Lessons unlearned

IN early 2002, just as the massive Los Angeles Unified School District building campaign was rumbling into gear, dozens of local architects joined district officials for a weekend symposium at the Getty Center.

The tone was decidedly upbeat. Supt. Roy Romer spoke during the opening session, eager to convince the crowd that the district had recovered from earlier missteps -- notably the environmental debacle at the Belmont Learning Center. But the real star of the event was architecture itself. Twenty promising designs for the construction program’s first phase were on display, including schools by Steven Ehrlich, Thom Mayne and Mark Rios.

“That was really the high point in terms of our hopes” for the campaign, recalls Robert Timme, dean of the USC architecture school and chairman of the Design Advisory Council, a review panel set up by LAUSD. “The approvals for some of the Phase 1 schools were coming in from the state, and the architects were really hitting their marks.”

These days, with 45 schools finished and another 115 in the pipeline, that optimism seems somehow quaint, if not altogether naive. As LAUSD seeks voter approval next month for a $4-billion bond measure -- the building campaign’s fourth in eight years, which would push the budget for the construction and renovation campaign to a staggering $17.2 billion -- the architectural promise on display at the Getty has largely faded.

Certainly the district deserves praise for confronting, after years of official neglect, the twin problems of overcrowding and aging facilities. The building campaign’s central goals -- to move every student back to a traditional two-semester calendar and into a neighborhood school -- are finally within sight.

But as the district has become more aggressive about asking for money and tackling new lists of educational problems, on the design front it has shrunk into caution and insularity.

Timme now complains that the Design Advisory Council has been “marginalized” during the tenure of Jim McConnell, a former Navy captain who has served as the district’s chief facilities executive since 2001. Kathi Littman, who had been McConnell’s top deputy for new school construction and worked closely with Timme, left the district in early 2003 and returned to the private sector, replaced by another Navy veteran, Guy Mehula.

Inside the LAUSD facilities division, McConnell and Mehula have created a back-slapping, can-do spirit that views architecture from a cultural remove, if not with active suspicion. The newly hired director of design management, Jeffrey Brickner, is a former construction-industry executive whose office walls are lined not with images of new schools or architectural icons but with pictures of the We-Ko-Pa golf course in Fountain Hills, Ariz., and a framed copy of Sports Illustrated announcing Joe Paterno as the 1986 Sportsman of the Year.

Even some architects who continue to work for the district say they have sensed a growing backlash from facilities officials in the last couple of years against high-profile firms and progressive design. The district’s goal now appears to get the remaining campuses finished without incident or controversy -- to keep the assembly line moving. Given how dramatically the building program is remaking neighborhoods from San Pedro to Canoga Park, you don’t have to be a parent to find the shift troubling.

Still, despite the campaign’s recent turn, the district has a chance to recapture at least some of its early potential. While design work is virtually complete for the first two phases, LAUSD is selecting architects this month for a group of nearly three dozen schools that will make up the third phase. And there may well be a fourth.

Best, and worst, of designs

TO be sure, the schools completed so far include a handful of impressive designs whose success the district can build on as it moves forward. The most attractive -- the Mayan-influenced South East High School in South Gate by Gonzalez Goodale Architects, for example, and a brightly attractive elementary school in Huntington Park by Rios’ firm, Rios Clementi Hale Studios -- qualify as models of how to produce appealing schools without spending a lot of money. On the other end of the spectrum, the very worst -- such as the Washington New Primary Center No. 1 on 112th Street, near the intersection of the 110 and 105 freeways -- are depressing reminders of where public education ranks on our culture’s list of priorities.

Far more typical are the dozens of new campuses occupying a wide swath of architectural middle ground. These buildings aren’t terrible, but they show the considerable strain of tight budgets and limited thinking. Their architecture is dispiritingly identical. They are clad in the same scored-stucco walls used for strip malls all over the western United States, a look synonymous with expediency.

Many use a bright palette of exterior colors to suggest at least some sense of individuality. The irony is that the effort makes them indistinguishable from dozens of other new schools. Indeed, if there’s an identifiable style emerging in the campaign -- the mark of the L.A. School school, you might call it -- it is this combination of boxy horizontal forms, endless stretches of plaster and aggressive color schemes.

