A Babylon of Signs

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

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.

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
6. 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.
   
   
7. 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.
   
   
8. 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.
   
   
9. 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.