Los Angeles's Dirty Realism

los angeles forum for architecture and urban design

forumANNUAL 2004


forumANNUAL 2004


forum ANNUAL 2004

Forum Annual 2004© 2004 the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Designall rights reserved

ISSN: 1553-3042ISBN: 0-9763166-0-9

Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban DesignPO Box 291774Los Angeles, CA 90029-8774

http://[email protected] this and other laforum publications online: http://www.laforum.org/orders

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting innovative architecture, art, and urbanism that takes this city as a laboratory. The Forum plays a vital role among architecture organizations nationally and internationally by initiating, presenting, and discussing architectural and urbanistic speculations about Los Angeles.

A 501 (c)(3) non-profit corporation

Edited by Kazys VarnelisDesigned by Steve RowellIncidental photography by Steve Rowell and Kazys Varnelis

Forum Annual Editorial Committee

Dan HermanTherese KellyAlan LoomisSteve RowellPaulette M. SingleyKazys Varnelis

contents

introduction / kazys varnelis

memorial for rose mendez

the once and future shopping mall: the farmers market, the grove and the future of the mall / alan loomis

twilight capitol / steve rowell

downtown… again / peter zellner

plans come and go, or downtown is almost ok / robert s. harris

small skyscraper by chris burden and taalman koch architecture

cathedrals of the culture industry / kazys varnelis

lounge core / helene furjan

los angeles’s dirty realism / paulette m. singley

art and architecture portfolio series curated by tom marble

forum annual report 2002–2004 / board and sponsor lists

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forum ANNUAL 2004

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This inaugural issue of Forum Annual marks the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design’s first print periodical after a five-year absence. Forum Annual is our reaction to a void we perceive in the city. For if it is hard to imagine any contempo-rary city as closely observed as Los Angeles, it is remarkable that we lack a regular venue for critical writing on architecture and urbanism.

From January 1988 to December 1999 the Forum Newsletter played this role, providing critical writing alongside reports of Forum activities and a calendar of architectural events in the city. At the end of the decade, with the cost of paper rising and the prom-ising new medium of the world wide web, the newsletter left print for the Forum’s newly created website at http://www.laforum.org. Starting in 2000, Alan Loomis’s “Delirious LA” email list took over from the print calendar as well.

introductionby kazys varnelis

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Although the move to the Internet expanded our audience, by 2003 the Forum came to the conclusion that leaving print limited us in certain ways. In particular, longer articles are hard to read on the web. We came to the conclusion that we needed publications in many formats and diverse media. Today, the most important Forum announcements are printed, their designs either commis-sioned specifically for the event or part of our Forumemo series of postcards, designed by Los Angeles artists and later collected in a portfolio series. We follow-up and expand on these via our web site and through electronic correspondence to our e-mail list, which you can sign up to at http://www.laforum.org /lists/?p=subscribe. Appearing a few times a year, the online newsletter—now known as the Forum Issue—features a guest editor who investigates a single topic relevant to architecture, design, and urbanism while special online features focus on topics and projects outside the bounds of the Issue such as the LACMA competition of 2002. Forum Annual gathers the most pertinent material from recent Forum Issues and online features to document our activities in the year and to provide an arena for debating the most pertinent issues concerning architecture, urban design, and art. This fall also marks the Forum’s return to publishing small pamphlets with the results of the Dead Malls competition of 2003 initiating the series. Expect more pamphlets and even Forum books in the near future.

This inaugural issue of the annual, a Forum first, represents two years’ worth of activities and debates. Four essays have previ -ously appeared on the web (Loomis, Harris, Zellner, Varnelis), four pieces are new (Rowell, Singley, Furjan, and our reflections on the Small Skyscraper), and one brief piece on the Forumemo series first appeared on the last Forumemo postcard. The result, dedicated to Forum board member Rose Mendez, who died in 2002, serves as a record of the themes that have emerged thus far in this decade.

We begin by revisiting the theme of the Dead Malls competi -tion with Alan Loomis’s essay on the history of the Grove and the Farmer’s Market. Steve Rowell uncovers the dark future of shop-ping malls in his essay on the deadest mall in America, which we can be thankful is located in Illinois, not in Southern California, but which reminds us of the fate of a growing number of malls in our own region. Given that much of the architectural production and discussion during the last two years in this city has been punctu-ated by the redevelopment of downtown, Peter Zellner examines the tortured history of the Bunker Hill redevelopments while Bob Harris redirects our attention from the obsession with Grand Avenue to the Downtown Strategic Plan of 1994. Next, Forum Annual focuses on the city’s texture by exploring how Chris Burden and Taalmann Koch Architecture hack urban bureaucracy to create a DIY urbanism through their Small Skyscraper project. Another kind of transforma-tion is addressed in my article on “the Cathedrals of the Culture Industry.” There, I raise a concern over the new monuments built in our city. Is the goal of this burst of architecture to transform the degraded nature of Los Angeles’s urban environment or does it just give the fallen condition an alibi? In “Lounge Core,” Helene Furjan investigates how the spaces of Los Angeles are increas-ingly non-places that still manage to breed a vital spatial culture of their own. The essays conclude with Paulette Singley’s text on dirty realism as a way of not just mapping, but also intervening into, the city. The back pages of Forum Annual contain a description of our Forumemo 1 portfolio, curated by Tom Marble together with an account of recent Forum activities since 2002. For a city with such a concentration of neo-avant-garde architects and with more recent buildings of note than any other on this continent, it is remarkable how lit tle good architecture there really is here. Forum Annual’s goal is to challenge that condition by supporting thoughtful writing about this city. A final word, the Forum hopes to live up to its name. Please send your comments about the Annual or about any aspect of our operations or publications to [email protected]. We actively seek proposals for newsletter articles and programming ideas.

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The first issue of Forum Annual is dedicated to Rose Mendez and marks the second anniversary of her passing. All of us on the L.A. Forum board wish to remember the inspirational person that she was and the contribution she made to architecture.

Rose taught that architecture’s greatest potential was not to comfort the body but to provoke the intellect. She worked passion-ately to make the Forum a dynamic place for public discussion and debate and tirelessly strove to elevating standards of excellence in all her endeavors. Those of us lucky enough to know her as student, colleagues and friends will always remember how Rose inspired and encourage us to pursue our dreams. Rose will be greatly missed.

Donations may be made in Rose’s honor to:

The Rose Mendez Undergraduate Architecture Memorial Scholarship Attn: Walter Williams Cornell University Department of Architecture, Art, and Planning 129 Sibley Dome Ithaca, NY 14853

dedication

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Union Square Park(ing) by f.m. Design (Rose Mendez and Michael Tunkey), first place competition entry in international design competition for the redesign of San Francisco’s Union Square, 1997.

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the once and future shopping mall:the farmers market, the grove and the future of the mall

by alan loomis

With considerable fanfare, three major malls opened their doors to the shoppers of greater Los Angeles near the beginning of 2002. By the end of the year, at least another three shopping centers would be completed, with more in the final stages of construction and plan-ning. Combined, they represent a prodigious and stunning production of retail space, over 4 million square feet of shopping. Not since the mid-80s opening of the Beverly Center behemoth, a notoriously large mall located among the bungalows of West Hollywood, have shopping centers of this scale, density, and architectural typology been seen in urban Southern California.1

As perceived by consumers, the development press and munic-ipal agencies, these malls represent a reinvestment in the city as a social and economic site. The Hollywood & Highland complex serves as the keystone for the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency’s revi-talization of Hollywood Boulevard. A plan commissioned by the City of Pasadena dictated both the mixture of housing and retail at Paseo Colorado and the configuration of its public spaces in respect to the civic center’s Beaux Arts axis. Long Beach’s twin malls CityPlace and The Pike at Rainbow Harbor are instrumental in the sleepy port city’s attempt to recast itself as an urban entertainment destination on par with San Diego. Not to be out-done, Santa Monica and West Hollywood, the region’s two most successful boutique retail cities, also unveiled plans to expand their retail districts with significant mall construction.2

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For others these malls signal the final capitulation of the city to suburbia’s homogenous cultural and economic norms. They suggest that the fundamental nature of these massive complexes, with their repetitive mixture of national and global retail chains typical of any high-rent, centralized management structure, remains unchallenged despite a veneer of aesthetic contextualism and simulated streets. Local observers such as Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, argue that such malls are “a testament to the death of the historic city, not its salvation.”3 Yet beyond the prolif-eration of malls with Baby Gaps and Banana Republics in the heart of the city, this creeping suburbanization indicates a shift of a more systemic nature—one that significantly diminishes the palette of urban design tools and, more disturbingly, reduces our understanding of urban life.

Of the recently completed malls, The Grove in the Fairfax/Mid-City district most clearly illustrates these issues, particularly because its adjacency to the historic Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax amplifies the history and future of the urban shopping mall. A visit to both the Market and The Grove reveals strikingly different spatial experiences, insofar as the former is a semi-enclosed, almost claustrophobic labyrinth of small shops, housed in vernacular agri-cultural shacks and resting precariously on an asphalt parking lot while the latter’s medium box stores and multiplex cinema, which face a central open-air promenade, are housed in vigorous reproduc-tions of historic commercial architecture, detailed throughout in materials luxurious for a shopping mall. Instead of deferring to the Market, The Grove seems to take its cue from Main Street Disneyland or the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Place in Las Vegas, albeit without animatronic fantasy figures or an artificial sky. Only a collection of mid-sized buildings by the Market’s architectural stewards of twenty years, the firm Koning Eizenberg, mediates between its one-story casualness and The Grove’s deliberations and its 3500-car, seven-story, computer-monitored parking garage.4

Nonetheless, a relatively straight evolutionary line bridges the gap between the two, beginning with the use of architectural style. Although the Market’s relaxed attitude suggests it was an outgrowth of ad-hoc gatherings, its rural aesthetic was a calculated marketing strategy similar to the Mexican styling of Olvera Street, built at roughly the same time. Like Olvera Street, a rustic accumulation of small shops adjacent to Los Angeles’s original pueblo plaza, the unique environment of the Market was designed to encourage leisure shopping. As Richard Longstreth writes:

With little outlay, a bazaar-like atmosphere was cultivated to enhance the experience so that shopping for food would seem more akin to a leisure than a routine pursuit. Fueled by an aggressive advertising campaign, the Farmers Market began to attract an affluent trade of movie stars and others who sought the unusual goods sold there and took pleasure in the novel ambience.5

Updated by seventy years of market research, The Grove’s historicist imagery engages in the same manipulative choreography, with architect Jon Jerde as the mediator. Less skillfully executed than a Jerde Partnership “experience,” such as San Diego’s Horton Plaza or L.A.’s CityWalk at Universal Studios, The Grove’s narrative archi-tecture and programming clearly owes much to Jerde’s innovations and the Market’s precedent.6

However, the fundamental innovation of the Farmers Market lies not in its use of architectural style, but its disposition of parking and public space. Unlike the shopping courts of its day, the Market displays no retail street frontage, but turns inward to a pedestrian court located in the middle of a parking lot. This typology, of course, would become the dominant model of late twentieth century shop-ping malls. In Los Angeles, Lakewood Center was the first mall to conform to this now-classic model, firmly established by earlier structures such as Seattle’s Northgate and Boston’s Shoppers World.7 The juggernaut of this type is now the 4.2 million square foot Mall of America outside of Minneapolis, although the title of world’s largest mall once belonged to 3+ million square foot Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance. In the transition from the Farmers Market to the Mall of America stands the late modern architect

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Victor Gruen, father of the modern shopping mall. Although Gruen did not participate in the development of the Market, he organized its parking strategy and pedestrian-only environment, transformed by the economic proformas of department stores and the technical innovations of modern architecture and transportation planning, into a codified formula for producing shopping malls.8 Notwithstanding Gruen’s concurrent interest in central cities, over the next twenty-five years the suburban regional mall quickly became one of the most recognizable architectural and marketing typologies in America.9 Inevitably, as retailers rediscovered the city, they brought with them the suburban mall formula. Although surface parking generally does not surround urban malls—cars may be located underground as at Century City or next-door in gigantic parking garages as at The Grove—their spatial organization remains decidedly suburban. Even if the roof has been removed, opening the mall interior to the sky, shops and pedestrian passages remain focused inward towards privately controlled “public” space, disconnected from the street life of sidewalks. Thus the Farmers Market serves as a prototype for the suburban shopping mall and The Grove acts as its most current incarnation—the “urban” themed lifestyle center.10

As The Grove is nothing more than the linear evolution of the shopping mall, it is neither innovative nor particularly imaginative. For architects, the dilemma of The Grove is not its postmodern pastiche of architectural styles, but its failure to expand the mall’s range of typological or urban performances. More troubling still, The Grove’s popular success also reinforces entertainment retail (retail-tain-ment) as the only legitimate activity for creating urban places. The dominance of shopping exacerbated in California’s sales tax addicted cities establishes retail centers as the only tool of urban design, to the exclusion of production (the workplace) and living (housing), and at the expense of a sustainable urban economy founded in a physical form that balances land uses with transit needs.

In other words, a divorce between consumption (represented by shopping / entertainment) and the productive, domestic, or civic / political life has occurred during the evolution from the Farmers Market to The Grove. At The Grove, shopping has no connection to the surrounding Fairfax neighborhood, or even to greater Los Angeles. Whereas the Farmers Market married rural agricultural production with urban life at the local scale, the corporate enclave of The Grove, like most malls, is occupied by branch stores of national retail / entertainment corporations, with little relationship to the industry of the city. Shopping at The Grove does not prime the economic engine of Los Angeles manufacturers or retail companies.11

Although the Market’s connection with local production was quickly lost as its architectural typology was applied to regional shopping malls, malls briefly retained elements of local civic culture. Gruen viewed the shopping mall as the suburbs’ social center, and the inclusion of local cultural and political establishments was integral to his early mall formulas, though today even modest civic features such as storefront post offices are absent from most major shop-ping centers. In its place, The Grove features two European-feeling

pedestrian streetscapes that converge on centralized park, with a small pond and actual grass. In one corner of the park is a collec-tion of bronze sculptures, representing a gaggle of (white) children in 50’s attire selling lemonade. At Christmas, the park features a gigantic fir tree which signage proudly explains is taller than the Rockefeller Center tree. The references to the Rockefeller Center and mid-century Americana symbolically equate The Grove with the archetypal public green of New England villages and the democratic, urban civic culture such archetypes carry. But this park is essentially an outdoor version of the atrium typical of suburban malls, including its set-to-music water fountain created by WET Design of Bellagio Vegas fame. The Grove is an entirely private space, created, owned and governed by Caruso Affiliated Holdings.12 Although the park is immensely popular—and reportedly the attraction of The Grove has increased business at the flagging Farmers Market—this very popu-larity makes The Grove that much more problematic. Its primary and only purpose is shopping and entertainment: public facilities and institutions associated with democratic government are absent; offices and workshops of middle-class and working-class labor are not to be found; and the products of regional businesses are not sold here. The congested popularity of The Grove and its architectural and decorative symbolism gives it the appearance of a vibrant, rich urban place yet it is ultimately a place where urban life is rendered in one-dimension, reduced to consumption only. The simulated city is just a marketing tool to amplify sales-per-square-foot numbers. This concentration of hyper-consumerism is not a problem per se—after all, commerce constitutes a certain kind of “publicness” and is one

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of the city’s primary functional reasons to exist. Rather, the problem is that within popular perception The Grove’s success quietly and insidi-ously eliminates other possible definitions of urban life, leaving archi-tects and developers only one option for activating the city: shopping.

Meanwhile, The Grove presents a blank wall to the real public face of Third Street and its massive parking garage hides it from Pan Pacific Park. The Grove’s architectural cinema is not directed at the sidewalk and none of its storefronts open on the street. The urban design of The Grove does nothing to positively contribute to the pedestrian life of Fairfax’s streets—it merely increases traffic. One suspects that the Byzantine machinations of retail real estate convention played a greater role in shaping the disposition of The Grove than L.A. City plan-ners, who should have rejected its “Berlin Wall” as a matter of course.

The Grove’s defiant rejection of Los Angeles’s streets is all the more distressing because of the latent transformative effect L.A.’s commercial corridors could have in solving the region’s planning chal-lenges. Beginning with Doug Suisman’s 1989 Los Angeles Boulevard pamphlet, the under-performing commercial mileage of L.A.’s boulevards has been viewed in the context of a cataclysmic housing shortage, no-growth single-family neighborhoods, and the prospect of transportation gridlock. Suisman and others have argued that Los Angeles’s boulevards are the optimum site for mixed-use corridors combining high-density housing, sidewalk pedestrian-oriented retail, and, critically, either bus-way or fixed-rail transit lines.13 From this ideological perspective, it is sadly ironic that The Grove’s “streets” feature a double-decker, state-of-the-art electric-powered trolley to transport shoppers from the parking garage to the Farmers Market.

