Student Building on L.A. Street Culture

Ancelmo Perez grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Lawndale, sidestepping gangs, refusing drugs and steering clear of crime.

Yet those same urban traps that he worked hard to avoid have inspired many of his architectural designs.

“I want to create architecture that is by the people rather than for the people,” Perez said. “I want designs to come from the bottom up and into the mainstream.”

Perez’s design philosophy permeated the projects he created as an architecture major at Woodbury University in Burbank, where he earned a bachelor’s degree earlier this month. He will begin graduate studies in architecture at Columbia University in New York on June 1.

As a requirement for graduation from Woodbury, Perez, 22, had to conceive, research, design and present a comprehensive project that incorporated all the skills he developed in the five-year architectural program.

Perez’s design, called “Coded Literature: A Repository for Reading the City,” envisioned a library of Latino street culture set along the west bank of the Los Angeles River under the Golden State and Pasadena freeways interchange near downtown.

The project featured two buildings housing graffiti galleries, food vendors and a research repository of Latino street life, separated by a sunken outdoor theater.

“I want to bring what already exists in the subculture -- like graffiti, food vendors, performance art -- into a mainstream setting,” Perez said, walking along a bike path below the freeway overpasses.

A wiry man with close-cropped hair and a steady gaze, Perez designed a place where people unfamiliar with Latino street culture could gain a better understanding of graffiti artists and street vendors by talking with them directly.

A graffiti artist, for example, could come to the urban library to paint an interior wall as visitors watched and asked questions, he said. The work would be photographed before another artist would paint over it and begin a new work. The photographs would be archived for future reference.

In a food court, vendors would prepare and sell ethnic foods to visitors who would be encouraged to ask questions, he said.

Perez said his project sparked debate when he presented it at Woodbury earlier this month to a jury of architects, professors and students. Several observers said they thought he was attempting to present graffiti as legitimate art rather than vandalism.

“I could have done a homeless shelter, school or a traditional library,” he said. “But I kept asking myself, ‘What is the role of architecture in contemporary times?’ I think it is to bring the culture of the streets into the mainstream.”

Norman Millar, architecture department chairman at Woodbury and Perez’s faculty advisor, said his protege did a good job of defending his work.

“The project had been controversial from the beginning,” Millar said. “Some people were saying that it was just a graffiti gallery. But by focusing on the project as a repository for cultural expression that was an extension of a traditional library, he was able to defend it.”

While growing up, Perez mostly saw parents like his construction worker father and seamstress mother struggle to feed, clothe and house their children on low-wage jobs.

And there was the constant lure of street life. He said, “A lot of kids took the wrong path.”

In spite of the negative influences surrounding him, Perez dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot and planned to enlist in the Navy or Air Force after high school -- until his mother, Antonia, put her foot down.

“I knew that he was a talented young boy and that he needed a university education that would offer him more than the military,” she said in Spanish.

So instead, Perez, who also was interested in architecture, entered Woodbury after graduating from North High in Torrance in 1999.

Perez had never been to Burbank before arriving on the rolling hills of Woodbury’s 22-acre campus.

“I lived on campus,” he said. “I met a lot of people from diverse backgrounds. I had a lot of influential teachers who helped bring out talents I didn’t know I had.”

Millar, the faculty advisor, watched as Perez developed from a soft-spoken, shy freshman who seemed overwhelmed by the university into a leader of his class.

In a school of architecture tradition known as “The Grand Critique,” Perez was named by his peers last year as the person who represented the best among them and most influenced their work, Millar said.

Perez and classmate Sergio Gonzales designed a steel experimental performing arts center that won third place in the 2002-03 international design competition of the Assn. of Collegiate Schools of Architecture / American Institute of Steel Construction.

Woodbury’s faculty also honored Perez by nominating him for the 2004 Architecture Traveling Fellowships Program sponsored by the Skidmore Owing Merrill Foundation. The foundation awards two $15,000 fellowships annually to one undergraduate and one graduate to research architecture. Winners will be notified July 1.

“I predict that we will hear about Ancelmo in the future,” Millar said. “He has a very idealistic way of thinking that grows out of his own set of life circumstances growing up in an urban area. In that way, his ideas about architecture are truly his own thing.”

Although he expects to practice architecture, Perez said his first love is teaching.

“There are other things that I want to explore -- zoning, residential developments, subcultures,” he said. “But the classroom is a lab atmosphere where ideas grow.”