Arthur Erickson vs. the LA All-Stars
Rem Koolhaas reviews the California Plaza Design-Development Competition.
Two weeks ago, I shared an essay about Downtown Los Angeles to coincide with the topping out of The Grand, near MOCA and the California Plaza complex. Today I am posting ‘Arthur Erickson vs. the LA All-Stars,’ Rem Koolhaas‘ little-known review of the California Plaza design-development competition. This is the second in a series of posts based on ‘Whatever Happened to LA?’ an exhibition at SCI-Arc. Sometime in May or June, I will be posting another semi-obscure essay, “Explaining Los Angeles,” by the late Michael Sorkin.
Face-Off
By June of 1980, the California Plaza design-development competition had come down to a final pair of teams culled from an original field of five competitors. Canadian architect Arthur Erickson faced off against a hometown ‘supergroup’ led by planner Harvey S. Perloff, Dean of the School of Architecture at UCLA, and architect Charles Moore, UCLA’s architectural department chairman from 1976 to 1984.
In 1971 Perloff founded the Urban Innovation Group (UIG)1 at UCLA, a teaching practice studio (joined by Moore in 1974) that was involved in the Bunker Hill Masterplan effort. Working with UIG the LA ‘supergroup’ competition team included Barton Myers, Edgardo Contini, Lawrence Halprin, Cesar Pelli, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, Ricardo Legoretta, Frank Gehry, Sussman Prejza, Carlos Diniz, and Robert Kennard. They teamed with developer Robert Maguire.
Canadian Erickson’s winning scheme, the so-called California Center, presented a composition of three towers connected by a plinth arranged around a water-filled courtyard at the site’s “city-end,” the California Plaza. Essentially its ‘parti’ developed from an established, homogeneous Modernist gesture unified by an unremittingly banal language – tower blocks and excavated courtyards. The project would lead, in part, to the bankruptcy of Erickson’s Los Angeles office in 1991 followed by his dismissal from the design of a third tower, Three California Plaza, in 1993. The site for that third tower is now being proposed as the Angels Landing development by Handel Architects, a New York city-based firm.
The supergroup scheme abandoned the singular Modernist gesture in favor of a sort of Post Modern orchestrated chaos. In the place of a unified nod to an earlier master plan made up of uniform towers (as developed by Charles Luckman) the supergroup presented a collage; nine projects connected by a street-like necklace of public spaces designed by Moore and the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. The approach is emblematic of Moore and Gehry’s adventurous, collage-like, and often outré civic works of that period: Moore’s Piazza D’Italia or Gehry’s Loyola Law School. It would seem the design’s playful spirit was too much for the jury.
Delirious Los Angeles?
In the 1990s, after moving on from Manhattanism, the subject of Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas turned his sights on North America’s post-war suburban cities. Atlanta and Houston became fodder for other emerging interests: sprawl and low density. Strangely, LA did not make the cut for Koolhaas’ dirty-urbanist bible SMLXL. In fact, he has said and written scant little about Los Angeles, possibly because this city has mostly spurned his attempts to build here.
In a recent interview, Koolhaas describes the Randstad2 in Holland, where he lives now, as “…an extended city not dependent on coherence or adjustment of each of the parts to each other. Yet it is able to sustain itself as a connected entity — kind of like a collage.” He does go on to say that Los Angeles is the “prototype of this kind of habitat for the future.” This isn’t so unconventional; it is something we have heard from LA’s boosters and detractors, from Reyner Banham to Mike Davis, for at least sixty years.
The brief piece, below, is the only recorded writing by the Dutch architect about Los Angeles that I have found. His criticisms of the competition schemes are pointed, succinct, and well-built. There are a few hints of later obsessions and pet interests. The essays “Bigness, or the Problem of Large,” “Generic City,” “Shopping,” and “Junkspace” are all prefigured here. Sprinkled throughout the competition review are intimations of what OMA3 would search for in the Parc de la Villette competition: an interest in finding a methodology for “combining programmatic instability with architectural specificity.”4
Unfortunately, on the bigger topic of Los Angeles, the review is disappointing.
Besides describing LA as a qualified 'no-topia,' Koolhaas adds little of his own voice to the canon, proffering no unique insights into its genesis or future. Ultimately he not so subtly intimates that New York architects handle urban anarchy better. On that note, Koolhaas misunderstands both New York and Los Angeles, mistaking New York’s energetic but mannered and carefully zoned skyline for actual chaos and not seeing LA’s seemingly ordered horizontal grid as utterly surreal, catastrophe-driven, and uncontrollable by either architects or planners.
Finally, there is an unintendedly comical reference to a ‘Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art” which would be LAMoMA, I guess. Try saying that a few times quickly, it’s funny.
Arthur Erickson vs. the LA All-Stars
Rem Koolhaas, "Arthur Erickson vs. The 'All-Stars" This article originally appeared in Trace, Vol. 1 July-September, 1981.
