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The First Los Angeles
1781-1880: The Pueblo
After the conquering of Mexico by Cortez in 1519, Southern California was visited only twice by Spanish expeditionary forces, during the voyages of Cabrillo in 1542 and Vizcaino in 1602. It was not until 1769 that a combined religious/military group headed by Gaspar de Portola and Father Junipero Serra landed in the San Diego Bay. They headed northwards along the El Camino Real to found religious missions in the hope of both converting the native Californians and promoting the colonization of their territory. Departing from this course, Captain Gaspar de Portola accompanied by Father Juan Crespi set out on a long march from San Diego to Monterey to find future suitable sites for settling. Later that year, Father Crespi arrived at a spot along the Porciuncula River where the coastal plain comes upon the hills of the Lower Arroyo Seco at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. Crespi considered it the most suitable site for a mission and large settlement. The Mission was not settled here but in San Gabriel in 1771, leaving Los Angeles a premier site for a pueblo. Ten years later, the pueblo of Los Angeles was indeed founded in this spot. This butterfly-shaped area shaded by alders, cottonwoods, and sycamores had clear running water and fertile flat land for farming and grazing as had been earlier described in the most poetic terms by Father Juan Crespi. Los Angeles was afforded the rare civic destiny of being settled by decree of the Spanish Crown. On September4, 1781 Governor Felipe de Neve, having laid out the pueblo based on the guidelines for site selection and urbanization coded in the Laws of the Indies, led a procession of other soldiers, eleven families of forty-four individual settlers, mission priests and some natives marching slowly around the pueblo site. They invoked the blessing of the new community. Los Angeles became one of the few cities in the North American continent deliberately planned in advance and ceremoniously inaugurated for and by its new settlers.
The Laws of the Indies were a very sophisticated set of urbanizing rules propagated by decree of King Philip II in 1573 and used extensively in the process of Spanish colonization in America. The pueblo’s location near a river and not near the ocean was deliberate. The settlement would be protected from the unhealthful effects of swamps and from pirating. Two separate precincts were delineated for each settler: a lot for the construction of an urban house and a plot of land in the adjacent countryside for farming. The residences encircled the plaza along with royal public buildings, the granary, and a guardhouse lining the southern edge. The plaza was rectangular with corner streets heading straight into the square. It was oriented at the compass quarter points in order for the streets to be protected by the wind. The lot sizes were smaller than what was typical of other Laws of the Indies towns, perhaps through an evolution of the rules which had been in effect for over 200 years by the time they were implemented in Los Angeles. A typical house lot size was twenty by forty varas, about fifty five feet by one hundred and ten feet. The field lots were about five hundred and fifty foot squares, some well-irrigated by the river and the zanja madre, others drier.
The zanja madre (or “mother water ditch”) separated the fields from the plaza allowing for domestic water to be distributed close to the new settlement. This enabled the houses around the plaza to be located on higher ground further away from the Los Angeles river. This did not prove effective enough, however, and in 1815 the pueblo was washed away by floods; its site was subsequently moved to its present location.
This move to higher ground explains why today the plaza doesn’t resemble that of the original plan. While the open space was retained, its shape was no longer rectangular; it became smaller and irregular. It was at this time that the existing, larger church of Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles was laid out in its present location. The plaza became the site of a water reservoir, and because of the disarray over property lines, many houses were built encroaching on streets. A wealthy landowner built his house so far out at the northwest corner of the plaza that it required the Calle Principal (Main Street today) to angle further west as it headed north.
Throughout the Spanish and Mexican years of its existence, Los Angeles remained a tiny and unimportant village. It was surrounded by an immense territory, dominated by its Catholic Mission and was subdivided into ranchos rich in agricultural production. The pueblo’s public life was centered on the plaza and its church; the private life of its citizens focused on the spare adobe houses lining its streets and dotting the countryside. All of that changed rapidly beginning with the Mexican-American War of 1846-47 and the subsequent annexation of California into the United States.
In one of its first acts, the new American administration under Governor Bennett Riley sent Lieutenant Edward O. C. Ord to survey Los Angeles in 1846 and later in 1849 to draw up a plan of the pueblo’s expansion. His work was meant not only as a record of the existing settlement, but also as a document to establish the limits of municipally owned land in an as yet undeveloped and unplatted territory. Under American law, lots could be sold and taxes on those holdings could be levied in order to fill the coffers of the new municipal government. Ironically, one of the first municipal transactions under the US. system represented a vision of the city’s fate. In order to pay Ord, Los Angeles had to first gather monies from the merchants of the pueblo. Upon selling several lots in auction, the City paid Ord his full fee. The principle of district assessment, and the primacy of real estate speculation were the legacy of Los Angeles from the very beginning.
Ord’s plan called for expansion to the north and to the south. Unlike most cities in the world, Los Angeles did not develop concentrically. This was due to pueblo’s proximity to the river at its east (and the continued desire for adjacency to the rich agricultural lands on either side of it) and the hills to the west. The platting called for blocks that were roughly 320 x 610 feet and streets that varied in width from 60 to 75 feet. One of the blocks to the south declared unsaleable because of being located in the flood plain was reserved for a Central Park and is today the site of Pershing Square. The pueblo’s buildings continued to be built of the locally available materials, adobe and wood. The predominant building types were those of the Spanish American territories, one- story small- room structures arranged around courtyards with their street fronts lined with wooden arcades.
If the land divisions of the pueblo were rational and gridded, the delineation of the territories under the Spanish rancho system was more or less topographically derived. The disegos, picturesque land contracts of the period, were laid out by reference to all kinds of unique natural conditions, such as hills, stream beds, coastal bays, etc. Both the regularity and irregularity of territorial subdivision within the Los Angeles basin have their source in Spanish colonial practices.
The institution of an American banking and tax system coupled with the catastrophic drought of 1863-64 which destroyed the cattle and tallow business, forced the original Californio ranch owners into irreversible debt. The ranchos were taken over by American businessmen from the northeast and midwest. The economy and the social structure of the region were changed forever. The countryside began to be dominated by large-scale agricultural business. The pueblo slowly became a territorial outpost, a frontier town. An unstable population produced a violent present and an uncertain future. The culture of the pueblo under the American administration produced a settlement that began to resemble a spontaneous camp.
Yet Los Angeles continued to develop despite its location, rather than as a result of it. The expectations that the water supply for the pueblo would be adequate did not turn out to be quite so reliable in a region dominated by a ten year rain and drought cycle. In the future, all the vegetation, water, energy and institutions that would support the life of a resident population here would have to be imported or invented. Los Angeles would become the ultimate artificially sustained city of this century.
The Second Los Angeles
1880-1900: The Town
The eventual domination of Los Angeles by its recently arrived emigrant American population produced a settlement in the image of their former towns and homes. This Los Angeles was made possible primarily through the establishment of railroad connections to the rest of the continent as well as the radical expansion of local infrastructure that included new road networks, water distributing zanjas, horse-drawn trams, etc.
The transcontinental railroad reached Los Angeles in 1876. The famous real estate boom that ensued in the 1880’s transformed Los Angeles into a mainstream American town. Its center was dominated by multi-story brick Victorian civic, office, retail and warehouse buildings–expressions of the commercial interests that controlled its fate. Its periphery was formed by neighborhoods of tree-lined streets of single-family wooden houses, like those of Bunker Hill, the West Adams District, and Angeleno Heights, many designed in the extravagant styles of the turn-of-the century. Central Park (Pershing Square) overtook the prominence of the old plaza as the heart of Los Angeles shifted southwards.
The Stevenson map clearly illustrates this southward drift of the town and the slow displacement through development of the agricultural lands surrounding it. The railroad tracks were located alongside the Los Angeles river as a convenient path to the north and east out of the basin and to the south to the port of San Pedro. The decision to locate the railroad here has to this day kept the city from relating to the river as a recreational amenity. The eventual location of industrial uses next to the railroad tracks also precluded the contiguous, orderly growth of the city eastwards. The north and west boundaries of Los Angeles were provided by beautiful hills. The town during this period was contained and dominated by its natural surroundings, the urbanistic consequences of its Spanish foundation still visible.
It should be noted that four principal parks ringing the city were established at this time, but only because the lands from which they were formed had not been sold. Nonetheless, the building of Hollenbeck, Elysian, Westlake (now MacArthur), and Echo parks provided regional amenities for the neighborhoods surrounding them and for the town as a whole. They also surrounded Los Angeles, establishing its size and a sense of itself by marking its urban edge. In 1877, Brooklyn Heights, the first “suburb” overlooking Los Angeles from across the river to the east was created. It was platted as a picturesque series of curvilinear streets focused around a neighborhood park on the top of a knoll, Prospect Park, formed in a teardrop shape fashionable at the time is still in use . The entire subdivision is the first example in Los Angeles of laying out an area and fully landscaping all of the streets as a way of attracting residents.
The surrounding open countryside, further away from the plaza was settled into small foundation towns, like Santa Monica, San Pedro, Wilmington, Pasadena and Claremont. They were strung out along the transcontinental railroad all the way to the edges of the basin. Although Los Angeles was the dominant settlement in the region, these other towns had separate strong identities, economies, and populations. The city of San Pedro was especially well- developed, housing the area’s harbor and a predominantly Anglo shipping and fishing industry. In fact, San Pedro and Santa Monica were linked by local rail well before the railroad connection to San Francisco and then to the rest of the continent.
Starting in the seventies, Southern California was heavily promoted nationwide but particularly in the midwest for tourism and for health reasons. The cult of the climate of this land of perpetual sunshine had begun, and the claims of a closer, more perfect Mediterranean made people flock here in great numbers. Pasadena was such a tourist destination and resort, developed in the midst of fertile fields of orange groves, the last rail stop before Los Angeles.
The land boomers were veterans of life in Wichita, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Chicago. A typical subdivision was made by trying to attract these buyers through building a hotel, laying out a few streets, sidewalks and curbs, and planting rows of street trees, the fastest way to establish the presence of civilization in the arid environment of the basin. By 1893, fruits, vegetables, trees, and flowers imported from Mexico, South America, Japan, Australia, and Africa were dominant . A new, exotic image for Southern California was evolving through the use of this eclectic palette. The natural forms of the agricultural countryside were utilized in urban applications, such as in rows of street trees. The forerunners of the so monumentally beautiful palm-lined streets like those found throughout the region (and made famous through the promotion of Beverly Hills) were agricultural windbreaks and date groves. Strident contrasts of plant materials such as redwoods with palms, or tropical flowering trees with native oaks began to appear.
From January 1887 to July 1889, over sixty new towns were laid out in the region on over 79,350 acres. But by 1889 the boom had run its course. Out of 100 towns platted from 1884 to 1888, 62 no longer exist except as minor suburbs and outposts. The boom came in two distinct movements: the first in a normal course of railroad warfare; the second in an hysterical frenzy based on the first. What is so remarkable about the rapid transformation of Los Angeles in this period was the desire to eliminate the vestiges of the pueblo and its buildings. In part, this can be interpreted as the need to erase the memories of the pueblo as an inhospitable and dangerous frontier settlement. But equally plausible was the desire to establish in Los Angeles the dominance of an urbane Anglo-American civilization, by removing all evidence of its cultural origins in a minor rural, Hispanic Sonora Desert outpost. Only Olvera Street, the diminished and remodeled plaza, and a few surrounding buildings survive today as remnants of the original pueblo.
Urban clearance prevailed as a principle of growth during the Second Los Angeles. However, an even more critically important aspect of Los Angeles’ character began to emerge during this time: its regional expanse. The sheer amount of land made possible and accessible through the railroad encouraged land sales and subdivisions within the boundaries of properties related to the Spanish grant ranchos. These properties encompassed the entire land mass of Southern California. The majority of newcomers either became directly involved with agriculture or had inexpensive opportunities for living spread out across the land. Los Angeles evolved from this point on as a region anchored by a historic center and surrounded by emerging smaller towns. Their building fabric was mostly compactly contained within pedestrian precincts, leaving the groves and farms among them open for cultivation.
The Third Los Angeles
1900-1940: The City
Under increased pressures of migration, immigration and economic development, Los Angeles was transformed into a major new agricultural, commercial and industrial city on the west coast of the United States. Between 1890 and ’97, its streets and sidewalks were paved, and sewer systems were constructed. Intense infrastructural expansion fueled urban development. In 1913 the City of Los Angeles completed construction of an aqueduct in order to bring Owens River Valley water to the city. of sufficient capacity to service a population of 2,000,000 people. In 1912 a deep water port was opened in San Pedro. Lacking in wood or coal, Los Angeles became the first electrically illuminated city in America. Oil was discovered with the first well in production by 1892. In 1906, the Wilshire/ Vermont area had 160 active wells, dramatically transforming the landscape. Oil shipments made from the Port of San Pedro brought prosperity to the harbor and an increase in ocean-based trade. A major airport was established in 1930 and the region developed into the most important area for the design and production of aircraft in the world.
By 1909, as seen in the bird’s eye aerial, the third layer of Los Angeles’s center which would become known as Downtown was already being built over its Victorian commercial heart–again erasing most traces of the previous settlement. The image illustrates decisively the southerly and westerly vector of the city’s growth. Development followed transit lines through available tracts of undeveloped land in the flat central plains of the basin. In the same year, Charles Mulford Robinson, one of the foremost theoreticians and practitioners of the City Beautiful movement was commissioned by the City to offer guidelines for its further growth and orderly development. His contributions to the future form of Los Angeles were substantial: He conceived Downtown as a beautiful, commercial center city of broad streets and parks, elaborate bridges and public works, grand civic buildings and continuous-fabric commercial blocks limited in their height to 150 feet. Pershing Square was confirmed as the symbolic center of the region and Broadway as its commercial and entertainment heart.
The essential character of Downtown as we know it today is based on the Robinson vision. Several important regional civic monuments were built during this time including the Central Library by Bertram Goodhue and Exposition Park. The City Hall, and Union Station were proposed by him but where ultimately built in locations and in form different to his suggestions. The Los Angeles Times Building by Gordon Kaufmann, the Atlantic Richfield Building and others by Morgan, Walls and Clements, and the many office buildings by John Parkinson on Spring Street are only a few of the monuments to commerce built at this time to the prescriptions of the 1909 plan.
Robinson also established standards for the development of vehicular boulevards and for the landscape and open space character of residential neiborhoods, both of which eventually became central to the unique garden city image of the Los Angeles region. The early twentieth century was not just another period of routine growth. The city experienced sustained development based on the creation of a major industrial manufacturing sector. From 1920-30, one million and a half people moved to Southern California. This time they came on the new national trans-continental highway system. Eight new cities were created in Los Angeles County alone: South Gate, Bell, Torrance, Hawthorn, Maywood, Lynwood, and Tujunga, mostly as “company” towns for new major industries.
By the 1920’s, an extraordinary 2,500 mile inter-urban train transit system called the Pacific Electric Rail or “Red Car” was virtually complete, allowing people from all over the region to commute to its center. The intense growth of train suburbs and charter towns surrounding Los Angeles and the idea of a dense downtown employment district developed simultaneously. Extraordinary places such as Glendale, Burbank, Beverly Hills, San Marino, and many others were founded, planned and built as isolated, self-sufficient towns with a balance of civic, commercial, recreational, and residential uses. Along with their equivalent neighborhoods within Los Angeles city limits, they offered a small- town atmosphere and lifestyle to their residents away from the congestion of the regional employment center Downtown.
Simultaneously and for the first time in the city’s history, an architecture native and specific to Los Angeles was being created. Architects with many diverse interpretations of a design idiom based on Mediterranean precedents such as Gill, G.W.Smith, Goodhue, Hunt, Neff, Kaufmann, Spaulding, Johnson, and many others produced some of the best residential architecture ever built in America. R.M. Schindler, in a rooted but modernist idiom, created truely unique and original residential and commercial forms. Their great houses and gardens, multi-family courtyards, public parks and magnificent streets, shopping villages, schools and other public institutional buildings intensified the sense that the Los Angeles region was one of the most amenable places to live in the United States. They established the fundamental built fabric within which life in Southern California has been enjoyed for most of the twentieth century.
Throughout this period, the automobile played a special role in the city’s development. Used primarily as a means of local transportation, it allowed people to move easily around their suburban towns. Residents of the region typically used the train for the long commute to and from the center while being picked up by the car to be brought home at the end of the day. Boulevards, most notably Wilshire, served as the city’s great motoring promenades. As they were linear they tended to connect some of the new subdivisions such as Westwood, Hancock Park, Larchmont, and others to downtown. Although commercial/retail activities began to spring up along them beginning in the 1930’s, they were limited compared to the major concentration of similar activities Downtown. As a consequence, Downtown remained remarkably dense. The constellation of towns surrounding it were connected primarily by rail transit, leaving much of the in-between and surrounding countryside virtually open until the 1940’s.
The Fourth Los Angeles
1940-1990: The Metropolis
In 1942, three years after the inauguration of the Pasadena Freeway, the word “smog” was uttered in Los Angeles for the first time. Fueled by massive post World War II westward migration, the city began to spill over beyond its urban boundaries determined by rail corridors and pedestrian neighborhoods and districts. Infrastructural changes, principally in freeway, airport and flood control projects, induced massive land development in Southern California. Post-war national policy was designed to encourage such automobile-induced sprawl. With a new federal mortgage program in place, single family housing was built at an amazingly rapid pace. The entire basin was eventually covered by this homogeneous growth, giving the region an unlikely unity and commonality of values shared by its young, suburban residents.
A region-wide freeway system was promoted in denial of the certain air-pollution catastrophe that it would precipitate. Its role as a piece of transportation engineering was to parallel the functional role of the boulevards as well as of rail transit and to resolve their perceived shortcomings. The interurban and intercity train lines in place were principally radial in order to service Downtown. Additional ring routes were required to connect suburb to suburb. The boulevards in place were seen to be too congested to continue to carry the ever greater loads of passengers traveling to newly acquired lands further and further away and beyond the pedestrian reach of transit stations. As a result, the freeway system was adopted and developed in a unique pattern – both girded throughout the basin and concentric around Downtown. In the early 1950’s, the transit rail system was eliminated as the transportation principle of “uninterrupted flow” became gospel. This was one of the most shortsighted and costliest decisions in the history of Los Angeles. A much abridged transit rail system is now being reinserted into the region at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.
The first freeway, the Pasadena Parkway was built within and sunken into the fabric of the city and the natural landscape of the Arroyo Seco. However,the next generation of freeways were built above the city on pylons and into enormously wide rights-of-way. Because many of them were not built in straight lines (national policy set to keep drivers from falling asleep at the wheel), they severely damaged the social and the built fabric of the areas they traversed. Not only did they create great gashes wiggling through the city, but became walls through neighborhoods and districts often dividing one of their parts from another. In the early years of freeway-building, the system functioned quite well. The limited commuting distances and the low number of vehicles allowed traffic to flow relatively smoothly. But eventually, and as the urbanized edges of Los Angeles moved further out and the number of vehicles in circulation skyrocketed, a severe case of low density congestion set in. The city had annexed quite a bit of land preceding this period. In an effort to respond to an enormous demand for housing as well as additional water rights, the San Fernando valley had been acquired. To gain access to a new industrialized port, the city had reached down a thin strip of land to San Pedro/Wilmington for incorporation. To acquire land for an airport, the city had claimed the beach area south of Santa Monica. The universal directionality of motion encouraged by the freeway system allowed all open land within Los Angeles to become accessible, therefore, valuable and available for contiguous development. The Fourth Los Angeles grew by filling out the sections of the Jeffersonian mile-by-mile continental survey. Large boulevards lined with commercial activities surrounded exclusively residential developments within this gigantic grid. This urbanizing pattern was endlessly repeated until it collided with a distinct town like Santa Monica or a topographical feature like the foothills, the river, or an old rancho boundary. Los Angeles began to be developed as the enormous, formless in-between all the somewhere places of Southern California. A vast, privatized nowhere, lacking of adequate open space or access to the regional landscape and spatially isolated from the necessary common, civic places. Every family in Southern California was sentenced to perpetual dependence on two or more cars.
In the spirit of modern planning, Downtown was judged to be overly congested. Since the early 1930’s a grave confusion had prevailed regarding the phenomenon of congestion. The conflict of accomodating excessive numbers of people and vehicles within road ways and sidewalks was judged to be a serious problem. Unfortunately, it never occured to anyone that large numbers of people were necessary to sustain an economically prosperous pedestrian city center. The freeways were advertised as a means of easing access to and circulation through Downtown. Instead, they allowed many people to bypass Downtown for their employment and retail needs, while flooding Downtown with cars and requiring vast amounts of parking. The same number of people, about 300,000 were employed in the beginning and at the end of the Fourth Los Angeles in the greater Downtown. Where roughly two thirds of them accessed their jobs by transit in 1940, it was the same percentage that accessed them by automobile in 1990. Naturally, a de-congested Downtown became physically, functionally and symbolically eroded. More than 50% of its building stock was demolished in favor of parking. Many downtown districts atrophied and decay set in.
Downtown continued to play a prominent role in the life of the region. But as accessibility by automobile became omnidirectional within the basin, a variety of other competing sub centers emerged. Economic growth was increasingly attracted to them, especially after the Watts Riots when whole populations moved westwards fleeing the inner city and its racial and economic problems. Their growth generated a sense of fragmentation within the metropolis. It was then that the word “urban” began to mean “poor” and “suburban” began to mean “affluent.” By 1960 there was political consensus that the now de congested and declining Downtown needed to be replanned and redefined as a modern city center befitting a car-dominated, up-to-date metropolis. Bunker Hill, the oldest mixed-use district of Downtown was declared severely blighted and measures began to be taken to have it replaced through clearance and redevelopment with large separated blocks of commercial, motel (not hotel!), residential and parking uses. The hill was to be lowered in order to eliminate the necessity for an Angel’s Flight and a super block sized grid of highway-standard streets and ramps was to be laid over it for easy auto access. Pedestrians, automobiles, and service vehicles were to be separated vertically in space by overpasses for “safety”. New high-rise buildings were to be isolated in the centers of blocks, surrounded by plazas designed primarily for viewing, not human occupation.
Bunker Hill was indeed cleared, and a commercial citadel was built to replace it. It was all part of that most tragic and misdirected process of Urban Renewal that swept the country in the 1960’s and destroyed so many center cities throughout the United States. The life of what was left of Downtown Los Angeles was sapped as commercial activity did not multiply as expected, but just relocated to the newest quarters. Dozens of empty buildings were left behind, many dozens of them significant architectural monuments, most of them still empty. The architectural form of the new Bunker Hill was finally established by the “Silver Book” plan of 1972, so named because of the sleek color of its cover representing the region’s attachment to high tech metaphors during this time. Its stereotypical modern buildings, isolated plazas and parking and car-dominated streets turned the center of Los Angeles into a caricature of an international anyplace. Its housing prescriptions were never carried out. Downtown became increasingly dominated by non-residential uses. In combination with similarly conceived and constructed segregated islands of commercial development, such as Century City, Southcoast Plaza, and Warner Center, it erased the possibility for a genuine public, pedestrian life in Southern California for a generation.
At least the economic life of Downtown was stabilized. It reemerged as the predominant West Coast financial and business center of our country and one of the most important on the Pacific Rim. Yet, the homogenizing influence of the automobile-oriented development standards, the erosion of a vital and popular public realm, and the disinterest in retaining significant housing neighborhoods undermined downtown’s special physical endowment. This became exacerbated by the predominance of suburban development models, such as sealed, underground malls and office parks, that undermined Downtown at the expense of surrounding centers and bedroom suburbs.
The expansion of the territory finally transformed the city into a contiguous metropolis, what we now call simply Southern California; at 5000 square miles, one of the most extensive areas of suburban sprawl in the world. Within this vast spread of monotonous and undistinguished suburban house tracts, the region’s public monuments, employment and shopping centers became engulfed by parking. Farther out beyond the Jeffersonian grid into Orange, Ventura and Riverside Counties, these same public places gravitated away from populated areas, isolated from them by the phenomenal quantity of parking surrounding them. The commanding physical contrast between the dense built city and the open countryside that dominated the Third Los Angeles was virtually erased and replaced with the landscape of nowhere.
On the verge of a Fifth Los Angeles, the metropolis became quickly dominated by those aspects of the built world constructed in the last fifty years to accommodate and favor the car: roads and parking lots. The citizens of the region increasingly became subject to the cumulative negative effects induced by fifty years of sprawl: extreme distances and time delays, intense privatization, social ghetto-ization and alienation, and environmental pollution, now the typical experiences of current daily life. Random growth and uncritical dependence on technology brought Southern California to the brink.
The Fifth Los Angeles
1990-Present: The Region/State
The problems of Los Angeles are the very definition of the burgeoning urban and ecological crisis everywhere. The urbanism crafted out of a single-minded dependence on the car has been carried out as low density, land-intensive suburban sprawl on the one hand and as abandonment of the center city and the public realm on the other. The qualities that characterize this form of Los Angeles have been planned for exactly as they are: segregated land use by “zones”; streets made for automobiles, not the pedestrian; landscape as residual buffers, not for human occupation; neighborhoods of racial and economic homogeneity; and buildings without a human-scale. The resulting urban fabric is neither urban nor rural. Any sense of a vital urbanity associated with small towns or large cities and of unspoiled nature expected of the countryside is increasingly threatened by the omnipresence of “nowhere.” The economics of continuing to build and maintain such widely-spread infrastructure of freeways, roads and utilities is indeed unsustainable in the face of competition with other more compact cities and threatens our economic well-being. Los Angeles has pioneered in the short-term, techno-centric economic development of immediate consumption over long-term. human cultural development of social equity, quality of life and environmental responsibility. The riots of the Spring of 1992 indicated among other things that the systematic assault on the city and its public spaces destroyed more than just buildings. It destroyed our collective shared experience – a bond that bridges ethnic and class distinctions. The extremes of the intense hermeticism of the walled enclaves from Simi Valley to Mission Viejo and the disenfranchisement of the barren and alienating streetscapes of Florence Avenue must be seriously re-evaluated if the city is to become the integrated multi-cultural if boosterist city of its dreams.
Despite of this or in part because of it, evidence of an emerging transformation of this metropolis is to be found everywhere. A new regional, multi-modal rail transit system comprised of four hundred-miles of light and heavy lines, amplified by electric trolley buses, bikeways, and expanded bus service is under construction, partly in the old right-of-ways of the Red Car lines. This project promises a region-wide alternative to the car as well as intensified development around its stations.
Rebuilding public space throughout Southern California coupled with the “localization” of retail activity is generating active pedestrian districts all over the basin. Cities like Pasadena and Santa Monica stand out as the best examples of municipalities actively directing the reuse of their downtown commercial districts. Through mixed-use projects and selective densification, commercial activities are accommodated adjacent to multi-family dwellings. The net result is that the making of livable pedestrian centers preserves the character of the surrounding single-family residential neighborhoods. Large new development projects such as Playa Vista are now emerging that use urbanistically and ecologically sound practices in land use, transportation, water conservation, garbage disposal, sewage treatment, pollution controls etc. At Playa Vista, the use of denser housing types, duplexes, townhouses, courtyard housing, in neighborhood configurations, will generate a pedestrian-based community life familiar to the residents of Southern California’s pre-sprawl towns. This same model has also allowed for an ample provision of neighborhood and regional parks as well as the preservation and biological reconstruction of a significant portion of the Ballona Wetlands.
The city that we envision the Fifth Los Angeles becoming would be predicated on a few operative principles aimed at encouraging a dedication to place: Supporting a sense of local economy and community, building upon our city’s heritage and reinvesting in the public realm. These are the motivations of the Downtown Strategic Plan and Playa Vista, both led by our office and published herein.
Because our society has so fetishized the private spaces in this city, it is important to emphasize the need to also encourage its opposite. The public realm is made up of both open space and institutions: it is those shared places which bring people to gather together, that relate them to one another or, conversely, that separate them and secure their privacy. A city is a cultural artifact and a repository of places and things. It is what we are born into and what we leave behind. What a society holds in common is not only what it shares with the living, but that which is shares with those before us and those after us.
Our system of governance upholds both our individual civil rights and our common interests as cities, states and nations. However, while our Constitution guarantees these rights, they are being constantly undermined by the sorry state of the built world around us. In order to maintain the vigor of our democratic ways, we need to elevate the construction of a Los Angeles suitable to the needs of its residents to the level of urgent priority. For too long, all levels of government have been preoccupied with abstract social and economic programs divorced from the power of place. It is, however, by building this common permanent place, the public realm of our built world that the urgent problems of our society can be addressed, our rights and responsibilities applied and a balance between public and private interests established.
If the Fourth Los Angeles was chaos by design, then the reversal of policies that destroyed this metropolis and degraded the quality of the natural world in and around it is in order. The following is an outline of operative principles towards the physical transformation of the Los Angeles region during the phase of its development we are now entering:
1. Layering – The fifth Los Angeles depends for its growth on a new, regionally centered enterpreneurial economy that is committed to the enhancement of local places. Similarly, it is also dependant on a government with a new purpose that measures its accomplishments by the positive physical change that its initiatives generate. The metropolis all around us represents over a hundred years of continuous investment in our well-being. To the degree possible, the Architecture and Urbanism of its future should be based on an ethic of conservation and gradual infilling. The unique physical fragments of Los Angeles as they exists today should become the point of departure for its further redevelopment and the source of its character and difference from other places in America. In research such as is represented by this essay, the historical images and facts about the ecological and urban history of the city must be documented and taken into account in design. And the lost, mythical-poetic dimensions of past Southern California cities and landscapes should also be imagined and brought to bear. No more attempts to turn Southern California into a memory-free zone should be tolerated.
2. Urbanism formed by Architecture – Urbanism is the design of the public void of the city. A complex array of voids composed in particular figures is the essential character and experience of all cities, including Los Angeles. Architecture and Landscape Architecture are the means by which this forma urbis is incrementally formed. The collective figure of this void is more complete, permanent and important than the shape of any single one of the buildings that define it. