Seen and Architecture

Residential Planned Developments: Yea and Nay

2011-10-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

Would you place a mixed-use development in this residential neighborhood?

The City of Los Angeles is proposing to change the City's Zoning Code to modify the existing Residential Planned Development (RPD) supplemental use district definition and process. If adopted as being presented by the Planning Department, the singular RPD would evolve to become the more plural Planned Developments or PDs. PDs, as described in the Planning Department's September 2011 Draft Version of the ordinance, will be defined as follows:

A group of buildings and appurtenant structures located and arranged in accordance with requirements established by ordinance per Section 13.04, "PD" Planned Development Districts, of the Los Angeles Municipal Code.

Section 13.04 evolves from existing ordinance language that provides for the design manipulation of residential-only tracts to enabling language that permits a far greater range of mixed-use, i.e. residential and commercial, projects. Notwithstanding that this type of development flexibility might be a good idea in certain circumstances, the flexibility of the proposed zoning regulation needs to be carefully considered, and probably constrained, to both build support for the proposal as well as to ensure that the uniqueness of Los Angeles' existing residential neighborhoods - particularly single-family neighborhoods are maintained.

Planned residential developments were originally conceived in the years after World War II when planners were searching for ways to encourage more design creativity and environmental consciousness regarding the design of single-family tract home neighborhoods. The suburbs were in full bloom and there was a sense that the sameness of endlessly repeated identical lots and houses was dulling. At that time only a small cadre of landscape architects, architects, and regional planners were developing urban design ideas that countervailed predominant suburban development patterns.

Planned Residential Developments were one important response to the uniformity of standard suburban planning, such as seen throughout Southern California. In the Los Angeles basin, a ceaseless grid of major boulevards defined vast neighborhoods, where 1000 square foot houses on 5000 square foot lots repeat to the horizon, the ocean, and the mountains. Planned residential developments, as adopted in the late 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and reaching a height of popularity in the mid- to late- 1970s, allowed for flexibility with regard to the zoning standards used to design tracts. Instead of the typical minimum lot areas, prescribed building setbacks, and maximum heights associated with typical zoning designations, one could propose alternative standards. To borrow from the language of the Los Angeles Zoning Code that is being eliminated, the intent was to, "...encourage well planned neighborhoods with adequate open space..", something that clearly was not realized in this city utilizing the standard residential tract process.

The idea for Los Angeles' residential planned developments was to allow for the clustering of housing, provide for townhouses and other types of more compact development forms, and in return for the increased intensity of housing, provide public benefit in the form of increased density of parks. The existing Los Angeles code explicitly requires that no less than 25% of a residential planned development's land area, exclusive of streets, be common open space. This requirement, in combination with the simultaneous provision that a residential planned development, "...not exceed the maximum number of dwelling units permitted by the underlying zone...", suggests that the intent of the existing ordinance is to maintain the overall concept of the land use recorded in the City's General Plan and Community Plans, and to allow for creative designs that realize open space benefits. These in turn allow for retention of land and environmental features, providing for passive and active residentially oriented open space. Perhaps these ideals and standards were too stringent. According to the Los Angeles Planning Department, only three residential planned developments were ever implemented.

If mid-Twentieth Century planning worked towards the separation of land uses, Twenty-first Century planning embraces mixed uses. The proposed Planned Development ordinance follows this latter day logic and allows applications for planned development zones in a broad range of land use types including C (commercial), M (manufacturing), P (the now antiquated parking), and even R (residential) zones. At first read this new ordinance allows housing in industrial districts, despite concern that jobs rather than housing should be the City's priority, and commercial uses within R1 single-family zones. In practice implementing these types of surely controversial mixes would not be as easy as a cursory read of the ordinance suggests.

Establishment of a planned development district would require an action of the City Planning Commission and City Council, which in turn would only be after the full range of typical public hearings. More importantly, if a planned development zone included uses that were less restrictive than the underlying zone, for instance commercial in a R1 zone, a General Plan Amendment would be required, typically an even more time consuming and costly process. Still, and despite these legislative obstacles which are prohibitively expensive, one has to wonder why Los Angeles' prime order of single-family neighborhoods surrounded by commercial boulevards and scattered commercial districts need be opened up and challenged.

At the same time that the proposed PD ordinance prospectively introduces land use flexibility within Los Angeles zones that have been previously thought to be inviolate, the language of the reformulated code also suggests that existing density standards contained within height district restrictions can be stretched. Section 13.04 C 1 (b) states that, "(i)n approving a Concept Plan and Development Standards for a PD District, the City Council may modify zoning regulations relating to height, setback, and area requirements (i.e. density)..." No upper limits or definitions are placed on how much modification or increase in underlying standards is allowed, only general provisions for public benefits including increased open space and ",,,other desirable features that are not regular requirements of the zone (see Section 13.04 1 (b) (3))".

PD districts, as proposed by the Planning Department do require the submittal and approval of concept plans and renderings, suggesting that design considerations will be highlighted during approval processes and pegged to minimum thresholds of design performance. PDs are also proposed to have minimum sizes, at least 200,000 square feet of non-residential floor area, 200 or more dwelling units and/or guest rooms, or a minimum three acres of land area, suggesting larger land assemblies and/or projects. Additionally, where communities have already established specific plans and special planning districts, PD districts will not be allowed. Unlike many special planning district types, which can only be initiated by Council offices, the Planning Commission, or Area Planning Commissions, this ordinance allows individual property owners to initiate planned developments, as long as they control the land.

There are many nuances and wrinkles to the proposed PD ordinance, yet the policy direction is clear. Mixed-use districts with perceived public benefits of compact form, reduced vehicle trips, support for emerging transit infrastructure, and increased pedestrian orientation should be encouraged throughout the City of Los Angeles. Greater flexibility in terms of project initiation, and land use and density standards should be allowed as well. Flexibility should be exchanged for higher quality and creative design outcomes ensured through specific design approvals that are attached to land entitlements.

The PD Ordnance is part of a larger long-term effort by the Los Angeles Planning Department to not only increase the flexibility of the existing zoning code, but to make it simpler, bring it up to date in relationship to best practices, remove conflicts in the language of the code that plague interpretation, and make the Code more developer friendly and "smart" by creating more tools and certainty in the land use entitlement and development process. The PD ordinance does this, at least from the perspective of the Planning Department, by allowing project advocates to initiate projects instead of being dependent upon Council offices, letting project proponents consolidate the numerous variances associated with development approvals into one application, and shifting the emphasis of planned developments from residential-only projects associated with past times to mixed-use projects associated with the present and the future. All of these are worthy goals, but in practice gloss over critical Los Angeles realities, making the ordinance as written problematic.

Los Angeles, is still fundamentally a vast spread out City of residential communities surrounded by lines and nodes of urbanism. Admittedly it is evolving towards a more urban lifestyle and image of itself. Granted there are destinations and places of great and emerging intensity that belie older visions and ideals. But regardless of the nuances of present Los Angeles or future Los Angeles urbanism, and these are fought over every day, few argue that Los Angeles' urban future will or should be urban in the sense that an east coast city or European city or even emerging Asian city, is urban. Opening the door to intrusion of commercial uses within low density residential neighborhoods - even if accepting that the hurdles of General Plan amendments and required community input make this unlikely - seems to both contradict Los Angeles' overarching image of itself, and needlessly needle advocates for the conservation n of single-family and low density neighborhoods.

Concern for neighborhood integrity also leads one to question why a planned development ordinance, whether in a residential, commercial, or even industrial area needs to undermine through flexibility allowances underlying land use constraints as established in the General Plan and Community Plans of the City. The original planned residential development ordinances, both in Los Angeles and elsewhere, were about gross design flexibility, not about land use or density flexibility. They were also pegged to a perceived design good, open space. Nothing this specific exists in the proposed ordinance. Each project becomes a deal separately negotiated. This type of transactional land use process is precisely what neighborhoods groups in Los Angeles resist, leading to a climate of rightfully objected to development uncertainty.

A modern planned development ordinance can provide a needed tool for the zoning menu. As proposed, consolidation of the pluralistic variance process makes perfect sense. The use of a tool which can from a design perspective allow for creative urban design solutions for both residential and commercial projects also is wise. However, as propose the Planned Development Ordinance is too broad, not Los Angeles specific enough, particularly with, regard to its theoretical impact on residential neighborhoods, and written in a way that perpetuates the notion that development is only an economic transaction, not a social and design transaction as well.

To shape this tool so that it better fits the Los Angeles situation will require tinkering at both its core and its edges. First, the notion that commercial and/or mixed use development should be allowed in lower intensity neighborhoods should be dropped. Limited commercial intrusions should only be considered in perhaps R4 and R5 multifamily neighborhoods, and only with clearly defined concepts of what the design benefit is, i.e. public space, wider sidewalks, community centers, etc. At the same time, serious consideration should be given to limiting the establishment of Planned Development projects to ttransit oriented districts and within reasonable distances, perhaps a quarter of a mile from major transit corridors. This would in one stroke conserve vast tracts of land to residential only projects and probably build more support for passage of a Planned development ordinance. Restricting density to underlying land use intensities would also create more confidence that uncanny development juxtapositions would not be created nor jar neighborhood sensibilities.

Most important, assuming the design ordinance gets tweaked, more focus should be placed on the underlying historic intent of planned developments to be designed, high-quality developments. If the goal of a planned development is to first and foremost realize quality that can not be achieved under the normal statutes, don't immediately allow for increased density, breaking of height limits, etc., all under the guise of flexibility. This is development, not design flexibility. Accept the limits as they are and let designers, on parcels of all shapes and sizes, come up with creative and supportable ideas that mix up the existing puzzle of zoning towards better designed results. If the goal and objective is design flexibility and creativity respectively, why limit the ordinances to large parcels and large projects? This is inherently unfair and boxes out of existence the incremental type of beauty that is characteristic of many great cities and places, and especially defines the magic of Los Angeles.

Planned development is a concept that the City of Los Angeles should update and expand to encompass commercial and industrial areas as well as limited residential areas. The zoning code needs tools such as this that encourage design flexibility. However, as written the City's proposed planned development tool emphasizes development flexibility more than design flexibility and needlessly challenges the underlying logic that makes Los Angeles unique. At this moment in time, the ordinance should be taken back to the drawing board and adjusted so it becomes a tool worthy of the specific circumstances of the Los Angeles scene.

ABOUT JOHN CHASE ON THE OCCASION OF FORUM FEST 2011

2011-04-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

At this Forum Fest 2011, I have been asked to speak about John Chase. So many have written wonderfully of his personality, his sartorial predilections, his loves and greatest love, and even his sometimes difficulties, both professional and personal. John clearly was a captivating presence in our lives and we miss him. But rather than dwell again on loss, I want to concentrate on his legacy - his cogent everyday design intelligences that will continue to influence.

Through his writings and through knowledge of how these writings translated into design practices, we learn specific methods of observation, criticality, and design technique that mark a specific moment in the history of architecture and urban design. But these writings, taken as a whole, are not just timepieces, they are a call to design today and in the future with an exacting sense of social and cultural smartness, awareness, fairness, and openness to the full spectrum of forces that shape the contemporary urban scene in a contemporary American democracy.

John had many well-known mentors and teachers, David Gebhard, Esther McCoy, Charles Moore, Charles Jencks; a compendium of UC and UCLA influences and ideation of a now bygone era. While his writings are reflective of these individuals, there was one ephemeral presence, the author and educator John Beach, who John comes back to time and time again. In an afterword to “The Stucco Box”, an essay he co-authored with Beach, he talks about Beach’s approach. In Chase's words:

If high-art architecture supplies heroes; then John Beach, with his finding of equally cogent and complex products in the world of vernacular architecture, (such as the Drive-through Donut Hole in La Puente), supplied the other personae that any decent novel or movie requires: the fascinating villains and the memorable character actors. These Beachian universes made a compelling argument for considering high-art architecture as merely one part among others of a system of production and consumption of the built environment, rather than the top of a pyramidal value structure.

The drive through Donut Hole in La Puente, California memorialized by John Beach and John Chase.

In this fragment that celebrates Beach’s contribution to his education, John describes many of the themes that led him to an equanimous view of architecture in general and the Los Angeles urban landscape in particular; the importance of narrative, the capacity of Los Angeles movies to shape the actual landscape, suspicion of a singular avant-garde canon, fascination for the vernacular as well as the commercial and most important, and the potential for the commercial and the vernacular to be connected in the public mind and thereby realize a seamless and populist architectural and urban experience that is valued.

John Chase felt John Beach, more than any other individual, taught him to deliberately embrace parallel architectural story lines of both popular and elitist landscapes and see them as equals, a neat post-modern trick that exposes the full semiotic of the built environment, and that belies the cartoon image of this era, from the seventies through the nineties, and its architectural and urban works.

John took this Beachian approach as a starting point to observe the city and then related it to a deeper reading of the creation of the architecture and urbanism of Los Angeles (as well as Houston, San Jose, and finally Las Vegas). John Chase, utilizing simultaneous environmental and urban narratives, was able to see not only the narrowness and diminishment that results when an environment or a city is commercialized and consumed, but the possibilities for architects to engage these negative consumptive forces and turn them into something positive.

In another of his essays, “You are What You Buy”, he describes this process and the architect's role in ameliorating its negative impacts.

The intensely meaningful imagery and the shared public values that consumerist architecture harnesses endows it with conflicting powers. It is capable of producing architecture with genuine civic and public characteristics, but its manipulative exploitation of forms for commercial purposes tends to contradict and undermine this potential. The task for architects and designers of consumerist architecture is not to avoid the task of addressing consumerism, but rather to invest consumerist architecture with both traditional populist and architectural values.”

In John’s world, the architect, as well as the conscious individual, would always discover a sense of place through not only observation but practices of architecture, sometimes but not always designed by architects. He imagined these observations as critical and the practices that resulted as potentially uplifting. In this world, architects and individuals could always design, create something of value, even if the circumstances at first glance appeared reduced.