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Meanwhile, a mid-density residential development, similar to many others appearing across the city, has been completed across Third Street, yet the relationship between housing and retail seems to have been given no thought by either the designers of The Grove, of the housing development, or the planners charged with imagining the City’s future.

There are alternatives to The Grove: commercial projects by mainstream developers that incorporate ground level, street-facing retail with upper-level condos or apartments—the Paseo Colorado in Pasadena, the Hollywest complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, and CityPlace in Long Beach. Of course, none of these three projects represent an ideal model. Service yards and parking garages form half of CityPlace’s sidewalk frontage, including that facing the adjacent Blue Line light rail stop; the clunky brown and orange stucco detailing of Hollywest is simply ugly and garish, even by Hollywood standards; and Paseo Colorado retains internalized shopping courts while its architecture is deadly flat and uniform, as if it were a full -scale enlargement of a cardboard model.14 Nonetheless, each of these three malls has partially turned the conventional typology of the mall inside-out and upside-down: storefronts face the sidewalk and the airspace above the stores is occupied by housing. As architectural prototypes, they inject new imagination into the standards of large-scale urban shopping centers. As urban design, they are part of broader strategies to increase the residential density of traditional office/commercial cores with an

aim towards creating the proverbial 24/7 city.15 As financial proposi-tions, they also seem to be meeting early success: Paseo Colorado was recently sold at a considerable profit to its original developer.16

Certainly the mythical days of shop owners living above their wares are over, but neither do these recent projects promote that myth. Rather they suggest that, although just opened, The Grove is already an obsolete model for the mall. For The Grove is nothing more than Fairfax’s version of CityWalk, incorporating its spatial choreography, but also its isolation as a destination. When exhausted as an enter-tainment destination (for assuredly something newer will come along), its single-purpose architecture will be obsolete, like its “dead mall” predecessors on the suburban fringe.17 Although the Pasadena, Hollywood and Long Beach projects share many of The Grove’s stores and therefore engage in the same consumerist fantasies, they are constructed in an architectural form that responds to the city’s present social dilemmas, yet is adaptable to incremental change, where storefront tenants will reflect the evolving nature of the city’s street life. As such, they represent a more sustainable investment of city’s resources and its long-term future. With their mix of residen-tial and commercial uses oriented towards the city’s sidewalks and suggestion of transit corridors on boulevards, these projects are the first gestures towards the future of the mall in Southern California.

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10. “Lifestyle Centers” are the latest trend in mall development. They tend to be open-air malls that simulate traditional town squares and streets, with a concentration on upscale durable goods retailers such as Apple Computer stores, Crate & Barrel furniture stores, and bookstores, in addition to cinemas and higher-end clothiers like The Gap, Banana Republic and J. Crew.

11. The Farmers Market was established to sell local produce. (Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, MIT Press, 1997, p 282.) Some might argue that the cinemas at The Grove are outposts of the local film industry. Considering that marketing and finances of cinema makes little variation for local circumstance, I do not find this convincing.

12. For more on the private control of mall space, see Benjamin Barber, “Civic Space” and Kevin Mattson, “Antidotes to Sprawl” both in David Smiley, editor, Sprawl and Public Space: Redressing the Mall (National Endowment for the Arts, 2002, pp 31-45)

13. Doug Suisman, Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, 1989. Also see John Kaliski, “The Form of Los Angeles’s Quotidian Millennium” in The Edge of the Millennium: An International Critique of Architecture, Urban Planning, Product and Communication Design edited by Susan Yelavich (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1993), pp 106-119. Research by the Planning Center in Orange County studied the viability of converting commercial corridors into housing sites from a design perspective (see Evan Halper, “Turning Old Strip Malls Into Housing,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2001), and a June 14, 2002 Solimar Research Group brief authored by William Fulton confirms that this conversion is in fact taking place. The City of L.A.’s General Plan Framework, adopted in 1996/2001, promotes mixed-use corridors, but it is only recently that zoning codes have caught up with policy. See Ordinance No. 174999 Residential/Accessory Services Zone, reported by Jocelyn Stewart, “The Sky’s the Limit with New Zoning,” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2002 and Howard Fine, “City to Ease Way for Residences in Business Districts,” Los Angeles Business Journal, September 02, 2002. More recently, see Diane Wedner, “The Mall Comes Home,” Los Angeles Times February 29, 2004.

14. For a more extended critique of CityPlace, see Michael Bohn, “The Good, the Bad, and the Monotony” http://www.laforum.org/issues/more.php?id=32_0_7_0_C. For Paseo Colorado, see Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Pasadena’s Paseo Colorado: Shopping for Reality, in Vain,” Los Angeles Times, November 09, 2001. For a general critique of new pedestrian malls, see Nicolai Ouroussoff, “No Sale in a Faux Town,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2002.

15. Jesus Sanchez, “An Upscale Urban Village Emerges in Genteel Pasadena,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2002 and Marshall Allen, “Living Large in Pasadena,” Pasadena Star News, September 16, 2002. Both articles note the significant dollar premium paid for such “urbane” living and the affordable housing gap this presents. Recent plans for Santa Monica Place also propose to “invert” the mall and top it with housing: see Carolanne Sudderth, “One Little Shopping Mall and How it Grew and Grew and Grew,” Ocean Park Gazette, June

05, 2002.16. Danny King “Trizec Said Near Sale of Successful Pasadena Project,” Los

Angeles Business Journal, September 02, 2002 and “Developers Diversified Realty Announces Acquisition of Paseo Colorado Shopping Center”, DDR Press Release, January 16, 2003. DDR, curiously, is also the developer/owner of CityPlace and The Pike in Long Beach. The housing component of Paseo Colorado is owned by Post Properties and was not part of the sale. TrizecHahn developed both Paseo Colorado and Hollywood&Highland. The latter project, with an exclu-sive focus on tourist-oriented entertainment/retail, was sold to the CIM Group in early 2004 at a financial loss.

17. The Gilmore family, which owns The Grove property and leases it to Caruso Affiliated Holdings, apparently sees the site as the entertainment compo-nent to their primary investment, the Farmers Market. Prior to The Grove, the site was first occupied by a race-track followed by a drive-in movie theater.

Alan Loomis is a senior urban designer at Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists in Pasadena CA. He is the creator/editor of http://www.DeliriousLA.net, a comprehensive weekly listing of architecture events in Southern California.

1. The three principal malls are Hollywood & Highland at 640,000 sq ft, The Grove at 575,000 sq ft in the Fairfax/MidCity district, and Pasadena’s Paseo Colorado at 565,000 sq ft. Following these in 2002 are Long Beach’s The Pike at Rainbow Harbor at 369,000 sq ft, The Promenade at Howard Hughes Center at 250,000 sq ft, the West Hollywood Gateway at 245,000 sq ft, Sunset Millennium in Hollywood at 200,000 sq ft, Pasadena’s The Shops on South Lake Avenue at 150,000 sq ft, and the reconstruction of Long Beach CityPlace at 500,000 sq ft, Sherman Oaks Galleria at 300,000 sq ft, and Santa Monica Place at 278,000 sq ft. The Beverly Center is a whopping 876,000 sq ft.

2. For the popular perception of the new malls, see Mary McNamara “On the Sunny Side of the Mall,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2002 and Mitchell Landsberg “There’s a New Buzz on Hollywood Blvd,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2001.

3. Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Pasadena’s Paseo Colorado: Shopping for Reality, in Vain,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2001. Also see Nicolai Ouroussoff, “No Sale in a Faux Town,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2002.

4. Martha Groves, “Landmark’s Upscale Neighbor”, Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2002 and Carolyn Ramsay, “A Market Fresh Look”, Los Angeles Times, January 03, 2002.

5. Roger Dahlhjelm established The Farmers Market in 1934. Olvera Street (formerly Olivera Street) opened in 1930, thanks to the efforts of Christine Sterling. (Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, MIT Press, 1997, pp 279-283.)

6. The rooftops and HVAC equipment of The Grove can be seen from the upper levels of its parking garage, a lapse in the coherency of the design/fantasy narrative that one would not expect of the Jerde Partnership. For more on Jerde, see Frances Anderton, editor, You Are Here: The Jerde Partnership International, Phaidon Press, 1999 or http://www.jerde.com. For more on the narrative design of The Grove, see Morris Newman, “The Grove’s Groove” in Grid, May 2002.

7. Lakewood Center opened in 1952, Shopper’s World in 1951 and Northgate in 1950. (Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, MIT Press, 1997, pp 332-333.)

8. Victor Gruen and Larry Smith, Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers, Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1960.

9. Peter Rowe, Making a Middle Landscape, MIT Press, 1991, pp 109-147 and Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall” in Michael Sorkin, editor, Variations on a Theme Park (Hill and Wang, 1995, pp 3-30)

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twilight capitolby steve rowell


The exhibit for the Dead Mall Competition, hosted by the Forum during fall 2002 / spring 2003, is now on view inside the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois.

The Dixie Square Mall is an 800,000 square-foot mall that has been abandoned for twenty-five years. Remarkably, the main struc-ture is still intact, though it has been transformed by time and the elements. It is located twenty miles south of downtown Chicago on land that was once used as a golf course along the curiously titled Dixie Highway, the Illinois—Florida segment of the historic network of tourism routes developed in 1915 that stretched from Ontario, Canada to Miami. The mall is an economic reflection of the heavily depressed south-side suburb of Harvey, once known as “the gateway to the south suburbs.” Many attempts (including an ongoing effort by Jesse Jackson, Jr.) have been made to have the mall converted for other uses or demolished entirely, but none of these attempts have cleared difficult political or financial hurdles. The sparsely populated surrounding neighborhoods and shuttered fast food busi-nesses seem to be succumbing to the mall’s spiral of blight as if by a gravitational force.

USGS satellite photograph (March, 1999)


The Harvey Police Department headquarters, holding cells and vehicle lot, along with an empty expanse dedicated as a heliport, occupies the west parking lot. The heliport sign is the only indicator on the property blocking trespass. Despite the proximity of the police, criminal acts in the mall include more than simple vandalism: multiple rapes and at least one murder have occurred there over the years. Other hazards include roving packs of wild dogs, patrolling the labyrinthine hallways.

Decapitated street lamps flank two of the three entrance roads that are still open, without gates or barriers, to residential streets. Where doors and windows once were, gaping holes now yawn open without lock or shutter. With the exception of the storefront labeled

“City Life,” all signage has been removed or stolen from the random assortment of brick and shingled facades and eves. Vague reminders of stores like Sears and Montgomery Ward, Jewell Grocery and J.C. Penny linger in windowless fenestration and themed uses of plywood and metal flashing. Rebar stubs and rusting framework remain where a large tent structure was briefly erected for the entrance of a film set Toys-R-Us.

Resembling one of the many forest preserves that fill the gaps of the Chicago grid, the parking lot is overgrown with native grasses and oak trees, providing an unintended ecological restoration to Harvey’s anemic commercial center. Courtyards are peaceful and quiet, protected by stands of ash erupting through pavement and sidewalk. Ponds form from summer rains, attracting migrating birds and gulls from Lake Michigan where station wagons once roamed in search of parking. The loading platforms are littered with piles of spent tires and decorated with slumping murals depicting vehicular work and recreation, together acting as a memorial to the trucking industry, minus the vehicles themselves. A new ecosystem is estab-lishing itself in the abscence of shopping, merging the interior with the exterior, complicating facades and reducing the structure to a shelter for plants and animals. A replacement food cycle, more closely resembling what existed for eons before the arrival of the mall, is established. The promise of consumerism and recreation and attempts to capitalize through clever marketing techniques is dismissed in favor of a system of seasonal procreation and hiberna-tion. The ice-age of capitalism in Harvey has passed, allowing for nature to once again take its course.

Approaching the buildings, it ’s often difficult to spot the parking barriers and store entrances amongst the new-growth forest. The northern lot is dominated by grass, spreading through geometric patterns of ice-stressed pavement fractures. Despite this abundance of flora, the atmosphere of Dixie Square Mall seems paralyzed in a bitter, lifeless, upper midwest winter. Color is faded and shades of tan and grey dominate, punctuated only by black portals. Across this surface, a vaguely western themed store façade still beckons visitors with its wide, cave-like entrance: an expression frozen.


Crossing the threshold into the mall evokes a sense of prescient entropy. The interior is a museum of decay of 1970s building mate-rials. Drop ceilings have dropped, and flooring has buckled up. The carpets are sodden, and the smell of mold announces the culture that now resides in the food court. Generic store signs and cheap rotting paneling give the feeling that this mall was not designed to last for more than a few years. The roof has collapsed in places, and sunlight pours into the vast, flooded, moss covered spaces where families once shopped. An escalator has snapped from its moorings, but is leaning against a mountain of debris, still allowing access to the second floor of one of the mall’s anchor stores.

There is a layer of artificial construction and destruction, subtly and indelibly merged with the existing history, further complicating the archeology of the place; in 1980, a year after the mall closed, it was refashioned for a film shoot that involved the destructive high-speed perusal of the shops along its interior corridors. As the police chase the Blues Brothers’ renegade police car through the mall, Elwood casually comments on the new fashions, then steers the car through another row of plate glass.

Dialogue from The Blues Brothers:1

Jake: Hanson Burgers. Elwood: Yeah. Lots of space in this mall. Jake: Disco pants and hair cuts. Elwood: Yeah. (They crash through some shop windows) Elwood: Baby clothes. Jake: This place has got everything. (They crash through another shop window) Elwood: New Oldsmobiles are in early this year. Pier 1 Imports.

The end result of all architecture is demolition (creative or not) or abandonment followed by decay, and the Dixie Square Mall, abandoned since 1979, is steadily advancing towards the later state—aided further by harsh weather, arsonists, and vandals. On June 21, 2004, a fire destroyed what was a storage area for Woolworth’s, but the mall seems indifferent to the arsonist’s efforts, and less than two months later, the evidence was already partially masked by a field of wild flowers. As part of this monument to the mall era, copies of the Dead Mall Competition print outs were hung throughout, and have become part of the surficial material of the mall interior—its fate merged with that of this, perhaps the most emblematic of them all, the über dead mall of America. While not officially open to the public, the exhibit will, like the mall itself, be on display indefinitely.

1. The Blues Brothers. Dir. J. Landis. Writ. J. Landis, D. Aykroyd, Perf. J. Belushi, D. Aykroyd. Universal, 1980.

Steve Rowell is a designer and photographer and a co-director at The Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles.

All photographs by Steve Rowell unless otherwise noted.

top: interior with installation. photo: CARP

middle: film still from The Blues Brothers.

bottom: interior with installation. photo: CARP


downtown… againpeter zellner


Spectacle

The future of Downtown Los Angeles is in play again. The Grand Avenue Project is the biggest public re-development spectacle to come to town in a long while. Under the banner “Re-Imagining Grand Avenue, Creating a Center for Los Angeles,” the newly invigorated push to revitalize L. A.’s center is once again focused on Bunker Hill, the area around the recently completed Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The Grand Avenue Project is being promoted and organized by the Grand Avenue Committee, a public/private partnership that has aims to “transform the civic and cultural districts of downtown Los Angeles into a vibrant new regional center which will showcase entertainment venues, restaurants, retail mixed with office build-ings, a hotel, and over 1000 new housing units.”1 Directed by the Los Angeles Grand Avenue Authority, a joint power entity formed by the union of the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/L. A.) and the County of Los Angeles, the Grand Avenue Committee has the singular agenda of creating no less than a new 3.2 million square foot regional center. Also planned for redevelopment is the existing County Mall, a little used public space that stretches from the Music Center at the top of Bunker Hill to City Hall at the bottom of the hill. Ingenuously, the enhanced park is being promoted as “L. A.’s own Central Park.” The fact that the County Mall is neither central to Downtown Los Angeles—or greater Los Angeles for that matter—nor at sixteen acres anywhere close to Olmstead and Vaux’s 843 acre urban oasis seems beside the point. What matters most is that the entire project is hinged on the premise that Downtown L. A.’s dead-after-5 pm curse can be finally vanquished. Eli Broad, billion-aire tract house developer, patron of the arts and architecture, and vice chairman of the Grand Avenue Committee said recently, “We’re hopeful we’ll be able to create a street where people will stay after work and one that will be a draw for the entire region.”2 Bringing foot traffic to Downtown L. A. after dark should cost $1.2 billion. Of this approximately $300 million will be required for public infrastructure, and approximately $900 million will be needed for real estate devel-opment. If successful, the project will generate 16,000 long-term jobs and raise $85 million annually in local, county and state taxes.


