Do Architects Really Shape Cities?

Great buildings can define a cityscape, but how much do the grand plans of architects influence daily life?  During a panel moderated by San Francisco Chronicle urban design critic John King, no one could agree on an answer. But everyone acknowledged that one of the big challenges facing architects and planners today is keeping up with the pace of a rapidly changing world.

One of the great challenges of architects in Los Angeles is that no one with any political power cares about architecture, said architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis. Culturally, the role of the architect in L.A. is to make pretty objects that people talk about; the architecture, he said, can only reflect the nature of the city’s values. This makes it difficult for Southern California architects to be catalysts for cultural change.

Architect Válery Augustin of Dn/A disagreed. “I think architecture matters,” he said. “But I think it matters in ways we as architects haven’t been able to fully tap into.” It’s not about the built form or a budget but about how a great space makes people feel—how we experience it every day. Good architecture, he said, provokes questions and makes people think differently about their cities.

Project for Public Spaces founder and president Fred Kent said he doesn’t think architecture “is anywhere near as important as it should be,” but architects themselves need to focus more on the people in their buildings and how they’re using them. The field has become so rarefied and isolated—in its own tiny world—that it can be difficult for laypeople to understand it.  He added that buildings need to be able to change over time, and that the future of architecture—and public spaces—is flexibility.

So what, asked King, can architects do in Los Angeles to change the city?

Augustin said that architects in L.A. need to figure out “how to work in these small in-between areas, the middle ground”; we like to talk about big projects like Disney Hall, but incremental changes can likewise have far-reaching implications.

“I think the architecture of the future,” said Kent, “is about small-scale things,” like the base of a building bringing the street around it to life.

“Your discussion is incrementalism,” responded Mayne, “which is laissez-faire.” Mayne thinks that the way cities are growing—and how large they are growing—is going to make for a more radical shift in what comes next for architecture and design.

In the question-and-answer session, an audience query about beautifying digital billboards turned into a discussion about what makes for a beautiful streetscape.

“We live in this radical, heterogeneous place,” said Mayne. He drives down the incredibly ugly Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica to get to work—but he finds Lincoln preferable to the sleep-inducing landscaped roads of Orange County that hide cars and buildings. “I really miss all that junky crap,” he said.

Another audience member wanted to put in a word for iconic buildings like the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, which has elevated the city.  Kent responded by asking her how many people sit out in front of the Disney Hall and use it as a public space.

Mayne said that Disney Hall and similarly ambitious buildings can be enjoyed simply as images that represent the city, whether or not they’re used as public spaces— especially in Los Angeles, which you see from your car.

Kent countered by polling the audience informally to find out if they were content to see the city by car, to which the answer was no—proof enough for him that while iconic architecture is good, people using it is much better: “If you created some life at the base of the Gehry building, it might be worth it.”

King jumped in to note that, while walking around Disney Hall yesterday, he saw plenty of signs of life—people on the steps were being photographed, and the shops were full. “There were people there,” he said, and “I didn’t get robbed.”

How Do People Reinvent Spaces? 

L.A.’s buildings and streetscapes aren’t the products of architects—but rather of residents, weather, immigration, social change, and history, argued members of the afternoon’s second panel.

To demonstrate how change works in L.A., photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara showed his photographs of different buildings around the city that had changed over time. Between 1992 and 2012, the structure at 7316 South Broadway in South Los Angeles changed from a plain-white Baptist church with three crosses projected into the air to a flat-roofed building (the crosses were lost to high winds) that included both a Pentecostal church and a store offering Christian books and herbal remedies. Vergara also showed a meat market on South Vermont Avenue and 42nd Street, where a mural of Martin Luther King Jr. was transformed into a Barack Obama mural.

Such change, agreed the panelists, is emblematic of Los Angeles—and how architectural change really happens.

“This reclaiming of the built environment is the stuff of history,” said California Historical Society executive director Anthea Hartig. “The history has changed over time. The evolution is this incredible set of narratives that are layered.”

