies a central social role; the students are its missionaries.

That vision is imbued with a deep sense of communal spirit. Stretching out along Grand Avenue, the painting and dance studios are housed in a long, low building pierced by an asymmetrical pattern of big porthole-like windows, allowing passersby to peer in at students at work. Inside, studios are arranged as generous, open lofts -- workshops for the imagination.

As the structure turns the corner of Cesar Chavez, its form cantilevers out over a small plaza, giving the complex an added air of permeability. Seen from this point, the conical library will serve as a kind of visual lure, drawing people into the central courtyard. The courtyard, in turn, functions both as a sanctuary and a communal meeting place -- a social condenser where students, teachers, artists, curators and local residents can meet, exchange ideas and take part in the kind of urban friction that is central to any creative process.

Picking up on that theme, LAUSD officials have already met with representatives of the avenue’s cultural institutions to discuss possible joint ventures. The most obvious include having curators, artists and musicians teach at the school, or using the theater as an additional venue for MOCA lectures or Music Center events.

Compromise and commerce

Such collaborative notions dovetail nicely with the architecture firm’s rebellious identity. Established in Vienna soon after the student riots of 1968, Coop Himmelblau’s name is loosely translated as “Blue Sky.” In one of the team’s most celebrated projects, a 1985 addition to a traditional apartment block in Vienna, shards of glass and steel spill out of the building’s roof, evoking a high-tech parasitic organism. It may seem an apt symbol for a society in revolutionary turmoil.

Like others shaped by the events of ‘68, however, Coop Himmelblau has also had to learn to maneuver in a world of realpolitik. The Vienna project was commissioned by a high-powered law firm. Later commissions ranged from public housing projects to an entertainment complex for a Mexican health-drink magnate.

At Grand Avenue, the firm has been more than willing to engage the world of commerce to attain its social aims. Two advertising billboards, for example, have been proposed for the tower’s facade. And the events space was at least partly conceived by the firm as a revenue source. It could be rented out to help raise money for the school’s theater programs.

While this may be a sellout of sorts, it can also be seen as a sneak attack on bureaucratic thinking. All architecture is shaped by politics, money and the hidden agendas of clients. The AC Martin design evoked an era in which many architects were more concerned with landing big commissions than breaking rules, when major civic projects were doled out to those with the deepest political connections, not the most raw talent. The result was often an architecture of diminished expectations -- buildings that sapped the soul.

By comparison, the Coop Himmelblau scheme is architecture at its most boisterous. There are no frills here, no oak floors or garish chandeliers. What you get, instead, is an astute response to the clash of forces -- political, social and aesthetic -- that shape the urban realm. It is also an ideal monument to a city whose culture has always been uneasily balanced between crass commercialism and higher cultural aspirations.

Faustian bargain? Maybe. But the result will be an invaluable contribution to the city’s cultural landscape.

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Timeline: Performing and Visual Arts Academy

January 2001:

Los Angeles Unified School District hires AC Martin Partners to design a school complex covering 9.8 acres at 450 N. Grand Ave. The project includes a small arts component, but it is not conceived as a performing and visual arts school.

March-April 2001:

Philanthropist Eli Broad holds informal meetings with LAUSD and city officials, including LAUSD Supt. Roy Romer and the local district superintendent, Richard Alonzo, to discuss expanding the school’s mandate.

May 2001:

LAUSD holds “brainstorming meeting” with Broad Foundation director Veronica Davey, then-Music Center President Joanne Kozberg, Los Angeles Philharmonic executive director Deborah Borda and MOCA director of education Susan Isken. The group discusses possible links between a visual and performing arts school and existing institutions in the area.

August 2001:

Broad Foundation flies staff members from New York City’s La Guardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts to Los Angeles to meet with LAUSD officials and AC Martin staff. Among the issues discussed are the kind of facilities, curriculum and faculty that would be needed.

December 2001:

District allots $100,000 for the design of a new, expanded master plan. AC Martin retained to work on revised proposal.

April 2002:

Broad Foundation pays to fly a group of LAUSD officials -- including David Martin, design partner at AC Martin, Alonzo and LAUSD project manager Ivan Kesian -- to Houston to meet with faculty of High School for the Performing Arts, considered a model program.

July 2002:

LAUSD board approves creating full-scale arts academy on site.

August 2002:

With LAUSD’s participation, Broad Foundation sponsors competition to select a new architect for the expanded school design. The list includes London’s Foreign Office Architects, New York’s Bernard Tschumi, Vienna’s Coop Himmelblau, and Daly Genik and Michael Maltzan Architecture, both of Los Angeles. AC Martin is notified that foundation would be choosing a new architect.

September 2002:

Coop Himmelblau selected as new architect for visual and performing arts school plan.

November 2002:

School bond issue receives 68% of the votes, approving additional $18 million for proposed school.

March 2003:

Demolition begins on Grand Avenue site.

Nicolai Ouroussoff is The Times’ architecture critic.