Sometimes dressing up a school in shades of purple, red or canary yellow proves effective, as in the case of Arquitectonica’s John W. Mack Elementary School near USC. More often the strategy resembles a garish, even desperate sleight of hand.

Los Angeles architects have long been famous for an ability to produce memorable architecture on the cheap. But only a tiny group of firms has so far figured out a way to meet LAUSD’s slender budgets while avoiding the strip-mall look. Among them are Mayne’s Morphosis, whose Science Center School along Exposition Boulevard features an exterior covered in metal panels that are somehow aggressive and delicate at the same time, and Steven Ehrlich Architects, whose Central L.A. Area Middle School No. 4 is scheduled to open next fall.

Ehrlich’s school occupies an awkward site straddling a busy section of Hill Street near Jefferson Boulevard south of downtown, with a pedestrian bridge connecting its academic wing with athletic facilities. It treats modestly priced materials in a number of creative ways. The split-faced concrete block on the gymnasium and corrugated metal on the street-side facade match the school’s tough urban location -- but also lend it visual character and a sense of savvy.

“These aren’t first-rate finishes by any means,” says Thomas Zahlten, an architect in Ehrlich’s office. But compared with typical plaster walls that have become ubiquitous in the new schools, he points out, “they are at least finishes that have some integrity.”

Marmol Radziner + Associates used an unusual exterior stair to enliven the facade of the Accelerated School, which opened in April in South-Central L.A. But Accelerated is a charter school, which meant the architects faced fewer restrictions than are typical for LAUSD projects. To pay for the new building, the school received money from the bond fund but also a $10-million gift from the Annenberg Foundation.

It’s perhaps not surprising, given the constraints that public-school architects face, that the interiors of the new schools are generally unremarkable. Each elementary and middle school, for instance, has a so-called multipurpose room whose size and layout is rigidly fixed. It usually winds up as a low-ceilinged area with plastic chairs scattered over a linoleum floor.

Even small design gestures, though, can help break that grip. Kazumi Adachi and Associates’ Bellingham Primary Center, which opened last fall in North Hollywood, includes bathrooms that open both to the hallway and to the playground, bringing sunlight into the interior through an unexpected path.

The really dismaying realization about the completed schools is that unless the district executes a quick architectural about-face, they are likely to wind up looking like a collection of aesthetic jewels compared with the 40 buildings in Phase 2, most of which are already designed, and the 35 in Phase 3. Some in LAUSD consider the first phase of the building project its wild-and-crazy period, when it experimented -- less than successfully, in the prevailing district view -- with a variety of architects and approaches to design. As the campaign moves forward, officials are pushing for schools that fill a narrowly conservative architectural range.

This is true even as LAUSD has given additional assignments to Mayne and Rios and promised one to Ehrlich: Their designs may be overwhelmed by the stucco brigade.

There are several explanations for the shift -- and some, to be fair, have been beyond the district’s control. Soaring prices for steel (which essentially doubled from 2002 to 2004) and other construction materials have squeezed budgets for the new schools to the breaking point. Budgets averaged less than $200 per square foot in the early phases of the campaign and have since jumped past $300.

That higher figure, paradoxically enough, doesn’t really mean that architects have more money to work with. From a design point of view it means they have less, since it is fixed costs that have helped push the budgets higher. It is possible for a budget to be tighter at $300 per square foot than $250, in other words, as the district and its architects have learned.

At the same time, some of the district’s attempts to work with cutting-edge designers have convinced them that hiring prominent architectural talent is rarely worth the effort. The design by the Austrian firm Coop Himmelblau for a performing and visual arts high school on Grand Avenue has been held up for more than a year by the Division of the State Architect in Sacramento, as officials there puzzle over its swirling steel forms.

Then there are the lingering effects of Belmont, where the district discovered they had built half a high school on a contaminated site and struggled to clean it up -- only to discover that an earthquake fault also lurked below the foundation. That project has finally begun moving forward again, but Mehula calls the episode “the albatross we’ve all been wearing around our necks.”