Thus John brought to his work, particularly his work as the urban designer for the City of West Hollywood, a sense of design hope and generosity. He could place himself in the shoes of architects and when they did not know how to respond to public demands encourage them to attend to start with acutely observed local needs and desires, and to do so within their personal design languages. But, he also could steer developers and individual property owners who presented casual efforts the work of the broadest range of architectural masters, pushing them to realize higher orders of aspiration. For John, and for those influenced by John, the world, architecture, and city design was rich with possibility because he could truck in all design traditions all at once; whether Neutra and Schindler, or Woolf and Dolena. The goal was always to realize an urban landscape of heightened intensity and richness, whatever the tradition and whatever the means.

John Chase reveled in the intelligence of period-style architecture and was one of the first contemporary architects to notice and write about James Dolena, an advocate in the 1930's through the 1950's of the stripped down, almost severely modern Hollywood Regency style. The public loved this architecture which still lies outside the canon of architectural history as typically taught in architecture schools.

I suspect that John's gravitation towards this particular type of intensity was shaped by his recognition and personal interest in supporting the right of the individuals to construct their own specific place and identity in the world. John worked hard to construct an identity for himself, a gay man in Los Angeles, and he connected this personal struggle to a larger belief that architecture could liberate the soul of the individual as well as society. For John, Los Angeles, with its grab bag of ever emerging diverse populations each seeking to construct a place of purpose, was the perfect American urban canvass to realize in a public manner personal rights – yet another theme that John returned to again and again. In his essay, “Knocking off the Knock-offs”, John describes the modeling and remodeling of single family homes in West Los Angeles as having a human importance that exemplifies the Jeffersonian idea of the pursuit of happiness. He writes in this essay;

The constant that has held for each era of miniature remodel has been the replacement of an outmoded or non-descript façade with a design that clearly conveyed that the occupant had made a conscious design choice to live life elegantly, by their own lights. Even if the results may not be to everyone’s tastes, surely the remodelers deserve credit for that all-American attempt to construct an identity by choosing among alternatives, to be self-made individuals by living behind a self-made façade.

Self-made identity, self-made façades, the construction of a free individual; these were ideas integral to John, both as an architect, an urban designer, and as person. This constant call for self-expression in the context of a polyglot urban environment was both an expression of how John lived his life, and an invitation to those he came in contact with to more closely observe cities, streets, and sidewalks, and thereby uncover the unexpected and discover through architecture and cityscapes the surprise of the urban. Indeed for John, life and architecture, with a small as well as a capital “A”, was a constant urban derive with positivist lessons.

A common complaint of those who reject what in essence is John Chase's post-modern approach to architectural diversity is that it somehow must eschews selectivity and thereby wallow in relativity. There is for them in this approach no ability to discriminate. For John Chase this could not, in both his ideas and practice, be further from the truth. In “How can I miss you when you won’t go away”, he points out that design discrimination is in the eye of the beholder, even as he describes how in American democracy, quality is derived from an open discussion that has to be based upon respect for all who participate. He writes here:

Just because there is no universally accepted worldview doesn’t mean that there are not sets of cosmological beliefs accepted by subsets of the public. Many well-defined sub-groups within America have strongly held worldviews, from fundamentalist religious sects to Hells Angels and members of the Thousand Oaks PTA. And despite the apparent diversity of belief among subgroups within the American public, one seems to find a surprisingly great coherence around matters of architectural form and its symbolism – as proved by the success of consumerist architecture. Works of architecture may begin as private statements of taste, but they inevitably become, to some degree, public artifacts that are part of everyone’s daily life.

When architecture becomes public, it becomes subject to the public will. At least in the United States this means the crush of public meetings and consequent public design decisions that John Chase spent the last decade and a half of his life managing with great skill and aplomb. In John’s urban design cosmology, quality, excellence, and endurance resulted, most of the time, both the capacity of the individual creator to amaze and stun through individual talents, as well as concise public discourse that either reified these talents, or told the talented to try harder to meet a public interest. From an interest in a self-constructed house and a self-constructed facade, John found himself the design stager of a self-constructed city, West Hollywood.

John Chase's work clearly is an homage to and extension of the “both/and” philosophy of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, but his is a projection that eschews the latter’s sense of irony and elitism in favor of the former’s love for the right of all to have a say in the production of urban heterogeneity, whatever the starting point. John reveled in architectural history but he took on the everyday world as it was. He did not need to distance himself from it through strategies of abstraction or elitism. He encouraged all to contribute, but most of all he encouraged all things urban and architectural to be debated, believing that the ugly and the bad would then surely become the good.

The everyday in design is best described as an attitudinal acknowledgement of inside to outside, bottom to top, observation of the daily, honoring of routine, respect for diversity, delight in multiplicity, revelation of the polyglot, equation of low with high, sensitivity to cycles and rhythms of weeks, days, nights, and seasons, simultaneity of past, present, and future, recognition of struggle, the knowing of history, making do and mashing up, acceptance of the feminine, the masculine, the ethnic, the queer, color and otherness; the everyday relates always the stuff of the environment to a sense of openness, fairness, and justice.

The everyday that John practiced in his professional and personal life allows all to state that I - the particular me - is alive, here, present. Try writing or designing architecture and cities with this as crutch and collar; not an easy task. Yet John was able to do it. For him no formal discipline or fixed set of values to fall back on; just query and critical projection and sorting through the consequences and opportunities of chance, in paranoid moments conspiracy, always looking for glimmers and gleans and finding thereby moments of pure clarity, clarity of human intelligence, clarity in history and memory, clarity in dreams of the future and through all clarity in architecture and urban design.

Perhaps I just described one aspect of John Chases’ theory of the everyday. But more accurately, perhaps the theory of the everyday which resulted in Everyday Urbanism was in large part a result of the manner by which John, at first unknowingly, but later most deliberately, lived his life and lived his work. His was a consciously constructed life, a consciously constructed façade that resulted in a uniquely American identity. This John Chase endures in my heart and in my practice, and for these lessons - so richly taught with smiles, winks, half-whispered secrets, tours, walks, conferences, studios, breakfasts, lunch, and dinners, and enduring essays - I am most grateful.

John Chase's collective essays can be found in Glitter Stucco & Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City (Verso, New York, 2000).

Seen and Architecture 4 - Critique Those Plans

2011-01-04T21:26:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hawthorne has a point to make when he states in his December 30, 2010 review of planning in Los Angeles that, "...the extra-large deals always seem to get hammered out...while a more thoughtful, forward-looking and comprehensive brand of planning continues to lag behind, underfunded and undervalued." He is also not wrong to note in this article about the proposed AEG stadium next to Staples Center in Downtown Los Angeles that much of this city is planned one project at a time. As a result, it is difficult to often understand how the pieces add up to a larger urban whole.

But I am not so sure, as Hawthorne states, that there has been a "lack of strong and coherent planning creating a vacuum into which powerful individuals - developers, moguls, patrons and even architects - have rushed". Rather, I would argue that there has been a surfeit of political leadership in Los Angeles that has too consistently chosen to ignore, over ride, not be aware of, not be serious about, and/or contravene a plethora of plans and urban design concepts, some very good.

There are many plans in Los Angeles that the public as a whole is mostly unaware of; the Westwood Specific Plan, the Park Mile Specific Plan, the Downtown Urban Design Guidelines, the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan, the Playa Vista Master Plan, to name just five. Each was done utilizing large amounts of public input over long durations of time, and each, even accounting for sometimes inappropriate variances allowed by City officials, has managed to establish a modicum of place that marks each of these areas as distinct.

There is also in Los Angeles constant tweaking of the zoning code that directly impacts the shape of this City. In recent years there have been major debates about signage, hillside housing, and mixed-use accessory zones. At present there are major debates about adult residential care facilities and their impact on single family neighborhoods. A bit over a decade ago the City adopted a new General Plan Framework that directed growth to boulevards. Ten years before that Zev Yaroslovsky sponsored a referendum that reduced density along these same corridors. In the past three decades Metro and its predecessors have planned and implemented 80 miles of rail transit and the largest bus rapid transit program in the country. The 30/10 effort promises to greatly add to these planned mass transit totals.

Within the region there is also no lack of planning and urban design to both talk about and possibly review. The City of Pasadena and Santa Monica are both considered to be national models of planning innovation and have implemented many strong, innovative, and demanding plans. The recently adopted Land Use and Circulation Element in Santa Monica, not without controversy, is one of the most design-oriented and detailed general plans ever adopted in the State of California. Pasadena's Civic Center Specific Plan went through years of public debate and reinforces and builds upon the success of Old Town Pasadena, again a planned effort. This same City adopted the City of Gardens standards, three times. More recently, the City of Santa Ana adopted one of the most ambitious form-based zoning ordinances in the country.

Ironically considering the point of Hawthorne's Times piece, a lot of developers think that Los Angeles, and the smaller cities that surround it, are chock full of plans and overlapping regulations that both shape their projects to too great a degree and at the same time choke them. The truth of the situation is probably somewhere in between my overly enthusiastic belief in the efficacy and impact of the planning that is being done and Hawthorne's sense that Los Angeles never passed a plan soon enough.

Given just how much planning and urban design work is out there, I do wish that newspapers like the Los Angeles Times covered it to a greater degree. In fact, I think that Christopher Hawthorne should cover it to a greater degree. By covering it I mean really digging into the ideas that are being generated, critiquing the numerous draft guidelines and documents while they are before the public, celebrating the codes that win prizes, and most important, calling out as mediocre the planning and urban design stuff that just doesn't cut it.

Perhaps this is not Hawthorne's job. He is, after all, the architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, not the planning and urban design critic. Still, he has to his credit steadily related the state of planning Los Angeles to the state of its urbanism and its architecture. At this point it is time to go one step further and concentrate to a greater degree on the specificity and details of the plans and codes that are being produced, put them in their proper place, and define more often the nexus between them and the architecture and environments that result. It is even more vital to describe when the planning and the architecture are at variance with the plans and why this is ok, or not.

Contrary to opinion, Los Angeles and the region are flooded with plans, some good, some not, and it is time the plans, the urban design concepts, and the citizens, leaders, and indeed planners and designers behind these plans get more exposure, and as necessary more grief, for the work that is actually being undertaken everyday.

Seen and Architecture 3: So Long to Pinkberry

2011-01-03T21:39:00.000-08:00

I must confess I was not sad when I noticed that the Pinkberry on Larchmont Boulevard had vaporized over the holiday, vacated, gone, cute metal facade dismantled and shipped off for scrap, only a forlorn 25' wide yellow stucco facade with show window and Herculite glass door covered with brown paper and awaiting the next tenant who will pay way too much rent for the privilege of selling something you really don't need, or need to eat. My misanthropic feeling at the demise of this shop had little to do with the quality of the Pinkberry product; I confess I stopped and bought a frozen yogurt or two during the store's duration on my neighborhood shopping street. I do the same thing when I visit the beach, or Mackinaw Island. However, Larchmont is not really a tourist destination. Or is it?

No, rather than disappointed at a vacancy, perhaps a sign of the ever collapsing local economy, I saw it as an optimistic sign that maybe every corner and nook in Los Angeles, or at least in my neighborhood, was not doomed to be another trendy chain, all brand and no soul, another venture that made my street that much closer to being like every other mall and every other street.

At one time there were lines of eager patrons on the sidewalk in front of Pinkberry jostling to get in, waiting for a tart treat. But even early on, even as Pinkberry was expanding like Starbucks onto numerous corners throughout the wedge of Los Angeles I call home, I noticed grumblings. I have now reached the age where brand cool is not defined by what I think or what I do, but by what my daughter consumes. In this regard at least Pinkberry was quickly supplanted by Yogurtland, a storefront that occupied decidedly more humble settings on La Brea Boulevard, one mile to the west. Even as Larchmont became more polished, more slick, more full of "shoppes", each trying to appeal to a local demographic in the hopes of defining a national brand - for me an empty vessel of a neighborhood street - La Brea somehow became more authentic. The kids got it and the lines moved to another neighborhood that wasn't quite so shiny and predictable.

Larchmont is left with is one more empty storefront. There are quite a few these days, the result of real estate speculation hell bent on defining the street as a mini-Robertson Boulevard. Perhaps the property owners and the commercial brokers and the brand concept marketers are right, this is the street to be on. For those of you who need a frozen Larchmont delight you could try Twirl (again, frozen yogurt), or Baciami (gelato), or the old standby Baskin Robbins, and prove them right. Yet, on December 1, 2010 there were four icie treat purveyors on one longish block in the middle of a wealthy upper middle class community in the middle of Los Angeles, and that was finally one too many.

Is it any wonder we are overweight and have an ever-increasing incidence of diabetes? And what about the children? I am not that far from young dadhood and my memory at least was struggling to control sugary temptations. Now Larchmont is a street that is increasingly all temptations all the time. It has all the quality of a food court, a quality food court, but a food court nevertheless. I want to think that the burghers of Pinkberry looked up and down Larchmont and came to the conclusion that their brand would suffer if they remained. So, in this fantasy at least, they took off to pinker more authentic pastures. And, now that they are not in my backyard, I might finally seek them out.

Seen and Architecture 2: The Big Red Loop

2011-01-02T16:12:00.000-08:00

Looking over Lake Hollywood on a rainy day and imagining a Red Line loop from Hollywood to Burbank, Glendale, and then along the Los Angeles River to Union Station.

For about fifteen years now there has been a focused discourse in the design professions about infrastructure. Infrastructure, that dimension of urbanism that for more that half a century has been the almost exclusive domain of engineers. Infrastructure, the stuff of highways, sewers, high-tension electrical grids, fiber optic networks, etc. Infrastructure has become a fashionable pursuit of designers. A quick trip to an architectural book store such as William Stout in San Francisco or Hennessy and Ingalls in Los Angeles will unveil a plethora of magazines, books, and pamphlets, each extolling the opportunities of infrastructural urbanism. In these design manifestos, more often than not, infrastructure, often buried, is made manifest, and designed and writ large over the city landscape.

