Theirs is the talk of the city

ON a night in May, on the sleek roof deck of the Petersen Automotive Museum, a group of architects, urban planners and graphic designers get together in their best party duds to drink, gossip and discuss the future of Los Angeles’ built environment.

The guest of honor is architect Thom Mayne, who stands by gamely through a slide show portraying him as an alien who came to Earth to populate it with otherworldly structures. Rising star George Yu is there in his enormous glasses, and eminence grise Eric Owen Moss presides as partygoers chat about “seeing L.A. through a different set of lenses” and exposing “the unseen city.”

A few weeks later, on a warm, clear evening, some of the same crowd gathers at a striking Modernist house in Venice. The atmosphere is less clubby and the task at hand more focused: After touring this new glass and steel structure designed to demonstrate the possibilities of a tight plot, the crowd of 40 or so sits in the backyard as the home’s designers and tenants, Olivier Touraine and Debbie Richmond, speak about this and previous projects. Bottles of Bohemia Pilsener sweat in an ice bucket and pretzels, cookies and bottled water sit nearby.

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, which put together both events, does more than throw cocktail parties and offer lectures -- though it seems to do these things pretty well. The group, which will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year, also commissions urban-themed art projects, issues publications of various degrees of heft, occasionally sponsors competitions, and gathers for oddball slideshows at Chinatown’s Mountain Bar, a red-leather watering hole designed by artist Jorge Pardo.

The group aims to provide connection between professionals spread out across the L.A. area and create an architectural discourse with the public.

Neither task is easy. Architects tend to work long hours, rushing in and out of meetings and hunching over their Macs. Still, says Frank Escher, a Silver Lake architect and past forum president, “it’s absolutely crucial to be able to discuss your work with other people and get feedback, whether they support what you do or not.”

Escher finds the city’s architectural discourse frustrating compared with dialogue in his native Switzerland. “Every architectural intervention was reviewed in newspapers, so people talked about them. What’s really important is to let the general public know how architecture shapes the environment,” he says.

The consensus, at least among forum members, many of them local architects who teach on the side, is that the area’s architecture schools don’t sufficiently facilitate discussion or extend it to the public. “Los Angeles,” says Forum President Warren Techentin, who teaches at USC, “is either blessed or cursed with eight architecture schools” -- and in each the architectural conversation can become closed off and pedantic.

“Every school believes it’s very diverse,” says Michael Pinto, the group’s treasurer. “But the platform of any school encourages some things and restricts others. In schools you deal with the history of an idea; we’re more interested in the life of an idea.”

The forum’s orientation, then, is somewhere between critic Reyner Banham’s winking, fascinated optimism for the city of 35 years ago -- the group has commissioned a series of art objects based on the English writer’s work -- and the debunking despair Mike Davis brought to the city decades later in “City of Quartz.”

“If there’s a guiding philosophy,” says Kazys Varnelis, the group’s director of publications and immediate past president, “it’s to try to be experimental in a way that the schools aren’t willing to be.” He tries to showcase “people who are far outside the architectural profession, interested in new media or political subversion.”

These days, Varnelis says, the group is hard to pin down, and many of its members -- there are about 200 paying members and 2,500 on the mailing list, and most are young for the field -- regard themselves as outsiders. “If anything, it’s the idea of nonconformity and trying to look at cities in new ways. If you just want to do what’s already taking place at the schools, you might as well do it at the schools. Maybe that’s what unites this group of malcontents or rebels -- even if we’re very diverse.”

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First contacts

THE Los Angeles Forum was founded in 1987 by a group of young architects and urban scholars on the Westside, some living in lofts off Venice Boulevard, who wanted to bring to the city some of the connective tissue the Architectural League offered New York’s design community.

“In the ‘80s, there was fundamentally no architecture culture whatsoever here,” recalls architect Craig Hodgetts, who helped found the group soon after arriving from New York City and Yale. “It didn’t exist. We were a small, pathetic group of people who banded together and said, ‘There’s not even a place to have coffee!’ And the city was way too big for a spontaneous meeting.”

From the beginning the group had a bohemian profile, he says. “The first few publications were cobbled together by a student at SCI-Arc who did it for free. They were very fledgling, sort of stapled together on a kitchen table -- like a small poetry magazine.”

Architectural League of New York, founded in 1881, has slightly more august origins. With a year-round staff and dozens of private and public sponsors, the league operates out of a mansion off Fifth Avenue. Architecture historian Alan Hess calls it “a flagship for the profession and its high-art ideals.”

The Los Angeles Forum grew in a more idiosyncratic direction in this very different soil. Hess calls it “a little edgier, a little more into technology -- open to the side of Los Angeles that is popular and commercial, the side that gives the city much of its energy.” Generally, the forum is less official and businesslike than the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, less culty and eccentric than the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee.

Architectural organizations, like the field itself, typically exist in an odd place between art and commerce. Greg Wessner, the Architectural League’s special projects manager, says that unlike arts organizations, architecture and urbanism groups don’t follow any clear template. They often have to create their conversation from scratch, as if speaking in a new language. “It may be why architecture hasn’t developed the organizational infrastructure arts groups have,” he adds.

One way the Los Angeles Forum tries to spark discussion is through its summer-season, every-second-Thursday On the Map series, which concentrates on emerging talent but also has showcased figures as established as Wes Jones and Barbara Bestor. Its next installment is Thursday at a Silver Lake artists studio designed by Daly, Genik. (For information, see www.laforum.org.)

Jennifer Dunlop-Fletcher, an independent curator who organized this year’s series, says she began attending the lectures out of frustration with museum architecture exhibitions, where the work exists only as scale models and drawings. Despite the huge growth of museum architecture and design departments over the last few decades, she says, the curatorial methodology hasn’t adjusted to suit these fields. “Architecture works are often treated like art,” she says. “Flat drawings on the wall, models on vitrines.”

Forum publications can create a conversation with longevity. They include volumes put out by established publishers -- such as “Experimental Architecture in Los Angeles,” published in 1992 by Rizzoli, which helped establish Frank O. Gehry, Josh Schweitzer and Neil Denari outside Southern California -- and smaller, quicker-off-the-mark books called pamphlets.

Tom Marble, who’s in charge of the pamphlets and plans installments on MacArthur Park street vendors and the region’s changing density, calls the pamphlets a way this fragmented city can build a collective memory. “They’re individuals exploring very special ideas,” he says of the authors, “but when you take them all together they form a picture of the city. I’m really interested in the way the city plays in our minds, and how that can have a stronger effect than the city itself.”

One recent pamphlet, “Dead Malls,” got attention nationally. It accompanied a forum-led competition to come up with reuse plans for abandoned shopping centers. The project asked provocative questions: What to do with these extinct beasts that in their prime swallowed local businesses? Are they incubators of democracy or populism? Are malls most like airports, Roman marketplaces or minimum-security prisons?

Another pamphlet, due this year, will examine the overlooked parts of L.A. County that surround Los Angeles International Airport, with a collection of photos and essays by urbanist Norman Klein and essayist Pico Iyer.

Klein, a CalArts professor and respected interpreter of the city, says he enjoys the way the forum considers the entire city as a laboratory. “In Europe they have more groups like this,” he says, but in L.A., there’s been a century of local boosterism and recent innovations like cultural tourism instead. The forum seems ready to try all sorts of possibilities, and seems to be proud of the imperfections of the city.”

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Active minds

ALTHOUGH some members describe the Forum as going through a dormant period in the late ‘90s, the last few years have seen the revival of its publications, pamphlet series, the preparation for next year’s 20th anniversary and the unofficial search for a permanent space. There’s talk of opening the organization to a wider public. Early June saw the forum co-hosting a lively event in honor of British Pop architect Peter Cook. And last year the forum dusted off a long-dormant fall-season series called Out There Doing It, featuring very new architects and out-of-the-mainstream scholars. “The work tends to be raw,” says Techentin, “and the presentations earnest.” Members have also begun an outdoor series called Sunblock, held on some Sundays this summer, designed to accommodate kids.

It’s easy to get people in the scholarly or architectural community to say good things about the forum, and on a pretty California night, at an On the Map lecture, one can feel blessed to be in a city with so much innovative new building and so many people eager to hear about it. (Not to mention weather that makes both the architecture and viewing possible.)

Cities need groups that take fresh angles on architecture, says Thomas Hines, a UCLA professor of history and architecture. The forum is “especially useful in that it caters to younger practitioners, some of whom have not yet built much and thus have not gotten the notice they deserve.” The group, he says, works as a support group, chat room and incubator for ideas.

But some who know the forum are concerned about its future, especially because the group runs entirely through volunteers, with little infrastructure and no brick-and-mortar home in which to meet, exhibit or collect publications.

Escher doesn’t agree with those who think the forum needs a home base, and he likes the way it functions “like an underground club that just surfaces in different places.”

He does think geography sometimes frustrates the forum’s quest to wire the city’s architectural discourse to the rest of the world. “Los Angeles is very isolated: Twelve hours to Tokyo, 12 hours to Europe.... So you get people who don’t know much about what’s happening outside the city and who think that Los Angeles is this architecture and design capital of the world, which is complete baloney.”

Hess, who admires the group, doubts it will ever acquire the muscle of the Architectural League. “It’s harder to get an intellectual discussion going here,” he says. “We don’t have the magazines, publishers, or as many galleries and forums. We have part of it -- we have the schools -- but it’s never taken firm root here.”

Hodgetts says the forum has the right idea, but laments that funding -- which doesn’t come heavily from local corporations the way the Architectural League’s does -- hasn’t kept up with the group’s ambitions. “In order to be heard in a city like this they need more horsepower.” And he worries about the group’s ability to have an influence with writings that, he says proudly, often resemble “Finnegans Wake.”

“I think architecture publications are kind of in a bind, because the shelter magazines have commodified the culture,” Hodgetts says. “The discussion of architecture has moved away from urbanism and social commitment and into a narrow sliver about high style.”

The group’s most important role, Mayne says, is to give young architects a voice -- especially crucial in a city whose ideas largely come from younger, smaller firms. And since architecture emerges from a giant discussion between clients, designers, politicians and the community, the discourse on the subject needs to be healthy and open.

The forum, he says, has its work cut out for it “in a city that, strangely enough, has a huge amount of talent in architecture but that can be laissez faire about looking at it in a serious way.”

But there is no shortage of issues -- from downtown’s growth to gentrification to the L.A. River to formal aesthetic concerns -- for the group to tackle here. “My God, no,” says Mayne. “Los Angeles still represents an experiment as to what a city can be, and the forum is part of that experiment.”

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