As they push to revitalize downtown’s cultural core, city leaders devise a selection system and reveal a mind-set that favor the bottom line over inspired planning.

Nearly 45 years after the first bulldozers began scraping away the old Victorian mansions and aging rooming houses atop downtown’s Bunker Hill to make way for a series of cultural venues, the pieces are beginning to fall into place on the final phase of development along Grand Avenue. Given the cultural expectations placed on the avenue, the outlook is grim.

The avenue has become a virtual catalog of grandiose development projects, ranging from the dismal to the sublime. The chiseled form of Jose Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels anchors one end of Grand at the edge of the 101 Freeway. Nearby stands the 1960s-era Music Center, designed by Welton Becket; its brutal concrete structures were once promoted as a symbol of L.A.’s cultural awakening. Farther south are the rust-colored sandstone forms of Arata Isozaki’s 1986 Museum of Contemporary Art, with its odd underground galleries, and the banal brick Colburn School of Performing Arts building, completed a decade or so later by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. Just beyond is a cluster of soulless 1980s-era office towers.

This scene is now dominated by the rambunctious steel forms of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which spill out along the avenue with unrestrained exuberance. The latest addition to downtown’s cultural corridor, the hall imbues its surroundings with an unexpected vitality while seeming to wag a finger at the failures of the past.

That landscape is about to be radically altered by one of the largest developments in downtown’s history. Covering a total of 8 acres, nearly the size of Universal CityWalk, the development site includes four critical parcels that envelop two sides of Disney Hall. It is the most visible piece of publicly owned land slated for development in Los Angeles. No single project will do more to define the city’s rapidly changing civic identity.

The development is expected to include up to 3.2 million square feet of housing, office and retail space as well as a variety of entertainment venues. The cost of the project is estimated at $1.2 billion.

Also being discussed is the creation of a 16-acre civic park that would extend four blocks between the Music Center and the steps of City Hall and could involve the demolition of a number of major county buildings. Such a scheme would radically transform the city’s entire civic core, forming a critical link between downtown’s government, cultural and business centers.

The project is being spearheaded by the Grand Avenue Committee, a nonprofit group appointed by the city and county governments. Four teams are competing for the right to develop the site: Weintraub Financial Services, whose team includes architects Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid; Related Cos. with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Morphosis and Elkus/Manfredi; J.H. Snyder Co. with the Jerde Partnership, Johnson Fain and Rios Associates; and Forest City Enterprises. A team led by the construction management giant Bovis Lend Lease recently dropped out.

The teams must submit their proposals by Wednesday. A selection committee, consisting of seven developers, planners and government officials, is expected to make its recommendation by early May. The decision must then be approved by the Joint Powers Authority, a panel empowered by the city and county to oversee the development.

If Gehry’s Disney Hall set a new standard for the avenue’s future, the current process represents a return to mediocrity. As a government-appointed entity, the Grand Avenue Committee’s main responsibility is to balance the interests of private development and the public good. Instead, the committee has repeatedly pushed aside cultural concerns. In a striking display of narrow-minded thinking, it has told developers that the selection will primarily be made according to financial -- not design -- criteria. And it has refused to allow teams to submit the kind of detailed urban planning proposals that could spark an intelligent discussion of the site’s future.

The outcome of such an approach is relatively predictable -- a sterile mix of entertainment, shopping and conventional housing complexes that is the latest, most mundane expression of corporate globalism.

In fact, the selection process points to what is becoming a growing crisis in how America’s urban centers are planned. Over the past decade or so, many world cities have turned to high-end architecture to raise their profiles and draw lucrative tourist dollars. At the same time, U.S. planning agencies have relinquished much of their power to private interests. The result is that architecture is being reduced to its most superficial function -- decorative packaging for what are often crude and unimaginative development strategies.

