Playing Olympic dress-up is far from the right path

Picture the Mona Lisa wearing a leather jacket and miniskirt and clutching an iPod.

It wouldn’t work. Imposing a modern sensibility on a classic icon creates a culture clash that the brain simply can’t process.

The temporary steel-framed addition that would envelop the Coliseum if Los Angeles gets the 2016 Summer Olympics would have the same jarring effect.

The $112-million project, which would be funded by Games-generated revenues, was unveiled Thursday by the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games. Designed for use only during the Olympics and Paralympics, it’s a lukewarm compromise between embracing the 84-year-old Coliseum’s grandeur and acknowledging it needs extensive updates no one wants to pay for.

The superstructure would stand three feet outside the existing walls and encircle the venue except for the peristyle. In renderings it resembles a saber-tooth necklace of towers that would support 204 luxury suites, vinyl sun shades, and elevators. It has no “wow” factor, just fleeting functionality.

Barry Sanders, chairman of the bid committee, said the Los Angeles Games plan incorporated traditional, new and planned structures “and put them in a crown in which the leading jewel is this facility here, the Coliseum. No city in the world bidding for the Olympics would not want to have the Coliseum as the jewel in their crown.”

This setting isn’t worthy of its jewel.

Los Angeles wasn’t alone in its stadium quandary. Faced with similar problems before the 1992 Barcelona Games, officials there kept the outside of their majestic 1929-built stadium and totally renovated the inside, skillfully blending old and new.

The plan for the Coliseum would marry new to old with adhesive tape.

Chicago, a co-finalist with Los Angeles for the U.S. Olympic Committee’s backing in the international selection process, plans to build an 80,000-seat stadium that would later become a 5,000-seat venue. That solution isn’t perfect either, since it’s costly and isn’t the grand legacy the International Olympic Committee likes the host cities to inherit after the flame is extinguished.

The USOC will announce on April 14 which city it will back in the final round. It might not matter. The IOC may turn up its aristocratic nose at Los Angeles because the Games have been here twice, in 1932 and 1984, and it may scorn Chicago because many venues would have to be built. The higher the construction tab, the lower the potential profit. And no one wants a repeat of the 1976 Montreal Games; the debt for those Games was retired only a few months ago.

The Coliseum is owned by the state. It’s a state and national landmark, which complicates efforts to alter it.

The NFL has the money and clout to do it, even though its building fund was depleted after it approved a loan to help finance a $1.4-billion stadium in New Jersey for the Jets and Giants. Without a team or an owner poised in Los Angeles, the NFL isn’t rushing to open its checkbook. Nor should it.

The architectural plan introduced Thursday “basically is sending a message to the [U.S.] Olympic Committee that the Coliseum is functional with or without an NFL franchise,” said Bernard Parks, president of the Coliseum Commission and a member of the Los Angeles City Council.

“If you had your druthers, it would be great if all of it were done permanently. But what they’re asking to do for the Olympics, you can’t do in six months on a permanent basis.”

Parks also said that the Coliseum Commission is preparing for negotiations with USC, which has played football there since 1923, to “ascertain what, as a tenant, USC might want to see in the stadium as it relates to their 80,000 people that show up for every game.” So the Coliseum might get lasting enhancements even if the Olympics go elsewhere.

Bill Chadwick, a Coliseum Commission member and former president, said permanent upgrades for the Olympics would be ideal except for that little problem of no funding. The NFL has estimated the cost of a state-of-the art stadium inside the Coliseum walls would exceed $800 million.

“In my bathroom I have taped on my mirror, ‘Can you explain this to a mother in Fresno?’ ” Chadwick said. “How do you explain to somebody that lives outside of Los Angeles that spending money on the Coliseum is good for their children, for their child’s public safety or health care? You can’t do it.”

Chadwick says he’s not sure the Coliseum needs major renovations, that for perhaps $150 million it could be turned into a “traditional football stadium” with updated rest rooms, concession stands and seats. “We don’t have a tremendous amount of history in Los Angeles. This is our history,” he said. “I’m a big fan of preserving it.”

Preserving integrity would be nice too.

helene.elliott@latimes.com