Outside Architects Joining in the Debate Over L.A.’s Style

When New York architect Norman Pfeiffer presented his design for the proposed expansion of the downtown Central Library to the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission last year, he was astonished by the overwhelmingly negative reaction.

Critical of the way Pfeiffer’s design overshadowed and downgraded one of the city’s most popular historic buildings, the commissioners asked the architect to make major revisions. They were accepted earlier this year.

Pfeiffer’s experience illustrates one of the problems out-of-town designers can face in Los Angeles. Drawn by Southern California’s energy and opportunities, its newly found confidence as a major commercial and cultural power, architects from across the United States--as well as Canada, Japan and Europe--have captured some of the region’s plum projects.

‘Outsider’ Role

But, as the Central Library incident shows, the results are sometimes disappointing or inappropriate to residents and local observers, raising the question: Do these “outsiders” really understand the social and architectural character of the Southland, or do they bring with them false assumptions about its unique urban landscape?

In the last five years, more than 20 major architectural firms based outside the state have won commissions for major local projects. Designers from New York and Tokyo, for example, have designed all three of the city’s new or expanded major art centers--the Museum of Contemporary Art, the County Museum of Art and the Getty Fine Arts Center.

Others on the list include New York’s I. M. Pei & Partners, which is currently planning the expansion of the downtown Convention Center and new 72-story Library Tower, and Boston-based Moshe Safdie, architect of the proposed Cultural Center for American Jewish Life in Sherman Oaks.

Hollywood Stereotype

Asked about these newcomers, Santa Monica-based architect Frank Gehry, designer of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary, said: “Some of the new guys seem to think L.A. is a fantasia created by Cecil B. DeMille. Without mentioning names--some of these people are my friends--I feel they often come loaded down with notions they get from the movies. They imagine all of L.A. is one big Hollywoodland--if it exists at all as a city.”

But large sectors of the local design scene remain wide open to outsiders, Gehry said, because “the real energy of Angeleno architects has always gone into our wonderful array of custom-designed houses. Good public and commercial architecture is very thin on the ground in Southern California. Look at our collection of uninspired downtown skyscrapers, for instance.

“The fact is we have few local designers capable of carrying out large cultural and commercial projects at the level of a Richard Meier or an I.M. Pei,” Gehry continued. “Our bigger architectural offices are definitely mediocre by comparison, because our public sophistication and concern about architecture in Los Angeles has long been extremely low.”

Indeed, Meier, the New York architect of the proposed Getty Fine Arts Center in Brentwood, feels “the contemporary architecture of Los Angeles has an almost total absence of character.”

“I take my design clues from the mountains and the freeways,” he said. “The newer buildings I see in the city are of generally poor quality--they lack passion and ideas. They are bland to the point of nonentity.”

‘Invisible City’

Said Tokyo-based architect Arata Isozaki, who designed the Museum of Contemporary Art on Bunker Hill: “Los Angeles is an invisible city. There are no landmarks here. It’s like a star exploding, like an infinite expansion with a void at its center. Buildings cannot rely upon the structure of the city for their meaning. The architecture is unbelievably commonplace.”

But such perspectives can make for some disappointing designs, say observers. Many, for instance, have described the starkly formal style of Isozaki’s MOCA as “Shinto Pre-Columbian,” and worry that the building may crush the still-fragile local art scene under the weight of an alien symbolic pretension.

Others agree with Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, who compared the new Anderson Wing of the County Museum of Art, designed by Pfeiffer, to “the giant foot in Monty Python.”

But to local architect Michael Rotondi of the design group Morphosis, “It’s a big mistake to think that built L.A. is as invisible as many outsiders seem to believe. After a while, if you clear away your preconceptions and allow your eye to adjust, you understand something really subtle--that our architectural context exists as much in the imagination as in the flesh.

“Los Angeles is Dream City,” added Rotondi, dean of the Southern California Institute of Architecture and a native of Los Angeles. It’s much more a realm of the mind than fixed places like Boston or Philadelphia.”

Restaurants as Sets

In Meier’s view, however, “the only architecture that has any significant public impact (in Los Angeles) is found in restaurants such as Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills (designed by Morphosis). They are stage sets, by nature makeshift and temporary, and desperately fashionable. They’re fun places, totally lacking the intellectual rigor I believe is vital to serious architecture.”

Being serious is not what this city is about, countered Gehry. “L.A. is craziness and trash, it’s an overall feeling, it is objects fabricated from bits and pieces. The house I designed for a former lifeguard on Venice Beach, for instance, drew its clues from its tacky surroundings that many ‘serious’ architects might well have disdained.

“So little of what we see out here is architecture in any formal sense. We have to invent and reinvent ourselves constantly, as architects and Angelenos. You can’t survive here if you remain rigid in your feelings and ideas.”

Southern California’s natural landscape and its freeways--not its architecture--seem to be the only valid design clues for many newcomers.

L.A. was “all but incomprehensible at ground level” for New Yorker Jim Wines, winner of the 1986 Pershing Square design competition, who called his scheme for the landmark downtown park “an iconic grid emblematic of Los Angeles seen from the air.”

“I was fascinated by the conjunction of native chaparral and the technological super-scale of the San Bernardino and 210 freeways,” said Antoine Predock of Albuquerque, N.M., architect of a major new building at Cal Poly Pomona. “The interchange is one of the most beautiful man-made objects in Southern California.”

An Influential Article

The view that Los Angeles architecture is less permanent and pertinent than the region’s landscape and freeways was formulated in the 1960s. Two British commentators--Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham--set the stage for this perception. In an influential article in the British magazine Architectural Review, Smithson cited the 1949 Pacific Palisades house, built from off-the-shelf industrial components by Charles and Ray Eames, as an instance of the transient, lightweight character of L.A. architecture compared to the concrete solidity of the freeways.

But capturing national attention has never been easy for West Coast designers, maintains Tim Vreeland, senior designer with Albert C. Martin & Associates, one of L.A.’s oldest architectural firms. “The East Coast architectural Establishment that controls all of the influential design publications still sees us as either makeshift or ‘freestyle.’ If your style doesn’t fit these preconceptions, you won’t get published in Progressive Architecture or Architectural Record--and you won’t make a national reputation.

“The result is that many younger designers ape the ‘freestyle’ mannerisms of Morphosis or Gehry to fulfill these outsider expectations of our wackiness,” said Vreeland. “It’s an insidious form of our ingrained cultural cringe.”

Rotondi points out that Los Angeles has a long history of architectural immigration. “Frank Lloyd Wright from Chicago, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler from Vienna are only a few of the first-rate architects who enlivened our design scene in the 1920s through the ‘50s.

“All of these designers shared one great quality--they relished our ambiance of open-minded experimentation. They appreciated that our lack of an established architectural style was a huge benefit, not a terrible liability. They understood you either loosen up in L.A., or crack.”

“I think the recent invasion of outsiders is bracing,” Gehry added. “It spurs Angelenos to lift their sights as appreciators of good design. On the other hand, L.A. has a way of loosening up the stiff-necked. Whatever Richard (Meier) says, I fully expect him to do something very L.A. on his Brentwood hilltop.”