No Building Consensus on L.A.

Some people look at the last decade’s crop of big, weird buildings in downtown Los Angeles and ask why? But the conventioneers who are crawling all over those structures this weekend have other questions. And answers.

“What is the actual waterproof membrane between the wall and the scrim?” inquires one, peering out through the polka-dotted steel panels of the 2-year-old Caltrans building on Main Street.

“T-5s or T-8s?” asks another, squinting up at a motion-activated ceiling light.

“What’s the floor-to-floor height?” asks yet another.

They are architects, more than 7,000 of them, here with 16,000 designers, vendors and others for the annual gathering of the American Institute of Architects. Their meeting rooms and exhibit halls echo with talk of pneumatic actuators, base isolators, Vitruvian ideals and Title 24.

But ask these visitors for a broader opinion about the new generation of downtown landmarks and you get an earful -- some of it rhapsodic, some involving ritual suicide.

The three principal lightning rods are the Caltrans district headquarters, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis; Jose Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (completed in 2002); and, of course, Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall (completed in 2003), which is the hottest ticket of the convention, with some 20 tours sold out.

These are contemporary buildings whose wavy walls, sharp corners and vast concrete expanses signal a forward-looking posture -- but don’t always sit well with those who prefer 90-degree angles and evenly spaced windows. “Aggressive buildings,” designers call them.

We take you now to the 11th floor of the Caltrans structure, normally closed to the public, where several dozen architects stand on an external stairwell, eyeing the structure’s “second skin” of perforated metal panels.

“It’s dirty,” says architect Chuck Armstrong of Dallas. “And it’s gray. Very gray.”

The tour guide, an engineer, has been explaining the 13-story design, the $174-million budget, the 30-month construction schedule, the credit union, cafeteria and day-care center below, and the way many of those metal panels open and close automatically according to where the sun is. (That’s where the pneumatic actuators come in.)

From those panels to the 895 photovoltaic panels on the south face of the structure, it’s “a very innovative building,” Armstrong acknowledges. “But I can’t even imagine what the public thinks of this building. It’s brooding.”

Of course, that’s just his opinion. Only steps away stands San Diego architect Heather Johnston, who was seduced by the exterior -- “a beautiful abstraction,” she says -- and then alarmed by the interior, especially the sealed windows.

“I would sooner commit hara-kiri than work here,” she says.

Then they file into a bus, which carries them back to the Convention Center by way of Disney Hall.

“That was a machine,” says Texas architect Dallas Taylor, meaning the Caltrans building behind him.

“And this,” he says, with a loving gaze upon Gehry’s curvilinear concert hall, “is a building.”

With all those sold-out tours, Disney Hall has been winning many new friends these last few days. But with 7,000 architects poking around, you can’t expect unanimity.

“It’s really nice,” says David Baker, principal in a San Francisco architectural firm, standing outside the Disney Hall lobby. “But it seems very internalized to me. Where are the people sitting on this wide sidewalk sipping their cups of coffee and their glasses of wine? It’s a beautiful sculptural object. It’s just not an urban building.”

The same sort of back-and-forth is going on a few hundred yards up Grand Avenue at Moneo’s cathedral. Here’s Beth Lewis, who teaches design at Florida A&M; in Tallahassee, just emerging from a tour inside and, before that, a field trip to the Westside and back.

“Los Angeles seems kind of dirty,” she says, half-apologetically. “There’s trash. The traffic’s bad. But the people are friendly.” And the cathedral, she adds, “is absolutely beautiful.”

Chris Remedios, on the other hand, is just arrived with a gaggle of San Francisco architects.

“I don’t know,” he says, squinting up at the austere structure. “It’s hard. It’s pretty massive. Let’s give it more time.”

“I’m not going to say anything,” says Remedios’ colleague Peter MacKenzie, eyeing the tons of concrete, the reporter’s pen, and the tons of concrete again.

But once they get inside, beneath the filtered light, anxieties ease.

“I love the angled plane,” says Remedios, indicating the sloped floor. “And the cantilevered cross. Cantilevered concrete!”

One night, the architects mass for partying and prize-giving at the plaza of El Pueblo, next to Olvera Street. Amid throbbing bass notes from a DJ and rapid-fire images of progressive designs projected upon a classical facade of the 1870 Pico House, they compare impressions.

John Seppanen of Minneapolis thinks the Caltrans building is impressive and iconoclastic. John Anderson of Greenville, S.C., finds Disney Hall incredible and loves the cathedral just as much. Ernest Sills of Hickory, N.C., fresh from a tour of Staples Center (completed in 1999), is amazed that it went up in just 18 months.

William J. Stanley III of Atlanta, meanwhile, is flashing back and forward all at once.

“Years ago, when I was working on the Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles was depressed architecturally,” he recalls, thinking of the early 1970s. “I would say L.A. turned a corner. But I’m still waiting to feel the identity of those Los Angeles downtown neighborhoods. That’ll be the saving grace of L.A. -- not the monumental buildings, but the little buildings that you fit in.”