Circus

Eight teams of developers and architects, comprised of some sixty individual firms, initially responded to the RFQ issued for the project. The Grand Avenue Committee’s County Supervisor Gloria Molina, Council-woman Jan Perry, the CRA’s Bud Ovrom and L. A. County CAO David Janssen reviewed the submissions and announced in late January 2004 that five teams had been short-listed to compete for the job:

Grand Avenue Development Alliance, a consortium led by Australian property giant Bovis Lend Lease with Arquitectonica of Miami, Manhattan-based Gary Edward Handel + Associates, MVE & Partners, and RTKL;

Forest City Development of Cleveland, owners of the 42nd St Retail and Entertainment Complex in Times Square and developers of the recently unveiled Downtown Brooklyn Basketball Arena designed by Gehry Partners;

J. H. Snyder Company, the L. A. based developers of the local Water Garden business park, with private equity real estate invest-ment group Lubert-Adler Partners and the Jerde Partnership, Johnson Fain and the recently re-formulated Rios Clementi Hale Studios;

The Related Companies, backers of the $1.7 billion Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, with architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill under partner David Childs, and Elkus Manfredi. Thom Mayne, a late player in the game, was subsequently added to Related’s roster lending the developer an unexpected advantage.

Operating as Bunker Hill Ltd., only one other team was primarily L. A.-based—Weintraub Financial Services with the Bronson Companies, Apollo Real Estate Advisors, and the Vornado Realty Trust. The local consortium counts Gehry Partners, LLP as their archi-tect with landscape architects the Olin Partnership and the promising L. A. firm Daly Genik Architects. Curiously, Gehry, who would seem to be Bunker Hill Ltd.’s trump card, had down played his role, publicly announcing that he is not so much interested in the design of the project as its potential for urbanism. “For me, it ’s not important if I

do a building—I’ve got Disney Hall. I’m more interested in the urban planning,” Gehry recently stated.3 Nevertheless rumors of all -star designer involvement have spread with Jean Nouvel and Zaha Hadid pegged to join the Gehry led team. Earlier yet, Sir Norman Foster was temporarily aligned with Donald Trump’s team, which has since fallen out of the bidding process.

Notably absent from the redevelopment frenzy was the local dream team of Ming Fung, Craig Hodgetts, Thom Mayne, and Eric Owen Moss who joined together in discussions with a number of potential developers, but were to remain (strangely) on the sidelines. Should that team ultimately have join the Grand Avenue fray it could also have included Wolf Prix / Coop Himmelblau, designer of the new Central Los Angeles High School #9 and Steven Holl, architect for the new Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. Also conspicu-ously out of the running in the redevelopment frenzy was Dutch urbanist and iconoclast Rem Koolhaas, whose last two ventures in Los Angeles, a scheme for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new facilities on Wilshire and headquarters for Universal Studios over the hill in the San Fernando Valley both fizzled after losing funding. To date Koolhaas’ built reputation in L. A. now rests on the recently opened Beverly Hills Prada “Epicenter,” a project that received a luke warm reception after four years of anticipation.

In late May of 2004 the GAC made its selection—roundly elimi-nating the Frank Gehry-led team that included Harry Cobb, Daly Genik, Jean Nouvel and Zaha Hadid—leaving Forest City Development and the Related Companies still in the running. Effectively the initial field of some sixty architects and planners has been reduced to AC Martin Partners, Calthorpe Associates, Thomas P. Cox Architects, Civitas and the Project for Public Spaces (for Forest City Development) and Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Morphosis, Elkus Manfredi, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, Levin & Associates and Suisman Urban Design (for the Related Companies.) Gehry, who seemed well positioned to win the competition, assumed a prominent role in the debate of the project organizing a well attended, if controversial, public symposium—an action that may have led to his ouster.


Amnesia & Erasure

Despite, or perhaps because of the optimism surrounding the project, there seems to be a state of amnesia about the number of “ground-breaking” and largely unsuccessful fresh starts Bunker Hill has been given over the last five decades.

The view that many Los Angelenos hold of downtown as one of the city’s final redevelopment frontiers seems endemic, and its power wards off any bad flashbacks associated with the numerous failed efforts to redevelop Bunker Hill. Granted, L. A. is coming off a blissful decade of major civic achievements—Richard Meier’s Getty Center, Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral, and of course Walt Disney Concert Hall. Additionally, Angelenos have witnessed an overhaul of the city’s infrastructure, including a $2 billion Alameda Corridor transport conduit, a new subway system, a linked light rail network, and an “intelligent” metro bus line. So perhaps accordingly, the city’s dismal record downtown has yet to spark any questions about the viability or the reasoning behind the latest attempt to revive Bunker Hill. Indeed, the redesign, promotion and marketing of Bunker Hill’s future are something of a local tradition, in line with L. A.’s infamous skill for manufacturing the future while destroying its history.

As early as 1950/51 the newly established CRA tagged the then-down-at-its-heels Bunker Hill as “Redevelopment Area Number One.” Overlooking the downtown of the 1930s and ‘40s—the L. A. that Raymond Chandler called “that old whore”—Bunker Hill was a commu-nity of reportedly 10,000 low income, largely immigrant and minority residents living ten to a room in squalid, disintegrating structures. The initial Master Plan developed by the City Planning Authority called for the complete clearing of the area. In its place the study proposed a series of twenty-story high public apartment blocks arranged around

octagonal shaped courtyards. The scheme, widely pilloried, was scrapped and by 1959 the firm of Charles Luckman and Associates was retained to develop a new master plan. Luckman, former CEO of the Lever Company and later partner with William Pereira, planner of Irvine, one of this nation’s largest master planned communities, put forward a new scheme that envisioned some eleven million square feet of office and retail space, 2,000 hotel rooms and 3,000 residential units. Not coincidentally, Luckman’s plan also proposed that Bunker Hill be scraped clean, graded, and neatly divided into a series of gridded zones connected by overhead walkways and moving sidewalks.

It would be fifteen years before the Luckman plan for Bunker Hill could begin to be fully implemented. In the intervening years, amend-ments were made for cultural facilities and significant height varia-tions. The master plan was refined again in 1968 by Bay area firm WBE—Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons—by which time the Bunker Hill High Rise Apartments, the first new structures on the Hill, were completed. By 1970, Bunker Hill was shaved clean. Save the forty story Union Bank tower there was very little new construction completed or in the ground. Aerial photographs from the period 1973-74 look less like Los Angeles than images of Rotterdam after it was bombarded in 1940. Aside from those few lone towers, Bunker Hill was effectively the largest construction site in North America.

From 1975 until the mid-1980s close to twenty housing, retail and office structures were erected in and around Bunker Hill. These included five major buildings—the Bonaventure Hotel, the Security Pacific National Bank (now the Arco Towers), the Arco parking struc-ture, the Los Angeles World Trade Center and the Figueroa Courtyard. The construction boom that emerged in the early-1980s drove the development of the Angelus towers, the Citicorp Center towers, the


Marriott Downtown, and the Wells Fargo Center. This active new city core would lead the CRA to conduct a nationwide competition for a mixed-use 11-acre development to be situated at the top of Bunker Hill.

In February of 1980 the CRA announced that proposals from five North American developers had been accepted for the 11.2-acre L-shaped site between the Music Center and the Central Business District. Projected for the site was a mix of office and commercial space (70%) and residential (30%) with 1% of the cost of the project earmarked for the construction of the Museum of Contemporary Art and a related park on 1.5 acres. Additionally the CRA had stipulated the reinstatement, Disney style, of the “restored” Angel’s Flight funicular. The short list included:

Metropolitan Structures Inc., with Fujikawa, Conterato, Lohan and Associates, the successor firm to Mies van der Rohe

Olympia York / Trizec Western with SOM

Cabot, Cabot & Forbes with A.C. Martin and Davis Brody Bond

Bunker Hill Associates with Arthur Erickson, Kamnitzer, Cotton, Vreeland and Gruen

Maguire Partners with Harry Perloff, Barton Myers, Edgardo Contini, Charles Moore, Lawrence Halprin, Cesar Pelli, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, Ricardo Legoretta, Frank Gehry, Sussman Prejza, Carlos Diniz and Robert Kennard

By June of 1980 the competition had come down to pair of final competitors—Arthur Erickson’s team and the supergroup led by Harvery S. Perloff, Dean of the School of Architecture at UCLA, that would come to be known as the All Stars.


Arthur Erickson vs. the L. A. All Stars

Canadian Erickson’s winning scheme, the so-called California Center, presented a composition of several towers connected by a plinth arranged around a swirling center at the site’s city-end, the California Plaza. Essentially its parti developed from an established, homogeneous Modernist gesture unified by an unremittingly banal language—tower blocks and excavated courtyards.

The All Stars’ scheme, by contrast, abandoned the singular Modernist gesture in favor of a sort of Post Modern orchestrated chaos. In the place of a unified nod to the master plan developed by Luckman, the All Stars presented an “exquisite corpse”—nine projects approximately connected by a variety of public spaces developed by Moore and Halprin. Emblematic of Moore and Gehry’s adventurous and often outrè public work of the period (Moore’s Piazza D’Italia or Gehry’s Loyola Law School) the entry was rejected.

Criticism of Erickson’s winning project came fast and sharp. Invited to comment on the competition process, Rem Koolhaas declared that the Erickson scheme “.. .poignantly evokes what is no longer there: conviction, seriousness, invention.” He continued to add that “.. .for lovers of Los Angeles’ “no-topia” both schemes are disap-pointingly alien to locale mythology. In fact the images they offer are similarly removed from the L. A. myth of the freeway, of low intensity etc. Granting it would be another kind of nostalgia to condemn L. A. to a perpetual life without a center of gravity, it is surprising that the image of downtown is presented here as merely an East Coast one seen through rose-tinted polaroids.”4

Equally scathing, Michael Sorkin wrote of the winning entry, “.. .the Erickson presentation, instead of actually supplying any evidence of good design, sought to overwhelm by a mass of visual codes signifying good design. Instead of architecture, one was exposed to a banal lexicon of renderer’s icons for urbanity: flapping banners, balloons, push carts with mustachioed vendors...” Sorkin added, “.. .one would expect a cogent expression about the particular character of Los Angeles, one of the world’s wonder cities. This requires an act of imagination, an act which unfortunately proved unnatural to most of the entrants.”5

Group photo of Bunker Hill Development / Team, March 19801. Charles Moore2. Lawrence Halprin3. Frank Gehry4. Paul Prejza5. Deborah Sussman6. Barton Myers7. Cesar Pelli

8. Robert Kennard9. Edgardo Contini10. Richardo Legorreta11. Carlos Diniz12. HArvey Perloff13. Robert F. Maguire IIIAbsent: Hugh Hardy


Hope

Given the increasingly celebrated re-emergence of Downtown as a bona fide residential and cultural center, and the entrenchment of L. A. more generally as a center for contemporary architectural experi-mentation, it seems vitally important now to re-examine the future imagined for Bunker Hill yesterday as a way to sharpen our ideas about Downtown today. One wonders if the current excitement building around the Grand Avenue Project will spark an interest in a genuinely new discussion about Downtown’s prospects or we will be treated yet again to the usual, quotidian developers’ exigencies that are too often passed off as urbanism.

“We want a great mixed-use project that works economically,” says David Malmuth, real estate consultant with Robert Charles Lesser Co. and a board member of the Grand Avenue Committee. Malmuth, who helped conceive the recently completed Hollywood & Highland mall, brought Michael Eisner to Times Square while at Disney Development in the early 1990s. He claims that the need now at Bunker Hill is “... to move more towards a process that’s about urban planning ideas and a financial approach, as opposed to a pro forma that’s not going to be accurate—and that everyone knows is not going to be accurate.”6 What remains to be seen is what the current definition of “urban plan-ning ideas” means. If the notion of bringing a miniature version of 42nd Street or a Central Park to L. A. seems to define the outermost limit of what the Grand Avenue Committee is willing to picture as urbanism, then one is forced to wonder how far we have come since the CRA announced its first set of plans for Bunker Hill some 50 years ago.

The journey Bunker Hill has made from tabula rasa to Walt Disney Concert Hall hardly seems like a coherent trajectory. However, somewhere in its history Bunker Hill presents a case for the return to something akin to urbanism or at least the will to experiment with our accepted ideas about Los Angeles. “It’s difficult within the public environment not to ask for something that is so specific,” Malmuth remarks. “But then you’re locked into disappointment, and you’ll build gradually toward failure. I want to get a great project built here.”7 While Malmuth may be correct in terms of any assessment that could be made about Bunker Hill’s lost opportunities and erased history, Walt Disney Concert Hall creates a powerful argument for innovative urban form and it must be said here that its success has been entirely depen-dent on its specificity and the clarity of its vision for L. A.’s future.

In the twenty four years that have passed since the last major competition held to determine the future of Bunker Hill it seems as if Los Angeles has devolved from being the subject of wonder—think of Banham’s paean to this city—to a being a center increasingly concerned with simulating the picturesque urbanisms of the East Coast or nineteenth century Europe. The intricacy and complexity of the development process not withstanding, one hopes that what remains of L. A.’s distinctiveness as a contemporary city—its history of architectural experimentation, idiosyncratic forms and cultural diver-sity—will provide the Grand Avenue Committee with enough impetus to back a motivated team with a courageous scheme for Grand Avenue. This city deserves a proposal for Grand Avenue that is unapologetic about exceeding our present demands of urbanism or the litany of disappointing plans that have been foisted on Downtown Los Angeles.


1. Grand Avenue Committee Project Overview. http://www.grandavenuecommittee.org

2. Louise Roug, “$1.2-Billion Downtown L.A. Project Draws Top Architects.” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2003, B1.

3. Rem Koolhaas “Arthur Erikson vs. the All Stars,” Trace, Vol.1 1981, 21-24.4. Roug. Ibid.5. Michael Sorkin, “Bunker Hill Mentality” , Arts and Architecture, Vol 1,

Number 1, Fall 1981, 48-52.6. Peter Slatin. “Grand Plan Small Step.” The Slatin Report, January 8, 2004,

http://www.slatinreport.com7. Slatin. Ibid.8. Roug, Ibid.9. Roug, Ibid.

Peter Zellner is the founding principal of Zellner / Design Planning Research, is a Studio Faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and was recently a Visiting Critic at Florida International University. He is the author of Hybrid Space-New Forms in Digital Architecture and the curator of Sign as Surface, a group exhibition of works by ten emerging architects that was recently shown at Artists Space in New York City. His own architectural projects have been exhibited and published internationally, most recently in Experimental Architectures 1950-2000, an exhibition of the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France. His works are held in the permanent architecture collection of the FRAC Centre. His essays have appeared in journals such as Daidalos, Archis and Archistorm and in publications such as Digital/Real, an exhibition catalogue for the Deutches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt. Along with Jeffrey Inaba, he is the co-founder of ValDes, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching suburban conditions.

Special thanks to Mauricio Munoz for research assistance and archival image sourcing.

CODA

On August 9, 2004 the Los Angeles Grand Avenue Authority Board (acting on the recommendation of the Grand Avenue Committee) selected the Related Companies Development Team for “continued negotiations” on the Grand Avenue Project. At the time of the selection the Related Companies included Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP; Morphosis; Elkus/Manfredi Architects Ltd. ; Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd. ; Levin & Associates Architects; Suisman Urban Design; Richard Koshalek; and Merry Norris Contemporary Art. Despite the selection of a formidable team capable of producing a winning project, the winners of the RFQ process were named, curi-ously, without any testing of public designs and without the $300 million needed in financing for public improvements finalized.

“It is the project on the hill,” according to Eric Owen Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture. “... it has the potential to make the city and downtown an enormous magnet,” he said, cautioning that the project “... shouldn’t rise or fall strictly in terms of commerce. It shouldn’t just be another mall.”8 Ironically, its proposed developers are best known for making malls—large ones like the coruscating, SOM designed Time Warner Center in Manhattan. Until the 1970s, the “Related Housing Companies” built multifamily govern-ment assisted housing. By the end of the 1980s, however, Related was dedicated to making “innovative investment vehicles for institutions and individuals.” By the 1990s the Related portfolio grew to include more than $8 billion worth of developments. However it has yet to be seen if Related can marshal its considerable track record as a builder of low public housing and high end commercial profit-motivated devel-opment to produce a suitable civic center for Los Angeles.

“Everything is open,” according to Thom Mayne, “It ’s not a project where you have a fixed vision of what it ’s going to be. Because it wasn’t a competition, we’re coming in absolutely clean of any preoc-cupations. It keeps us extremely flexible. We literally haven’t started.”9

Or perhaps we literally haven’t started... again.


plans come and go, or downtown is almost okrobert s. harris

The Los Angeles City Council unanimously endorsed the Downtown Strategic Plan (DSP) in August 1994. The plan provided perspectives about current conditions Downtown, and about funda-mental purposes worth achieving. It provided a set of strategic poli -cies and “catalytic” actions to move forward. Before a year had passed however, Mayor Bradley who had provided impetus for the planning effort, completed his final term of office, District Councilwoman Rita Walters apparently forgot her own participation in the development of the plan and ignored the opportunity it provided for her to focus her City Council colleagues on Downtown issues, Ed Avila, General Manager of the Community Redevelopment Agency that financed and shepherded development of the plan was replaced, the President of the Central City Association retired, and the planning consultants completely departed, taking up their next assignments elsewhere.

Despite these apparent setbacks, the DSP continues a decade later to influence the review of new projects and the development of follow-up plans for South Park in 1996, the Ten-Minute Diamond Civic Center plan in 2000, and more recently, in 2002, a plan sponsored by the Central City Association. Each of these plans took their starting point from the DSP and made more specific recommendations for local areas. Just ten years after the plan was approved, the Central City Association and the Community Redevelopment Agency, in collaboration with leadership from the private sector, have created a virtual housing “boom,” thus implementing one of the DSP’s most fundamental objectives. Further, a series of major projects appear to have the catalytic potential the plan encouraged. These include the Staples Center, a new arena for sports and entertainment next to the Convention Center, a new Cathedral for the region’s very large Catholic community, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Downtown is no longer characterized in the press as forlorn and hopeless. Indeed, Downtown in many ways appears to be “hot,” if one is to gauge such temperature in relation to highly escalated values of housing, increased museum and concert attendance, a significant amount of new construction, and substantial reductions in office vacancies.

Of course, the irony is that few people actually refer consciously to the DSP, and it is actually out of print so that copies are hard to obtain. Thus development interests go forward without knowledge of the plan and CRA staff may have forgotten its existence. Staff in the city’s Planning Department may have forgotten its existence as well. Yet the shape of downtown mirrors closely the intentions and strate-gies of the DSP. How can this be?

The Downtown Strategic Plan Advisory Committee insisted on several key positions early in the planning process. The first strategy was to understand what already existed and build from existing strengths rather than to begin with top down imposition of bold ideas. This was in stark contrast to the previous plan for downtown nicknamed the “Silver Book Plan,” from twenty years before. That plan promoted introduction of a lake and other sweeping changes that demolished established residential communities on Bunker Hill and elsewhere. The new lake was never implemented, and the resurrection of a new district on Bunker Hill is still incomplete thirty years later.

The Committee realized that Downtown in 1994 had a number of distinct and thriving districts, but also that they were disconnected from each other and not well enough known either by downtowners or by the general public. The second strategy was to encourage development from the private sector, rather than solely relying on government leadership or funding. Los Angeles is not well known for great civic leadership, but has been built largely by private initiative. And the third strategy was to build a downtown residential base since otherwise the working population of downtown had homes, interests, voting rights, and ambitions elsewhere. The Committee realized that every great downtown enjoys the energy and enthusiasm of its own residents, and benefits from the economic base such a resident population provides for the everyday life of shops and restaurants, services and entertainment, high culture and fringe experience.


These three central strategies were accompanied by a series of other basic proposals for a safe and clean, economically competitive, and socially just downtown. Perhaps all of this has had only marginal influence. Yet what if the plan had followed the usual course of making recommendations for sweeping change? There have been numerous such proposals for downtown. In addition to the Silver Book Plan, other plans by individual architects and groups have heroically postured the possibility of rebuilding downtown with bold strokes. Had the DSP proposed such a future, who would have carried it out? What mega-companies would have been recruited to own large pieces of downtown? And how many small properties would need to be assembled into the megasites of modernist centers? It is possible, then, that the DSP has been influential in two ways: first, it made good sense about central issues, and second, it did not embroil downtown in quick fixes of the bold and glamorous kind that often result in little more than rhetoric. Its shelf life may be a rather long one, stimulating thoughtful initiatives from time to time. Indeed, new efforts in 2004 to develop the properties along Grand Avenue and to begin the redesign of First Street both promote objectives of the plan for those areas, whether the parties responsible for the planning are consciously aware of the DSP. In any case, Downtown is off and running again whether the DSP has been a force or not.

Now the new concert hall is open, and the music is glorious, and it is good that such a great thing happens where it should, at the center of the city. And yes, there is a center among centers where such places are especially welcome and appropriate. Downtown Los Angeles has for a very long time now been an economic engine for the rest of the city, providing revenues for services everywhere, employing hundreds of thousands in jobs of a wide variety of types and rewards. It is where more and more people live, and a few heralded projects are bringing attention as much to the place of Downtown as to themselves.

Admittedly, some of the catalytic projects are disappointing. The Staples Center, which offers little urban amenity, is entirely ordinary within. Likewise, Pershing Square appears to have been forgotten by everyone who could enrich its life and quality, especially the Recreation and Parks Department that can’t seem to figure out how to license vendors and thus to provide food and entertainment on an everyday basis. On the other hand, people from throughout the city continuously inhabit the Central Library, and its children’s programs are always popular and oversubscribed. The Cathedral has enough great qualities, such as a substantial public plaza and the creation of a great urban room and sanctuary, to overcome the Cardinal’s decision to isolate it at the edge of its district. The Asian American Museum and the transformations occurring in Exposition Park are not being given much press attention, but they are excellent additions to our lives and to their places. Most of all, the many districts of the downtown are coming to life as people move into apartments and lofts as fast as conversions of older buildings can be completed and new housing constructed.

As people move into Downtown, everything begins to change. The stores stay open a little later. The streets become safer. The hangouts, respectable and otherwise, are more numerous and enjoy-able providing a social life that should be expected in a downtown. Small projects abound, including remodelings and refurbishings and fill - ins. Everyday life is better supported with markets and schools, even supermarkets and music schools, even architecture schools, and a barbershop. Several stores, not part of a global economy fran-chise chain, may actually stay in business.

Such then is the context in which the Walt Disney Concert Hall takes a place. Despite the hype of its advocates, it will not save its urban setting that needs no such salvation. We had heard that Staples Center would save downtown, and then it was the Cathedral, and now Disney Hall. And now we are told that some new Grand Avenue project


Robert S. Harris, FAIA, is a professor and urban design consultant. He directs the University of Southern California graduate programs in architecture, was dean of the schools of architecture at USC and the University of Oregon, and has been named a distinguished professor by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. In Los Angeles, he has co-chaired the Downtown Strategic Plan Advisory Committee and the Mayor’s Design Advisory Panel.

course, others will be there as well, having brought their lunches, or their love interests, or their grandmothers from one of the valleys. It is unusually provocative and intensely urban, not conventionally urban with little shops and stores, and soft places, rather more chal-lenging—urbanity to stand up to rather than to sink into—no place for faint hearts.

But downtown depends more on small and medium size projects everywhere than on a few blockbusters, though the big ones do have a role. They provide the settings big enough and prominent enough to allow us to shout our emotions: a Cathedral in which to mourn Ira Yellin’s passing, and to celebrate the repair of the historic core that he helped us start; a Staples Center in which to gather for the rituals of sports that are so integral to our culture in which we can be fanatic fans. The big projects have the potential to enlarge how we feel.

And so downtown is the lively place of the small but strategi-cally positioned Biddie Mason Park, and of a remarkable fashion district, and of amazing Broadway theaters that may well come back to life any day soon. It is the downtown of experimental theater at the Mark Taper Forum, of noontime and evening concerts throughout the summer, and ice-skating throughout the winter holidays. And it is also known as the world headquarters of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale housed in a hall of such quality that the bar has been raised for every project to follow, both large and small and medium sized.

It takes a long time to create a great city, and Los Angeles is still young. But every project counts, and we are beginning to add them up into places and neighborhoods and districts.

is finally just the ticket for complete downtown resurrection. But downtown is actually thriving already. It is an unusually large down-town with many distinct districts, and of course, all are not equally thriving. But sensitively designed shelters and other supporting programs are transforming even skid row. The problems of a society that includes the homeless and the drug or alcohol addicted, seem not to be addressed in Washington or Sacramento or in City Hall, but are left to volunteers. The afflicted inhabit the inclusive places of density and diversity, downtowns everywhere, more than the places that are more exclusive. And so downtowns are the settings for both extraordinary wonders and for desperate plights. Perhaps there has never been a time in human history when this was not the case.

The big projects seem to get all of our attention. Every mayor and council member, all the prominent reporters and critics, and the men and women of means and influence love them. Architects do too, for professional business reasons, and perhaps ego, because such big projects just seem so important. Yet in every good year there are only one or two such projects, and meanwhile there are many average size projects, and an even greater number of small ones. So while we were focused on Staples Center, the Cathedral, and, for sixteen years, Disney Hall, downtown was being transformed by projects here and there and everywhere, remodeling the city center. As an empty retail space was leased, the shops on either side were bolstered. A few street improvements provided a sense of care where there was none before. More than twenty projects supported by the CRA, over a period of at least as many years, each included attention to pedestrian walks and amenities until there was a continuous, fasci-nating, and well-supported path that connected Pershing Square to the Central Library, and up the steps to a mixed-use zone of offices, housing, shops and restaurants, and MOCA and the Colburn School (about to be further expanded) and to Disney Hall and the Civic Center (also in expansion mode) and the Cathedral and perhaps soon to El Pueblo and Union Station and along a hoped for Alameda greenway to Cornfield Park and the River. On another front, so-called artists lofts are a burgeoning commodity, generating more of their kind, and suddenly downtown appears to be rebuilding actual neighborhoods instead of stand-alone residential towers. Such neighborhoods are formed and forming on Bunker Hill, in the historic core, in the financial district, in South Park at last, and in Little Tokyo and Chinatown.

And in this context Disney Hall is welcome. MOCA was its prede-cessor in having a path that moves right through its plaza, making public a museum setting that would normally be more monumentally separate like LACMA’s. And so Disney Hall allows entrance up and over itself from the corners west on 1st Street and south on Grand Avenue. It is a new public park downtown, a perch of a park, up high, looking out over the urban landscape. Busloads of children on school field trips arrive, the children clambering up the steps and over the building and through the garden to the amphitheater in which to hear music from a position high atop the city. How unforgettable that must be as they find themselves among the shiny metal panels in the rooftop park hearing the unfamiliar sounds of the orchestra? Of


small skyscraperby chris burden and taalman koch architecture


The spring of 2003 was marked by two Forum lecture series, Suburbanity and Inter:facing. Suburbanity, organized by Pat Morton, Paulette Singley, and Kazys Varnelis investigated the growing dominance of suburban form in the city and the new post-sprawl landscape that confronts architects and urban planners today. Inter:facing, organized by Cara Mullio, followed the TRESPASSING: Houses x Artists show at the MAK Center, also curated by Mullio, to highlight recent collaborative undertakings between artists, architects and others from artistic disciplines.

Together, these lecture series illustrated how the Forum is not just an organization that addresses architecture, but constantly focuses on the interaction between architecture and other disci-plines, in particular, urbanism and art. And, just as these two series addressed the increasing traffic across an interface, be it territorial or professional, they intersected vividly one evening during Inter:facing when, in a lecture at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Chris Burden presented his Small Skyscraper while Alan Koch of TK Architecture, the Los Angeles firm that, as part of Open Office, initiated the TRESPASSING show and subsequently helped develop the small skyscraper with Burden, explained how it could be realized.

Small Skyscraper is a reaction to the stalemate being reached in Southern California, and increasingly elsewhere, as forces such as NIMBYist Neighborhood Councils, environmental regulations, view preservation ordinances, historic preservation areas, draconian zoning codes, building review boards, restrictive covenants, and other governmental and non-governmental organizations create an intractable micro-bureaucracy of obstacles. This new ecology of red tape, rules, and regulations increasingly comes to shape our landscape. Individuals find themselves struggling not with nature but with the constraints put upon them by the “second nature” that contemporary society generates.

In 1991, while planning a studio on his property, Burden became frustrated by Los Angeles County building codes and, in response, sketched his “Small Skyscraper.” Burden envisioned Small Skyscraper as a means of exploiting a loophole in the Los Angeles County building code that excludes out-buildings less than 400 square feet in size and below 32 feet in height from any oversight or review by the building department. Small Skyscraper, then, followed the familiar mantra of the developer and built to the maximum permis-sible building envelope: stacking four 10 foot by 10 foot rooms on top of one another in a 32 foot high structure.

During the development of TRESPASSING, Koch, together with TK Architecture partner Linda Taalman worked with artists to collaboratively develop realizable building proposals from sketches and models. Burden proposed Small Skyscraper and, together with TK Architecture, realized the design as a featherweight structure assembled from T-slotted, bolt-together parts belonging to a Bosch aluminum structural framing system. The Bosch system recalls a life-size Erector set, the material that Burden uses in his contemporary series of model bridges. Developed for rapid construction of auto-mated assembly lines, test benches, and equipment enclosures, the


Bosch system is not only relatively inexpensive compared to traditional building materials, it allows untrained builders working with a minimum of tools to erect projects quickly and easily. The floors and the sundeck are constructed out of ordinary two-by-fours.

Soon after the lecture, Irene Tsatsos, director of LACE and Julie Deamer, development coordinator for LACE, helped Burden and TK Architecture realize the project in their galleries. A ten-day workshop at SCI_Arc with students Tony Castillo, Bill Howard, Gabrielle Strong, and Maya Utsunomiya provided much-needed labor and additional help was provided by students Eric Lindeman, Shawn Littrell, Tina Pezeshkpour, Sheela Sankaram, and Jason Zasa from Art Center’s Environmental Design program. Structural engineering was provided by Cristobal Correa of Büro Happold and the project was supported by Gallery Krinzinger, Bosch, Häfele, Carlson and Co., and the LEF Foundation.

At LACE, Burden and TK Architecture erected the project horizon-tally, so that it would fit into the gallery, but propped it up to demon-strate that the project was not an avant-garde sculpture but rather a structural member, capable of withstanding bending forces.

This past June, the Small Skyscraper was erected in the Basel Art Fair where the architects and a team of three Bosch workers spent two and a half days assembling the structure. After ten days of being viewed by Swiss art lovers, the Small Skyscraper was disassembled and put into crates to await sale by the Gallery Krinzinger in Vienna.

Outside of its context, however, Small Skyscraper remains an art project, no matter how sophisticated its commentary. If realized on Burden’s property in Topanga Canyon, as both artist and architects still hope to do, Small Skyscraper will become a performative critique of Los Angeles’s culture of bureaucracy.

Perhaps, we imagine, after a confrontation with the authorities, Burden’s audacity might be accepted as his own busines and, as our fantasy continues, we hear the sounds of construction in backyards citywide as hundreds, even thousands of small skyscrapers rise into the sky, turning the city into a latter day San Gimignano.


Arriving in Los Angeles in 1996, I was struck by its lack of significant civic monuments. Only the diminutive Isozaki MOCA [Museum of Contemporary Art], huddling beneath the improbably tall skyscrapers of downtown and compromised by being forced largely underground, hinted that compelling monumental architecture might be a proper aspiration for a city. Indeed, it has always seemed ironic that historically, the home base of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called “the culture industry,” has been unconcerned with its own appearance. While New York and Chicago invented skyscrapers to represent their aspirations, Los Angeles remained content without significant monuments or even compelling tourist attractions. Perhaps no physical embodiment could represent the myth of Hollywood. Perhaps to try, and thereby risk failing, was some-thing the Industry could not allow itself. Complicating matters was the anti-urban position of real estate developers and civic boosters. Promoting the city as the locus of an idealized suburban lifestyle meant repressing any idea of the city as an urban center with public amenities.1 Whatever the reason, the city’s inability to develop a civic expression always lent it an air of transience, as if to underscore the ephemeral nature and fleeting importance of show business.

Today, however, Los Angeles promises a dramatic reversal, transforming itself into a cultural destination of the first order, adorned with architectural monuments to house its cultural institu-tions and announce its presence on the world stage. The reshaping of the city began with the 1997 opening of Richard Meier’s $1 billion+ Getty Center and reached a crescendo over the last two years with the consecration of Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of our Lady of

cathedrals of the culture industryby kazys varnelis


the Angels and the inauguration of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall. Together with Rem Koolhaas/OMA’s Prada store, the Renzo Piano expansion proposal for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an expansion of the Museum of Natural History by Steven Holl, and the renovation of the Getty Museum in Malibu by Machado and Silvetti, Los Angeles is becoming a destination worthy of even the most sophisticated connoisseur of the global neo-avantgarde. What a contrast to the pages of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which Adorno and Horkheimer, exiled to the city in the 1940s damned the entertainment business for caring about nothing more than the bottom-line, producing easily digestible and vapid pieces for consumption by the docile masses.2 How, then, might a city defined by this watering-down of culture into a transient froth come to reconceive itself as a showcase of architecture, the most permanent of art forms?

Rather than remaining an event of merely local importance, Los Angeles’s abandonment of its bottom-line mentality to metamor-phose from a featureless field of sprawl into a horizontal museum of international architecture reflects the newfound alliance between neo-avant-garde architecture, museums, and cities. In this, perhaps, Los Angeles is merely a laggard. Regardless how late, the “Bilbao-effect” has finally hit Los Angeles.

