Ground Level: New meaning for Venice's landmark binoculars

In their classic study of commercial-strip architecture, 1972’s “Learning from Las Vegas,” Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour defined two kinds of ornamented buildings: the “Decorated Shed,” a plain shell covered with applied decoration, and a “Duck,” a structure that is itself a symbol. As Scott Brown once explained to an interviewer, a Duck is “a building whose shape itself conveys a message. It's named for the building, made in the shape of a giant duck, where they sell Long Island duckling, a delicacy.”

Los Angeles has always had more than its share of Ducks; the original Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Blvd. was a classic, even unrivaled, example. But the recent fate of Frank Gehry’s 1991 Chiat/Day building, on Main Street in Venice, offers a twist on the local history of this architectural type, suggesting that a building can become a Duck simply with a change of tenants.

Last month, Google moved several hundred of its local employees into the building, on which Gehry collaborated with artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Oldenburg and van Bruggen designed the binoculars that serve as an oversized, Pop art portal to the parking garage.

Even if Venturi and Scott Brown have always been clear about preferring the Decorated Shed to the Duck, the Google move is still a marriage made in “Learning from Las Vegas” heaven -- a search company choosing to lease a building with a façade dominated by a pair of binoculars. Quack.

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--Christopher Hawthorne

Above: The Chiat/Day building in Venice, with the huge binoculars Gehry worked on with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Credit: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times

Reading L.A.: The Olmsted Brothers plan and what might have been

The editors of the 18th title in our Reading L.A. series, historians Greg Hise and William Deverell, write that the task that confronted them in putting the book together was “akin to urban archeology.” And in fact “Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region” managed when it was published in 2000 to rescue a key planning document from the dustbin of Southern California history (or at least to retrieve it from a distant shelf). It is a document that anyone with an interest in the urban design of Southern California will find both inspiring and -- because it was never implemented in anything beyond piecemeal fashion -- a little depressing.

The plan was commissioned in 1927 from a pair of major landscape architecture firms -- Olmsted Brothers, based in Brookline, Mass., and led by the sons of the famed Frederick Law Olmsted, and Harland Bartholomew & Associates of St. Louis -- by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. The chamber, which Hise and Deverell describe in their illuminating introduction as “probably the most powerful commercial body of its kind in the American West, if not in the nation,” asked the two firms to prepare a report on parks and open space across Los Angeles County.

Architecture review: Administrative Campus Center at Claremont

It was easy to forget during the boom years, but good architecture is fundamentally about resourcefulness. No budget is big enough, no client agreeable enough, to let every one of an architect's ideas run wild. The key is to figure out how to bend a visionary plan to make it work in built form — or, better yet, to think of the constraints and limitations that come with any piece of architecture as sources of ingenuity in and of themselves.

A new administrative center at the Claremont Colleges, designed by New York firm Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis and set to be dedicated on Monday evening, is a likable and especially clear example of that point of view. Given the state of the economy and the general gloom still hovering over the architecture profession, it also feels unusually timely — like a colorful, modest slice of the zeitgeist.

Reading L.A.: Think Southern California is unplanned? Think again

 
Debunkers and myth-busters have been among our favorite authors in Reading L.A., and in our 17^th title we find a classic example of the type. In his 1997 book “Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis,” historian Greg Hise sets out systematically to undermine the idea that Los Angeles, particularly in the way it grew in the decades after World War II, is the ultimate unplanned metropolis.

It’s a hardy cliché, to be sure, this notion of L.A. as untouched by planning foresight of any kind. Hise, who was teaching urban history and planning at USC when he wrote the book and is now a professor in the history department at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, acknowledges the uphill nature of his scholarly climb here, noting that “planning and Los Angeles are not terms that are easily coupled.”

But he is also eager to suggest a new way to look at the history of urban development in Southern California -- and to understand how we got from the relatively small city of the early years of the 20^th century to the massive, medium-density, “polynucleated” region we have today. His goal, he writes, is “uncovering the loosely knit but mutually reinforcing decisions and actions of home builders, industrialists, financiers, home buyers, and government” in shaping the urbanism of Southern California.

Far from working at cross purposes, Hise argues that these various actors together “forged a regional vision” and “thought in terms of a coordinated metropolitan system, a network of integrated communities. They did not dichotomize the urban landscape into a core and periphery, a city and suburb. And I have found it useful to view the American city from this perspective.”