UC Riverside cultural historian Catherine Gudis referred to the changes documented by Vergara’s photographs as the “storyscape” of L.A. She said that such change needs to be preserved to show the full story of the city’s built environment: “Buildings are containers for memory.”

The discussion’s moderator, Getty Museum educational specialist Peter Tokofsky, asked Gudis what, given all this change, she would put on a tourism poster of L.A. She suggested attractions and places that embody the city’s change and diversity—like MacArthur Park.

Architect Peter Tolkin said that his own work was an attempt to apply today’s L.A. narratives to the built environment—while contributing to the changes the panel was discussing. As an example, he showed photos of Saladang, a Thai restaurant in Pasadena that marries Thai and Californian styles. Tolkin said that his client was an orphan in Thailand who worked her way up in restaurants before opening her own place. “She was straddling multiple worlds,” he said. “She wanted something that was not just from her place—but something connecting from where she came but also about here.”

In the question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked to make predictions about where such change would occur next. Vergara suggested that L.A.’s many alleys were ripe as spaces for transformation. Hartig suggested that people’s engagement in civic life would make changes. Gudis pointed to the L.A. River—revived as a working waterway after years of being ignored—as a model.

Tolkin suggested that the preference of people to drive less, to move to transit and bicycles, could be transformative, as Angelenos focus on spaces closer to home. “One of the things that’s happening with the city is that it’s turning back inward,” he said. “People don’t want to be traveling great distances.”

Who Designs Tomorrow’s Los Angeles?

What planners of the future forget, explained visual futurist and Blade Runner designer Syd Mead during the third and final panel of the day, is that they can’t just get rid of the past. “The future starts with the now, “ said Mead. “You overlay the future onto what was already happening.”

Even then, your vision may be fanciful. Moderator Greg Goldin, curator of the A+D Museum, projected onto the screen a 1988 image by Mead: his vision of downtown Los Angeles in the year 2013. Tall, imposing towers flank the 110 Freeway, upon which maglev (magnetic levitation) cars drive.

“Actually, it’s credible,” said Qingyun Ma, dean of the USC School of Architecture, gazing at the image. “It’s too bad we didn’t build it.”

“Everybody loves a maglev,” said Goldin.

Cautioned Mead: “Just don’t walk in the street in wet weather.”

Ma argued that while Mead’s vision may not have come to life in Los Angeles, it bears a resemblance to what has happened in China’s major cities. Visions of the future in one place can become a reality in another place.

Urban planner James Rojas argued that one aspect of the Mead’s vision is outdated: the reliance on automobiles. “That future was based on cheap oil and no pedestrians,” said Rojas. “In L.A. today, we can’t build bikes fast enough. This future of cars is obsolete for the next generation.”

Ma said he views USC’s immediate surroundings as a laboratory for getting rid of cars, but dramatic changes in our building or living habits are unlikely to happen without something interfering with life as we currently know it. “It’s some form of catastrophe that brings the future to you,” Ma said.

Mead was skeptical of his co-panelists’ post-car visions. “A bicycle is a fantastic little machine,” Mead said, pointing out its engineering wonders. “But it’s dependent on weather, your age, your athletic ability, and the terrain.”

Rojas countered that Latino immigrants, many of them carless, have created urban communities of mom-and-pop shops on corners, within easy walking distance of residences. That, too, may be a future.

All the panelists seemed to agree that finding a system in which cars can be reduced in number but kept in service all day by different users—a fleet of autos shared by everyone, essentially Zipcar-style—would be a positive development.

As for what sort of places these bicycles, shared cars, or maglev vehicles will take us to—that’s still up for grabs.

“Developers and politics create a city,” said Mead. But Angelenos don’t show up for elections. “It’s tragic. The city will be created for them.” Mead added that “too much planning without sensitivity to who’s going to be there is a huge black mark to much of what gets called urbanization.”