Formidable challenges

The location of the Grand Avenue project raises a number of particularly daunting planning issues. A half-century ago, Bunker Hill was a decaying, working-class neighborhood, but its rich historic fabric was relatively intact. Today, the area is brutally cut off from the surrounding downtown fabric. Flanked by the 110 Freeway to the west and the 101 Freeway to the north, the area is dominated by a cluster of corporate towers and sterile plazas that were mostly created in the 1980s under the guidance of the Community Redevelopment Agency. The most depressing example of these is California Plaza, a $1.2-billion mega-development that forms a nearly impenetrable barrier to the vibrant ethnic enclaves that extend east from the bottom of the hill.

These barriers are psychological as well as physical. They reflect the rigid social divisions -- between west and east, a wealthy elite and a struggling immigrant class -- that remain one of Los Angeles’ most troubling realities. What is more, they have served to reinforce the notion that any model for a centralized downtown is doomed to failure in a city defined by its suburban sprawl.

The creation of the 16-acre park is conceived as one way of overcoming this divide. The park would replace the existing county mall, a series of drab interior courtyards flanked by the county courthouse and the hall of administration. Committee members have said they would be willing to offer the Grand Avenue developer lease subsidies or tax write-offs in exchange for building the park. More money could come from private donations. Unlike similar parkland in Los Angeles, it would be run by a private, nonprofit group, which its proponents claim would do a better job maintaining it than the city.

Recently, a number of developers and architects have privately suggested expanding the project to include the demolition of the county courthouse and hall of administration buildings. The idea has potential advantages. Both county buildings were damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake and will eventually have to be replaced or repaired. Moving the new county buildings to the lots on Grand Avenue would provide a developer with a guaranteed tenant at a time when downtown is suffering from a surplus of office space. The vacated area around the park would then be available for housing.

To succeed, the overall scheme would require bold urban planning leadership. At the very least, the area’s design will have to weave a range of mismatched landmarks into a cohesive experience. Ideally, it will be seen as an opportunity to give form to the city’s emerging cultural identity -- one that is strong enough to counter the pull of L.A.’s sprawl. Yet the Grand Avenue Committee has shown an almost total disregard for the degree to which creative planning ideas are a necessary component of downtown’s renewal.

Most unsettling have been a number of comments by Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist who has been a major force in the city’s cultural scene for more than a decade. Broad, the committee’s co-chair, has cited several models for Grand Avenue, including Paris’ Champs-Elysees and New York’s Bryant Park, which was renovated in the early 1990s as part of a private development project. He has also touted New York’s newly completed Time Warner Center as a model for the avenue’s development -- a somewhat generic vertical mall whose interior would look at home in an international airport terminal.

From an architectural point of view, it is hard to see what relevance these projects would have to downtown L.A. All were built in more traditional, densely populated areas. The desire to import them to Los Angeles is typically driven by a misguided feeling that the city lacks “real” urban experiences. Such efforts are bound to fail because they ignore the qualities that give L.A. its unique identity.

A recent conversation with Martha Welborne, the committee’s managing director, was more puzzling. Welborne admitted that she could not think of a single project completed by one of the development teams that could serve as a model for Grand Avenue.

“I haven’t really thought about this stuff yet,” she said. “Right now we’re focused on who can handle the project.”

Part of the issue has to do with the composition of the selection committee. Along with Broad and Welborne, the committee includes developers James Thomas and David Malmuth, the Community Redevelopment Agency’s Ayahlushim Hammond, California Community Foundation President Antonia Hernandez, and Alma Martinez, chief of staff for county Supervisor Gloria Molina.

Absent from the group is anyone capable of forcibly articulating the values of architecture. Of the seven members, only Welborne has a background in architecture and urban planning. Much of that experience was gained in the offices of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the New York-based architectural firm that is part of Related Cos.’ team in the current competition -- a fact that suggests a potential conflict of interest.

“We follow all state conflict-of-interest laws,” Welborne said. “And I don’t have any financial ties to SOM. I haven’t worked there since 1997.”

But the crux of the problem lies in the committee’s insistence on placing commercial interests above cultural and social values. Already, a number of architects have expressed dismay that their initial submissions will be limited to a 30-by-40-inch board. And Welborne has repeatedly stressed that the selection process would focus almost exclusively on whether the developers have the money and experience to see such a project through to its conclusion.