The museum is the crux in this transition. For not only is the contemporary city conceived of as a dispersed museum of neo-avant-garde monuments, these are dominated by the typology of the museum. This is a surprising about-face, for until recently the museum defined itself in opposition to the present. When Jean Cocteau stated “The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends,” he succinctly summed up the museum of old. Presenting in columned halls the accomplishments of cultures past, museums served as monuments, embodying collective achievements of nations while demonstrating the reach of empires through a display of their plundered loot. But beyond that representational role, the early museum sought to transform the citizen-subject. Appearing at the birth of modernity, museums served to align the newly invented nation-state with higher, universal values by teaching these eternal truths to the public. Contemplation of the aesthetic object removed from its physical and functional context would allow bourgeois subjects to develop the refined taste and understanding of the ideal previously possessed only by the aristocracy. With the process of nation-building complete by the early twentieth century, however, the museum’s role became largely obsolete. Apart from a handful of polemically-oriented museums of modern art, museums became storehouses of history, Cocteau’s morgues. Cultural production became dominated by the culture industry and its products for mass consumption or by a vanishingly small avant-garde, possessing a polemical critique that by its nature could only be understood by a select few. So, too, when advocates of the avant-garde created museums of their own, they retained the museum’s élite stance, verifying their cultural superiority through their ability to appreciate works the uncouth public saw as too difficult or too dissonant.3


Today the art museum no longer speaks with the condescending voice of a benevolent élite but rather joins the culture industry to address the public as a market, enticing audiences with popular exhibits and an architecturally stunning environment in which the museum’s stores and restaurants are as important a draw as the works of art. No longer is it enough merely to house the past in dignified quarters: the contemporary museum must be not so much distinguished as distinctive. Today, virtually every museum commis-sion, regardless of size, seeks a work by a cutting-edge architect to ensure the a barrage of media coverage that can draw maximum attendance.4 As if to assert their global significance, museums in smaller cities aggressively court an international pantheon of archi-tects as well. The list of architects for commissions in second-tier American cities alone tells a narrative of cultural aspirations: the Toledo Museum of Art’s Center for Glass will be by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the Milwaukee Museum of Art will be expanded by Santiago Calatrava, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Akron’s Museum of Art by Coop Himmelblau, Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center by Zaha Hadid and so on. The original competition for the LACMA project, itself invited solely signature firms—OMA, Morphosis, Steven Holl, Daniel Libeskind, Jean Nouvel—and when Koolhaas lost the project, the choice of Piano as his replacement certainly did not indicate a change in attitude on the part of LACMA. Corporate architects no longer need apply for major museum commissions.

The result is attractive not only to museum administrators and donors, but also to local governments and tourist bureaus. After all, the Guggenheim Museum’s branch in Bilbao has succeeded wildly, drawing in huge crowds and promoting tourism in the formerly depressed backwater town. Nearly 500,000 foreign tourists visited the complex in 2001 and, even following September 11, it suffered only a minor dip in attendance.

As radical as the new focus on the museum’s appearance is the revolution in curatorship. No longer do museums act as caretakers of their collections, cultivating a devoted local following; they must exhibit growth in attendance and revenues or be considered failures. The need to fill halls, necessary to both justify and pay for the new structures, has accompanied a curatorial populism meant to draw big crowds. Not only do museums turn to blockbuster exhibits of Van Gogh, Picasso, Rembrandt and the other familiar names, more and more they mount shows on themes previously considered “low” or outside the purview of the art museum. The “Art of the Motorcycle” at the Guggenheim Bilbao proved the success of such a strategy, drawing in the fifteenth biggest daily audience worldwide in 2000. The danger is obvious: does luring in crowds come at the expense of attention to permanent collections or the teaching mission of the institution?

Even more controversial is the policy of “deaccessioning” or selling works, often to help pay for new construction. Pioneered by Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, deaccessioning gave museums a new source of revenue, but it also compromised the museum’s

autonomy, tying it more closely to a postmodern economy in which culture was thoroughly permeated by capital.

A recent New York Times article by Deborah Solomon raises questions about the sustainability of the Guggenheim. While the Guggenheim Bilbao continues its success with a show on Frank Gehry that was the most well-attended in the museum’s history, taken as a whole the Guggenheim has run into difficulties. The Guggenheim Las Vegas, designed by the superteam of Koolhaas and Gehry failed to draw the anticipated crowds. Coupled with declining revenues from the Manhattan location after the terrorist attacks this caused a financial crisis at the museum forcing Krens to slash its annual operating budget from $49 million in 2001 to $25.9 million in 2002, lay off 79 of its employees, about a fifth of the staff, close a branch in SoHo and postpone a number of major shows. More seriously, from 1998 to 2001, Krens has dipped into the museum’s endowment to cover operating expenses, precipi-tating a decline from $55.6 million in 1998 to $38.9 million at the end of 2001. Even so, the museum continued to plan for a $680 million branch on the East River in lower Manhattan, yet another Gehry designed project until 2002. Krens doesn’t see this as a contradiction: “It ’s easier to raise money for a building than a show. A building is permanent.”5 In any event, should the lower Manhattan Guggenheim have been be built, the long-term feasibility of the Bilbao branch would have been in question. With a much larger version in a city obviously far richer in other tourist amenities, would vacationers still have flocked to Bilbao? More recently, rumors are circulating that the Dia Foundation, having just built a vast exhibit hall in Beacon, New York while shuttering its original Chelsea headquarters for renova-tions, may never re-open the latter due to lack of funds.


With the economic sustainability of contemporary museum expansion strategies an open question, what of the architecture? What does this spectacular proliferation of neo-avant-garde objects mean? Although it is almost fifty years old, André Malraux’s ‘Musée Imaginaire’—(generally known in English as the ‘Museum without Walls’)—gives us a prescient model for not only today’s curatorial practices but also for the consequences of the global proliferation of the neo-avant-garde museum. With the invention of the color photolithographic plate Malraux believed a supermuseum of art had been created, its collection encompassing any work of art that could be photographed:

“In our Museum Without Walls, picture, fresco, miniature, and stained-glass window seem of one and the same family. For all alike-miniatures, frescoes, stained glass, tapestries, Scynthian plagues, pictures, Greek vase paintings, ‘details’ and even statuary—have become ‘color-plates.’ In the process they have lost their properties as objects; but, by the same token, they have gained something: the utmost significance as to style that they can possibly acquire. … Thus it is that, thanks to the rather specious unit imposed by photographic reproduction on a multiplicity of objects, ranging from the statue to the bas-relief, from bas-reliefs to seal-impressions, and from these to the plaques of the nomads, a ‘Babylonian style’ seems to emerge as a real entity, not a mere classification— as something resembling, rather, the life-story of a great creator. Nothing conveys more vividly and compellingly the notion of a destiny shaping human ends than do the great styles, whose evolutions and transformations seem like long scars that Fate has left, in passing, on the face of the earth.”6

Where the nineteenth century museum removed objects from their contexts to subject them to a coherent narrative imposed by the state’s experts, unleashing the image from any physicality made it possible for us to classify and reclassify works of art according to our desires, a process that anticipates the search function of the Internet image bank. For here, in the steady glow of the computer monitor, a pornographic fascination with the image can be played out: masterpiece after masterpiece march in an endless parade across the screen. This too is the model for the art museum of the twenty-first century: concern with establishing enduring narratives of historical periods gives way to short-term blockbuster shows drawing together art from sources around the globe, temporary thematic exhibits that aim to recontextualize works, and new media such as video art, computer-based art, and Internet art allowing shows to be mounted simply through the loading of appropriate data. The art museum’s model is no longer that of the tomb, it is that of the data bank. Once again, Thomas Krens proved to be the most ambitious museum director, hiring Studio Asymptote to undertake a much-trumpeted but never-opened project for a Virtual Guggenheim that would exist on the Internet.

Given that they are unwilling to act as storehouses of collective memory, today’s museums cannot act as traditional monuments. The volatile memory stored within the museum-databank is subject to disappearance if the power of leveraged multinational capital is switched off. Like databanks, today’s museums can be anywhere: they occupy a placeless continuum and engage in dialogue with each other across continents more easily than across town. The self-contained nature of the contemporary museum leads it to disengage from the city fabric—here the Getty Center’s perch atop a hill approachable only by freeway is exemplary. And if the Guggenheim Bilbao initially appears to have a greater connection to the city, its most remarkable aspect is that this is a ruse: the museum has virtually no architectural influence on Bilbao beyond the park on the banks of the Nervion.

Reading an urban environment as a museum-city inevitably means ignoring the urban context, which exists only as a place to buy dinner and shop for clothes. The only continuity discernable between its isolated structures is through reproduction, either in a series in a monograph or in comparison drawn by some critic. But here again, the emphasis is more on a relationship between products scattered across the globe or at best across a city. Traditional typological boundaries break down in our attempt to understand the products of the museum-city: their function as contemporary architectural masterworks overcomes traditional divisions between concert hall, airport, and museum. Only thus can Disney Concert Hall be compared to the Guggenheim Bilbao. What is important now is only that the object be recognizable and distinct.7

Andre Malraux with the Photographs for the Voices of Silence, c. 1950.


The reconfiguration of the contemporary city as a field of isolated masterworks is anticipated by the interest in autonomous form that emerged during the 1970s, not incidentally the decade of professional adolescence for today’s superstar architects. With the defeat of modernism, the neo-avant-garde of that day turned to the only strategy that could give relevance to architecture: affirming its right to exist through formal games to display in the gallery. Manfredo Tafuri described the scene: “It is no wonder then, that the most strongly felt condition today belongs to those who realize that, in order to salvage specific values for architecture, the only course is to make use of ‘battle remnants,’ that is, to redeploy what has been discarded on the battlefield that has witnessed the defeat of the avant-garde.”8

Thirty years later, today’s knights have no battle to fight. Buoyed by the museum industry’s belief that neo-avant-garde architecture is necessary for maintaining the bottom-line, archi-tecture seems to have a function in society again. Thus today’s neo-avant-garde abandons the melancholic irony of the “exasper-ated objects,” as Tafuri called them, of the 1970s or the “violated perfection” of the 1980s. Aldo Rossi’s idea of the building as emptied sign is gone: there is no meaning to evacuate. Architecture is now utterly self-referential, proclaiming its success, the victory of pure form.

What has been lost in all this is the possibility of architecture as an agent of social change. The ancient role of architecture to repre-sent the sacred has been resurrected, only now rather than God, we worship the alliance of culture and industry that creates a new global order and gives architecture relevance.

The result is not so much a field of monuments but a field of tombs. Adolf Loos suggested that architecture as art could only be found in that which evades the everyday: the monument, the creation of an artificial memory, and the tomb, the illusion of a universe beyond death.9 The museum buildings of today certainly do little to represent the contents of the volatile databank within and, given the rapid obsolescence of architectural fashion—one of the buildings that OMA proposes to tear down at LACMA is a fifteen year old structure by Hardy, Holzmann, Pfeiffer—these structures may not be around for long in any event. Rather, a virtual world is created in which architec-ture is the most significant of arts and its products lord over the city as cathedrals did. Where Loos’s tomb presented an order beyond death, the museum-city presents a utopian dream of architecture, profoundly relevant to society through the heroism of its forms alone.

To comprehend the neo-avant-garde’s role in society, Tafuri turned to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer.”10 As Benjamin explained, what ultimately matters is not the attitude of a work to the conditions of its day but rather its function in them. Thus, Tafuri found the debates of his day to be merely peripheral and pointless: with the task of planning taken from it by economists, architecture’s relevancy was gone, it had become a thing of the past. Adopting Benjamin’s method today, we read the contemporary monu-ment as demonstrating the global economic order of late capitalism

in which the construction of museums and large-scale real-estate investment are compatible. No longer does Los Angeles need to rely on Disneyworld or Jon Jerde’s Universal Citywalk: these are the monu-ments of a less sophisticated time. The culture industry is now strong enough and hungry enough to absorb the neo-avant-garde. But the impact of all this great architecture on the city fabric is fleeting. The exasperated objects of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio plan, which Tafuri read as an anticipation of the 1970s neo-avant-garde, have been replaced by self-contained jewels punctuating Koolhaas’s junkspace.

Turning back to LACMA, we should follow Benjamin to ask not what this project means but rather how it will be funded and why. For if the LACMA competition signifies anything, it is the ascendancy of the city’s elite to global status. The museum expects that a large part of the construction will be financed by billionaire Eli Broad and, in turn, the structure is seen as a prerequisite for the display of his collection. But the source of Broad’s riches reveals the ruse of contemporary architecture’s success. Known as “the King of Sprawl,” Broad made his riches by building more cut-rate homes in suburban America between the late 1950s and 1980s than anyone else. As a founder of Kaufman Broad (now KB) Homes, Broad did more to create the contemporary condition of suburban sprawl, than anyone else. Now over the last twenty years, Broad has increasingly dissociated himself from home-building, managing a large insurance firm instead. But Broad’s shift is the product of the home market becoming too risky for investment, not because of a moral transformation. Today, however, Broad proclaims sprawl too expensive and hopes to under-write a transformation within Los Angeles. Not only has he promised funds for LACMA, he served as founding chairman of MOCA and also raised tens of millions to ensure that the Disney Concert Hall would


1. In Los Angeles, the movie business is commonly called “the Industry.”

2. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1969).

3. Ortega y Gasset’s attack on modernism is a response to this, as is

the sociological analysis of Pierre Bourdieu. No matter how brilliant the

latter, it is of limited use for us today given the changed condition of the

museum described below.

4. A personal anecdote illustrates the situation: I was consulted by

representatives of a new museum in a small American city recently to

aid them in their choice of an architect. Above all, I was instructed, they

wanted guaranteed front page coverage in the Arts Section of the New

York Times.

5. Deborah Solomon, “Is the Go-Go Guggenheim Going, Going ...”

The New York Times (June 30, 2002).

6. André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert,

Bollingen Series, no 24 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978),

44, 46.

7. For more on this, see my “One Thing After Another,” in Log 3,

September 2004, 109-115.

8. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, (Cambridge,

Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), 267.

9. Adolf Loos “Architecture,” 1910. Roberto Schezen, ed. Adolf Loos: Architecture 1903-1932, (New York: Monacelli, 1996), 15. Mine is very

much a Tafurian reading of Loos, see Tafuri, 375.

10. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”, Reflections (New

York: Harcourt Brace: 1978), 220-38.

11. Mark Arax, “Convention is Just an Introduction to Eli Broad’s

vision of Downtown; Once the King of Sprawl, Billionaire Turns his

Sights to Reviving the City’s Heart,” The Los Angeles Times, August 6,

2000.

12. See also the questions raised in Joe Day’s essay for the Los

Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design website, “MEIERED,

MoCA’s recent exhibition What’s Shakin: New Architecture in L.A.,”

http://www.laforum.org/shakin/index.htm

Kazys Varnelis is the President of the Los Angeles Forum for Architectureand Urban Design and a founding member of AUDC (www.audc.org). He is currently on leave from the Southern California Insitute of Architecture and will be teaching history and theory at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 2005.

This article first appeared in the August/September 2002 issue of Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica (Madrid)

be built. Although it would be easy to see this public beneficence on Broad’s part as penance, akin to the building of cathedrals by barons to justify the pillaging of the surrounding countryside, he insists that this is not the case.11

What then is the rationale behind Broad’s decision to fund Los Angeles’s transformation into a museum-city? More broadly, what is the ultimate consequence of the museum-city for architecture and urbanism? In its emphasis on the singular object, the museum-city acts to reinforce the persona of the hero-patron, such as Broad. The museum-city also domesticates any transformative force claimed by architecture, reducing it to a producer of affect for a greatly expanded culture industry. Disconnected from the field of sprawl they punctuate, the monuments of the museum-city serve as an alibi, paying lip-service to the idea of the urban environment even as they take attention away from everyday life in the city and its increasing unaffordability. When it is economically feasible to revive city centers, they are taxidermized, turned into historic districts functioning primarily as tourist attractions or playgrounds for the global elite. But if the city becomes nothing more than isolated historic districts and monuments in the sprawl, even if the cathedrals of the culture industry have funded the neo-avant-garde with lucrative jobs for the moment, what will become of the profession if the fashion for architecture passes?12


lounge coreby helene furjan

The concept of “lounge” today devolves around two different forms: the first demarcates a zone and experience rich with intensity, effect and affect (the lounge bar), the second the radical opposite, a neutral, sterile zone of coercion and pragmatism (the waiting lounge). To date the latter has received the most attention, as the defining space of globalization, the product of mobility and consumption and purveyor of a mind-numbing uniformity.

Marc Augé, the noted cultural anthropologist, defines these spaces as “non-places.” Following arguments posited by sociologists of the emerging metropolis such as Georg Simmel, “super-modernity” is characterized for Augé by its “atomization” of people (“community” dissolved into seas of discrete, anonymous individuals—“customers, passengers, users, listeners”) and its replacement of “place” by “space”—the depersonalized, homogenous transit, communication and consumption hubs that demarcate the contemporary world: “.. .The air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so pecu-liar that it often outs the individual in contact only with another image of himself.”1

These non-places are the products of the gradual appropria-tion of public space by private interests: the genericized, privatized, neutralized enclaves that form “a succession of autonomous worlds” generated to accommodate flows of people and capital, minor pulses in the modalities of transit.2 Such sites have also been theorized by Rem Koolhaas, renamed by him as “Junkspace.” Koolhaas, oscillating between critique and enthusiasm, sees this new paradigm as a combi-nation of shopping, infrastructure and experience into unmemorable, formless enclaves of simulation: space-as-entertainment offering canned euphoria scripted by corporations.3


Those who lounge

“It is only in the manner of immense parentheses that non-places daily receive increasing numbers of individuals.. . . The non-place is the opposite of utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society.”

One of the primary characteristics of the non-place is the suspension of time: the terminals of mass transit (most acute in the airport), highway travel (and the non-places of rest areas), the waiting rooms of countless professionals, border controls, the new forms of “detention centers,” or even the radical interiorization of shopping malls and big box retail that suspend all references to the tempo-rality of the exterior world. The experience of LAX today, like that of Wal-Mart or Ikea megastores, is more and more that of an extended non-time, a stretching of wait-time that forms in the travel sequence, from check-in queues, to multiple security queues, to the departure lounge, to the duration of the flight itself, and finally to the delay formed by the arrival sequence: the waits of customs, baggage reclaim, ground transportation.

Writing in the 1920s, Siegfried Kracauer noted a similar effect in the hotel lobby. The space of “relaxation and indifference,” the hotel lobby c1925 is already a prototypical Junkspace: the space of a pseudo-togetherness, anonymous and atomized, what Kracauer terms a “contentless solemnity” that evacuates difference. An enclave of “pseudo-life” constructed from a surface aesthetics, the lobby is the spatial formation that corresponds to rationalized society (“a society that exists only as a concept”). Kracauer writes: “The people dispersed in the lobby accept their host’s incognito without question. Lacking any and all relation, they drip down into the vacuum with the same necessity that compels those striving in and for reality to lift themselves out of the nowhere toward their destination... In tasteful lounge chairs a civilization intent on rationalization comes to an end... Remnants of individuals slip into the nirvana of relaxation, faces disappear behind newspapers, and the artificial continuous light illuminates nothing but mannequins.”4

In Koolhaas’s interpretation of the contemporary world, the spatial experience of the hotel lobby has spread throughout the city. Koolhaas understands the new forms of casino or megahotel—of which those in Las Vegas are iconic—as developing shifts in urban formation more generally. What he locates in Las Vegas is a parasitic encroachment of the casino/hotel program onto the city as a whole: “Now Las Vegas has turned into a complete tapestry of shopping that engulfs every other medium and every other program, where the whole is no longer subdivided into recognizable entities, but on the contrary is turning both into a complete patchwork of every activity, and architecturally into a field of the most incredible continuity that we have ever seen.”5

For Koolhaas the smooth urban landscape found in Las Vegas is a condition of shopping (of which gambling is a variant), but it might also be possible to see it as a condition of lounging: the lobby formation of the typical hotel becomes a “programmatic lava” in the megahotel or casino, smoothly distributed throughout the complex as a synthetic carpet of leisure-lounging that links seemingly discrete zones together (registration, slots, restaurants, bars, clubs, shows, shops, spas, pools, gyms, and so on).

It is not so much the casino itself or even the shop that colonizes Las Vegas, but an extension of the lobby—as a lounge-carpet, or, if you will, a “carpet-lounge”—that moves beyond the casino- megaresort itself and out onto the strip, seamlessly merging interior to exterior attractions and finally to the streetscape and other resorts. In contradistinction to Koolhaas, Augé or Kracauer, Las Vegas casinos have returned to the “carpet-lounge” formulation pioneered by Bugsby Siegal at the Flamingo as setting for the mid-century lounge-core glamour of the Hollywood Ratpack. In new bar-club hybrids popping up all over the Strip, cool vibes, ambient effects and sensual pleasure promote an economic model based on experience and adult play (“what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”) In returning to their historical origins, these hip hangouts follow the model increasingly fashionable in the bar-lobby-lounge culture of cosmopolitan cities like London and New York, one also


long established in Los Angeles: a model of lounging that involves active play not passive waiting, immersion not atomization, and one no longer requiring the anonymous indifference of the “non-place” but demanding an effects-laden environment.

Cool vibes

“When the family group disintegrates and the division of time and space is no longer socially determined by produc-tive work, when one can decide the place and duration of one’s stay, the ultimate ties are broken. For all that, the more or less lasting relations between people will not have disappeared, but restrictive social relations will have been replaced by more varied and changing emotional ties. More so than in stable communities, the fluctuating society favors fortuitous contacts and encounters.”

In Los Angeles, the morphing of lounge-space and retail space in the megacasino could be seen as a variant of new mall typologies and their attendant programmatic mutations, “junkspaces” all : the themed, “entertainment”-based shopping precincts marketing them-selves as the pseudo-public domains of the modern metropolis—Third Street Promenade, The Grove, Universal City Walk. But the diffusion of the lobby throughout a complex has been developed in two different arenas. The first is the megaplex, of which the Bridge Cinema Deluxe is the leading example. The Bridge, in bringing back a notion of experi-ence to the cinema that extends beyond the screen, has combined viewing with lounging in multiple ways, extending lounge-space smoothly from the vestibule, through the concession and bar areas, into the halls leading to the theatres (with seating areas that provide a vantage on the throngs moving past—literally and via monitors—and upscale restrooms), and finally into the theaters themselves (replete with stadium armchair-style seating). The second is the hotel lobby—fast becoming as much of a multipurpose zone in the boutique hotels of Los Angeles, London, New York and countless other hip cities as it is in the casino megahotels of Las Vegas.

Lounge culture colonizes sites in which the abandonment of traditional ties—to family structures, “home,” social prohibitions and proprieties—is routine. These lounge-programs—chill-out zones in night clubs, lounge bars, hotel lobbies, and so on—correspond to a certain kind of tourism, then, a “getting-away-from” codes and conven-tions. Following the dance-club movement, we might call these archi-tectonic manifestations of the emergent culture “Lounge-Core.” Hans Ibelings sees the new tendency towards what he defines (in terms similar to Koolhaas) as “coolness, smoothness, and abstraction” in the service of novel sensation as a consequence of the parasitism of everyday life by the formation of tourism: “Tourism has spawned a mind set whereby buildings, cities and landscapes are consumed in a touristic manner even when people are not on holiday, and the environment, consciously or unconsciously, is increasingly regarded as a décor for the consumption of experiences.”6 He points to two

consequences: the aestheticization of mobility (for which the recent “Hotels for Global Nomads” exhibition and publication would serve as clarion call), and the resort-ization of the domestic (the machine-for-living has become the machine-for-leisuring).

The leisure resort, which is a form of highly scripted lounging, has thoroughly permeated the program of “dwelling.” On the one hand, the hotel itself is the home-away-from-home, and at hotel chains like the Westin, Schraeger Hotels or the W, the hotel is marketed as a better home than your own could ever be precisely because it is more relaxing and welcoming, but also a permanent party zone—more thoroughly a space of lounge culture, in other words. Meanwhile, the home itself is mutating in the direction of “lounge-ness”: the wi-fi home entertainment system escapes the bounds of the room—now in the Los Angeles manse a “home theatre”7 —and takes over the whole domain. Lounging has also become the defining organizational imper-ative not just of the home but also at the scale of entire residential communities: the “resort-style” condo-complexes and leisure-oriented gated enclaves that populate Los Angeles and Orange County.

For Ibelings, the primary function of tourism is “the evocation of experiences.” But such an imperative has already eclipsed the tradi-tional domains of tourism, marking a shift from the service economy to an “experience economy.”8 In this model, experiential elements add value to a product: goods are experientialized, experience branded. Experiences must be immersive and interactive, they must congeal around a product, adding an intensified ambient atmospherics. In the resort-homes and lounge-carpets of Las Vegas or Los Angeles lies a logic already discovered by Koolhaas in Delirious New York: a sequence of programs largely given over to leisure, to a specialization of lounging. From the “technology of the fantastic” to the Downtown


Athletic Club, diverse lounge-programs are organized along a smooth surface that acts as a social condenser and a laboratory for experi-ence and sensation—the “irresistible synthetic.”9 The overwhelming typology that Koolhaas “found” in the New York of a historical moment (and that has sustained his subsequent practice) was this “open matrix” of non-hierarchical distributed program.

Both Los Angeles and its desert-resort sister, Palm Springs, while formally and organizationally very different kinds of urban field, can be viewed through the history of cities dedicated to lounge culture. The Ratpack lounged in Hollywood as much as Las Vegas. The A-list allure of Hollywood hangouts (Formosa Café), the smoke-hazed vibes of dive bars (Frolic Room), the vinyl glitz of jazz lounges (The Dresden Room), the themed romance of tiki lounges (Trader Vic’s), and the easy glamour of hotel bars (Bar Marmont) that provided their playrooms half a century ago are still in Los Angeles today the models for its lounge revival. But the peculiarity of Los Angeles as “sprawl”—a roomy urban terrain favoring cars and big houses—is that its history of a social scene organized around lounge culture includes both the car—think of the convertible, the drive-through and the drive-in—and the residence. In fact, the mid-century modern houses that came to characterize Californian cool could be seen precisely as examples of a smoothly distributed lounge carpet: a continuous surface that stitched together open-plan interiors where lounging predominated to patio to poolside, and to city itself through the de rigeur urban view. In Los Angeles, the cocktail party or the pool party (and they are often both), aided and abetted by modern planning, have long been as much the model of nightlife as the lounge bar.

Lounge-Core has persevered, of course, and today finds itself developing into ever-new assemblages of lobby/bar/lounge/club/

gallery/restaurant/spa. Kracauer’s hotel lobby has been eclipsed by the lobby/lounge/club hybrids of the new boutique hotels: Schrager’s Mondrian, the W in Westwood, and the Downtown and Hollywood Standards the leading examples, where registration merges seam-lessly with lounging while DJs produce ambient grooves to match the carefully choreographed ambient atmospherics. It is not acci-dental that hotelier Ian Schrager explicitly defines his lobbies as club spaces. As Kracauer wrote, “An aimless lounging, to which no call is addressed, leads to the mere play that elevates the unserious everyday to the level of the serious.”10 The serious pursuit of play for Kracauer was a distraction from the awareness of social reality that would lead to revolution. But for later figures, the Situationist archi-tect Constant in particular, play was in itself revolutionary.

The kind of “ludic space” developed by Constant and material-ized in the play-environments of these lobbies, bars, clubs (heirs to Verner Panton’s ambient spaces of seduction) is not that far from Koolhaas’s “irresistible synthetic.” The interest in an architecture that can catalyze sensation, emotion, pleasure and play through effect is the same. But the difference lies in the technique of hybridization: for Koolhaas, the Downtown Athletic Club and the other programmati-cally unstable skyscrapers he investigates are, despite the logic of the smooth surface that organizes them, assemblages of discrete programs: atomized, “scattered throughout.” In the contemporary “lounge” environments, programs are diffused and interwoven, super-imposed and distributed: a multiplicitous field. Lounge-Core could thus be defined as a generalized delirious enclave, in Koolhaas’s words, a “magnetic field of fabricated pleasure.”11


ness. Here the hybrid “boutique/hotel” is instructive: “Boutique” is a brand image marketing lifestyle with/as a cool contemporaneity (brand as vibe, “vibe” as brand), and built around hybrid programs that concentrate extreme atmospherics and extreme styling, a space of hyper-effects. Following Jeff Kipnis’s formulation of hyperindexicality as effect over meaning,14 hyper-effects mobilize an architectonics in which light, sound, sensation, aerial effect are mobilized as fully as in the most saturated cinematic experience. The spaces that result are ambient and immersive, wrapping the visitor, who is no longer strictly speaking an observer, in the affective and interactive possibilities of special effects.

Hyper-effects are intoxicants—multisensory, mood-based, atmospheric intensities. Architecture is no longer defined through enclosure, wall, or even surface, but as surface and space conceived together, as a field or matrix of effects. From the hotel-lobby-as-club of the Standard or the W hotels, to the color fields that define the bars of Schrager hotels, or club spaces themselves (descendents of open-air raves which constructed their spatialities from the introduc-tion of luminescent color and multi-dimensional soundscapes into darkness), architecture becomes as much about the generation of mood and vibe as it does about material effects. From the aerosol-ized ephemeralities of projection, hue, luminosity and obscurity to texture and sound, hyper-effects are put into play in the Lounge-Core world as the very matter of architecture.

In lounge core, mood and atmosphere emerge through effect, defining an architectonics concerned above all with the generation of vibe; multiple and provisional sensory effects deploying sound, light, color, surface texture; kinematic bodily encounters with animated environments; fluid forms and fluid spaces; all combining to produce post-spectacular immersive environments redolent with special effects. While this mode of attention is most explicit in the intoxicating, delirious immersions or chilled-out vibes of the lounge-carpets, distraction is equally present in the mallized typologies of consumption or the sterilized genericities of the waiting zones of terminals and offices, each intent on distracting the user from the realities of raw commercialism or eviscerated time. And, as the busi-ness lounge reorients itself towards play over work and infiltrates the rest of the terminal, the two models of lounge are becoming blurred, a smooth extension of “lounge core” as a defining modern condition.

Ultra lounge

“.. .When architecture seeks mood instead of meaning... topologies of continuous color, texture, and animation eliminate any traditional ‘frame’ of vision and thus provide no mechanism to ensure that the viewer gazes at a particular object.. . . A superabundance of special visual effects produces a kind of diversionary vision: not the distraction of the everyday, or the mundane, or the banal, but a visual mode that is at once diffuse and oversaturated.”

Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos describe a particular category of architectural effect that they liken to walking through a painting: “your gaze swerves and orients you through color, shininess, light, figuration, and sensation.”12 This is an experience of space in which imagination, fantasy, hallucination, effect, mingle with the mate-rial, the visual, the sensory. Such a conception has long been at play in the club or rave (and equally the chill -out zones and Lounge-Core venues it has spawned): an environment in which the synaesthesic merging of light, sound, bodies, motion, and chemicals creates an architectonics not reliant on the traditional materiality of wall, one that is in turn generated by the propriosensory processes of the body as it turns and moves. The world opened up for the participant is one of flux and flows, a dynamic field of provisional, contingent and distractive effects.

Distraction, posited by Walter Benjamin all those years ago as the mode of architectural perception,13 is not so much a periph-eralizing inattention as it is a mood. Countering absorption with a synaesthetic mode of perception that is optical and tactile, distractive and immersive, a distracted attention requires an active engagement with the matrix of information flowing towards the viewing subject. An organization that operates like the rapid-jump-cut mode of attention, distraction is created by flooding the visual field with information, demanding not a hyper concentration but an absorption that pushes perception to its limits: a distracted concentration, or a concentrated distraction; a perceptual mode that is at once over-staturated and understaturated (overexposed and underexposed in Paul Virilio’s terminology).

A distracted attention is more attuned to mood than to particu-lars, more inclined towards the generation of feelings and emotions than semiotics. Constant’s New Babylon already promised an interactive space of effect, atmosphere and mood, one that relied on a logic of flows and a networking of technologies to generate its spaces. Like its progeny—the works of Archigram and Koolhaas—and its peers—the psychedelic spaces of the 1960s and 1970s—New Babylon dissolved building into a flux of ludic, erotic and strongly affective atmospheres.

We must not forget, however, that the demand of the “experi-ence economy” is that experiences—and hence lifestyles—must be branded. Atmosphere and effect thus become hyperdesign elements—special effects attached to designer signatures and cool-


Helene Furján is an Assistant Professor at Rice University and previously taught at UCLA, SCI-Arc, the Architectural Association, the Bartlett (University College of London), and Princeton University. She has a practice with Jeremy Leman, which received a national design award in New Zealand in 1992 and has had essays and reviews published in journals including AAFiles, Assemblage, Casabella, and Journal of Architecture. She is currently working on a book on John Soane’s house-museum and a second project with Sylvia Lavin (forthcoming from Monacelli) tracking the contemporary.

1. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Antropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London/New York: Verso, 1995), 79.

2. See Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization (Rotterdam: NAI, 2003), 78. Ibelings borrows the term “supermodern” from Augé.

3. See Rem Koolhaas, “Junk Space,” Domus (January 2001), 33-9; and “Junk Space: The Debris of Modernization, “ in Project on the City 2: Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, eds. Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 408-421.

4. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Hotel Lobby,” in The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 176-83.

5. Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” Domus, 37.6. Ibelings, Supermodernism, 135.7. The trend—long since noted by Angelino fashionistas—has grabbed

the attention of the nation, featured in the style section of the New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 29, 2004.

8. See, for instance, James Gilmore and Gregory Pine, The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage, (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1999).

9. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for New York (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994 (1978)), 105.

10. Kracauer, “The Hotel Lobby,” 179.11. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 213.12. Ben van Berkel and Carolyn Bos, “Effects: Radiant Synthetic,” Move, Vol. 3

(UN Studio/Goose, 1992), 27.13. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical

Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 239.

14. Jeffrey Kipnis, “In the Mood for Architecture,” Anything (New York and Cambridge, Mass.: Anyone/MIT, 2001), 97.

pg. 41-42 + 44 photographs of The Standard, Downtown LA by Tim Street Porter, Architect: Koning Eizenberg Architecture.


los angeles’s dirty realismby paulette m. singley


Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963), Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), Thirty-four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967), Real Estate Opportunities (1970)—these Edward Ruscha books, and more, developed an aesthetic sensibility, as well as a theoretical position, that points towards the idea of dirty realism as it pertains to architecture and urbanism in Los Angeles. Although Twenty-six Gas Stations docu-ments the wasteland between L. A. and Oklahoma City, much of Ruscha’s subject matter is the city of Los Angeles and while L. A. watches us through the monumental perspective of his work, Ruscha has taught us how to watch back, how to exist within, work in, and even appreciate this degraded landscape of asphalt and automobiles. Ruscha’s documentation of Los Angeles’s seamier and simultane-ously more banal imagery inaugurates the tradition of viewing the city through the lens of dirty realism.1 As a documenter of evacuated landscapes Ruscha has inspired a generation of artists and architects to look at the city through a lens tinted with the colors of obscene sunsets that view utterly deadpan glimpses of a semi-pornographic urbanism—the likes of Turner’s Liquor and Filthy McNastys from the Sunset Strip of the 1960s.

If the sixties and Ruscha gave us these sites, then the nineties gave us Larry Flynt’s transformation of the Great Western Savings headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard into the headquarters for Hustler magazine, turning this elegant corporate modernism into a legitimizing mechanism for one of the more controversial industries that thrives in L.A.. The nineties also gave us the Hustler Hollywood store on the Sunset Strip, a neon and glass facade behind which consumers may purchase juice, coffee, gifts, or adult magazines in a transparent modernism that strips hardcore pornography of any transgressive potential. Ruscha’s work anticipates the aestheticizing of Los Angeles’s more insipid persona in films such as Pulp Fiction

(1994) and Boogie Nights (1997) during which corporate franchises serve as ersatz public space while images of the San Fernando Valley offer tender memories of growing up in the 1970s—all in an endless, depressing, sea of apartment buildings. Dirty realism offers tangible methods not only for evaluating but also for constructing a built envi-ronment that engages Los Angeles’s post-cinematic fabric—that is, an urbanism defined as much by the brilliance of its highly experimental architecture as it is by the hyperbolic gaze of its movies.

The term realism, of course, remains somewhat problematic insofar as it does not necessarily mean that an art object is real but rather that a sense of reality may dwell in the verisimilitude, poignant details, or struggling of the lower classes as depicted the paintings of Honoré Daumier or the novels of Gustave Flaubert. Adding the sobriquet of dirty to the equation suggests, instead, André Breton’s Surrealism, the Unprecedented Realism through which K. Michael Hays frames the work of Machado and Silvetti, or even Umberto Eco’s and Jean Baudrillard’s Hyperrealism. But dirty realism emerges both in response to these traditions and in differentiation from them. It undoubtedly works as something artificial, in opposition to the idea of the real as an exponent of truth, but unlike these other forms of the real it also engages a pragmatic dimension of confronting the flat-tening operations of late capitalism without necessarily attempting to add any physical depth to the surface.2 Dimension is added, rather, through the shifting mechanisms of reflection and mirroring. Perhaps the most well-known deployment of this term may be found in Rem Koolhaas’s SMLXL (1995) where he includes, as a dictionary entry, the following quotation taken from Bill Buford’s introduction to Dirty Realism: New Writing from America:

Dirty realism is.. .a fiction of a different scope devoted to the local details, the nuances, the little disturbances in language and gesture... But these are strange stories: unadorned, unfur-nished, low-rent tragedies about people who watch daytime television, read cheap romances or listen to country and western music. They’re waitresses in roadside cafes, cashiers in supermarkets, construction workers, secretaries, and unemployed cowboys. They play bingo, eat cheeseburgers, and stay in cheap hotels, they drink a lot and are often in trouble for stealing a car or breaking a window, pickpocketing a wallet. They’re from Kentucky or Alabama or Oregon. Mainly, they could be from just about anywhere—drifters in a world cluttered with junk food and the oppressive details of modern consumerism.3


While this statement derives a visual aesthetic from the imagery of cheap hotels and roadside cafes, dirty realism in architecture and urbanism proffers a more elusive and consequently challenging response to the city than such lowbrow and pop contexts may offer.

Koolhaas’s treatment of dirty realism owes much to Liane Lefaivre’s translation of the concept into architecture and urbanism in her 1989 essay “Dirty Realism in European Architecture Today: Making the Stone Stony.” Lefaivre critiques several European archi-tects—the most prominent being Rem Koolhaas, Nigel Coates, Jean Nouvel, Bernard Tschumi, and Zaha Hadid- -as their work pertains to the literary concept of dirty realism that Buford published in Granta.4 Lefaivre, a faculty member at the Technical University in Delft, tempers her Eurocentric focus by acknowledging that a fuller discussion of the topic “would include Frank Gehry, Lars Lerup, Craig Hodgetts, and Morphosis—all scavenger-poets who have introduced harsh aesthetics of urban blight into architectural lyricism.”5

Notably three of these architects or firms are based in Los Angeles. Dirty realism is no longer Buford’s exurban phenomenon, Lefaivre understands dirty realism as focusing on the industrial edges of late twentieth century cities where “reality is sensed as harsher.”6 But if the work of these Los Angeles architects exhibits the kind of reliance on forms and materials recycled from the derelict materials of abandoned factories, most clearly exemplified in Michael Rotondi’s work on the Carlson-Reges residence at the Brewery, the landscape of anonymous high rise apartment buildings, faceless parking ramps, and bland corporate headquarters also form a significant dimension to this term as it inhabits global cities.

In his 1994 book The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson provides other analytical tools with which to approach this self-effacing,

anonymous, blank, or flat architecture and urbanism that remains fundamental to understanding dirty realism as a response to the homogenizing processes of globalization more so than to the contex-tual specificity of regionalism. When Jameson considers this term in the context of OMA’s oeuvre, he further distances dirty realism from its origins in Buford’s literary criticism—no longer about particular details and extra-urban landscapes but about totality and urbanism.7

This architecture profoundly reflects the products of late capitalism back on itself—subtly mutating and transforming them into enclaves of difference. In other words, the replication of existing urban forms allows the architect to engage the totality of late modernism while simultaneously critiquing the anti-urban consequences of this architecture.8 What is most significant about Jameson’s work is that he posits totality in distinction to totalization, undoing a previous conflation of terms that in many ways sponsored the fragmentation of forms produced during the late 1980s. To summarize quickly, designers from this time period responded to Michel Foucault and other intellectuals’ critique of architecture as a totalizing vehicle for social control by abandoning totalities—singular, monolithic forms—in favor of fragments splintering vertiginously into themselves. When Jameson redeems the idea of totality, no longer inherently wedding to totalizing thought, he concomitantly sanctions this form of architec-ture for its ability to enclose complex and diverse programs.

An example of the difference between the fragment and what now is commonly referred to as the box might be the difference between Morphosis’s Kate Mantilini restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard (1985) and the more recent Caltrans District 7 Headquarters on First Street (2004). The facade of Kate Mantilini exhibits subtle geometric shifts that hint at a structural system in the process of


unraveling while the facade at Caltrans remains hidden behind a veil of perforated metal—enigmatic and almost without scale. Both a contemporary iteration of the authority expressed in the fifteenth century Palazzo Medici-Riccardi and a counterpart to A. C. Martin’s 1963 Department of Water and Power building, Caltrans assertively expresses the almost incomprehensible scope and scale of the infrastructure that this public agency is in charge of building. The size of this project, thirteen stories tall, enclosing some 750,000-square-feet, betrays this sense of power and magnitude. But Thom Mayne develops the cubic solid as a totality with the top portion of the building, the piano nobile, shearing precipitously off of its base only to hang over first street as a strong urban marker for this edge of Los Angeles next to City Hall and Little Tokyo. Caltrans reflects the simple strategy of corporate modernism’s large box, cloaked in a kinetic screen, which opens and closes according to the movement of the sun, that nonetheless remains a neutral and even bland reflection of the Los Angeles’s modernist context. The project, in other words, performs as a totality that does not totalize.

If dirty realism provides a productive model for large-scale architecture and incommensurable urbanism that understands the potential of large, total forms, then it also offers an antidote to the perils of an everyday urbanism that turned its back on these very design opportunities.9 Dirty realism calls for a constructive modality that entirely eclipses everyday urbanism’s rather utopian (despite protests to the otherwise) and conversely, anti-architectural program. If everyday urbanism hinges on the design of such public amenities as dog drinking fountains then it does not offer substantial enough tools to confront the acreage of development occurring in the Inland Empire, the endless fields of tilt-up warehouses emerging next to freeways, or the immanent suburbanization of downtown with big box stores set back on expansive parking lots. As with theories of the everyday, dirty realism proposes a close scrutiny of local condi-tions, but unlike the everyday it also proposes to build big. As with everyday urbanism, dirty realism proposes looking at the city from the bottom up, but unlike the everyday, it also is willing to look at it from the top down. The potential of dirty realism to offer a counter project to everyday urbanism holds our attention for its positive ability to embrace those incidental and at times highly corporate architectures of places like Denny’s or Costco that proliferate our landscape but display no overt signs of design. It also describes the more monumental and large-scale architectures of hybrid or complex programs, of freeway interchanges, or even of a terrain vague, Ignasi de Solà Morales’s term for both “industrial wastelands and monotonous suburban developments.”10 Indeed, Jameson describes Koolhaas’s Zeebrugge Terminal as “the helmet of an immense cosmonaut,” filled “whole former structures, such as a hotel and an office building,” as well as on and off ramps like those at “the great Figueroa grade crossing in downtown Los Angeles.”11 If here we might think of the freeway-scale ramps leading into the Beverly Center or even the pedestrian ramps of the Bonaventure Hotel (a space that Jameson critiques in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism ultimately Jameson is describing the condition of the megastructure, another architectural form anathema to the everyday.

Perhaps the best way to understand the immediate complicity between dirty realism and multinational capital is to take, as a quick example, the phenomenon of Safetyville in Sacramento, California: a section of a small city’s downtown area, built at one-third scale to educate children, as the name would imply, about issues of safety that also is available for hosting children’s parties.12 What remains striking about the existence of Safetyville is that it mirrors the reduced scale and small-town aesthetic of Disneyland for didactic lessons that also may serve as a form of entertainment: but it does so by including, as part of this townscape, the junkscape of commercial enterprises such as McDonald’s, Jr’s Texas Bar-B-Que, State Farm Insurance, and minia-ture, glass-clad office buildings. Safetyville in and of itself represents an artificial terrain of a fallen world in which children are not safe and there is little room to play in this arena of degraded civic space.

As a subject of Miles Coolidge’s’ photography, Safetyville becomes dirty real, part of this artist’s larger project to capture the mundane and often ignored suburban architectures of garages, elevators, or golf courses. Coolidge transforms Safetyville’s ticky-tacky construction into a cold world emptied of scale, human inhabitation, and any pretense that small-town USA can survive global capital. No trace of nostalgia for this lost world inhabits Coolidge’s work, however, which serves simply to flatten the degraded, through his clinical eye, into the aesthetic. Safetyville is the contemporary condition of much of Los Angeles and other new cities- -the condi-tion of sprawl, the seemingly endless horizon of commercial strips, all mixed with the remnants of small town Americana- -reduced to its most iconographic, most sterile, and simultaneously most mesmeric.

One might very well ask if this condition of Franchises having branded Safetyville’s identity, and dirty realism in general, is part of recent movement toward post-criticality insofar as, like Rem Koolhaas, it accepts the penetration of corporate mass culture into those “utmost recesses and crannies of everyday.”13 If post-critical theory accepts partnership with capitalist systems as pointless to resist—a fait accompli in terms of architecture’s ability to perform critically—then the ensuing notion of simply succumbing on one’s back to the force majeur of globalization remains unsatisfying for those intent on contributing to the production of a rich and complex urbanity in cities such as Los Angeles.14 To put this more succinctly, finding aesthetic frames such as Coolidge’s through which to posi-tively view these neglected landscapes of franchises and chain stores also implies actively producing architecture that critiques these worlds. Along with documenting and aestheticizing such urbanism, dirty realism may act in a decidedly productive and critical capacity.

Eric Owen Moss has arrived at an urbanism of the dirty real that critically responds to the infinite landscape of one to two story-high density mixed with the abject yet extensive language of the commer-cial strip. His work with Frederick and Laurie Smith, the land-owners and developers of a section of Culver City called the Hayden Tract, has offered Moss the unique opportunity to construct, over a roughly


fifteen year period, an experimental complex of buildings that also forms part of a larger urban plan for Culver city called “The New City,” a linear path of architectural projects that take over an aban-doned rail right of way and transform this dormant infrastructure into a viable urbanism. While, it is true, that the Hayden Tract is not precisely on the strip, it does offer a solution for responding to this context. If Moss’s architecture may provoke anger or disappoint in terms of the shoddy construction and grossly sculpted forms such as the Trivida Building or the Umbrella—the plexiglass and gunite—it also delights in terms of the embedded narrative threads of 3535 Hayden or the sleek glamour of the Stealth building. It is both global and local, clandestine and exhibitionist, provocative and reticent, kitsch and corporate. Indeed, Moss was canny enough to convince the city administration that his architectural moves are so unique a cultural product that they deserve to receive the precious one percent funding that is required to support the inclusion of artwork in a building project. But, even more than transforming urban design into a series of art projects, Moss has created a form of urbanism—called Conjunctive Points—that offers an alternative to the hotly debated politics and stylistic proclivities of new urbanism, the megaloma-niacal diagrams of Dutch urbanism, and as previously mentioned, the often irrelevant obsessions of everyday urbanism. As Los Angeles architect Alice Kimm explains, in an important essay on the Hayden Tract, because the Smiths “did not own the entire area, they generated a strategy called ‘Conjunctive Points’ that would develop overlapping ‘points’ of land” that would serve as “sources of visible architectural energy which, once accrued, would unify the geography into a coherent landscape.”15

With the Hayden Tract, Moss has produced the urbanism of the dirty real, a series of disparate architectural investigations that none-theless hang together as a collection of inflated sculpture, where the playful shapes such as the umbrella or the beehive fade behind the Stealth Building’s ominous exterior. Kimm argues that the buildings are now attracting attention as they relate to a collective vision: one that provides a precedent for how similar abandoned or under-used industrial environments around the world might be transformed into thriving art- and commerce-driven communities.16

No matter how much one’s aesthetic sensibilities may or may not despise the individual buildings, Moss has transformed what once was a terrain vague into an active urbanism that transcends and even celebrates those aforementioned shoddy construction techniques without entirely obliterating the memory of industrial wasteland that this area originally maintained. And moreover, Moss’s provocative posture and violent forms convincingly transform any such nostalgia for dead-tech into a cool understanding of architecture’s ability to adopt the persona of corporate radicality. Where the Hayden Tract operates at the scale of the building and the city block, Moss’s plan for The New City suggests the potential for taking over bridges, freeway structures and other similar parts of the city in an effort to transform what once were gaps and scars into places of connectivity. Thus, Moss operates between the particular and the hyperbolic

scales of gritty reality, cheap construction, and large-scale public space. For Moss, if architecture does not matter for its own sake, it certainly matters as a part of urban design.

From its emergence as a form of literary criticism that Liane Lefaivre translated into architecture and urbanism to the theoretical inquiry of Jameson, dirty realism has come out from beyond the chain link fences of Gehry’s early work to address a larger scope of investi-gations that engage the complexity and scale of urban infrastructure as well as those details, nuances, and little disturbances that Buford initially mentioned. As its various advocates have described it, dirty realism straddles two distinct scales—the local horizontal sprawl found throughout the Los Angeles basin and the global size of the megastructure. Jameson helps to identify certain qualities and theo-retical moments of this concept but he fails to reconcile the disparate attributes of the gigantic, infrastructural, buildings within buildings, apropos of Koolhaas’s Zeebrugge Terminal, and the cracker box horizon of cities that have grown up around the automobile and mass media. And in fact, this is precisely why dirty realism remains such a compelling category. While it is about dirt in the most prosaic sense of the word, as well as a gritty reality, and also, pornography it also is not so much about reality as it is a heightened postmodern moment. Given these apparent contradictions, I propose that it works as a term that, in network cities such as Los Angeles, operates beyond scale and as Jameson would agree, beyond maps.17 It operates on the products of minimalism and modernism turning these architec-tures back upon themselves as the simultaneous depth and flatness of an Andreas Gursky photograph and the Caltrans Headquarters. The productive component of the dirty real is not to laud Denny’s or Costco as a new aesthetic but to offer instead another understanding of urban contexts that everyday urbanism or new urbanism shun. This is to find a beauty in the blank façade, the sublime pleasures of gargantuan and incomprehensible systems such as the Figueroa Crossing or 110 freeway south of downtown, or yes, even that source of frustration to many architectural critics, who view it as the cruel reflection of a highway patrol officer’s silvery sunglasses, the Bonaventure Hotel.


1. Siri Engberg “Out of Print: The Editions of Edward Ruscha” Edward Ruscha: Editions 1959-1999: Catalogue Raisonné (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999), 19. Although the use of found objects and derelict narrative that characterize the work of Edward Kienholz may originate this tradition, Kienholz presents a world full of imaginative junk that does not coincide with the sense of emptiness and evacuated urbanism that dirty realism identifies.

2. For an excellent discussion of the idea of the real in architectural theory see Deborah Fausch “Ugly and Ordinary: The Representation of the Everyday” Architecture of the Everyday, eds. Steven Harris and Deborah Berke (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 75-106. On the hyperreal, Jean Baudrillard writes: “The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks, and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an infinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.” In “The Precession of Simulacra” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 254; reprinted from Art & Text no. 11 (September 1983). Also see: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/Baudrillard_outline. For Umberto Eco’s hyperreal see Travels in Hyperreality trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). Regarding Surrealism’s relation to the real, André Breton writes: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.” In “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” André Breton: Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 14. Also see Hal Foster The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). On Machado and Silvetti see K. Michael Hays Unprecedented Realism: The Architecture of Machado and Silvetti (New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 1995). Finally for another discussion on the dirty real see Paulette Singley “Los Angeles: Between Cognitive Mapping and Dirty Realism,” Shaping the City: Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design (New York: Routledge, 2004), 98-134.

3. Bill Buford, Dirty Realism: New Writing in America, (Cambridge: Granta 8, 1983) quoted in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau Small, Medium, Large, Extra-large, ed. Jennifer Sigler (New York: Monacelli: 1995), 290-292. On the art of dirty realism see “Dirty Realism” curated by Sima Familant and Caitlin Masley at Robert Peale Fine Art: http://www.e-flux.com/welcome/PEARRE/text_1.html. For another architect who works on dirty realism see “Conversation between Iñaki Ábalos and José Luis Mateo, “ Barcelona, 17 September 2002:

IA: When you talk about the difficult of the third phase of the building process, the aspect that you term pragmatism or dirty realism seems to be an open strategy (...)

M: In the most traditional sense of the word, I have not built urban projects but I have operated in this somewhat peripheral world.

You talk of pragmatism or dirty realism, but I think they are two very different things. I consider myself to be a kind of semi-inventor of the term “dirty realism” in architecture through my recent activity with Quaderns. I remember having discovered it in the early Eighties via the British journal Granta, which focused on the literature of “dirty realism” in a number of issues, which I read with a sense of genuine shock as the concept corresponded to something that I had intuited at the time and which interested me (though I didn’t still didn’t know it at the time), that kind of raising of the banal to the status of the monumental. It was also related to something that had constituted another shock in my childhood and youth, which was the Neorealist movement in film.

Dirty realism was an important moment for me, though less so now. I’ve always tried to find lateral paths, to avoid looking directly at the sun, a sun that blinds, but instead to navigate indirectly. That’s what dirty realism was, picking up that which nobody wanted and turning it into something fundamental, indispensable. It’s also a typical intellectual and creative strategy. See http://www.mateo-maparchitect.com/02_jlmateo/analysis/01_entrevista_eng.html.

4. The other European architects Lefaivre discusses are: Hans Kolhoff, Laurids Ortner, Carel Weeber, and Cees Christiaanse. Lefaivre explains that “This selection is based on Rem Koolhaas’s initial selection of participants for a conference called “Whether Europe” held April 15-16, 1988”: Liane Lefaivre “Dirty Realism in European

Architecture Today: Making the Stone Stony,” “ Design Book Review: Postmodern

Urbanism (17: 1989), 18.5. Lefaivre, 18.6. Ibid. 7. Following Lefaivre’s application of this term to address architecture and

urbanism, Jameson questions Buford’s reliance on an extra-urban setting as really being about ‘neoregionalist’ writers. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 148.

8. As Jameson writes, “If modern architecture is in general characterized by the dilemma of a radical split between architecture and the urban, the concept of replication can be read in a novel way of addressing that gap, not by synthesis or reconstruction but by way of reduplication (or even of scaling, to use Peter Eisenman’s concept),” The Seeds of Time, 148.

9. Regarding the “everyday” Jameson writes: “these new spaces are the space of work...; and the space of the street, henceforth called daily life or the everyday, the quotidian, which is fully as much a sign of the breakup of the private and the personal as it is of the emergence of consumption and commodification over against the public realm itself.” In this schema, the everyday ceases to over a solution or critique of hegemonic structures, it ceases to be valid,” The Seeds of Time,154.

10. From an exhibition description at the Heinz Architectural Center titled “Terrain Vague: Photography, Architecture, and the Post-Industrial Landscape” (March 20-June 20, 2004):

Terrain Vague is a French term used by Spanish architect and critic Ignasi de Solà-Morales to describe ambiguous, unresolved, and marginalized spaces in the urban landscape. Terrain vague refers to sites that are often ignored in the mainstream discourse on architecture and design, such as industrial wastelands and monotonous suburban developments. See http://www.cmoa.org/exhibitions/archives04winspr.asp#terrain

11. Jameson, 138.12. On Safetyville see: http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0298/

fe98safe.htm and http://www.safetycenter.org/childrenssafety.html.13. Jameson, 147.14. On post-criticality see: http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/affiliated_publications/

assemblage/assemb41.html15. Alice Kimm “MOSSticism in the Hayden Tract,” ArchitectureWeek, (October,

2000): http://www.architectureweek.com/2000/1011/design_1-1.html.16. Ibid.17. Also see Kazys Varnelis who writes: “Networks, on the other hand, exceed

our ability to map them. As the invisible city grows, its possession by private forces makes it impossible to map.” In The City Beyond Maps: from Bonaventure to One Wilshire” Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica, September, 2003 and http://varnelis.net/projects/beyondmaps/index.html.

Photograph (page 47) Police Station, Insurance Building, Gas Station. courtesy of Miles Coolidge

Photograph (page 49)Suburban home prop at LAPD’s Ed Davis Emergency Vehicle Operations Center & Tactics/Firearms Training Center located in Granada Hills north of Los Angeles. courtesy of Steve Rowell

Paulette M. Singley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Woodbury University. She also teaches in the Department of Architecture, Landscape, and Interiors at Otis College of Art and Design. She received a Ph.D. in architectural history and theory from Princeton University, an M.A. in the history of architecture and urbanism from Cornell University and a B.Arch. from the University of Southern California.


art and architecture portfolio seriescurated by tom marble

Los Angeles has always benefited from an embarrassment of creative talent. From music to the movies, from TV to radio, our city has long been a center of the entertainment industry. In recent years it has also become one of the places the world looks to for all that is new and interesting in both art and architecture.

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design cele-brates this cultural moment through a portfolio of images uniting the work of emerging artists and architects. Rather than soliciting artists to merely render the work of architects, the artists were asked to reflect on the practice of a particular architect or firm. The resulting body of work is as varied as the participants: Mary Hodson on Habitar, Mitchell Kane on Studio 010, Pae White on Techentin Buckingham, Jim Isermann on Christophe Cornubert, T. Kelly Mason on Shubin & Donaldson, Jim Feldman on Jorge Pardo, Sam Durant on Amy Murphy, and Sharon Lockhart on Escher GuneWardena.

Each piece first made its appearance on the reverse of a Forumemo, a vehicle for news, commentary, and announcements for the L. A. Forum. The eight works were then archivally printed by Robert Grahmbeek of Lemon Sky at 15-1/2” x 22” in an edition of 25 and assembled in a custom box created and fabricated by Jorge Pardo. They were on view at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhbitions (LACE) in January, 2004. At press time, four portfolios are available for $3,000 each.

Tom Marble studied architecture at UC Berkeley and Yale. He has designed buildings, planned communities, written screenplays, and created public art—all part of an ongoing project that explores how architects and urban thinkers help form the urban mythology of a place like Los Angeles, and how that mythology in turn forms and informs their work in that city.See http://www.tommarble.com. Board member since 2002.


forum annual report 2003–2004

Forum Issue Newsletters (ongoing)For over a decade, the Forum’s newsletters have served as the

foremost critical periodical on architecture and urbanism in this city. Beginning in 1999, the Forum moved its newsletters on-line to reach a broader audience and to take advantage of the possibilities offered by this new technology. Each issue typically addresses one theme. Recent issues have included Consuming the City (February 2003), Parks (June 2003), Downtown (February 2004), and Late Moderns (September 2004). Forum Issue newsletters were funded in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

Suburbanity: Three Discussions on the Contemporary City (Lecture Series, February 2003)

These discussions explored how suburbs are no longer merely an alternative—be it utopian or degraded—to the city but rather, how suburban form and culture have become dominant in suburbs and cities alike and how traditional boundaries between the two have dissolved. This condition of “post-sprawl” presents the architect with a new landscape of interrogation and engagement. In the first two discus-sions, Dana Cuff, John Dutton, Denis Cosgrove, and Alessandra Ponte explored the emergence of suburbanity while in the third, Mary-Ann Ray of Studioworks, Roger Sherman, and Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee presented models of operating within this territory.

Inter:facing (Lecture series, March–April 2003)This lecture series highlighted recent collaborative undertak-

ings between artists, architects and others from artistic disciplines to explore the increased traffic across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Pairings featured Neil Denari and Jim Isermann at their LA Eyeworks store, Linda Taalman and Liam Gillick, T. Kelly Mason and Adam Wheeler, Renee Petropolous, Roger White, and Daniel Martinez, Jeanine Centuori and Russell Rock, Alan Koch and Chris Burden, as well as Jorge Pardo and Jan Tumlir.

On the Map (Lecture series, August–September 2003)The Forum’s long-running summer lecture series, “Out There

Doing It” became “On the Map” in 2003. The name change indicates that, for the first time, the series moved out into the city into recently completed architectural projects to build a critical map of Los Angeles’s architectural milieu and to provide access to some works that might otherwise remain inaccessible to the general public. Architects spoke about their work in a setting of their own design. Featured speakers and projects include Daly Genik’s Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, (M) Arch’s Fred Segal Beauty in Santa Monica, a dynamic award-winning house by Linda Pollari and Robert Somol, John Friedman and Alice Kimm’s Los Angeles Design Center on Western Avenue, and Tolkin Associates’s Saladang Song in Pasadena.


Forumfest 2003 (December 2003)In its second fundraiser and award ceremony, the Forum honored

Aaron Betsky, Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute and founding member of the LA Forum by presenting him with our Founder’s Award at a reception held at the Vitra showroom in Santa Monica. Mr. Betsky, who was recently featured in an issue of Newsweek devoted to cutting edge design, is currently the director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam and was the curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1995 to 2001. He is active as a writer on design, serves frequently as a critic and competition juror, and has taught at several universities in the U.S. Among his publications on architecture and design are Landscrapers, Architecture Must Burn, Violated Perfection: Architecture and the Fragmentation of the Modern, and critical studies of Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. Speakers included John Dale, Frank Escher, and Kazys Varnelis, and Thom Mayne presented the award to Mr. Betsky. Noted artist and DJ Dave Muller provided the music.

Communities Under Construction (Exhibition, April–July 2004) The exhibit celebrates recently completed and on-going design

build projects in Los Angeles with an educational and community focus. The juried exhibition is organized and presented by CITYworksLA, a volunteer group from the architecture and design community acting as a catalyst for real world solutions in Los Angeles, in conjunction with the LA Forum and the Los Angeles Architecture + Design Museum.

Forum Nights at the Mountain (more or less monthly since April 2004)Located at Jorge Pardo’s the Mountain, monthly Forum Nights

create a social opportunity for the architectural community in Los Angeles while providing provocative programming. François Perrin’s “Global Warming Party” created an ambient atmosphere of high heat, humidity, and disaster movies. R. Malcolm Honybee’s “I Fell to Her” explores works by Rem Koolhaas through fictional video narratives. Robert Sumrell’s Pecha Kucha nights brings Klein Dytham’s Tokyo Show and Tell project to Los Angeles: 20 architects speak about 20 slides for 20 seconds each.

On The Map (Lecture series, July 2004)The yearly summer lecture series again showcased emerging

architectural practices working in the Los Angeles area discussing their practices within structures they have recently constructed. Projects were presented by François Perrin, Roger Sherman, Barbara Bestor, Heyday Partnership, Wes Jones, Lorcan O’Herlihy, and Neil Denari.

Forumfest 2004 (October 2004)The third Forumfest celebrates Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung in

the Connor Pavilion of the Petersen Automotive Museum.

Forumemo 2004 (October 2004 on)The Forum is again commissioning artists to produce an original

work of art to be used on the Forum’s cards announcing events and projects during the upcoming year. This series, in which artists will revisit Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies, will be curated by Anna Helwing of Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles.

Dead Malls (Publication, October 2004)Featuring the work of the finalists in the recent Dead Malls compe-

tition, this pamphlet critically investigates the proposals and what they suggest about how to re-animate the dead and dying regional mall. Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

New Spaces and New Cartographers (October–November 2004)This lecture series examines the fields and networks defining

contemporary spatiality together with the extraterritorial spaces remaining left over or deliberately excluded from this emerging spatial regime and proposes new methods of mapping. Speakers include Trevor Paglen on the Black World of Hidden Budgets and Secret Bases, Jeremy Hight and Jeff Knowlton on their 34 North 118 West project and the use of locative media to bring information into physical spaces through GPS and other wireless technology, AUDC on Ether and instant cities, and Keller Easterling on familiar and unfamiliar sites of architec-tural production that are embroiled in the politics of global trade, labor, tourism and security.


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benefactors [$5000+]

City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine ArtsNational Endowment for the Arts Ted K. Osborn, Osborn Architects

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patrons [$1500+]

AnonymousAnonymousARC American Reprographics CompanyChelsea ManagementConsulate General of the Netherlands in Los AngelesJoe Day and Nina HachigianFriends of the Schindler HouseThe Irvine CompanyLACELemon SkyLeo A. Daly & AssociatesNabih Youssef & AssociatesPaneliteTina Petra and Ken WongMark RiosStoli Russian VodkaWillametta K. Day Foundationah-be Landscape ArchitectsDMJM

contributors [$500+]

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laforum board of directors 2004

Kazys Varnelis, presidentMeara Daly, vice president for developmentAlan Loomis, vice president websiteTom Marble, vice president for publicationsMichael Pinto, treasurerPaulette M. Singley, secretaryWarren Techentin, vice president for programsTim DurfeeDavid ErdmanLiz FallettaDan HermanTherese KellyAndrea Lenardin-MaddenFrancois PerrinAmy MurphySteve RowellJanet SagerOlivier TouraineDenise Bratton

laforum board of directors 2003

Frank Escher, presidentJack Burnett-Stuart, treasurerMeara Daly, secretaryAlan Loomis, vice president websiteJanet Sager, vice president for developmentPaulette M. Singley, vice president for programsKazys Varnelis, vice president for publicationsTim DurfeeMike FergusonSusan LanierMark LeeAndrea Lenardin-MaddenTom MarbleCara MullioMichael PintoWarren Techentin

board of advisors

Frances AndertonAaron BetskyJack Burnett-StuartMatt CoolidgeDana CuffMichael DearFrank EscherHsin-Ming FungEric GarcettiTom GilmoreBob HarrisBrooke HodgeJohn KaliskiRichard KoshalekSusan LanierMark LeeKevin LippertArvind ManochaNorman MillarMerry NorrisLinda PollariJames RojasMargi ReeveMark RiosJudith SheineJulie SillimanKevin StarrIrene TsatsosLorraine WildWim de Wit

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Los Angeles's Dirty Realism

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