Hise discovers that from about the 1920s on, planners and developers “envisioned growth and development occurring in urbanized clusters within the metropolitan region.”

“In 1922,” he writes, “the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors sponsored four conferences on regional planning devoted to subdivision regulation, transportation, and water and sewage, issues whose effects and domain elided tidy jurisdictional boundaries.” Near the end of World War II the city would sponsor a similar campaign to plot future growth in the San Fernando Valley, which was in the middle of a massive population boom, nearly tripling in size between 1940 and 1950.

And well before that -- by the late 1930s, Hise argues -- “a vision of an alternative urban future was in place.” The heart of that vision was a new sort of planned community: not just a detached suburban subdivision, but, as Hise defines it, an entire interconnected ecosystem of housing, shopping, schools and jobs. Lakewood, Leimert Park and Westwood Village are among the local examples.

At the core of Hise’s book is an effort is to study the relationship between modern community planning and industry -- particularly Southern California’s major aircraft and aerospace companies. As he puts it, the very “spatial logic of community building” was closely tied to the rise and location of industry: “Private home builders sited their new neighborhoods in close proximity to employment, aggressively marketed their projects’ location as a primary inducement for sales, and targeted wage earners employed in defense industries as their principal buyers.”

This is a significant and in some ways counterintuitive set of propositions about how Los Angeles grew. Instead of following the usual logic that the American suburb was created by people fleeing something -- usually the overcrowded, overpriced, crime-ridden city -- Hise argues that at least in Southern California suburban growth was driven by people drawn to something, primarily jobs and to a lesser extent a certain kind of community or residential architecture. Hence the book's title and its use of the word "magnetic."

The writing in “Magnetic Los Angeles” can be pretty dry. If the book has another weakness, it flows from Hise’s disinclination to examine in any detail the architectural and urban design aspects of the seams where the various postwar communities he studies came together.

There’s no doubt that modern community planning, before Hise’s book, was underexamined and underappreciated as a key element in building Southern California. But the fact is that the landscape we tend overwhelmingly to see as we move through Los Angeles is not those communities themselves as much as the commercial thoroughfares, often barely landscaped, that run between them and stitch them together.

This is precisely the vantage point that has given rise to the clichés and the stereotypes about Los Angeles that Hise works so steadily -- and for the most so persuasively –- to overturn.

We’ll meet up with Hise again very soon: He’s the co-editor, with William Deverell, of the next book in our series, "Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region.”

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Previously in Reading L.A.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Photo: Westwood in 1937. Credit: Dick Whittington Studios.

Review: 'California Design 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way' at LACMA

 
The first object you see in “California Design 1930-1965: ‘Living in a Modern Way,’” which opens Saturday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is an impossibly shiny aluminum Airstream trailer from 1936. Think of it as an aerodynamic time machine — or a dose of design-world Prozac, complete with wheels and lacquered cabinets — ready to whisk you off to a version of our state that could hardly be more different from the one we inhabit today.

The California in the exhibition, one of LACMA's major contributions to the Pacific Standard Time series, is bathed in an optimistic glow, adding population faster than it can tally the growth and ready, even impatient, to embrace the future. It is the state before Proposition 13 and bankrupt cities north and south, before the Watts riots or either of Jerry Brown’s stints in Sacramento, before Joan Didion symbolically renounced her California citizenship by calling her 2003 collection of essays “Where I Was From,” emphasis very much on the past tense.

Nobody is renouncing anything in “California Design,” organized by Wendy Kaplan, who heads the department of decorative arts and design at LACMA, and Bobbye Tigerman, a curator in the department. Though the show begins with references to the Depression and World War II, and hints later on at the political and aesthetic battles of the late 1960s and 1970s, it's the upbeat, cooperative spirit of postwar design that the curators are keenest to convey.

Ranking the best public L.A. architecture of the decade

In Wednesday's Calendar section I review the new West Hollywood Library by the Culver City firm Johnson Favaro, calling it "one of the seven or eight most impressive pieces of public architecture to open in Southern California in a decade."

Aside from Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) and the Caltrans District 7 Headquarters (2004), which I mention in the review, here's what else I'd put on the list, using an admittedly flexible definition of "public":

Reading L.A.: The giant, complex legacy of the Case Study program

Consider this installment of Reading L.A. the All-Star Game of the series.

The 16th title in our year-long trek is "Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses," published to accompany a 1989 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art curated by Elizabeth A.T. Smith. It includes essays by some of the biggest hitters in our series, including Esther McCoy, Reyner Banham and Thomas Hines. There are also entries by historians Kevin Starr and Dolores Hayden and by Smith herself.

It is the only collection of essays I decided to include in Reading L.A., which is otherwise made up of books by single authors (plus one pair). Given the list of contributors to the book -- and the wide-ranging and continuing influence of the Case Study houses on American culture -- it was an exception that had to be made.

"Blueprints," which Smith edited, is remarkably good: smart, concise, deftly organized and generously illustrated. It ranges far beyond the limits you'd expect to find in an exhibition catalog, especially one supporting a show on what was essentially regional architecture.

The Case Study program, in case it still needs any introduction, was a pioneering effort sponsored by L.A.-based Arts & Architecture magazine and its ambitious editor, John Entenza, to develop new and unapologetically modernist prototypes for the postwar American house. The program was unveiled in the January 1945 issue of the magazine; it made its last appearance there in 1964, after David Travers had taken over for Entenza, who by then was running the Graham Foundation in Chicago.

The architects hired to design the Case Study houses, for sites that were mostly in and around Los Angeles but ranged as far as the Bay Area and Arizona, made up a who's who of California modernism: Charles and Ray Eames, Richard Neutra, Julius Ralph Davidson, Raphael Soriano, Pierre Koenig, A. Quincy Jones and Craig Ellwood, among many others. (There is a brief discussion in the book about the best-known local modernists who were left out, including Gregory Ain and Harwell Hamilton Harris.) In all, 35 designs were published, and roughly two dozen of them were built. Nearly all were single-family houses -- and fairly small ones at that -- but the program did in later years feature two multifamily projects, including an unbuilt proposal by Edward Killingsworth for a 10-unit complex in Newport Beach.

Jeanne Gang is first architect in 11 years to win MacArthur grant

The annual list of MacArthur Fellows is out -- and for the first time in more than a decade there is an architect among the winners. Jeanne Gang, the 47-year-old founder of Studio Gang Architects, joins 21 other honorees this year; each of them will receive a $500,000 cash prize from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that famously comes with no strings attached.

Gang's best-known work is undoubtedly Aqua, an 82-story residential tower in Chicago that opened in early 2010. After touring it with Gang, I wrote that "with its undulating concrete-and-glass skin" Aqua "suggests a fresh direction for skyscraper design. Balconies on each floor extend from the tower's concrete core, but instead of following the rectangular shape of the interior floor plan they pursue a rich variety of curves. The balconies create what Gang calls 'an inhabited facade' and give the building, as its name suggests, a liquid personality. The effect is particularly dramatic if you stand at the base of the tower and look up: From that angle the facade resembles the rolling surface of the ocean."

Fall arts picks: Architecture

This fall the architecture world will whipsaw between past and present, looking back at postwar Southern California (thanks to Pacific Standard Time) and the postmodern movement even as a batch of new museums get ready to open.

It is a group of seasonal offerings that reflect the state of the profession, to be sure. Credit remains tight for commercial and civic projects, for the most part, which means that there is plenty of time for retrospective analysis — and that completed buildings continue to get outsize attention.

So do proposed ones with any sort of momentum: Farmers Field, the planned football stadium in downtown Los Angeles, is a case in point.

First look at Diller Scofidio + Renfro's plans for BAM/PFA

Even as Eli Broad begins to build his own Diller Scofidio + Renfro museum on Bunker Hill, the busy New York firm has released the schematic design for a new facility for the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, known as BAM/PFA, in downtown Berkeley. The plans are classic DS+R, which is to say they are canny, sleekly attractive and conceptually overstuffed all at once.

A photo gallery of the design is here.

The proposal replaces an earlier plan for the complex by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito that was exquisitely designed but turned out to be, at nearly $150 million, prohibitively expensive. (The budget for the DS+R plan is roughly $90 million, about $65 million of which has been raised.) The museum has long been housed in a striking, if rather aggressive, landmark of Brutalist architecture by Mario Ciampi. That 1970 building (below), on the southern edge of the UC Berkeley campus, has seismic problems that the university estimates would cost at least $60 million to fix.