Pasadena Goes Modern

IT’S like watching Grandpa buy a convertible: Long clad in a dark-timbered Craftsman style, motivated by its deep respect for the past, Pasadena is now spiffing itself up with sleek contemporary architecture. It’s either a step into the future, or the early stages of an aesthetic identity crisis.

Either way, the built environment of one of the Southland’s most architecturally conservative cities is about to change.

The newest building on the campus of the California Institute of Technology is an appropriately Janus-faced symbol of the transformation: From the south, the Broad Center for the Biological Sciences is a tasteful exercise in travertine that faces an expanse of green fields and comfortable Spanish Revival halls. But stand to the north of the once-controversial edifice and you find a sharply modern vision, clad confidently in stainless steel -- and aimed, it seems, at a future that has not yet arrived.

That future, whatever its shape, is getting closer, at Caltech and elsewhere in town. These days, the tension between genteel and audacious impulses reaches far beyond the edge of campus.

It will take some work, despite new buildings planned from Michael Maltzan Architecture and Thom Mayne of Morphosis before Pasadena becomes an architectural laboratory to rival Rotterdam or Shanghai. But optimists, including Art Center College of Design’s President Richard Koshalek, hope this once-sleepy, preservation-conscious city of 140,000 could become an “incubator of innovation.”

The image of Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady From Pasadena” is hard to shake. But Koshalek insists the place is a visionary, forward-looking city. “You’ve got people at Caltech who are talking about global freezing,” he says. “ ‘Forget global warming, it’s a short-term problem.’ This has always been here in this city, beneath the surface.”

Still, Pasadena’s very real zoning and design restrictions would make many adventurous architects say forget it. “And at moments of frustration,” says Joshua Prince-Ramus, a Rem Koolhaas associate who is designing another Caltech building, “we also said it....

“It wasn’t easy. But we now have a concept we’re really excited about -- and that was a pleasant surprise.”

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Planting the seeds of change

THE 2002 Broad building -- designed by the late James Ingo Freed, best known for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum -- could be the beginning of something serious.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, has enlisted Silver Lake-based Maltzan (acclaimed for his temporary Museum of Modern Art in Queens, N.Y., and Pasadena’s new Kidspace) to design an administration and visitors’ center, to open in early 2009.

Soon joining Broad on Caltech’s campus is another building with a split personality: an interdisciplinary laboratory by Prince-Ramus, who has found Pasadena both rule-bound and unexpectedly stirring. He’s expressed that duality with a doughnut-shaped edifice more traditional outside than in. He calls it “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

On the Southern edge of Caltech’s campus, Mayne, the Pritzker-winner best known for downtown L.A.’s Caltrans district headquarters, is designing the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. (Both Caltech buildings should be occupied by 2008.)

And in a gritty area near the 110 Freeway, Art Center is partway into constructing an adjunct called South Campus, which has already seen the dramatic reuse of an aircraft wind tunnel by Santa Monica’s Daly Genik Architects. New dorms will go up nearby, and Frank Gehry will design a research complex near the gorge-spanning Craig Ellwood building that serves as the college’s heart.

These buildings, of course, will be exceptions to Pasadena’s cityscape.

Visit during one of the cooler months, or in the morning -- before the view-killing combination of sun and smog sets in -- and it’s easy to see the vision of pleasant living imagined by the early settlers of the Rose City. With deep green lawns, old sycamore and oak trees and plenty of quiet, low-density spaces that still support foot traffic, Pasadena can seem like a throwback to a more civil, civically engaged time -- a postcard from the City Beautiful movement.

The large number of early-20th century buildings -- the Craftsmans along the Arroyo Seco, the elaborate Bakewell & Brown city hall framed by the beaux-arts axis in the city’s center, even the 1920s storefronts of thoroughly commercialized Old Pasadena -- furthers the illusion. They summon an era, before the talkies, when Los Angeles was still a raw, wide-open cow town and Pasadena already envisioned itself the Athens of the West, with a theater, art galleries and the literary culture to prove it.

For all those ambitions, which now include an emphasis on “green” programs and sustainability, it’s hard to find the postwar Modernism that distinguishes much of Southern California. There are few of the Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler and John Lautner homes that enliven Silver Lake and Hollywood, or the often-whimsical buildings of the Santa Monica / Venice post-1970s boom. After World War II, the city continued to thrive, but some spirit of innovation, it seemed, died.

“The city of Pasadena has been very concerned with preserving history,” says the intense, outspoken Koshalek, of Art Center. “But it’s been less committed to making history. That has to change.”

The change, he hopes, will come from the research and educational bodies, including his own, which he calls any community’s natural leaders. By contrast, the spurt of high-modernist homes on the Westside was driven by wealthy homeowners and aspiring architects.

Perhaps the most startling are the Mayne and Prince-Ramus buildings on Caltech’s campus, which originated as a Spanish-style master plan with inspiration from Thomas Jefferson. Why hire daring, auteurist architects for a campus associated with a mellow Mediterranean revivalism?

“It’s exactly the same reason,” says Caltech President David Baltimore, “I hire physicists who are on the forefront of their field, who are trying to rethink the history of the universe. These are the exciting people of the time. As long as the building serves its function well, we can get architects who think differently.”

Since the Churrigueresque and Italianate work of Bertram Goodhue and Gordon Kaufmann in the ‘20s and ‘30s, he says, most new campus buildings have been undistinguished.

“Were I able to roll back the clock,” says Baltimore, a Nobel Prize-winner for his work on viruses, “I would love to have an ethic that says Caltech works at the forefront of whatever it does, and we should get to the forefront of architecture as well.”

Jet Propulsion Laboratory President Charles Elachi speaks in similar tones about the visitors’ center Maltzan will design: Since JPL is about “exploring space, extending intellectual frontiers,” it needs architecture in the same spirit, and he hopes “that when young kids come to visit JPL, they’ll say, ‘Wow, this is what exploration is all about.’ ”

The heady tone of intellectual inquiry these institutions share doesn’t always lead to daring work. Baltimore argued the Broad building past the city Design Commission that originally rejected it, but he had to punt in 2002 on his plan to place a Richard Serra sculpture on campus.

There has always been tension between the city’s genteel cultural conservatism and its high intellectual tone. “Pasadena,” critic Carey McWilliams wrote 60 years ago, “shows a rather liberal streak, in matters of free speech, and the like, that communities of settled wealth are likely to manifest.” In the ‘20s, writes historian Kevin Starr, the city “embodied the certainties and pursuits of the white Protestant upper middle classes: education, refinement, a cautiously progressive view on social and political issues.”

Even critics agree that Pasadena is an enlightened place. So why has so much new building over the last half-century been forgettable at best?

Robert Winter, the venerable architecture historian, is cheered by the work of Kevin Daly, Maltzan and others. A longtime Pasadenan, Winter says the city is less stodgy than is usually held.

But since about 1960, he says, downtown Pasadena has become home to “some of the ugliest buildings in the world.” Some are so bad that people stop him on the street to complain. A new structure near Vroman’s Bookstore, for instance, is “this enormous thing that has no character -- not even bad character.”

Part of the problem, Winter says, is that local architecture enthusiasts tend to face backward. “It seems to me that people who know about architecture of the past, the Greene & Greene people, should be in there and protesting to the design commission about the terrible stuff that’s going up.”

Koshalek thinks the problem is timidity: “The city was traumatized by the loss of historic structures” -- from which it has only slowly recovered.

And now, he says, “There’s a new trauma that is emerging from apartment buildings, from commercial structures, from development-driven projects.” The marketplace’s failure, he says, requires institutions to step in.

Baltimore says the city is rightfully proud of its preservation movement, but: “People get very nervous with anything that doesn’t fit within that [tradition]. What you get that way is mediocrity.”

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Manufacturing a turnaround

IT’S hard to summon thoughts of Pasadena’s architectural heritage in the industrial stretch of South Raymond Avenue, where Art Center’s South Campus sits. Like the areas of Caltech and JPL where the new buildings are going up, this region is a hodgepodge.

Daly, of Daly Genik, says Craftsman and beaux-arts traditions were far from his mind when he refurbished the wind tunnel that once tested airplanes and now educates graduate students. But working in Pasadena shaped the project.

“People in the city are more likely to protect what’s valuable than in the town where I live,” he says of “selfish, risk-averse” Santa Monica. He’s struck by how close the institutional leaders are to one another, in a way that’s tough in a larger city. “There’s a broader sense of civic responsibility.”

“I’ve been to a lot of architectural review boards,” he says, “and Pasadena’s is at a pretty high level. It’s not about implementing rules, but using an informed kind of judgment to consider what the value to the community is.”

Prince-Ramus has also found the city hospitable, partly because its limits are clear.

“Because the rule book was harder and more prescriptive, we had to be more inventive, think harder, edit more. The concept of how to be both ambitious and sedate became a main goal early on. The solution we’re working on here is something we never would have come up with in any other environment.”

Best known for 2004’s Seattle Public Library, Prince-Ramus says that Pasadena’s “overt” regulations were easier to deal with than his drizzly hometown, where “we had to do a lot more negotiating than I thought.”

Bill Bogaard, the city’s first elected mayor, sees architectural innovation as the natural outgrowth, not opponent, of the preservation movement. (Bogaard should know: His wife Claire co-founded Pasadena Heritage in 1977 after the approved destruction of blocks of old houses for the now-razed Plaza Pasadena mall.)

Still, as the mayor relaxes with a cup of tea outside the city’s handsome Spanish Renaissance library, he admits limits to this enthusiasm.

“I hear a lot about ‘contextualism,’ ” he says, “about taking into account Pasadena’s built environment and its relatively low scale of development. An architect who focuses on dramatic works for their own sake might not find himself well-received.”

This sort of talk makes the New York-based Prince-Ramus uncomfortable. “I believe the word ‘context’ has been hijacked,” he says. He points out that Caltech’s architectural style ranges from Moorish to Brutalist, so the idea of reflecting surroundings is pointless.

“Those original buildings from the ‘20s and ‘30s were radical in their day. They were not, at the time they were built, quaint stylistic throwbacks.”

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On the drawing board

THE next few years will see more new work. Bonnie Khang-Keating, director of major projects at Caltech, mentions five new buildings, including a chemistry lab, likely to go up in the next decade. There will likely be more at JPL as well.

Observers disagree as to whether these can, or should, turn Pasadena into a beacon for innovative design. Koshalek would like to see Pasadena’s public sector, including its school system, take the next step. As Southern California becomes more urban, he says, it’s time for cities to take the lead from private developers, which belong to the region’s suburban past. “We could see this city develop a contemporary form of architecture,” he says, “as valuable as the historic architecture valued by the preservationists. We need to commit to that for the future.”

Well, says Winter, “The problem is that great architecture doesn’t inspire great architecture.”

“Some cities are good at creating architectural zoos,” Prince-Ramus says. “A strip that has [buildings by] the last seven Pritzker winners. I think it’s more important to have people like Baltimore and Koshalek, who are putting architecture on the agenda. I’m not sure the buildings themselves will ever do it.”

His model is Rotterdam, where Koolhaas’ main office is located. “There are good and bad things in Rotterdam,” he says. “But even the bad ones are trying to do something. There’s a bus stop, a bridge, a public toilet. They have a commitment to architecture in the everyday.”

For now, Pasadena’s new buildings are not woven into the city’s fabric. That may be just as well, for some. “If there were 50 or even 15 new buildings instead of the five we’re talking about,” says Mayor Bogaard, who likes the new projects, “perhaps I’d be less sanguine.”

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Contact Scott Timberg at calendar.letters@latimes.com.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A new vocabulary in steel and glass

A number of architects known for their unconventional works are developing projects in Pasadena. Here are sketches of some of their plans.A number of architects known for their unconventional works are developing projects in Pasadena. Here are sketches of some of their plans.

Joshua Prince-Ramus

A New York-based partner at Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture, PrinceRamus has designed an interdisciplinary lab for Caltech. “It has to meet a very strict city requirement,” he says of the Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology, “which comes from the Caltech master plan.” This “relatively conservative set of obligations” spurred an innovative design -- which allows the lab to serve two very different groups of scientists, one in the more conventional outer ring and another in the “dynamic” inner core.

The four-story building will be a colonnaded ring of concrete, with one story underground, a first floor made of glass and an interior possibly made of steel. He says it “will look like a two-story doughnut floating a story off the ground.”

Frank Gehry

The ubiquitous Gehry will design a combination library and laboratory at Art Center College of Design’s main campus. Gehry was traveling and not available to comment, but Art Center’s Richard Koshalek describes the 50,000-square-foot edifice as “a very practical, environmentally sensitive building” that is also “dramatic” and “experimental.”

“All the circulation will be exterior, with an extensive use of glass” inside and out. In between the lab and the Craig Ellwood building that houses most of the college’s undergraduate facilities will be an outdoor student plaza yet to be landscaped.

“You will know it’s a Frank Gehry building; his fingerprints will be all over it.”

Thom Mayne

The Morphosis co-founder says his plans for the roughly 100,000-square-foot Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Caltech will be “a low, ground-hugging building” with a glass first floor and two upper floors made of “something parallel to terra cotta,” which will “appear to be floating above.” Because he sees the campus defined by its trees more than by its “hybrid of styles,” he’ll plant a grove of eucalyptus or similar trees that will rise between the building and the nearby soccer fields. “It’s a very tame building by my standards,” he says. “I don’t see any crisis looming.”

Kevin Daly

A principal at Daly Genik, the architect is designing three dormitories on Art Center’s South Campus that will extend the style of the aircraft testing facility he restored in 2004. He plans to have these buildings engage the surrounding industrial neighborhood and face the street: “We tried to activate the street with the wind tunnel building and we want to continue that with the dorms.” These will be made of flat-plate concrete, with translucent exterior screens, which may be made of perforated metal, to keep excess heat out. The dorms will be “naturally lit and naturally ventilated.”

-- Scott Timberg