To boost their chances, several of the developers have padded their design teams with high-profile names. Over the past month, for example, Weintraub has added the celebrated British architect Foster and Greg Lynn, a rising local talent, to a list that had already included Gehry, the French-born Nouvel and the London-based Hadid -- this year’s Pritzker Prize winner. Related Cos. recently added Thom Mayne of the Santa Monica-based Morphosis to its team. Mayne is the architect of downtown’s massive Caltrans headquarters building, which is scheduled for completion this fall.

Welborne did make a concession of sorts last week, saying that teams would be able to present more detailed material during a series of interviews that will be held April 26-30. But the meetings will be closed to the public, and some of the teams were not even aware of the change.

“We had no idea that they were relaxing the conditions,” said Jon Jerde, who is working with J.H. Snyder Co. “Until now they’ve claimed it’s not an architectural competition.”

Typically, the argument for marginalizing the role of architects in the planning process is that only developers are capable of ensuring a project’s commercial and popular success. Architects, it is assumed, have no interest in controlling budgets. Local governments, meanwhile, no longer have the resources to handle a project of such scale. Los Angeles is facing a $250-million shortfall next year. If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget is passed, the county would have to make $459 million in cuts.

As Broad put it: “I give the county and city credit for not interfering with the process.”

More than architecture alone

Such attitudes are becoming increasingly hard to sustain. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was completed within the proposed budget. It has single-handedly transformed a cultural backwater into one of the world’s most-visited cultural destinations. Even the battles that have raged over ground zero have accepted the notion that conventional development formulas are no longer capable of producing meaningful responses to rapidly changing urban conditions.

Nor do these formulas guarantee big profits for developers. One of the most highly promoted projects in recent memory in Los Angeles was the $650-million hotel-retail-entertainment complex created by TrizecHahn Corp. at Hollywood and Highland. Completed in 2001, the project was supposed to revive a decaying commercial strip. Two years later, it was sold at a $400-million loss. And although TrizecHahn has blamed its failure on the aftermath of Sept. 11, at least part of the responsibility should be assigned to the design. Wrapped in video screens and towering billboards, the mall’s labyrinthine interior was created to trap visitors in a frenzy of shopping. The result was an extreme form of urban malaise. Tourists and locals stayed away in droves.

Time to break the mold

PLacing so much control in the hands of developers does not guarantee financial success, but it usually leads to the kind of generic results that are quietly suffocating our cities -- chain restaurants, brand-name shops and cinemas arranged along pedestrian-friendly promenades and capped by a mix of office and residential spaces. Occasionally, a few cultural venues are thrown in.

The solution is not to turn the process over to architects and planners. Architects, planners, developers and government officials should share an equal voice in an open, public process. This begins by assembling a qualified jury. But it will also require a mental adjustment. What needs to change is a mind-set that continues to insist that the only option is to turn the public realm entirely over to development interests.

That fiction is harder to maintain when the public is actually allowed to see what is at stake. For that, the committee will have to abandon the secrecy that surrounds the selection process. It must solicit a range of ideas for the site. And it will have to encourage the kind of spirited debate that such a major project demands. The failure to do so should be considered a betrayal of the public trust.*

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The project’s selection committee

Eli Broad

Broad made his fortune as chairman and CEO of SunAmerica Inc. and co-founded KB Home Corp., a firm that specializes in low-cost residential development. One of the country’s wealthiest art collectors, he is credited with being a major force behind the drive to build Disney Hall. Last year, he pledged $50 million for a new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He also made an unsuccessful bid to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Martha Welborne

Welborne has graduate degrees in both architecture and urban planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was the managing director of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Los Angeles office from 1994 to 1997 after working as an architect and urban planner at the firm’s Chicago and Boston offices in the mid-1980s. She has also worked for Sasaki Associates Inc., a 270-person corporate design firm based in Watertown, Mass. More recently, she worked as the project director for the Surface Transit Project, which was the principal force behind Los Angeles’ Metro Rapid bus system.