Schematically, the suspense which was raised by this contest can be seen as follows: big, established, late-modern versus adventurous and no-longer modern.
Erickson's 'California Centre' develops a 'parti' that conceives of the site as a place, to be generated in a single gesture. It is a composition of towers connected by a lower (twenty-four story) linear element. At the joint of the L, there is a head of three skyscrapers, surrounding a kind of maelstrom, through which a variety of culture disappears underground, connected by a vaguely megastructural slab, whose triangular section not only provides a profusion of verdant terraces - both schemes are firmly committed to the Age of the Fern' - but also the space for the future Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art; this last offering its visitors all the excitement of a Guggenheim Museum uncoiled. Erickson's skyscrapers are all variations on a Miesian cliché, made interesting at the top through a variety of lops and chops.
The All-Stars scheme is an attempt to apply the surrealist formula of the 'exquisite corpse' to urbanism: a row of identical bases is arranged on the site on which each architect 'does his own thing' - in this case, a tower - ostensibly oblivious to what happens next to him. But as if shocked by such neo-primitive conception, the designers have behaved so that the indifference of each element is tempered by a series of partial adjustments and common references. The towers are embedded in a network of connective tissue developed by Moore and Halprin that replaces the street. The towers also have noses (so-called by the architects) that sniff this synthetic street life. Along the Olive Street edge of the site, there is the further connection of a housing aqueduct. Finally, all towers have the same 135-degree angle cut-off.
At its most basic level, urbanism is or ought to be, the creation through groupings of buildings or segments of cities. Only one-quarter century ago, the word had a glamorous aura. But as the century dragged on, this glamour sadly dissipated. By the end of the sixties, this decline was so evident that the English architect Cedric Price conceived of a project he called No-Plan: based on the observation that nobody liked the results of planned complexes of buildings, while everybody liked those 'created by the free play of random forces'’ His `No-Plan' proposed to go ‘cold turkey’ by withdrawing from the whole activity of planning entirely and leaving it all to accident. Since that time, the concept of 'Urbanism' has remained plunged in more-or-less permanent crisis.
Since the two 'Canadian' entries5 for Bunker Hill represent almost polar opposites in terms of conception, ideology, and style, they can be seen together as symptomatic of the state of "Urbanism' today, that is, a moment when architects generally have forgotten how to put large groups of buildings together. To do this, let us first attempt to enumerate the similarities that exist between the two projects in spite of their apparent oppositions (because it is essentially these similarities that reveal the depth of the present impasse) and second, let us deal with the differences since they might point in directions which offer a route to an escape.
Since all 'stars' share essentially the same values, the All-Star project becomes a series of merely strained differences. The only truly 'foreign' elements are ingredients lifted from other ideologies. The most striking — and probably most significant of these— are such megastructural elements in the proposal as the aqueduct, which serves as a 'connection' in a manner reminiscent of the work of Team 10 from 15 years ago. But alas, this ingredient only makes its reappearance subconsciously. As a result, the proposal lacks the subversive depth and resilience of cliché, showing instead only the superficial sparkle of invention. The various 'stars involved are uneasy about the roles of 'connection' and `disconnection'’ of 'adjustment' and 'non-adjustment,' and of 'co-ordination' and 'non-co-ordination.
In a broader cultural context than that offered by these projects, one can see that it is open to the architect to behave as the engineer does, to influence through the simple act of measuring. So here, many problems become architecturalized due to the sheer presence of the architect. Hence the 'All-Star’ scheme could turn out to be a frankly disjointed and disconnected series of separate buildings.
The tactics vis-a-vis diversity can be condensed as follows: Erickson works with repetition, the All-Stars with uniqueness. But Erickson's repetition is too agitated and apologetic to be truly boring; neither restful and serene nor monotonous and impressive. The All-Stars differences, on the other hand, are too controlled to suggest a genuinely anarchic free-enterprise genesis.
A SEARCH FOR AUTHENTIC DIVERSITY
Both schemes project at first sight a phobia of monotony. They aggressively offer various forms of diversity and variety. Both temper the harshness of the ninety-degree angle with the alleged 'interest' of the forty-five-degree angle, or its more sophisticated cousin, the one hundred and thirty-five-degree angle. Both angles appear and reappear over the five-block area.6
Whatever glimpses the models reveal of the further downtown context (this may be a case of contextualism or of inflections to similar distortions in neighboring design concepts), all the towers are so exceptional that together they herald a new consciousness: the consciousness of the agitated.
It is clear from the outset, then, that the diversification is 'willed' and artificial, not corresponding to any authentic demand, constraint, or imposition.
The All-Star scheme, especially, simulates a quasi-anarchic genesis, leading to different solutions that are nevertheless good taste. For instance, the color consultants write: 'color will provide a thread linking the various elements of the project.’ To be sure, each tower is different. As is to be expected, the 'stars' are invited to stamp their personalities on them. They are also different heights and different proportions. But it is obviously not a difference caused by circumstance, but a willed one, as different as Vuitton from Gucci. A historical contrast is illuminating. Synthetic, even though its arrangement refers to reality, the New York grid was filled in by architects oblivious to one another's production. But these proposed Los Angeles towers are too polite.