Infrastructural schemes for giant parks, buildings as landscape, or the ad-infinitum insect-like meta-structures self-constructing themselves on top of the topos are at once visions of the future and expressions of a desire by designers to re-engage city building beyond the four walls of an individual building or the fence-line of an open space or park. In an age of climate change, population explosion, dire poverty, fabulous wealth, and with more than half of the world's people now living in cities, designers want a piece of the extra large construction pie. The profusion of infrastructural drawings, schemes, and concepts connect the design of cities with the design professions who have largely, even today, been left out of the infrastructural decision-making tree.

I will admit to a bit of cynicism when I see many of the ideas that purport to show a designed-by- architects infrastructural future. Too often the extra-large scale of the ideas, the magical thinking with regard to materials and structure, the naivety with regard to any understanding of resource requirements, all combine to make it too easy to dismiss the visions as utopian, i.e. nowhere. Yet this impulse to describe a future, and do it in terms of a drawing or model, can not be totally discounted because aesthetics has the capacity to bring the challenges and optimism of progress towards a more livable city to the foreground, and allows even those of us with somewhat Luddite everyday tendencies to re-imagine for the better the place where we live.

Today, my freind Nevin and I took a hike in the rain, wind, and cold from the top of Beachwood Canyon to the Hollywood Sign. While the clouds were low and the atmosphere damp, nevertheless the views were long and wide below the gray cover. One could see all of the mountains through the mists for a distance of up to seventy miles. Below us sprawled all of greater Los Angeles; the spine of Wilshire, the clusters and concentrations of Hollywood, Glendale, Burbank, Downtown, Century City, and beyond were all visible. Our center for these panoramas of course was that great stretch of open space, Griffith Park and its wilderness surrounds. From its peak we could see and imagine the whole city at once. The rain in our faces only made the intensity of the moment more acute. We were standing at the navel point of Los Angeles infrastructural urbanism. At that moment a flash came into my head, an infrastructural snapping that while divorced from the parametric meanderings of advanced architecture and landscape urbanism logics, was nevertheless dependent upon their constructs and insights.

I imagined that the Metro Red Line subway did not terminate in North Hollywood. Rather, after its journey from Downtown to Hollywood, and then north along Lankershim Boulevard, the train turned east on Chandler Boulevard, an abandoned rail-right-of-way, and rolled on and into Burbank. Once in Burbank the train could turn north, again on existing heavily used rail roads, and head to Bob Hope Airport, or, turn south and link to Glendale running parallel to both San Fernando Road and the Los Angeles River. On this journey soon enough our subway crosses the Glendale Freeway and heads towards the confluence of the Los Angeles waterway with the Arroyo Seco. We pass Taylor Yards, the new Los Angeles State Historic Park, and the Cornfields, all subjects of planning studies that imagine redevelopment of historic rail yards into places of work, living, and play. Moving further south the trains curls home into Union Station, refinding its starting point and completing a grand Red Line loop; a loop that can be easily imagined from the roof of Griffith Park.

The completion of this infrastructural dream would hardly be inexpensive, but it has a type of material pragmatism that is approachable over the course of two or three or five decades. It ties together Downtown, Hollywood, Burbank and Glendale, along with numerous other communities, with some of the largest undertakings in the Los Angeles basin, such as the Los Angeles River Master Plan.

In many ways this is a modest proposal. While I am sure I am not the first person to imagine this, the impact of such a proposal, its ability to change the way we experience the urbanism of Los Angeles, the manner that completed infrastructure allows for intensification in new neighborhoods and conservation in older communities, is as big as any bloburb drawn or illustrated in a book. While one can be at first dismissive of designers that draw infrastructural visions that look unobtainable, the culture of the extra-large, as exemplified by the imagining of a giant Los Angeles loop below and at-grade, has the capacity to make even those of us who think from the ground up, and from the inside to the outside, conceive of neccessary ways to build and rebuild at giant increments of scale and scope previously unexplored and unimagined.

Seen and Architecture 1: Same Old Same Old

2011-01-01T14:28:00.000-08:00

The Metro bus stop at Wilshire Boulevard, Fremont Place, and Rossmore Avenue in Los Angeles, California.

I love our community newspaper, the Larchmont Chronicle. Even though I live in the second largest city in the United States, Los Angeles, and am a daily and faithful reader of the Los Angeles Times, if one wants to know what's happening in this city's Mid-Wilshire, Miracle Mile, Hancock Park, and my neighborhood Brookside, communities, you need to peruse the Chronicle. Here one can find the local crime blotter, news from each of the schools in the area, advertisements for Mom and Pop stores, comings and goings of an increasingly diverse Hancock Park social set, and, at least in the past, my favorite, the columns of the irreplaceable and now deceased, Mr. Blackwell.

Jane Gilman, the editor, also publishes letters that reflect well the fears and hopes of community residents. These tend, at least in my opinion, to run the gamut of present day NIMBY-ism. Over and over the letters bespeak a sense that things are just fine the way they are in our little town, or more accurately the way they were; nothing should change.

For the first issue of the new year Jane publishes a letter titled, "Lack of lanes", by Tony Medley, a resident of Fremont Place. Fremont Place is a gated and secured cul-de-sac of private streets off of Wilshire Boulevard, features turn-of-the-20th Century mansions as well as upper middle class homes, and is a quiet "Model T" suburb amidst the bustle of a still intensifying city. While Fremont Place is a defining feature of the Wilshire Boulevard landscape as one travels east and west along this major thoroughfare past the southern terminus of Rossmore/Vine Street, few actually cross through its threshold and behold its broad green lawns and architectural treasures.

On several occasions I have used the bus stop located at Rossmore and Wilshire at Fremont Place's main gate. Mostly one sees working people waiting at this stop, many of whom no doubt serve the local gentry who live beyond the guard station. I doubt too many of the residents of this community have actually ever taken a bus, which brings me to Mr. Medley's thoughts.

Mr. Medley states in his note to the Chronicle that he is, "astounded that there isn't more outrage about Los Angeles' plan to destroy Wilshire Boulevard by taking two lanes away during rush hour, limiting them to the buses." He goes on to describe his chagrin in conspiratorial tones using words and phrases such as, "intentionally refused to repave the street, "I don't think politicians think for one minute", "far too important an issue to be left to a few politicians", and a "foolish idea"; perhaps he has a point, but on second thought no.

Mr. Medley has gotten on this bus way too late and more unfortunate expressed his outrage in an inflaming manner that assumes elected officials, professional planners and engineers, and citizens who have taken the time to testify for, and sometimes against, this forthcoming improvement, must all be stupid, despite having attended, or attended to, the dozens of public meetings (at least three meetings were held just blocks from Mr. Medley's home), the long process, the massive number of public documents, the alternative discussions, and on and on.

Where was this guy for the past ten years while this project was discussed and planned? Why is my local newspaper giving Medley, who is fortunate enough to live behind gates that shut the City and its problems out, an opportunity to express an opinion that is not in the least informed by the facts of the situation? His is an attitude that undermines civil discourse about the the design of the City. His very late thoughts are a manner of negative expression that does does not contribute to the design and making of a better City, only stasis. This is an attitude that is presumptuous in its sense of entitlement, shooting from the hip without ever looking up a website, attending a public meeting, or reading a fact sheet. This is raw and misguided NIMBY-ism expressed in its most problematic form.

I respect the right of anyone to disagree. My experience is that most of the time disagreement about the design of a city leads to better more thoughtful place-making. At the same time, each of us who choose to contribute to these public discourses have an obligation to at least in a cursory manner learn about the issue before we shoot off our mouths. And, newspapers who are stewards of public discourse, should think twice before publishing an opinion, regardless of whether they agree with it or disagree with it, without providing some context, or insisting that the writer demonstrate some sense of grounding in the issue at hand.

I think it is amazing that after ten years, exploration of many alternative approaches, implementation of a pilot bus lane project in West Los Angeles that failed to persuade people of the efficacy of rush hour restrictions in this part of town, the opting out of the bus lane option by other communities along the route, that nevertheless progress towards more efficient rapid bus transit was achieved that will shave many minutes off the commute.

I know the young people in my office who ride the bus will appreciate this. I know the thousands upon thousands of working people and commuters who use the Wilshire Rapid Bus will appreciate this. And, I know that some people who drive their cars during rush hour on Wilshire Boulevard will be certainly inconvenienced between 7:00 AM and 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM and 7:00 PM. This is urban compromise, and compromise we must in the big city.

Whatever its limitations and compromises, the Wilshire bus lane represents a positive evolution of Los Angeles towards a city where public infrastructure, such as streets, is reconfigured to better serve more of the public. While Mr. Medley, and the editors of the Larchmont Chronicle - who hopefully unwittingly published his letter - may not agree from an individual perspective, even they will benefit if increased numbers of Angelinos are able to move quickly, in smart and sexy buses, east and west along this aptly named "Fabulous Boulevard" (see Ralph Hancock's 1949 eponymous book).

Ten Things I May Have Learned Today

2010-11-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

Mayors discussing urbanism on 11/15/10 at the Villa Galilee in Zefat, Israel.

Today I was not so much a traveler as a listener (and sometimes contributor). For close to twelve hours I was immersed in the first of two days of discussions regarding development, redevelopment, urban design, planning, financing, branding, transit and traffic planning, affordable housing, and the politics of city design - in Israel. While I was asked my opinion of the four city schemes we were presented, my opportunity was to listen and learn about how a very different urban environmental design culture works, or in some cases does not.

Here are ten unformed observations in no particular order or hierarchy.

There is a 100% tariff on new cars imported into Israel. Not surprisingly there are at present one-third the cars per capita as there are in the United States, yet I am told that government policies push development out to the periphery of the country where there is poor transit service; thus encouraging more car ownership and the consequences of ever more sprawl.
Countering the prospects for future sprawl, Israel is building both trains and light-rail systems. Bus rapid transit is also being adopted. I observed and heard about bus-only lanes in the middle of roads and through the center of cities respectively. Jitneys are also a popular form of transit. I saw, while stuck in a traffic jam, police stop a 10-person jitney for utilizing an empty bus-only lane. I guess jitneys are not yet recognized as mass transit. Policies that relate urban form to transit are chaotic, with simultaneous expansion of all system types, including the single-occupant vehicle, and little rigor with regard to the niceties of transit-oriented development or the location of station stops. Still, with all this transit construction, the country is aggressively anticipating the realization of a "multi-modal" future.
Israel fosters for better and for worse "towers in a park" suburbanism. I saw several examples of new project proposals replete with towers, unprogarmmed green swaths, cul-de-sacs, and island-like urban definition where nothing was connected to nothing.
There is no tax increment financing, local redevelopment agencies, complex financial tools, or even a great deal of awareness of the complex real estate mechanisms that are at the root of American development practices. On the other hand, the mortgage market did not collapse here and there are cranes and development expectations everywhere.
Housing in Tel Aviv is phenomenally expensive. But, outside of a couple of pockets scattered elsewhere, housing is often cheap, encouraging further disbursement of urbanism into a diminishing countryside. "Affordable" housing as practiced in the United States, with all of its its incentives, subsidies, financing mechanisms, and types, is little known here.
People get nervous as opposed to excited about the art of the deal as practiced by captains of American real estate development like Donald Trump. Deals quickly become moral dilemmas as much as development dilemmas. Maybe that is a good thing.
Sustainability is not quite the impulse, fad, or framework that is familiar to those that design and develop in California. However, its coming. Israel will probably wean itself from foreign oil long before the United States. On a small scale, I saw Platanus Racemosa (California Sycamore) street trees being utilized because of their drought resistance (and lovely deciduous canopy), flipping on its head for me the notion of the definition of Mediterranean landscape.
There are fewer checks and balances to the development process as much of it is top down, from the central government to the local jurisdiction, with little or cursory input and participation into decision-making. On the other hand, centralized planning is a good thing when you think it is good for you (and a bad thing when you are convinced it is not).
The design of Israel, if you will, is still influenced by the legacy of the socialist founders and governments, left and right, that shape urban and development policy to this day. Another way of saying it is that they are designing their country and are even at times critical of its design. I am not sure anybody is as actively designing or at the top levels actively criticizing the design of the United States.
Religious people, religious neighborhoods, and design for minorities are delicately spoken factors influencing the shaping of urban growth as well as urban form expectations. In some ways this is akin to working with equivalent communities in the United States, but there is much less confidence that outcomes can be salutary.

Outside of the city centers, and utilizing the above assumptions, Israelis have adopted a type of car-oriented sprawl that is perhaps a bit too formless given the uniqueness of this environment. Of course, one can not forget that one sees this type of environment aspired to all around the globe. The whole purpose of conferences such as these is to reveal our assumptions and then aspire to something more specific.

Good City Form Versus The Daily News

2010-11-14T21:52:00.000-08:00

Khán-i-'Avámid, also known as the Inn of the Columns was built in 1784 when Akko, Israel was under the rule by of the Ottoman Empire. Does this architecture bear the moral failings of its political times or is it an artifact of typology that transcends temporal concerns?

I am lucky enough to be attending, as a "resource team" member, the second Israeli Mayor's Institute on City Revitalization. Based upon a similar program developed two decades ago in the United States by the National Endowment for the Arts, the program brings together Mayors who have a design, development, or environmental design challenge, with experts in a broad range of environmental design fields, from real estate economics, to affordable housing, to urban design and architecture.

During the conference, each Mayor is given approximately an hour and one-half to present their challenge and receive immediate input and response from both the experts and their fellow mayors. One could think of it as a type of city design "pecha kucha" with feedback. I have attended three of these sessions in the United States and always been impressed with how seriously the Mayor's present their cases, listen, and much work is accomplished.

In the United States their is a long tradition of presenting and listening and considering in the course of the city design process. This planning tradition, while not unique in the United States, and not always perfect for sure, is at this point an export service that people in other lands, including Israel, are curious about. Does it translate? How does it need to be modified to meet a different culture with different constraints and opportunities and expectations? One of my main interests in participating in this conference here is Zefat is to garner some insights into these questions. Our first session here in Zefat certainly made me think.

When you put nine mayors of Israeli city's in a room and ask them to each briefly introduce and present the vision of their city, they, like mayor's in the United States, with great pride tell you about the growth patterns, the beautiful settings and opportunities, the reasons their towns are attractive to business, etc. I certainly learn a lot about places I have either never been to or only have spent an afternoon in. For instance, on our drive to Zefat, my hosts were kind enough to take me to four of the eight cities that are the subject of this conference and show me first hand the settings that are the subjects of our session. While touching and feeling a place is priceless when you are about to make recommendations, hearing a city described by it's mayor has no equal when you are trying to appreciate the context.

Through the first eight presentations here in Zefat, all was quite familiar, at least as regards the form of the conversation. Each Mayor would present their materials, typically with more emphasis on the opportunities they were developing than the challenges they were facing. Then, in our case, the mayor of our host city was given the opportunity to both welcome fellow mayors and tell us all a bit about the town we are ensconced in on a mountain top.

Zefat, is a religious city where Rabbi's, mystics, and the faithful have come for centuries. It is also a tourist town set in the mountains overlooking the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights. Pre-1948, the town contained a large Arab population which fled during bitter fighting upon the declaration of Israeli independence.

The Mayor of this city was describing some of its challenges, which include moving a growing university. He also described how he spent much of his time trying to calm tensions between Jewish and Arab students and stresses between the religious people who live in the city and these same students. I am being purposely vague here because I heard all of this through translation and know I do not know the beginnings of what is a very complex situation with cultural and social dimensions beyond my present understandings.

Instead, what I can describe is what I observed, a quick shift in the conversation from the dynamics of city design to its nexus with spatial politics. Should the University be placed outside of town as a means to remove the tensions? Should Israeli Mayor's get more support from the regional and national governments to address these types of contestable issues? Is the national government paying too much attention to addressing these issues at the international level and not attending to the facts on the ground? The conversation quickly heated up, ever sharper points of view were exchanged, and a discussion about city design was all of a sudden a discussion, from this American's point of view, about the Middle East - in real time, in real place, in reality.

Our facilitator, Dror Gershon, the director of the Israeli Movement for Urbanism, did a wonderful job trying to keep everybody on topic. But still, social and ethnic tensions are ever present just beneath the surface. At one point towards the end of he conversation he turned to me, and said John, "do you have anything to say?" Talk about being put on the spot. I suggested that good city form has been created throughout history by both the most democratic societies and the most oppressive societies. I further stated that while there would always be a clear nexus between the form of the city and discussions of equality, morality, and politics, it was possible to discuss means of improving cities and good city form independent of politics. Or is it I wondered, even as I spoke.

While speaking I was reminding myself of two mentors; one from books and one a teacher. Aldo Rossi, in the "Architecture of the City", discusses cities as built artifacts through which uses, memories, and lives flow across time. One day a building is a prison, the next it is a school. Everyday it is a building, and in that sense at least has a type of autonomy that transcends the present, embodies memories, and teaches lessons the architect must learn from. My teacher, the architectural historian Vincent Scully, in response to my youthful insistence that architecture had a moral dimension, gently chided me saying that people are guilty, architecture is innocent. From both of these points of view one can separate the political and moral dilemmas of a Mayor in Israel from essential principles of good city form.

Still, a part of me believes that a city is also the accumulation of thousands of individual decisions, and each of these do have moral dimensions. Clearly, mayor's in Israel, indeed mayor's everywhere, can not and do not make decisions about the design of the environment in social and political vacuums. Here in Israel, the liquid surface of environmental urban design is immediately rippled by the currents of the daily news, and creating cities is not easily separated from the tensions of nation building.

It's The Scale Stupid

2010-11-13T14:27:00.000-08:00

A storefront seen in Tel Aviv, Israel after an eighteen hour flight on 11/13/10. The level of detail established by recessed entry, illuminated sidewalk, street side decor, and lighting, creates a sense of rich and vital texture. The first impression of this city; human-scale and vital intricacy is everywhere present.

In my very first (and as it turned out only) job interview upon graduating from architecture school, the Associate Dean of a college of architecture asked me what I thought of my possible future home, Houston, Texas. This was a trap of a question on many counts. How can one answer it correctly when I had been off the plane for all of two hours? At that point my knowledge of Houston was confined to the view of the City seen from the back seat of a taxi zipping from the airport to a hotel. The question was clearly a trap. In those days, and even today, the view from the freeway is a view of giant billboards, traffic, big steamy sky and a surreal skyline jutting above planes. You never experience anything that remotely resembles a traditional town. This type of urban experience was not and is not what most people strive to create. I certainly had not been taught to appreciate this schema of things in graduate school. However, my first impression was that I liked it. The Associate Dean had a perverse sense of urban humor as well. We ho it off. I got the job and the rest is as they say history.

As a traveler, first impressions are about all you have, and your sense of good and bad is pretty instinctual and pure. You either get it and like the place you have just arrived at or you don't. Part of the adventure of travel is the freedom to form these types of often uninformed and off-the-cuff judgments. However, there is usually a thread of truth in them. Understanding more clearly this thread provides a richer clue as to why you might return a second time.

In the case of Tel Aviv, I am just hours into my second visit, and this journey started much like the first. I arrived after dark at the airport, was met by a freind, driven to my hotel, took a shower, and then was taken on a long looping night walk (with dinner) about the city. If the first time I marveled at the 1930's architecture, the street life, and the paving details, as well as the cultural sophistication of the place, this time I realized that it was the scale that makes this place so unique. The original planners and designers in the early to mid-twentieth century seem to have stumbled on some magic formula of width, depth, height, massing, bulk, transparency, open space, boulevard versus street, etc. that is just about perfect in generating a joyful sidewalk-oriented and vibrant urbanism.

There are many places in the world where you see this type of organic street life where there is a mysterious fit between the activity of the street and the size and scope of the supporting buildings but few, and none that I can recall off the top of my head, were as consciously planned as Tel Aviv. In the coming days I hope to get out on the streets of this city and experience this scale in a bit more depth and understand it as both impressionistic experience and formula. First impressions matter; here in Tel Aviv its the scale stupid.

A Substantive Design Man: John Leighton Chase, 1953 - 2010

2010-08-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

John Chase in 2008 on a tour of South LA.

John Chase, best known to many as urban designer for the City of West Hollywood for the past 14 years – even as he was recorder of all things architectural throughout Los Angeles – passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on Friday, Aug. 13. Over the next few weeks and months I will be re-reading his many articles, essays, and books not only to keep alive his memory but to remind myself of his vivacious and educative voice, which was at once keen, enthusiastic, insightful, humorous, sardonic, always observant, attentive to his audience (whether it was a crowd or just an individual), and loving.

John Chase grew up in South Pasadena and as a consequence had a head start in understanding the Southland and all things L.A. – and I mean all things. Over the course of 30 years he not only developed expertise in the canonical histories of design and planning in this region, he expanded this envelope to include architectural types and urban experiences that remain invisible to too many practitioners and academics. John’s important early book, Exterior Decoration: Hollywood’s Inside-Out Houses, explored the dynamics of what much later came to be called queer space. A later essay, The Giant Revolving (Winking) Chicken Head and the Doggie Drinking Fountain: Making Small Distinctive Public Spaces on Private Land by Using Commonplace Objects synchronized Jane Jacobs urbanism with contemporary forms of street culture. In Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: reflections on building production in the vernacular city, John expanded his reach to include dingbats, six-packs and all aspects of Los Angeles’s everyday topos. Most recently, with James Rojas, he explored the influence of Latino culture on the transformation of public and private space in The Painted Sign Pictures of Latino Los Angeles.

John was able to expound upon all of these subjects because he was a Los Angeles flaneur without equal. But John was also a practicing architect who embedded his love of this city’s traditions in startlingly knowing forms. Like his writing, his built work exulted in fascination with the specific identity, signs, and symbols of place. His buildings were designed like explanatory essays and like him, they loved to explicate in beautifully wrought detail that dripped with wit, flow, and double entendre. His Jacobs studio project of 1988, a revisioning of the classic American bungalow, was widely published and it demonstrated well that one could realize a fascinating contemporary form within the guise of the history of architecture.

When John gave up his design practice and joined the City of West Hollywood as its first urban designer, I was at first surprised given how much joy he took in the design of individual objects. But his was a natural progression for someone who wanted to work on a larger stage, was acutely political in all of his viewpoints – design or otherwise – and deeply identified with the movement of neighborhoods, gays and lesbians, small business owners, recent immigrants, and others that culminated in the founding of this city. Here he could seek to influence the form of a city through the nudging of multitudinous and incremental acts of architecture. John mustered his architectural skills, his vast knowledge of Los Angeles environmental design, his capacity to write, his joy of design debate, and his passion for libratory democratic politics to become a consummate professional advocate for what Kevin Lynch described as the “good city” - in this case the good city of West Hollywood.

The City of West Hollywood has gone through a remarkable transformation since its founding 25 years ago. The redesign of Santa Monica Boulevard, the creation of numerous small parks, the implementation of the Sunset Specific Plan (which John initially advocated for and influenced as a citizen volunteer), the construction of the new library, and this town’s steady emphasis on design excellence and creativity in each new act of building all bear the imprint of John’s daily efforts and design intelligence. Yet John would have been the first to acknowledge that urban design is teamwork. John loved, though admittedly could also be frustrated by, the intricacies of working with an evolving cast of planners, politicians, and architects to create a more beautiful and sustainable West Hollywood.

During the course of his years at the city, John never gave up writing, lecturing, befriending, mentoring, and cajoling others to recognize the potential of design to bring people together through infinite acts, at times infinitesimally small acts, of everyday beauty. He was a motivating force behind the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, a board member of the fledgling Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles, a board member of the Westside Urban Forum, a steady long time co-chair of the American Institute of Architects Urban Design Committee, and an organizer of countless symposiums, lectures, and tours. John was at the center of design thinking in Los Angeles. Everybody knew him, everybody turned to him, everybody wanted and needed him to be a part of their Los Angeles design conversation because he was simply the best, the most opinionated, and the most accurate observer of the Los Angeles scene and its making.

On a personal note, I was privileged to work with John as well as Margaret Crawford on writing and editing Everyday Urbanism, first published in 1999 and then republished last year in an expanded version. John was always ready to spend hours looking at mini-malls, Latino wall murals, or the contents of garbage cans, and simultaneously without pause and from the back seat of a car relating these to the writings of de Certeau, Banham, Lynch, Gebhard, Davis; you name it; he was an urban design encyclopedia on two legs. His continuous committment to, no insistence on incorporating the margins of urbanism into the canon of city design widened our scope to include the entire vastness of the everyday city as exemplified in the landscape of Los Angeles. Most importantly he could always feel the everyday as a first inspiration towards the making of a more humane, democratic, responsive, creative, beautiful, and non-doctrinaire urban environment that serves all.

To figure out the full legacy of John Chase and its impact on the Los Angeles design and planning scene would take not only the careful rereading of his published writings but the careful culling of the thousands of memorandums, letters, and emails, he wrote in the course of his daily work. At the very least there should be a quick effort to conserve these for they are an accurate record of the design maturation of Los Angeles from a thousand villages in search of a city to a great city that seeks to preserve its villages.

To resort to a complete cliché, there are a thousand stories in the big city and John had the capacity to appreciate, tell, and even make up all thousand all at once. This is his genius. He was the perfect post-modern man of substance, respecting and balancing the multiplicitous, complex, contradictory, and parallel identities and narratives of Los Angeles’ unique urbanism. The opposite of an essentialist, his was a voice that sought out, celebrated, recorded, and then sought to design the polymorphous and the polycentric.

For 30 years John was at the forefront of showing and telling Los Angeles’ many stories and urbanisms. By holding them all with joy simultaneously in his head, voice, and heart, he was a design leader whose gift was to show, tell, and envision the everyday city where there is a place, a street, and a special home for each of us.

A version of this article first appeared in California Planning and Development Report.

Stimulating Ecologies of Design

2009-07-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

President Obama signing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
on February 18, 2009 with Vice President Joe Biden looking over his shoulder.

I have been pondering the ‘‘American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009’, known also as the Stimulus Package, Recovery Act, or ARRA. At the national level, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) expressed strong support for this legislation and I know of no organized opposition on the part of architects or the broader design community to the concepts that underlie ARRA. Still, many architects I know question the bill that was signed into law. They quietly express concerns about the prospects for architecture, architecture work, and design culture, especially if a second round of stimulus, based upon the same assumptions as the first round, is proposed.

For me, questioning the scope, if not the intent of the stimulus began when in early 2009 I attended “Grassroots”, AIA’s annual lobbying day in Washington DC. At this gathering AIA positions are introduced to component leaders by national staff. Then, architects go meet elected officials and their staffs, present “our” ideas, and lobby for action.

This year the timing was perfect. As a chapter president, I, along with hundreds of other architects, advocated passage of ARRA just days before its passage. We visited our congress members and were given the opportunity to sit in the House and Senate chambers and see these bodies debate a nearly completed bill. I felt privileged to see and participate in the making of history.

ARRA delivers almost a trillion dollars of spending. It is divided into broad themes including increased spending on transportation, support for education, improvement of educational facilities, mortgage relief, housing production, greening of buildings, energy sustainability, and energy independence. Looking closely at the range of programs proffered, there are dollars injected into almost every Federal department and program. President Obama claims millions of jobs will be preserved or created.

All this, one would hope, would be helpful to out-of-work architects and designers. But I do not get the sense from most of the architects I speak to that they are feeling more secure, sense that their prospects are improving, or that the Recovery Act, as passed, has much in it for them. Anecdotes and quick review of public documents thus form the basis for a critical narrative. Indeed, this narrative started being constructed in Washington DC last February.

There was a distinct sense conveyed to us by Congressional staff, regardless of political affiliation, that the Stimulus Package was a cobbled together potpourri of unfunded programs. They further stated that it would to be passed outside of the context of local wishes. In one Congressional office we were shown an early version of the City of Los Angeles’ recovery list which was described to us as unfocused, silly, and unhelpful.

As architecture is typically specific to a particular locale, the critique of the Los Angeles input, indeed the nearly uniform rejection by Congress of the suggestions made by Mayors from across the country, did not inspire confidence on my part that there would be much emphasis in the Stimulus Package on design and planning. Instead, ARRA’s emphasis on support for “shovel-ready” projects, it’s concentration on repair of roads, bridges and water systems (surely needed but hardly visionary), and most important it’s minimal funding of locally based advanced planning and design suggested that design would have virtually no role in this component of the recovery.

Later, Los Angeles’ wish list was revised and made shovel-friendly. Thus the lion’ share of announced stimulus spending in Los Angeles for physical improvements, close to 45% of the total, is going towards the construction of high occupancy vehicle lanes (HOV). No doubt jobs are created but one has to wonder if these types of projects prepare Los Angeles for a 21rst Century economy and lifestyles or are yet another attempt to re-engineer the consequences of 20th Century urbanism.

My nascent doubts of late winter were brought into heightened focus this past spring. Thanks to the initiative of Harry Wolf, FAIA, a conversation was held at LA/AIA where the Stimulus Package was discussed. There was much conversation about the difference between ARRA and the legacy of the Great Depression, which realized landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, and so many other designed treasures. Most felt that the activities promised by ARRA would provide little long-term leverage of present resources and leave a minimal cultural legacy.

On the one hand this critique is unfair, ARRA does include money for the introduction of high-speed rail, the building of a new Federal Courthouse, and numerous community development projects such as non-profit medical clinics. Still, nurturing an integrative built, cultural, and economic legacy for the country, a goal of depression era efforts, seems to be at best a weak motivation for the Recovery Act.

The reality is that the Recovery Act is short on exploring longer-term planning and design opportunities. From a parochial point of view it ensures only a small amount of work for architects and designers. I am not surprised that at the time of this writing that the AIA has just sent out a press release stating that “…the path toward recovery in design activity has stalled”. Yet, AIA’s position with regard to stimulus and recovery is largely unchanged and as yet unchallenged.

How can it be that the largest spending program in generations is in its conceptualization so distant from the values and aspirations of architects and creatives so as to only minimally include them in its implementation? The answers to this are manifold. I want to suggest three, and further suggest that it is only by addressing each of these that organizations such as AIA can begin to create the politics required to more successfully shape subsequent stimulus legislation that may very well be required as this economic recovery evolves.

The first reason I feel bills like the Recovery Act are less than satisfactory is based upon my experience lobbying for its passage. The experience in Washington DC illuminated a clear reality. Our society is much more comfortable debating and manipulating programs that result in projects, regardless of their efficacy, as opposed to projects that require programmatic support.

Our society has moved increasingly towards privileging expertise in the management and manipulation of services (especially financial services). This privileging of service systems, rather than platforms that produce things, creates a milieu where economic policy increasingly becomes grounded in programs that do not insist on any form of physically tangible outcome. Only by insisting that design outcomes are as important as program outcomes - that one cannot exist without the other - can architects and designers hope to influence future legislation in a way that leads to design work.

My sense is that organizations like AIA need to be more willing to go against the grain, insist upon the design vision thing, and be less comfortable working within systems of legislative, management, and business logic that prioritize the expansion and fine tuning of programs where the outcomes are predominantly temporal and abstract.

The second reason design is not as important a factor as it should be in the shaping of national policies is that we are only in the infancy of learning how to effectively communicate design values. If architects and designers, and most especially design organizations like AIA, are going to insist upon the value of design outcomes, then these values need to be communicated to the public and the public’s leaders in such a way, and with clear language, so as to better capture their imaginations before legislation is crafted.

I think that AIA has begun to do this in its emphasis on sustainability, support for the 2030 initiative that establishes carbon neutrality as an objective for all new buildings in twenty years, and insistence that community-based planning be incorporated into transit design initiatives. These types of advocacy ring true to the public and create a framework for new policies that not only benefit architects in terms of project opportunities, but society at large with outcomes that incorporate values that are in addition to those of the economic bottom line.

Finally, and ironically given my strong belief in the primacy of projects over programs, one small but concrete way to begin to heighten the importance of design values in shaping national priorities and legislation is to work towards the adoption of a national design policy. In this regard AIA could learn from and more vigorously support the efforts of the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative (see below). This particular endeavor, formed in 2008 to influence the programs of the present Federal administration, is grounded more in communications design than environmental design. However, this group has produced a ten-point policy statement that begins to suggest means to embed design values within politics and government so as to recognize and nurture the contribution that design already makes to the national economy and the Country’s future. My main concern with this initiative is that it is attempting to create from scratch what should be a collaborative effort by all the professional design organizations; AIA, ASLA, APA, IDSA, AIGA, etc. and their hundreds of thousands of members.

Each design organization and each designer, even the country, will suffer the consequences of future legislation that repeats the diminution of design values that is unfortunately inherent in ARRA. I am suggesting that designers and design organizations need to collectively organize before we publically support a second round of stimulus legislation. If done correctly, advocacy for projects, clear communication of the importance of design values, and formation and implementation of a collective national design policy may both in part and as a whole be the quickest way to influence legislators and leaders that demand new logics and ways of doing business, but at present have too few tools to realize their aspirations for a better-designed post-stimulative world.

The U.S. National Design Policy Initiative is found at http://www.designpolicy.org.

Their list of ten policy proposals include:

1. Formalize an American Design Council to partner with the U.S. Government.

2. Set guidelines for legibility, literacy, and accessibility for all government communications.

3. Target 2030 for carbon neutral buildings.

4. Create an Assistant Secretary for Design and Innovation position within the Department of Commerce to promote design.

5. Expand national grants to support interdisciplinary community design assistance programs based on human-centered design principles.

6. Commission a report to measure and document design’s contribution to the U.S. economy.

7. Revive the Presidential Design Awards to be held every year and use triple bottom-line criteria (economic, social, and environmental benefit) for evaluation.

8. Establish national grants for basic design research.

9. Modify the patent process to reflect the types of intellectual property created by designers.

10. Encourage direct government investment in design innovation.

This article will appear in the September/October issue of Form - Pioneering Design.

The Sound of It

2009-04-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

"Jews on Vinyl" at the San Francisco Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind

In early spring my wife, daughter and I spent a long weekend in San Francisco enjoying the sites, taking long urban walks, and eating great meals. I could spend an eternity talking about the urban design differences between San Francisco and Los Angeles, but I feel the dichotomies of two great places have been picked apart many times, are full of clichés, and most important, besides the point. These two cities are very different and trying at this mature point to nudge either to become more like the other is an exercise in futility and frustration. For me, both San Francisco and Los Angeles have their genius and genius loci.

Perhaps, I am just tired of debates that try to force the imprint of one place into the framework of another. Perhaps, I am bored by the constant abstractions of urban design, which at their projective best abstract place visions into goals, sketchy possibilities, and guidelines. There is little satisfaction with no guarantee of implementation. Or perhaps, I have come yet again to conclude that it takes an architectural idea or place in the city to realize the singular urban moment that is simultaneously richly experienced, deftly designed, and surprisingly encountered. We had one of these architectural encounters in San Francisco.

One of the must-see new buildings in the Bay Area is the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, the building opened to the public this past spring. This is the fourth building designed by Libeskind that I have experienced in person, the others being the Jewish Museum Berlin (1993), the Fredrick C. Hamilton Building of the Denver Art Museum, (2006), and the adjacent Museum Residences (2007). It is refreshing to see his buildings off the pages of glossy magazines and beyond the bombast of architectural chatter.

One discovers in person that the San Francisco structure, like each of the others, is dependent for its success and related closely to an existing building or setting – a fact that sometimes gets lost when one reads about his buildings - presented as objects - in the press. The new San Francisco museum structure is located opposite Yerba Buena gardens and on the edge of an otherwise sterile cultural district of now ten year old and more buildings and fountains that all seem unsettled in relationship to their surrounds and each other, a result no doubt of their origin in older concepts of urban renewal. In contrast, the Libeskind design has the benefit of not quite embracing but encompassing, indeed slicing through the context of the historic 1907 Jesse Street Power Substation designed by Willis Polk.

The tension created by the juxtaposition of two such different approaches to architecture, one beaux-arts and the other, well let us say post, post-modern, creates a visual vitality of old and new, square and slanted, shiny dark blue metal and red brick that is compelling. The otherwise wind swept surrounds of mostly unmemorable buildings and plazas have a new center, an attractor, indeed a destination.

Once inside the positive tension engendered by collision continues. Liebeskind states that the organization of the building is inspired by a Hebrew phrase, "L'Chaim" or “to life” and the displacement of two Hebrew letters, the alphabetic chet” and “yud” that combined mean life. I cannot see quite how this works in fact and generally get uncomfortable when these types of analogies need to be pointed out. Nevertheless, an architect has to get his inspirations and motivations from somewhere and then deploy them.

Here, as one enters the building, the organizing principles, whatever their origin, combine to shear the old with the twisted sensibility of the new. Looking up, one sees light-filled gaps between the architectural dynamics that spill cool blue into unexpected corners. Between old and new a sense of volumetric in-betweeness is realized that is palpable yet never disorienting. The great engine hall of the former power station is transformed into the space of a museum. The galleries and circulation of the museum twist and turn and slant and overlap and provide new energy to the more staid volumetric figure of the engine hall. Yin and yang, both need the other to have a present and future purpose.

While all of this is impressive, the moment that got my highest attention occurred not outside where I admired the combination of decorated brick box with off-kilter metal-skinned volume, nor in the entry hall, where I applaud a much more aggressive approach to historic preservation than is the norm in this country. Rather, what struck my nerve was a simple exhibition in a deceptively simple yet complex space on the second floor of the museum that we were lucky enough to encounter the day we visited. At the south end of the building and at the top of the stairs that lead away from the engine hall, this space is entered through a glass door that separates it from the circulation paths and galleries of the rest of the building. Here is a volume of distinctly unneutral white space that in plan and section is rhomboidal, never orthogonal, and pierced by small trapezoidal windows the allow for small beams of penetrating light that play about the walls and floors and surfaces to the side, below, and above. While it may be a multipurpose room in name, it is really best seen as a space where one becomes highly conscious of your self-presence. One can feel, to use a term that is so out of fashion, one’s haptic self.

We experienced in this space not an exhibit in the traditional sense, but a sound installation, “Jews on Vinyl”. The installation incorporated a simple 1960’s living room setting of couch, easy chairs, and coffee table set over an area rug. The placid living room, in contrast to the trapezoidal space invited one to sit and enjoy a potpourri of ethnic musical celebration recorded from the 1940’s to the 1970’s by artists both famous and unknown. One placed oneself on the couch to experience the space and instead was transported in time by the raucous jokes of Totie Fields of Ed Sullivan fame, or the Korean-American Jon Yune’s interpretation of Hebrew hits, or the African-American Johnny Mathis singing “Eli, Eli' 'Kol Nidre”, each bouncing against and being reflected by the walls of the space. Some of the songs were familiar but most were not. Still the combination of sound, domestic setting, and prismatic oragamic volume combined to create a total not quite surreal experience of site sound and sense that was heightening.

I think if I had just seen the space without the sound, or heard the sound without the space, or certainly felt the fabric of the furniture in the absence of the sound and the space, that none would have added up to a greater whole. Indeed this was a designed experience where the curators, Roger Bennett and Josh Kun, brought together a spectrum of atmospheres and played them deftly in contrast to the torqued volume of the museum room. This multipurpose room is probably an impossible space to hang a painting but is a great place to sing a song, or hear the architecture. Which all led to a simple, if not always obvious conclusion. Sometimes it is the sound of it, as much as the look of it, or material of it that counts.

Back outside, in the plaza in front of the museum, on the sidewalks walking back to the hotel, even in my own house once back from our weekend sojourn, I kept hearing the sounds of rooms, buildings, streets and even the city. I remembered what many architectural experiences sounded like or smelled like, or even (true) tasted like. Did Libeskind design the sound of it? I do not think so, but then again, all good architecture has a literal vibe and I am confident that like every good architect he hears it and well as sees it.

Sometimes in the rush of projects and schedules and especially in the design of urban systems and places, sound, touch, and taste get forgotten. The Libeskind designed room tucked away behind a glass door on the second floor of a museum building in San Francisco reminded me that more than often, when the design, or even more importantly the urban design is done, the sound of it - indeed the life of it - as much as the look of it is what counts.

This essay was written for the July/August 2009 issue of Form - Pioneering Design

Why Signs? Why Now?

2009-02-07T16:27:00.000-08:00

I am the president in 2009 of the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles Chapter (LA/AIA). AIA/LA has been increasingly involved in the Los Angeles signage wars. You might wonder why, when the economy is collapsing and architects are loosing their jobs, this particular issue consumes so much time and energy. The simple answer is that AIA/LA started down this road before the present economic circumstance.

Last spring, in an e-mail to AIA/LA’s Political Outreach Committee, one of our members challenged the committee to get engaged in a growing public controversy. Communities were upset at the proliferation of extralegal signage. Billboards and wall wraps with no permits or approvals were sprouting throughout Los Angeles. At the same time sign control advocates were most upset at the introduction of digital billboards looming over residential neighborhoods.

Almost 900 of these winking bright boards are anticipated, the result of a legal row between the City and outdoor advertisers. The latter claimed their rights had been abridged. The City had granted too many sign exceptions. Rather than continue to fight and maybe lose, the City settled and agreed to a set number of screens. A colleague goaded us. If AIA/LA could not take a stand on bright lights shining in people’s bedrooms and sign chaos, what did AIA/LA stand for?

In response to this challenge, the Political Outreach Committee developed what we thought was a nuanced response. AIA/LA suggested an interim control ordinance to give community groups, City staff, and decision-makers a breather. Allow time for enforceable signage regulations to be crafted, debated, and implemented. Subsequently, this position was adopted by the AIA/LA Board and became a part of our legislative agenda presented to City Council members and the Mayor’s office.

I never imagined that this position would resonate. I assumed Los Angeles leaders would interpret this as a message to initiate the drawn out process of revising the sign code. Instead, interim control was embraced. The Planning Commission adopted the idea last November. In December an interim control ordinance was approved by City Council. In January and February the Planning Department released drafts of revised signage regulations. During this time AIA/LA held two public forums exploring first, the place of signs in the urban landscape and second, the design impact of draft regulations.

Because of our support for the interim control ordinance and creation of public sign forums, AIA/LA is perceived as constructively engaged; architect’s opinions matter. Thus I began to get phone calls. Some encouraged AIA/LA to draw a line in the sand and stand with those who want a complete ban on new advertising signs. Others assume that AIA/LA has already taken such a stance.

A few architects called and said stick it to the signifiers. One architect conveyed calls from developers fearful of loosing sign rights, thanks to AIA/LA. One of my clients button holed me and suggested I was destroying the building economy. He then stated that he was only in part joking.

The LA signage debate pits sign abolitionists versus sign advocates and represents a design conundrum. Architects know that signs can contribute to urban vibrancy, whether on the sidewalks of Ginza or the Sunset Strip. Increasingly signs represent an integral and necessary contribution to a design’s bottom line. In this entertainment world capital, signs also promote a unique local industry that invents dreams and images for global consumption. Los Angeles signs, deployed on the exterior walls of movie studios or piercing the night sky, represent the work of our city.

Conversely, it is not unnoticed that Los Angeles is often times ugly. Unmitigated and immersive signage can and does contribute to environmental crassness and blight. Clearly, the opportunities of one point of view represent the constraints of the other. Given this range of opinions, where should AIA/LA stand?

A balance needs to be struck. Surely there are places in Los Angeles where exuberant signage is expected and appropriate. Just as obviously there are locales, such as residential neighborhoods, where most signs, particularly digital signs, are inappropriate. And then there are the places in-between, such as the plethora of commercial and emerging mixed-use boulevards. There is not a uniform design solution possible for these transects but I sense that the general direction that the Planning Department has indicated in their draft signage proposal makes common sense for these streets as well as the city as a whole.

Planning has outlined reductions in the overall allowance for signs compared to what now exists. They have also sought to create consistent definitions of signage that allow for easier enforcement. There are also provisions for signage districts within regional centers that allow means to realize exceptions to the new constraints. The devil of course is in the details of the sign types. These details need to be designed and vigorously debated if any type of balance is to be realized.

Los Angeles architects should have a public opinion on the details because if we don’t our silence is interpreted, at best, as an absence of professional ideas for signage stewardship within our backyard of expertise. At worst, silence suggests to many a lack of professional citizenship or perhaps undue professional acquiescence to client desires.

Why signs? Signage resonates. It forms spaces and places. Signage is symbolic of an urban design and architecture frontier; the qualities of the city’s future are at stake. People are interested in architect’s opinions. Not having a public opinion regarding signage now diminishes the profession’s credibility on too many other issues and thus unnecessarily diminishes the role of architects in shaping our city’s present and future form.

A version of this post will appear in the March/April issue of Form Magazine - Pioneering Design.

A Babylon of Signs

2009-01-21T21:12:00.000-08:00

Installation of a digital billboard in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood catalyzed environmental design protests that led to a proposed new sign ordinance in this city.

“There is no reason…why the methods of commercial persuasion and the skyline of signs should not serve the purpose of civic and cultural enhancement. But this is not entirely up to the architect.” Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown from “A Significance for A & P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas”

When Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote these words in 1968, just three years after the passage of the Highway Beautification Act (legislation championed by Lady Bird Johnson that sought to eradicate billboards from the national scene), their sense of ironic political resistance aside, they were clear that designers did not fully control the construction of the visual environment. And while they steadfastly maintained that their inquiry into pop (and junk) landscapes was a design exploration (as opposed to a cultural vendetta), they let a graphic genie out of a bottle. Pop landscapes and strips were elevated from environments of blight that needed to be banned to objects of serious critical examination and design inspiration. Interestingly, this study of pop landscapes began in Los Angeles when Scott Brown was teaching at UCLA in the mid 1960’s. Las Vegas was then–and remains now–Los Angeles in extremis.

For a generation, since Venturi and Scott Brown’s Learning From Las Vegas, most Angelinos either did not notice the steady proliferation of signs along their Southern California landscapes and strips, nor perhaps cared. With the turn of the century, that changed. For the last eight years Los Angeles has been engaged in a war with the outdoor advertising industry. In 2002, reacting to increasing outcries from newly-minted neighborhood councils that increasingly sought to control their local surrounds, the City banned all new “off-site” signage, typically deployed as billboards (existing billboards were “grandfathered:” as long as they are not altered they can remain). But the outdoor advertising industry struck back. They allocated $400,000 of free outdoor advertising to a successful candidate for City Attorney, Rocky Delgadillo. And lo and behold; upon Delgadillo’s election he authorized a sweetheart deal that allowed the industry to convert, with little penalty, almost 900 of Los Angeles’ 10,000 now non-conforming billboards to massive slide-shows of digital displays.

Total building supergraphic wraps, of questionable legality, obscure the architecture of tall buildings and the skyline along Wilshire Boulevard west of Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile outside of the lawyers offices various Los Angeles City Councilpersons championed exceptions to the billboard ban in exchange for directed revenues for parks and social programs. The City also established special districts that allowed even more signage, and Los Angeles sold off the rights to advertise at bus stops on City property. Political inconsistency engendered environmental design chaos. In a fine example of giving an inch and taking a mile, outdoor advertising industry players sued the City, claiming that Los Angeles’s granting of continuous exceptions limited the industry’s rights to commercial and protected speech. With 25 law suits to defend and counting, outdoor advertisers large and small seem determined to make Los Angeles a test case nationally for an underappreciated benefit of the First Amendment; 100% unencumbered outdoor visual clutter!

As the lawsuits pass back and forth, the technology of outdoor advertising evolves, presenting new visual challenges for communities and endless opportunities for commercially bent designers. Giant whole-building vinyl supergraphic wraps obscure skyscrapers and warehouses. One company with its roots in Los Angeles, SkyTag, claims their supergraphic wraps are so big they can be seen from space. Yet giant wraps and digital billboards that change messages every four to six seconds distract drivers, ramp up danger of vehicular collisions at intersections, obscure views and provide undesired night lighting in the bedrooms of residences hundreds of feet away. In the very near future, LED arrays mounted in the window walls of buildings will turn night skies into pulsing fields of light pollution. The stuff of science fiction less then a decade ago, holographic and “smart” billboards already tailor their messages to passing motorists and pedestrians using blue tooth and wireless technologies interacting with mobile phones and personal digital devices.

The cacophony of existing and potential environmental information delivery can be exhilarating, if you are in the right mood; but more frequently it’s exhausting and contributes to green house gas emissions (especially if you think about all that energy being used to power the digital signs). In Los Angeles, which has lost control of its visual environment, more and more people experience the presence of these extra-enabled billboards as an assault, yet another sign of private interests trumping the public good. In this babylonic empire of signs what little sense of the natural that is left is pretty much diminished by the commercialization of every inch of urban space.

Given the reckless abandon of outdoor advertisers to co-opt the visual public realm, and bending to popular will, the same City Attorney and City Council that brought Los Angeles to the brink of this newest form of visual blight are now rapidly attempting to reassert their authority over the environmental design of the urban scene. They have instituted an “interim control ordinance” banning the deployment of any new billboards or building wraps. They have instructed the City Planning Department to write a new “bulletproof” sign ordinance. They have promulgated criminal proceedings against contractors and property owners who continue, despite the interim control ordinance, to illegally erect giant billboards, sometimes in the dead of a quiet weekend night (2 a.m. Saturday morning installations always a hallmark of “best practice”). This has all occurred just in the last three months.

This past week the Los Angeles Department of Planning released a draft of the new sign ordinance that will be reviewed by the City Planning Commission before it moves on to adoption or defeat in City Council Chambers in February. If Venturi and Scott Brown unleashed a semiotic framework for examining the landscape that allowed an environmental empire of signs to be legitimized in a critical sense, the signage allowance pendulum seems to have now reversed itself in the place of its origins, Los Angeles.

The proposed ordinance will steadfastly maintain the ban on billboards and strengthen its ability to withstand legal challenges by eliminating the definition, and thereby existence, of off-site signs. Digital media will be banned. Signage allowances on individual buildings will be reduced to 25% of what is allowed under current code. The maximum height of signs will be reduced from infinity (!) to 35 feet, and no new logos will grace, or depending upon your viewpoint scar, the tops of tall buildings. All this is written within a context of “time, place and manner” restrictions that are thought to be more immune from legal challenges. Sign district exceptions are still allowed: though, weirdly, one of the stated intents for prospective districts is the reduction of visual clutter, and the elimination of signs, (anti-sign “theme” parks?), even as signage “creativity” is encouraged in these same districts.

When Venturi and Scott Brown published Learning from Las Vegas, they accompanied their formal explorations of the strip with a cagey set of tools, including a sense of irony that instigated decades of debate. Yet, they maintained an independence from the actual results of the elevation of the pop landscape. They made sure - it was not quite an inside joke and jokes after all are a time-honored means of learning - that we understood that they understood the difference between that which was “authentic” and that which was “informed by”. You decide which you prefer.

Obviously, one might still respond to the current Los Angeles signage debacle a la Venturi and Scott Brown; we designers can continue to choose to be signage sociologists. But this time, in 2009, as opposed to 2008, I suspect we in Los Angeles cannot be so removed and pretend we are not facilitators of the commercialization and degradation of our environment. The question before environmental designers, graphic designers, urban designers and architects in Los Angeles and the rest of the nation is no longer an academic exercise. Where should signage, indeed information overload, be allowed, and where should it be restricted (if at all)? What do we as designers want the environment to look and feel like? The public in Los Angeles at least is curious as to where designers stand. Will we answer? Do we have anything to say and contribute? Do we have solutions to address the design challenge?

This piece, co-written with Lorraine Wild, was first posted at Design Observer.

Nine in ‘09 for Los Angeles Architecture and Urban Design

2008-12-21T18:34:00.000-08:00

For years I wanted to develop a list of architecture and urban design New Year’s resolutions. The usual resolutions - loose weight, exercise more, let the other person talk first - while all useful, are too personal for these hard times. As an architect, because of the shrinking economy, I feel motivated this year to make architecture and urban design resolutions that lead to architect’s being asked to contribute to building the next Los Angeles.

What hopefully unites the following professional design resolutions is a desire to elevate discussion of the important role design plays in establishing a vital and interesting city. Design implemented makes a city more amenable, more comfortable, more identifiable, easier to navigate, and more delightful and beautiful. Beauty and delight alone do not solve the environmental, economic and social ills that surround us. But try to imagine a city without beauty and delight. Would you want to live there? More than acknowledged, designed delight and beauty, when incorporated into the routines of daily life do make a big difference, both in terms of our own civic enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of outsiders who visit us and then critically judge us.

Architecture and urban design resolutions are meant to remind leaders and citizens alike that a city must be continuously designed, even when the economy is bad. A continuously designed Los Angeles is a Los Angeles that competes successfully for attention, interest, visitors, and investment in a global urban marketplace with lots of choices. Architecture and urban design resolutions are also meant to be a New Year’s gift to ourselves as professionals, to give those of us who already live here, and want to keep working here, more reasons to trust that the next job is coming.

In this spirit I have nine 2009 resolutions on my list.

Plant and maintain 800,000 trees - quickly. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced two years ago an initiative to plant and maintain a million new trees. This is an important environmental program that promises to mitigate the effects of Los Angeles’ urban heat island, reduce water runoff, and beautify the city. To date, despite the valuable gifts of corporate sponsors and volunteers, the initiative has resulted in less then 200,000 new trees. This program should be speeded up, become the most visible evidence that the City is serious about realizing a 21rst Century urban forest, and utilized as a tool to let Los Angeles communities know that the City is planting for a better future. In this last regard, a good place to concentrate and maintain tree-planting efforts is along the City’s major boulevards.
Design and build environments for farmer’s markets. In Los Angeles there are now close to 40 farmer’s markets bringing tens of thousands of people sociably together on a weekly basis. Yet these public spaces are ephemeral, appear only for a morning or an afternoon, and then disappear, making no contribution to their surrounds for the rest of the week. Now is the time to design and realize tangible places for these markets that can become everyday spaces. High quality pavers, lighting, benches, landscape and pavilions should transform the parking lots, streets and sidewalks of farmer’s markets and allow people to enjoy them everyday, even when the farmers are not in town.
Paint Los Angeles taxicabs uniquely – hail them on major boulevards. Tokyo taxis are famous for their minty green color. New York’s are almost always yellow. Their cabs define in part the identities of their metropolises. Los Angeles’ are yellow, blue, green and do not contribute to the City’s image. Los Angeles needs a unique, colorful, and edgy taxi graphic and the City should require all new cabs to adopt it as a requirement of licensure. At the same time, Los Angeles should immediately extend the scope of the Hail-a-Taxi program from Downtown and Hollywood to major Los Angeles boulevards such as Wilshire, Ventura, and Vermont. Make it easier for people, and especially for tourists, to move about our city.
Create bus shelters that reflect Los Angeles’ diversity. Los Angeles has 35 community plan areas. Implementing a bus shelter design program that flexibly adapts to the characteristics and identities of the City’s many neighborhoods will establish heightened pride and sense of place throughout the city, and more importantly, shelter from sun and rain the hundreds of thousands of people that utilize Metro everyday.
Design and build streetlights, manhole covers, and all manner of street furniture in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has lots of creative designers and lots of foundries. Put them back to work designing and making the City’s outdoor furnishings. A couple of quick and highly publicized design competitions would bring a sense of progressive urgency and civic commitment to this local endeavor which engages local designers and businesses and directly integrates them into public works projects.
Push the fences back and plant the buffers. I am driven nuts each time I see a school fence, golf course fence, or a park or open space fence of any kind built right to the back of any sidewalk. Los Angeles should immediately pass legislation that sets any new fence back from sidewalk facing property lines. Give some landscape back to the public and the city in the form of greenways, parkways, and trails that all can enjoy.
Ban new billboards. While outdoor advertising has always been a part of Los Angeles’ urban landscape, the steady legal, and now illegal, proliferation of off-site signs, building wraps, and digital billboards sullies the city-wide environment. Hollywood and other parts of the city such as Downtown can and should make the case that commercialization of urban viewscapes is an essential aspect of Los Angeles place making. But these places should be the exception, not the rule. The rest of the City should be gradually freed from off-site signage blight.
Hire architects, landscape architects, and designers so that the City of Los Angeles can implement and administer a new civic design work program. The intent of the first seven recommendations is a call to implement with stimulus dollars a new type of civic design and works program. They expand the definition of local public works beyond the fixing of potholes and the paving of roads. They ameliorate and beautify the environment. The beauty and delight of our city reinforces our second largest industry, tourism.