Antonia Hernandez

Hernandez was appointed president of the California Community Foundation in February. The nonprofit group supports a range of local social programs, including affordable housing, community-based cultural programs and educational services. Before her appointment, she was the longtime president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Ayahlushim Hammond

Hammond has been project manager for the Community Redevelopment Agency’s Bunker Hill project area since 1990. During that time, she has overseen a number of public improvements at California Plaza as well as the construction of the Colburn School of Performing Arts and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

James Thomas

Thomas is a longtime Los Angeles developer with major interests in downtown. As a founding partner of Maguire Thomas he worked on a number of major proposals for Grand Avenue, including a four-block- long commercial-retail development whose designers included Frank Gehry, Charles Moore and Ricardo Legorreta. A second version of the proposal was resurrected in the early 1990s, but neither was built. Last year, Thomas bought Arco Plaza, a 2.7- million-square-foot office complex dominated by two granite towers and located a few blocks south of the Grand Avenue site. The complex is being renovated by A.C. Martin Partners.

David Malmuth

Malmuth has worked on a number of high-profile retail-and-entertainment developments. Among the most ambitious was the renovation of the New Amsterdam Theater and a retail store built in the 1990s on New York’s 42nd Street by the Walt Disney Co., where Malmuth was vice president of development. His most recent project in Los Angeles was the TrizecHahn development at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Built at a cost of $615 million, the project was recently sold to CIM Group Inc. for $200 million.

Alma Martinez

Martinez is a longtime aid to Supervisor Gloria Molina, serving as a campaign manager and chief of staff since 1986. A native Angeleno, she received her bachelor’s degree from UCLA. She is overseeing the development and expansion of Civic Center East, which includes a new library, park and county hall in East Los Angeles.

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The teams

Weintraub Financial Services

With Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster and Daly Genik

This is the first major development by Richard Weintraub, but the developer is backed by significant financial muscle, including the New York-based Vornado Real Estate and Apollo Real Estate Advisors. Vornado is developing the Bloomberg Tower in New York and owns the Mercantile Mart in downtown Los Angeles. Gehry is the Los Angeles-based designer of the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Hadid, this year’s Pritzker Prize winner, is designing the master plan for a 148-acre mixed residential and industrial development in Bilbao. Nouvel is perhaps best known for the Arab World Institute and the Cartier Foundation headquarters, both in Paris, as well as the Cultural and Congress Center overlooking a lake in Lucerne, Switzerland. Foster, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1999, has designed a long list of landmarks such as London’s City Hall, completed last year; a major renovation of the Reichstag in Berlin, completed in 1999; and the 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.

Related Cos.

With Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Morphosis

New York-based SOM is known for a number of high-profile corporate structures in major cities across the world. The firm recently worked with Stephen Ross and his firm, Related Cos., on the $1.8-billion Time Warner Center, an 80-story retail, residential and hotel complex overlooking New York’s Central Park. The Santa Monica-based Morphosis, which joined the team in January, is the designer of the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona. Two of the firm’s projects are under construction in L.A.: the Science Center School at Exposition Park and the Caltrans District 7 headquarters building in downtown.

J.H. Snyder Co.

With Jerde Partnership, Johnson Fain and Rios Associates

J.H. Snyder Co. is the developer of the Water Garden in Santa Monica and the Wilshire Courtyard, an office complex along the Miracle Mile. The Jerde Partnership is best known in California for its design of two groundbreaking entertainment-retail complexes: San Diego’s Horton Plaza, completed in 1985, and Universal CityWalk. The firm’s 7.8- million-square-foot Roppongi Hills retail-entertainment complex, which opened last year, is the largest privately developed project in Japan. Johnson Fain is the designer of a number of high-rise towers in Century City, including the octagonal Fox Plaza tower -- featured in the film “Die Hard” -- and the more recent SunAmerica Tower.

Forest City Enterprises Inc.

Based in Cleveland, Forest City specializes in retail and commercial development. Run by the Ratner family, the firm’s projects include a retail complex in Rancho Cucamonga and a shopping center on Market Street in San Francisco, both scheduled for completion this year. The developer has yet to select a design team.

Nicolai Ouroussoff is The Times’ architecture critic. He can be reached at nicolai.ouroussoff@latimes.com.