Ma agreed, but argued bad planning, not the act of planning, was the problem—and that lack of planning could be even worse. Even minutely planned cities, like Brasília in Brazil, have become viable as places to live.

Rojas said engaging the public was essential. “If we don’t have input for our plans, then the plans fail,” he said.

Questions from the audience touched on the role of parks, of preservation, and of social capital. Do Angelenos even care about what their city evolves into?

Yes, said the panelists, and that’s why they want to talk about it. “I do think,” concluded Ma,” that one of the most important and lovely aspects of L.A. is that it’s not finished.”

The post Architecture <em>Does</em> Matter—Even In Crazy L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Has the Dream Become Deranged?

To the rest of the world, Los Angeles is palm trees and stucco homes, crowded freeways, Mickey Mouse, and the violence of the 1992 riots. In a conversation about the past and future of L.A.’s global image, frequently interspersed with audience applause and laughter, four interpreters of the city–directors Wim Wenders and John Singleton, essayist Richard Rodriguez, and architect Eric Owen Moss–talked about the tension between the realities and fictions of Los Angeles.

Moderator Warren Olney, host of 89.9 KCRW’s “Which Way, L.A.?” and “To The Point,” asked Singleton if he feels that the global image of the city is “false.”

“It’s manufactured, but it’s also real,” Singleton replied. Los Angeles is beautiful, he said, but it has an interesting underbelly and a complex identity thanks to people from all over the world who come here “to reinvent themselves,” he said–whether from Europe or Schenectady or Weehawken. “Los Angeles is a place where you can come as a caterpillar and become a butterfly,” he said.

Wenders–who identified himself as the only foreigner on the panel–arrived in L.A. in 1972 and found a city that seemed to exist on a different planet. “The first thing I did was drive through Mullholland Drive, and I thought I was in a spaceship,” he said. Still more surreal, though, was returning to Germany. L.A. became a dream place that “lost all reality when I left.” Wenders felt he couldn’t even talk about his life here because no one would believe it. “The movies that I make [in L.A.] are about that conflict between the fiction and the reality,” he said. “Los Angeles is about stories and fiction and dreams”–and these fantasies have an incredible effect not just on the world but on themselves, forming a sort of closed feedback loop that can become dangerously insular.

Pointing to a painting of the 405 freeway with a stretch of empty road behind him on stage, Rodriguez explained that that particular image doesn’t exist in reality; the freeways never look quite so open and empty. The people from around the world who come to Los Angeles to live out their fantasies “have described California through their dreams,” he said. As a native Californian, Rodriguez believes that “those of us who were born here, and have to compete with these dreams, develop a sense of irony or a sense that we’re a lesser civilization.”

For Moss, the freeway is more than a symbol or dream of L.A. “Physiologically the city is largely defined by … infrastructure,” he said. The city was built around the east-west split of the 405, giving an odd power to the civil engineer who, long ago, decided to build the freeway through the path of least resistance.

Pointing again to the empty freeway behind him, Rodriguez said that people come to L.A. to be there–on that empty stretch of road–only to have that dream, and others, deferred. Singleton agreed, saying that it’s a place where people go with dreams only to have them dashed. “The problem with dreams is they die many times, and they turn into something as mundane as our lives,” said Rodriguez.

But for Wenders, it was the loss of reality, and too much fantasy, that drove him out of Los Angeles. He eventually returned to Germany because “the image that is the product of the city had too much impact on the city itself,” he said. If fiction is the product of the dreams of L.A., then violence has been the byproduct of those dreams. “If the city that produced all these dreams has a future where it’s going to produce only nightmares, then I’ve got to get out of here,” he realized. Films today–relying increasingly on CGI, shot digitally, and full of dreamlike violence–lack an appreciation for the real, he said. “They’re all suffering from a disease that is the loss of reality.”

Singleton agreed, explaining that trying to make reality-based films without gratuitous violence was impossible in Hollywood. He didn’t work for years until he capitulated (making Shaft with Samuel Jackson)–and he felt he lost something as a filmmaker by giving in.

In a lively question and answer session, the panelists explained why they decided to participate in the discussion. Olney’s answer was simple–to hang out with these people. Singleton professed his love for Los Angeles and the fact that “it’s defined who I am.” Wenders felt that the title of the conference, “How Los Angeles Invented the World,” was “a fantastic subject,” because “Los Angeles has this impact on how the world understands itself” and is “a strange testing ground for how the world will look eventually.”

For Rodriguez, and perhaps for the rest of the audience who’d gladly spent their afternoon cloistered away and captivated at the Getty, the answer was obvious: “Where else would I be on a Saturday but in this absurd room talking about a city as mysterious and vulgar as L.A.?”

A City That’s Fun To Obliterate, At Least Onscreen

The very things that frustrate critics of Los Angeles–its sprawl, its hidden spaces, its secret powers, its impermanence–have made the city a uniquely compelling film character, said a panel of filmmakers and critics focused on movie portraits of the city and how they have shaped how Angelenos see themselves.

Before World War II, films showed L.A. as a happy place. Since then, the film noir view has prevailed onscreen–and in popular conceptions of the city as a dark or superficial place. “One of my thoughts about Los Angeles in general is that it’s a hidden city,” said Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan, praising the 1967 Lee Marvin film Point Blank as a portrait of the hidden L.A.

One thing that obscures L.A. is the pace of change, the panelists said. “Face it: Los Angeles is an incredibly unstable place,” said film historian Richard Schickel. And the instability–“the impermanence”–of the city is dramatic.

Director William Friedkin said it was this quality that shaped his 1985 thriller To Live and Die in L.A. To portray the city, he sought out more obscure places, such as the Vincent Thomas Bridge, that he had never before seen on film. “I wanted slick, sun-bleached freeways, reflective surfaces, and nothing that had any kind of a permanent feeling to it whatsoever,” he said.

These portraits have changed Angelenos’ perception of the city–and the city itself. Thom Andersen, writer and director of Los Angeles Plays Itself, paraphrased the late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who observed, “Los Angeles itself has never recovered from the inferiority complex that its movies nourished.”

“An inferiority complex is probably a good thing for a city,” he said, “but here perhaps I think we take it a bit too far.”

The darker portraits of Los Angeles often came from New Yorkers and other transplanted writers who moved to L.A. to work in Hollywood–and didn’t like it. And generations of directors have exploited the negative view of Los Angeles less subtly: by demolishing it in all sorts of apocalyptic movies.

“I got chastised recently because I said that I enjoyed seeing Los Angeles destroyed in movies,” Andersen said, adding that he can’t help himself. “I like to see things blown up in movies. … It’s a boy thing.” Turan added that he found the final scene of Kiss Me Deadly“–in which the world ends first in L.A.–“wonderfully cataclysmic.”

Friedkin said the 1982 film Blade Runner “is the best film I’ve seen about Los Angeles.” He called it “prophetic” in predicting the presence of large TV screens throughout society; environmental degradation; and the breakdown of social connection evidenced in the California budget crisis.

That said, Friedkin and other panelists said that the best, most realistic portrayals of Los Angeles as it is are found in the past. Said Andersen: “I think the golden era of filmmaking in Los Angeles was probably the 1910s and the ’20s, when it was possible–before the coming of sound–for filmmakers to film on the streets.” When sound came to movies, filming moved inside to the studios.

The question and answer period was dominated by sharp, funny exchanges, usually involving Friedkin. Schickel said Angelenos treasure their connection to film, and mentioned a scene in Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer in which a character encounters the actor William Holden on the street.

“That’s something that people in Los Angeles think about, hope for,” Schickel said. “That you’re stopped at a stop light and in the next car you see a movie star. It puts a spring in your stride.”

“Which movie star?” Friedkin asked with directorial skepticism. “Who today gets you off that way?”

A Midwestern Small Town With Surfing and Paranoia

When she was researching postwar pop culture history, Kirse Granat May, author of Golden State, Golden Youth, found that one place seemed to be steadily muscling out the others. “California kept popping up,” May explained during a discussion on how Los Angeles created the good life. Photographs and advertisements of healthy California youth, of California outdoor living, of California safety–all of these were being celebrated and echoed in American pop culture in the mid-20th century. “These images were powerful nationally and internationally,” May said, noting that Californians themselves bought into the dream even as they were selling it to others.

The panel, moderated by New York University art historian Thomas Crow (formerly director of the Getty Research Institute), explored some of the Los Angeles imagery that has appealed to Americans through the decades, including pictures of the outdoors, the sun, and the sea. Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at the Huntington Library, traced many of the ideals back to 19th-century California. “From pretty much the 1880s through to the present,” she said, themes of robust health and downright superior humans have been present in images of California. California magazines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, notably Land of Sunshine and Out West, carried picture of babies who “were always naked and always outside.” California not only promised healing from ailments like tuberculosis, Watts said; it also told people “you’d have children bigger and brighter and whiter.”

UCLA historian Eric Avila, author of Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, characterized Los Angeles as the “it-city of postwar America.” Avila said there were certain icons, like the freeways or the movies, that defined L.A. in popular imagination, but what unified the disparate images was that all of them “reflected a kind of white, suburban, vaguely middle-class identity.”

May agreed, citing the power of Disney especially. “In the minds of millions of children, California existed because Disneyland was there,” and the Disney dream was a suburban dream. “Plus,” she added, “Disneyland is awesome.”

For Avila, “the success of Disney fundamentally corresponded to the desire of millions of consumers who recognized that Midwestern, small-town white worldview.” This was reflected in the entire approach to real estate development during those years, when entire cities sprang up out of the desert and imported Midwestern habits and mores and people.

Fear, however, was also central to the California experience. The privacy and security of one’s community also promised a refuge from the things that were frightening–like juvenile delinquency, racial differences, or war. Even as House Beautiful was enticing Americans with pictures of dream houses in the Pacific Palisades, Watts noted, the Los Angeles Times would carry a chart showing the “rings of radiation” that would emanate from a strike on the city’s downtown.

Crow recounted moving from Indiana to San Diego as a teenager in the early 1960s and likewise being struck by the fear. “It was a kind of paradise,” he said, noting the weather and beaches and low cost of living. “But it soon became clear to me that I was surrounded by people who were full of paranoia about communism. Even then I was thinking, ‘How do you people have all this and still spend your time obsessing over the threat of communism?’”

Avila described such fears as “one of the big paradoxes of Southern California during [the] postwar period.” Even as it offered people a dream of the good life, “it was deeply troubled by a set of fears and anxieties.” Not only internal subversion but also racial diversity was a source of fear. This, curiously enough, went hand-in-hand with Los Angeles as a place where people could “go to become white.” You might be an Italian or Jew or Irishman in New York, but in Los Angeles “that discrimination in many ways would magically disappear.”

Amid the racial fears, however, was a lot of cross-cultural borrowing. The Pendleton shirts in fashion among Chicanos became the “board shirts” of surfers. People were using their incomes to purchase “commodities that were used to create these things that did not fit with dominant identity,” Avila said.

In relation to the history of the American west more broadly, Los Angeles stands out, said Watts (nodding to historian Kevin Starr), as “a place utter self-invention.” It was a city with few resources, but “we found the water, and we carved out the port.”

As for the white-suburban postwar imagery for which California became known, it’s in many ways little more than a relic, as the state has undergone immense cultural and demographic shifts. Nevertheless, noted May, the vision still exerts a lot of power over people’s imaginations. “Images are like vampires,” she said. They stick around.

See full video here.
See more photos here.
Read opinions about what film best captures L.A. here.

*Photos by Sarah Rivera.

The post Was Ever a City More Bewildering? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.