Some of these improvements will require the talents of private sector design firms. Others are most efficiently completed directly from within City Hall. In a recessionary time and with a new definition of civic design works in mind, now is the moment that the City should hire architects, landscape architects, and designers with a range of design and design management skills to immediately begin and implement a new civic design program.
Implement one demonstration smart and green street. Of all the infrastructural tasks a city undertakes, restriping a street to make it more pedestrian and bike friendly is one of the least expensive. Imagine that along with a restriping that the City would plan, coordinate, and implement the tree planting, farmer market, taxi, bus shelter, street furniture, and fence push back recommendations just suggested, and for good measure take down a few billboards as well. The result would be a street transformed, a place that people could bike, walk, live, work and play in better harmony with their surrounds. A first step would be to find the perfect street to test these ideas on a demonstration basis.

I have always thought 6th Street from Downtown to San Vicente Boulevard would be a great candidate for streetscape improvement and consequent community reinvention. 6th, for seven miles, connects residential communities to places of work, education, worship, open space, and commercial activity. Today 6th is a four lane traffic-clogged byway along most of its length. Restriping this street with only two lanes, one in each direction, would allow for the introduction of dedicated bike lanes and protected left-turn lanes. Restriping would also create within the right-of-way room for local shuttles to move back and forth. Presence of shuttles would promulgate the need for bus shelters. More pedestrian scaled lights would further highlight districts that are already abuzz with activity and invite more people rather than vehicle activity. Missing street trees could be replaced and additional trees planted. Fences at parks and schools could become transitions to green spaces rather than single purpose security barriers. A demonstration of these ideas and principles could transform and change the use of an entire sector of the city and result in a social, economic, cultural, and sustainable urban transformation that betters daily life in Los Angeles for hundreds of thousands of people.

Would the above resolutions require, coordination, facilitation, design skills and funding to implement, much less implement quickly? Of course. But, in comparison to many of the ideas that are on the table to reinvigorate our local economy, these ideas are relatively less expensive and quicker to go. They also put a lot of people to work. They encourage others to make place-based long-term economic investments. Most critically, they demonstrate the important role that design and design improvements play in the life and health of cities generally and Los Angeles specifically.

At year’s end I will go back, look at this list, and determine for myself whether or not the City of Los Angeles is making this type of design progress. I emphasize that this is my list. Some of the items may appear a bit ephemeral or even silly (there should be a place for silliness in the urban world). Others may be impossible to achieve, at least in the near term. Yet, all of us, as architects, need to start describing to our friends how design realized makes for a better and more beautiful Los Angeles. I think they will be interested to hear what we have to say. Inherent in my 2009 design resolutions is a belief that a better designed Los Angeles, even in hard times, is a more beautiful, successful, and happy Los Angeles for one and all.

This piece is slated to appear in the January/February issue of Form - Pioneering Design.

Architecture and Urban Design Matters

2008-12-06T14:18:00.000-08:00

For the next year I have the privilege of serving as President of the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. LA/AIA has over 3,000 members and is one of the largest chapters in the United States. Yet this is not a propitious time to be an architect, what with all the layoffs and the sense amongst almost everybody I encounter that architecture is going nowhere fast.

Architects are frustrated. Just at the moment when cities, decision-makers, branders and the public at large began to take architecture as a subject of serious interest, the rug has been pulled out from under the profession. Thousands are out of work. New projects are not beginning. Prospects seem dim. In a time when trillions of dollars are being spent in the rescue of banks, and billions more will in all likelihood be spent on great public engineering works such as roads, as architects, we and what we work on run the risk of being forgotten - no worse - defined as irrelevant. Architecture must not be dismissed in this time of economic challenge as the luxury you add on after all of society's other ills are addressed.

Each of us who volunteer to be LA/AIA President are asked to think of a theme or organizing principal to guide our year. In a moment of larger challenge such as this, it is easy to forget that architecture and urban design matters. I can think of no better theme when our profession is so discouraged. Both as a practice and as a subject of engagement for our communities and our city we must remind all, now more than ever, that architecture and urban design matters. How does it matter? There are at least four key ways; as an economy that should be supported, as a practice that promotes sustainability, as a means to more efficiently make key decisions regarding the future of our urban environment, and as a practice that helps ensure the competitiveness of our region.

First, we must remind ourselves that we are a significant local industry. There are hundreds of architecture firms large and small in Los Angeles employing tens of thousands of designers. They in turn feed a larger building industry that delivers the housing, places of education and worship, work places and entertainment destinations that house a population that will continue to grow. As a micro-economy, architecture and urban design matters because architects are a key industry within a vital building economy that powers and shelters regional prosperity. The diminishment of our industry portends lesser prospects for the greater good. Supporting the architecture industry in ways subtle as well as direct leads inevitably to increased vitality throughout the region.

A second way architecture and urban design matters is the manner in which it increasingly fosters the sustainability of our daily lives. Indeed, architects now manage the information systems and technologies of sustainability. Architecture and urban design practices are saving energy, reducing dependence on foreign oil, leading to community designs that encourage walking and sociability and reducing our collective exposure to toxic materials and environments. Architecture and urban design matters because it is ever more entwined within the health, safety and welfare of our individual and communal lives.

Third, architecture and urban design matters because through the utilization of the tools of our profession, mainly intelligent visualization, communities agree to move forward with new projects, the libraries and schools and homes and retail centers of our near and distant future. No community in Los Angeles at this point, rich or poor, brown, black, yellow or white is willing to nor should accept a second rate built environment for themselves or their children. Architects visualize future visions better than any other profession. Along with the technology of sustainability, the technology of visualization is a key medium by which consensus is now reached. Architecture and urban design matters because it serves a a critical and artful medium for new agreements and new hope. In the planning for our near and long-term future we have to insist upon this type of visualization, not only because it is good for the economy of the profession, but because it is essential to forging forward with the projects that will define the 21rst Century.

But it is not enough to plan and visualize sustainably sound and beautiful environments. We must make them. There is no doubt in my mind that tremendous funds will be spent in coming years on infrastructure projects. Architects must insist that some of this stimulus be spent on improving not simply the efficiency of our cities and towns, but also the sustainability, quality and beauty of the urban environment as well. In a 21rst Century world all places are created equal, but those that attend to their sustainability and amenity values, that aspect of the city that incorporates delight as well as commodity and firmness, will find themselves more equal than others. For Los Angeles to compete in the coming decades, for our City to be attractive and competitive on a national and world stage, architecture and urban design has to matter. It defines the difference and is the difference maker now more than ever.

Perhaps as architects and designers this is all obvious. But I think we do not spend nearly enough time or energy articulating these ideas , and many other related ideas, to all of our friends and our publics. Each of us in the coming weeks and months should feel comfortable remembering and representing the crucial importance of architecture and urban design matters and not be discouraged by the difficult times and premature thoughts of our professional demise. When Los Angeles emerges from this present moment , and we will emerge, we will be a better city if during this time of challenge architecture and urban design mattered.

Over the next year let each of us renew the beautiful optimism of building that is embedded in our diverse practices. Let us not be afraid in our thoughts and daily lives to speak and practice architecture and urban design matters knowing that it matters now more then ever. Join a committee that interests you, volunteer to serve on a neighborhood council, come together in fellowship within our and allied professions. Speak to the matters and delights of architecture and urban design and know that you are making a positive difference in doing so.

I look forward to working on this theme and evolving a common agenda with all of you that reminds all of us and our publics of the critical and positive role of our profession and our work in the making and remaking of our environment and our city.

Minicity IV: Defining Minicity - The Architecture And Urbanism of Convenience

2008-11-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

Not far from my home two story mini-malls face off across Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles with taller office blocks and residential buildings beyond; each type a peculiar combination of social logic and economic calculation; each form serving an urban purpose, if not adding up to an artful townscape.

I did not start out with the idea that I would become an aficionado of mini-malls. No, in the beginning of my fascination I think, like most people, I saw them as a problem, a visual blight, second order urban detritus.

In Los Angeles, the first mini-mall I paid close attention to was one not far from my house in the mid-Wilshire district. I was not seeking out for study the mini-malls in my community per se. Rather, I was looking at the setting the mall was placed within. I found myself fascinated with the extreme juxtaposition of large buildings next to small buildings, a scene characteristic of many of Los Angeles' boulevards. This contrast, I postulated, must constitute a unique Los Angeles pattern. Within this frame of small versus large was surely some kernel of truth.

Upon reflection, I realized that the truth I was seeking was prosaic. It was formed by a nexus of land cost, parcel size, retail opportunity and traffic counts. If office markets and housing demand are not too robust, if the nearby residential population is plentiful and if traffic counts are high, economics dictate that most commercial corners are most productive as retail strips. Combined with traditional prejudices in Los Angeles against dwelling on traffic-congested streets, empirical observation suggests that market forces lead to the proliferation of mini-malls. I realized I was at them and in them all the time looking out at the city and denying what I was directly experiencing, the view from a mini-mall. What started out on my part as a formal study, looking at one corner commercial situation and imagining from this singular review the ideal shape of Los Angeles urban design, soon turned into review and research regarding an architectural type that I had unintendingly become familiar with, the mini-mall.

A feature on the mini-malls of the San Gabriel Valley appeared in the Los Angeles Times on March 31, 2005.

All Angeleno's utilize mini-malls but but few appreciate them. There are of course somewhat tongue in cheek reviews that appear infrequently in the Los Angeles Times describing the delights of mini-malls. And more recently a local real estate blog has taken to highlighting on an occasional basis favorite commercial corners, though again in an ironic manner. Notwithstanding these activities, few people actually honor the type or take it seriously as an integral part of daily life. Mini-malls are not Disney Hall and Frank Gehry does not design them. They are rarely seen as contributing to the life of their urban surrounds even as they are used everyday.

In normative urban design and architectural design practice the mini-mall is not a subject of serious study. Only in a few cases can one point to recognized architects being given commissions to design these centers. The prophets of New Urbanism eschew the type. Yet despite the lack of sanction, I found I could not resist them. I found myself and still find myself using them everyday. Soon I realized that my interest was not so much the juxtaposition of small versus large form and the codification of a Los Angeles pattern but understanding commercial types, particularly corner commercial types and their relationship to automobility and everyday life.

My hypothesis, perhaps too obviously, is that contemporary mobility breeds architectural types that are a direct response to daily life in the present metropolis - hence mini-malls. I also sensed as I delved into the subject that an interest in mini-malls would lead to an alternative view and illustration of the history of the city, one that was more inclusive of forms previously ignored as utilitarian and prosaic. My further thought was that an exploration of automobility and its forms would allow a more nuanced view of the building requirements for daily life in the contemporary city. From a design point of view understanding the typologies of automobility would lead to formal innovation within the logic of the mini-mall type. From this multi-faceted hypothesis came both a program of research and a concept, minicity.

Research in the form of driving and walking the streets of Los Angeles reveals an automobile oriented informal city of commercial corners bursting with mom and pop businesses, innovative stores selling specialty goods that can not afford to locate in shopping malls, ethnic and innovative eateries, businesses run by first generation Americans, businesses that depend for success upon the certainty of immediately available parking, and a huge range of enterprises and activities that span the range of daily life, from Tae Kwon Do studios to animal hospitals to storefront churches. Martin Leitner, an intern from the Bauhaus University who assisted me in this research, first dubbed this phenomenon Minicity.

Minicity is marked by easy in and out parking and focused visits, often quite short. Minicity serves the practical needs of surrounding neighborhoods while catering simultaneously to a larger mobile community who pass by on foot, by bus and of course by automobile. Minicity efficiently serves the needs of mobile lifestyles. It has a logical built consequence, an architecture and urbanism of convenience. The mini-mall in all its forms is its most refined outcome.

Minicity is also a feeling of or state of being within the city. In this sense minicity describes the routines and pleasures of using the commercial corners and mini-malls. Thus minicity is the heightened consciousness of daily routines within the automobile oriented metropolis. Minicity is also about movement through the space of the auto-influenced city. This type of movement is a cousin of the space time movement described so powerfully sixty years ago by Sigfried Giedion in Space, Time and Architecture. However rather than Gideon's space time, which was the liberating sense of pure flow through the forms of the modern city, minicity suggests rather a place time where the the mini-center offers a focused pause in the frenetic activity of the networked city.

The Flip a Strip competition sponsored by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) in Scottsdale, Arizona explored means to reinvent the ubiquitous strip malls of the Phoenix area. This entry by Gould Evans returns the strip center to its historic point of origin, the drive-in market selling produce to passing motorists and suggests a continued vital future for this overlooked typology.

Architectural types are neutral. They bespeak neither good nor evil. However good architecture is not neutral, it bespeaks care. Minicity in most cases needs care. My only regret when looking at the majority of this type of convenience landscape is that it is so underdeveloped, indeed formally ugly. Perhaps by revealing it to be a tangible and neccessary part of contemporary daily life the seeds are sown for its improvement. My sense is that with care minicity will find an honored place within the historic typologies of the city. The first step towards improving the design of minicity is to acknowledge its purpose and relevance.

