A new landscape awaits architecture community

The last time the American Institute of Architects descended on Los Angeles for its annual convention, downtown was desperate, Walt Disney Concert Hall was a moribund civic embarrassment, “design” was something schoolkids did rather than a middle-class fetish on sale at Target, and even the most ambitious architects tended to go about business never imagining that reaching the top of their field could transform them into star-magnitude international celebrities.

The local landscape has changed considerably since 1994, when AIA’s National Convention and Design Exposition last occupied the Los Angeles Convention Center, where it convenes again Thursday through Saturday. So has the profession’s stature.

Disney Hall made it, after all -- not just as an example of high artistry but as the cornerstone of municipal leaders’ hopes to create a vibrant city center. Together with the Guggenheim Bilbao museum, it turned Frank Gehry into a luminary of the new star-architecture.

As many as 28,000 architects, builders and clients are expected at the convention. It’s partly a massive building industries trade show -- free and open to the public -- with about 800 vendors displaying products and technologies, and partly a closed convocation of the architectural priesthood. In lectures, workshops and seminars, they will philosophize, debate and learn about nuts-and-bolts new developments in the craft and business of building. Lay architecture buffs can get in on the lectures and seminars by paying the $285-a-day registration fee, $45 for students.

With architecture being looked to for answers to such fundamental societal problems as creating livable downtowns and preventing cities from drowning beneath flood waters, L.A. architect Eric Owen Moss thinks it may be time to open the convention doors wider. In conjunction with AIA, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Moss is director, is hosting a free public panel discussion titled “Who Says What Architecture Is?”

Moss will moderate the program at 7:30 p.m. Friday at SCI-Arc, 960 E. 3rd St. Panelists include L.A.-based Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne and Viennese architect Wolf Prix, whose Coop Himmelb(l)au firm is designing the new downtown arts high school that aspires to join Disney Hall and Jose Rafael Moneo’s Our Lady of the Angels cathedral as a landmark that will not only make the neighborhood an architectural capital but attract the social and economic capital to make it thrive.

“The prominence of architects and architecture makes this more and more a public discussion,” Moss said. “If you go back five or 10 years, it tended to be a specialist discussion. There’s a general skepticism of specialists, and the more this discussion is opened up publicly, the stronger the discussion is.”

Other public aspects of the convention include two Friday exhibition openings at SCI-Arc, one showcasing winners of the Los Angeles AIA chapter’s annual design awards and another displaying Coop Himmelb(l)au’s 3-D, holographic model for developing a vacant site next to the SCI-Arc campus. Another convention-related public exhibition, featuring top works of students from 14 L.A. architectural and design schools, goes on display at 6 p.m. Saturday at 810 S. Flower St.

Meanwhile, conventioneers will spend their days taking architectural tours throughout the city, attending seminars that net architects the continuing-education credits they need to maintain their licenses, and listening to three major addresses on the theme “Architecture on the Edge: Innovation ... Engagement ... Inspiration.” Mayne, Moneo and Gehry’s partner, Craig Webb, will discuss innovation; Marilyn Taylor of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and former L.A. airports overseer Kim Day will comment on how architects can engage themselves in big public works projects.

The entire assemblage will look to architect William McDonough for inspiration in a talk titled “The Greening of the Profession” on the possibilities for environmentally sustainable architecture.

As for celebrity nonarchitects, environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the National Resources Defense Council’s senior attorney, will deliver a lecture dubbed “A Contract With Our Future.”