Architecture and Urban Design Matters

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

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.