Minicity III - Smart Cars = Smart City

2008-10-25T15:43:00.000-07:00

The El Adobe Drive-in Market built in the early 1920's in Hollywood California prefigures today's mini-malls (see Richard Longstreth, The Drive-in, The Supermarket and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914 - 1941)

There is an assumption in city design that both professionals and citizens have learned from the lessons of the past century. If the Twentieth Century brought us innumerable forms of sprawl that have left us out of shape and overweight, we know better than to reproduce the same patterns in the present. Today we are for mixed-use development with housing over retail and eyes-on-the-street overlooking active urban sidewalks. We relate land-use to transportation improvements. Higher density housing and job space need to be located next to light rail and bus rapid transit. Villages with residents within walking distant of neighborhood shops are much preferred over cul-de-sac suburbs. Growth within this framework must be compact and sustainable. When growth is both, it is smart.

At the same time economic and social forces reinforce these urban design tenants. In the last years we have heard about location-responsive mortgages that encourage us to build close to transit. Zoning innovations encourage small lot subdivisions and accessory units within formerly single family house neighborhoods Walkability audits lead to improved sidewalks and streets that are green and great. Combined with rising energy costs, together these factors suggest that the city will evolve, finally, towards a New Urbanism.

Facts suggest that these forces are no longer academic. In many cities you can ride a light rail from the airport to the center city to the individual neighborhood and see block after block of mixed-use development rising. Downtowns are being renewed by an agglomerating creative class. People are building smaller houses in the outlying districts. Drivers are selling their SUVs and buying smaller cars. A few are buying Smart cars and then go onto to live the smart urban life. This, if you subscribe religiously to all of the above, may be an urban design challenge you did not anticipate.

The Smart Car, because it is cheap, efficient and easy to park challenges the viability of a purely traditional urbanism and promotes the building of more mini-malls.Image from smartusa.com.

Smart cars are smart because they dart in and out of congested traffic with ease. They park in the most unlikely of places. They are light and promise great mileage. They project an aura of cool; light, compact, thrifty and convenient. They allow us to ignore and better negotiate the envelope of automobile-oriented sprawl and congestion. Soon, very soon, many more of us will drive micro-cars, save money, and look for places to go; places like light, compact, thrifty and convenient mini-malls.

History suggests that automotive innovation spawns building types and urban forms that belie traditional urbanism. There is no reason to think that micro-cars will not do the same. Los Angeles was one of the first cities in the United States to have a very high percentage of car ownership and it became the place where the 20th Century American landscape of super gas stations, drive-in-markets and supermarkets was more or less invented. While other cities also had their part in this evolution of urbanism, Houston (strip centers), Detroit (interior shopping malls) and Kansas City (auto-villages) come to mind, the forms of automobility spread fastest in Los Angeles (again, see Richard Longstreth). Now, a new generation of automotive innovation will spur a further round of typological evolution. One can easily imagine a hybrid city that is at once compact, traditional, smart and accepting of micro-cars in mini-malls.

If a car is inexpensive to buy, cheap to drive, easy to park and fun to boot, why deny yourself the private pleasures of a mini-car at the mini-center? Micro-cars present one of the greatest challenges to traditional urbanism in the 21rst century precisely because they enable people in urban situations to maintain already dominant patterns of daily existence within spread out urban landscapes. Mini-malls have a natural place within these micro-driven urban environments precisely because they, like the super stations, drive-in markets and supermarkets before them, offer the individual daily convenience through a specific typology with a minimum of fuss, a maximum of freedom and reasonable comfort.

I believe in the compact city. But I also believe that designers will find new ways to make automobile-oriented uses compact. I believe in smart growth. But I also believe that smart cars have a place within the urban intensity that is a consequence of this growth. I believe in sustainability. One response to evolutionary sustainability is buying a very small car that does not use gas nor measure efficiency in terms of miles per gallon. Minicity is the acceptance, sometimes reluctantly, of this already present urban projection and the understanding that architectural visions, indeed new visions for mini-malls, are needed, and will be created.

Minicity II - Ambition and Hope

2008-10-25T15:39:00.000-07:00

A question arises when looking at the common mini-mall. Are they pure building type, in essence a wholly engineered response to a given set of economic imperatives that directly relate the automobile to the consumption of everyday convenience, or do they have the capacity to embody more complex values and aspirations? Certainly most mini-malls are parsimonious in the deployment of detail, symbol and idea, sticking to the tried and true, rarely deviating from the formula of a corner "L" embracing a field of parking.

In Los Angeles at the intersection of Western and 6th, this two-story mini-mall is an engineered exercise in design efficiency. No architectural excess or delight mars its economy of purpose and convenience.

Another way of asking this same question might be, do mini-malls lie outside architectural discourse? Clearly if I really thought this I would not be writing this essay. Yet, one has to be an iconoclast at best and a masochist at worst to pursue the mini-mall as an object of architectural passion (or to desire to design a mini-mall - which I do). Most of them are quite plain if not visually blighting. All the conversations and experiments that mark contemporary architecture may be wasted on a building form that is more often than not prosaic. After all, the real purpose of a mini-mall is to provide a drive-in vessel of convenience, an envelope set in urbanized space to go in and out of quickly and with purpose - a machine to facilitate everyday consumption.

Seeking beauty in the form of a mini-mall raises all sorts of accusations from the architectural crowd. Somewhere between bemusement and anger, I am variously accused of being uninterested, undiscriminating and populist in the sense of being part of the ignorant mob-like crowd. At other times I admit to a sense of perversion. I do have trouble justifying this interest in the basest form of commercial architecture. Do I perhaps too quickly take undue pleasure in the destruction of traditional as well as yet to be realized cityscapes through the unintended promotion of unfettered commercial automobile oriented sprawl? Yet to those who don't believe it possible I tell you there are mini-malls that rise above the merely utilitarian. These mini-malls suggest that the form is still evolving, is still relevant, is still an architectural tool that can be deployed and when deployed reward and enrich everyday life. Three of these mini-centers are encountered in my daily life and they each make an architectural statement of care.

Beverly Palm Plaza in Beverly Hills, California was designed by Goldman Firth Architects and completed about eight years ago.

The first, Beverly Palm Plaza, is named after it's namesake intersection in Beverly Hills. Designed by Goldman Firth Architects and completed about eight years ago, this mini-mall is a rehabilitation of a 1951 Earl Sheib paint and body shop. When rehabilitated the size was doubled. What makes this center so special is the simplicity of the design means yet complexity of the end result. Minimal glass aluminum storefront, flat stucco walls layered to reveal the sky and a steel trellis sitting between the layered stucco walls and extending beyond the building form to create a vehicular gateway to the center from Palm Drive. Combined they infuse an integrated architectural spirit into the basic shape of a mini-mall by always bringing the eye back to glimpse the Southern California sky and the surrounding palms.

At Beverly Palm Plaza the sky is always mediated by the architectural forms, creating a connection between the built and natural environments.

At the ground plane of Beverly Palm Plaza flax plants create a vertical green buffer between the automobiles in the street facing parking lot and the surrounding sidewalks. The surface of the parking lot is made up of simple concrete pavers, providing a rich surface to walk across to and from your car. In the corner, a small round seating area creates a welcome respite and invites one to linger a bit after dropping off the laundry. Every detail is thought through, an educated hand and eye shaped every proportion and choice of material. Beverly Palm Plaza demonstrates that it is possible to create a mini-oasis along a busy Los Angeles boulevard, a moment of architectural uplift in the course of a busy day.

The second example of an architecturally focused mini-mall is just a block to the east of Beverly Palm Plaza along Olympic Boulevard in this same city. The fact that two such examples exist so close to each other in one city is also no doubt a testament to the rigor of the Beverly Hills design review process, but that is a topic for another time.

Doheny Plaza, designed by Kanner Associates in 1995; still crisp and fresh feeling in 2008.

Doheny Plaza, the mini-mall at the northeast corner of Olympic Boulevard and Doheny Drive, was designed by Kanner Architects and completed in 1995. Still fresh looking almost fifteen years after its completion, this center is unusual in that the parking is tucked behind the two-story structure, sheltered by a twenty foot overhang supported by tension rods. According to the architect this is a structural reference to a tension rod supported canopy that graced a previous gas station that stood at the site. Regardless of the resulting sidewalk hugging character of the building and the sense that it might be more of a taxpayer block then a mini-mall, the small footprint occupied by this building in contrast to the generous area left for surface parking clearly keeps this building within the commercial corner genre. Yet here the type evolves, providing sidewalk friendly storefronts and a second floor that clearly suggests use as office space as opposed to the second tier and lower rent retail found in too many centers. The diagram of this center is wrapped in a crisp modernism that at once evokes Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer and
Arquitectonica. However, the expressiveness of the structural detailing at both the storefronts and at the overhang make the architecture specific to the seismic forces of Los Angeles and surrounds. Doheny Plaza tweaks the typical mini-mall diagram by putting the cars in the back but never strays so far from basics as to become inconvenient for its vehicle bound patrons.

The last example is again a rehabilitated building, in this case a repurposed mini-mall. Designed by architects Rios Clemente Hale for their own offices with attendant ground floor retail space for their product business Not Neutral, this redesigned center sits just south of the intersection of Melrose Avenue and Larchmont Boulevard.

Rios Clemente Hale redesigned and repurposed an existing mini-mall in the Larchmont area of Los Angeles, transforming it into a center for their own offices and attendant retail space.

What was once an undistinguished center has had its walls ripped off and replaced with a visually sophisticated metal and glass wall. Transparent glass planes reveal interior activities yet at the same time allow for a sense of privacy when interupted by attached and integral aluminum decorative screens. Like Beverly Palm Plaza, concrete pavers at the ground plane create a simple yet textured plaza that is at once rich and welcoming. The exterior space is allowed to bleed into the interiors of the architect's offices, suffusing the entry with a sense of layering, light and the delightful confusion of reflections.

The interior of the Rios Clemente Hale office merges inside and outside space, a trait rarely characteristic of a mini-mall.

These are all of course designed phenomenon that transcend the utility that is presumed to be inherent to the mini-mall type.

In each of these three cases, and I keep collecting more examples, the presence of Architecture infuses a spirit of generosity into a form of built pattern that is assumed to be impervious to delight. In the hands of a capable architect of course anything is possible but imagine if you will a city in which the prosaic, indeed the typically banal mini-mall, is always infused with beauty. Convenience is celebrated as opposed to tolerated. Diagrams, mini-mall diagrams in particular, while not completely forgiven as a type that can foster mindless vehicle oriented consumption and sprawl, are also seen to be in these examples opportunities for the expression of architectural ambition and everyday delight.

Minicity I - Lou

2008-10-18T22:44:00.000-07:00

Lorraine and Denise before a meal at Lou, a slow food wine bar tucked into the corner of a mini-mall south of Hollywood, California

Yesterday, a San Franciscan and I had a conversation. He had eight hours before his plane ride home. He challenged me, "where do you go in Los Angeles if you have time to kill?" For any Angeleno this is an existential challenge. We use the city peripatetically, rarely going just one place, instead hopping about through great swaths of space. To MOCA, SMOA, LACMA, Runyon Canyon, Griffith Park, Downtown, the beach, etc. each a delight, but not connected or sustaining interest for an entire day.

Politically Los Angeles resembles Jane Jacob's Greenwich Village, but in practice this city remains closer to Reyner Banham's four sprawling and overlapping ecologies; surfurbia, foothills, the plains of id (where most of us live) and autopia (how most of us get around). "Hey", I told my freind, "if you want to see Los Angeles, visit a mini-mall."

Reyner Banham pays scant attention to mini-malls in his book but they are the logical typological consequence of a city that lives at once on the beach, in the hills, throughout the flats of the geographic basins and valleys and in cars (and I dare say even buses and trains). Angelenos are on the move across vast distances, at least in comparison to traditional urban situations and mini-malls are the halfway houses, the outposts, the forts and campgrounds of convenience.

Every Angeleno mentally maps the Los Angeles locales where they buy a bottle of water, drop off and pick up cleaning, wash pets, grab take-out, exercise, visit chiropractors and weight control specialists, indeed take care of all daily needs. Unheralded yet essential to everyday life, this minicity of "L" shaped haunts is our secret city where we spend the hours and the days of our lives.

Perhaps least obvious to the outsider is how mini-malls, despite lacking the traditional elan of great urban places, increasingly transcend definitions of high and low culture, realizing a type of placeless place to be that is the definition of this place, Los Angeles. One can find the world in a Los Angeles mini-mall. From ethnic foods of every type to goods from every continent, storefront churches and book stores, jewelry and clothing, photo-finishing and fried chicken, art galleries and light industrial manufacturing, there are mini-malls that feature any activity one can imagine or anticipate. You just have to first define your need and then seek it out.

Melrose Plaza, at the corner of Vine Street and Camerford Avenue in Los Angeles, features the slow food wine bar Lou, as well as a laundromat, burger stand, Guatemalan chicken restaurant and Thai massage parlor.

Upon reflection I would suggest that my San Francisco friend spend the hours before his flight at the mini-mall pictured above, Melrose Plaza. This is the "Lou" mini-mall at the southeast corner of Vine Street and Camerford Avenue south of Hollywood. I could wax poetic about the convenient parking, the stunning views of the hills to the north, the curious residential neighborhoods and studio haunts within a quarter mile walking distance, but the real secret here is Lou. Lou is a slow-food restaurant and wine bar. Lou is the guy who owns the place and stands behind the bar and pours the wine and picks the music. The interior is dark and the music is smoky even if one can't smoke. A curtain hides the view out and the view in. You could and I did drive by the place a dozen times before stopping in. On any given day or evening you might run into friends, neighbors, celebrities or just sit alone and talk to Lou. To the San Franciscan who doesn't want to drive in LA, take a taxi to Melrose Plaza, eat a meal, get a massage, look at the hills, enjoy a glass of fine wine and get to know Lou and get to know Los Angeles.