A final source of pressure on the building campaign has been LAUSD’s recent embrace of the Small Learning Communities movement. The goal of SLC advocates is to break large, impersonal schools into settings that are more manageable for teachers and students. Schools designed in the small-learning mode typically include several autonomous classroom buildings, each with its own entrance, play areas and bathrooms. They have more surface area to cover with windows, side walls and roofs. All of that means they cost more than a traditionally arranged school -- further tightening already low budgets and leaving less money for finishes, landscaping and other amenities.

The shift to the SLC model -- which the district hopes will allow it to tap new funding from champions of the concept, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- is clear to see architecturally in the designs for the second phase of the building campaign.

Massive scale, a daunting task

DESIGNING and building a public school in California, even in the flushest of times, is a tough assignment. The Field Act, passed after the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, requires that all new schools in the state meet stringent seismic codes -- and also makes it trickier here than in other states to turn existing landmarks into classroom space. But the sheer size and scope of the LAUSD program, which in the first building phase alone will add 77,000 classroom “seats” to a district with an enrollment of 737,000, has made it uniquely complicated.

Building sites range from intensely urban plots where security is a major consideration to classically suburban properties surrounded by sleepy residential streets. Indeed, the district struggles to produce schools that adapt well to their particular surroundings. Even Gonzalez Goodale’s generally excellent South East High, which opened last month, is pushed awkwardly back from Tweedy Boulevard by a thick wedge of a parking lot.

Many of the new elementary schools make the mistake of turning the short end of an L-shaped plan toward a busy avenue -- so that what the public sees of them is a stubby facade and a stretch of chain link -- while the longer side stretches grandly along a quiet side street.

District leaders respond to that kind of criticism by pointing to the overall complexity of the campaign. Simply to build a single school requires “that we find the land, buy the land, clean the land, find an architect and a contractor, pick a design, get the design approved and build the school,” McConnell says.

Multiply that process by 160, he adds, and you begin to have a sense of the challenge the district has been facing.

But McConnell and other district officials are dismayingly open about the fact they have come to view ambitious architecture as an expensive extra -- something to be considered when all the other elements for a new school are securely in place.

Indeed, they have managed to quantify architecture within an inch of its life. The single-page document that the district is using to pick architects for the third part of the building program carries the unwieldy title “Los Angeles Unified School District R-05028 Phase III School Design Architects: Written Proposal Evaluation Criteria Matrix.” For a chart designed to rank architecture firms, it allows very little room for the consideration of, well, architecture. The category called “design quality” accounts for just a fifth of a firm’s score, and is subdivided into three sections: meeting budgets, understanding the role of small learning communities, and managing the “document control process.”

Of course, you could say that the document is a necessary and hardly unusual product of a huge bureaucracy, that when you are building 160 schools you do what you can to simplify and compartmentalize an unwieldy process. You could acknowledge that it represents, in part, an effort to make the selection process rational and transparent, protecting the district against charges of cronyism.

But you could also say that it is itself a kind of blueprint -- or, at the very least, a less-than-encouraging indication of institutional priorities.

You don’t need to spend much time with the leaders of the building campaign to begin leaning toward the second way of thinking. On a recent visit to the hulking campus of Central L.A. Area New High School No. 10, designed by Johnson Fain Partners and set to open a year from now at the corner of Lucas Avenue and 3rd Street just west of downtown, McConnell looked up at the frame of one section of the building and frowned.

“We really bought a lot of architecture on this one,” he said.

But the best buildings in the campaign’s first phase suggest something very different: that thoughtful architecture promotes efficiency rather than waste. Indeed, the schools the district should examine closely as it moves forward are not the dramatic ones by Mayne or Coop Himmelblau, or even the big campuses at prominent sites by firms such as Johnson Fain, but the more modestly scaled designs by Ehrlich, Rios, Gonzalez Goodale and others.

These schools derive their sense of energy, openness and optimism not from lavish budgets or architectural pyrotechnics but from a basic sense of proportion and the use of color, texture and natural light. And they send students an important message: not that we can barely afford to put a roof above their classrooms but that we’re marshaling our most creative talents on their behalf.

Christopher Hawthorne is The Times’ architecture critic. He can be reached at calendar.letters@latimes.com.