THE TOWER AND THE STREET
For lovers of Los Angeles’ 'no-topia' both schemes are disappointingly alien to local mythology.
In fact, the images they offer are similarly removed from the LA myths of the freeway, of low intensity, etc. Granting it would be another kind of nostalgia to condemn LA to a perpetual life without a center of gravity, it is surprising that the image of an LA downtown presented here is merely an east coast one seen through rose-tinted polaroids. Especially surprising is the suggestion that both schemes embody: that LA has an 'urbane' street life as energetic and urbane as that foreseen in recent urban images of the Krier brothers.
Traditionally, skyscrapers and streets have a hostile, or at least dialectical relationship, which is necessary for both if they are to have their own autonomy and definition. The lesson is, if you design a building, leave the street alone.
Within the neutrality of the street ordinarily exists the subjectivity of the building. But both of these schemes lay claim to the street - and emphasize them as important parts of their buildings. In the All-Star scheme, the pavilions block the street, force-feeding the audience with whimsy. There is not a surface that is not dripping either literally or figuratively with a profusion of fountains, ferns, or overripe iconography.
As a result, the streets have an ambiguous relationship to the towers. Are they fragments of interior decoration that have leaked from the towers, or are they streets in the process of acquiring the qualities of buildings? They establish a field of oppressive playfulness and homogeneity that is at odds with the diversity of the towers since their degree of difference can never be related to the neutrality the street usually provides.
The All-Star street, then, has lost its re-assuring potential to offer neutrality. It has become the 'interior' of the project, charged with an iconographic pressure that would only be acceptable if it were on the inside 'shielded' by the exterior skin of the architecture. Significantly, a tone of apology has here replaced the irrepressible exhilaration. 'In no way are the diners under the spreading sycamore trees dominated by the high-rise structures above...’ reads the project brochure.
People used to want to be dominated by them, dominated by their vision and aspiration. Now they have to be shielded by sycamore trees. Usually, the tower preempts the street; here the street preempts the tower.
Notes
“The Urban Innovations Group (UIG) was a teaching practice, part of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Architecture and Urban Design department, established to give students practical experience working with clients and developing projects. It was founded in 1971 by Harvey S. Perloff, then dean of the department, who envisioned an initiative that would join physical and urban planning in city design. This visionary group worked on a number of significant buildings and urban spaces in the Los Angeles area, around the United States, and abroad. In 1974, renowned architect Charles Moore joined the UCLA faculty and began working with UIG. Moore enhanced the program by bringing in significant commissions, including the Piazza d’Italia, Beverly Hills Civic Center, and the Los Angeles Bunker Hill masterplan. Members of the group also won design competitions, including a 1986 bid to design the civic center in Oceanside, California. The Urban Innovations Group gave architecture students the opportunity to collaborate with practicing architects in all stages of the architectural process, from design to construction. The group operated for 23 years, disbanding in 1993.” Source: Texas Archival Resources Online
Several student members of the Urban Innovation Group went on to establish successful Los Angeles practices such as Moore Ruble Yudell and Koning Eizenberg. The late John Chase, writer, urban designer for West Hollywood, and an editor, with John Kaliski and Margaret Crawford, of “Everyday Urbanism,” was a Master’s student at UCLA in the late 1970s.
A conglomerate of Holland’s largest cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht.
OMA is the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, founded in 1975 by Madelon Vriesendorp, Koolhaas, Zoe Zenghelis and Elia Zenghelis. The office’s acronym is also a pun. In Dutch Oma means Grandma.
For OMA fans, here is an interesting lecture, circa 1983, posted on the SCI-Arc Channel that features Koolhaas as introduced by a very young Gary Paige.
Koolhaas may be referring to the Canadian Barton Myers, part of the Perloff-Moore troupe, or this is a typo.
Koolhaas seems unaware of Downtown LA’s two street grids:
“When Felipe de Neve founded the town in 1781, the Laws of the Indies dictated that the city's plaza—the social and political center of Spanish colonial settlements—be oriented 45 degrees off the cardinal directions. (Because of the vagaries of the Los Angeles River, the pobladores only ever achieved a 36-degree skew.)
When the [Yankees] conquered the city in 1847, one of their first tasks was to impose American cartographic standards on Hispanic settlement patterns—a prerequisite for converting city lands into private property. U.S. Army engineer E. O. Ord was the first to survey Los Angeles, marking with his chains an orthogonal grid of city blocks that extended south from the plaza at a 36-degree angle. Ord's 1849 map—the first-ever of Los Angeles—would define downtown L.A.'s development in subsequent years, enshrining what D. J. Waldie names L.A.'s "crooked heart" into the city's urban morphology.”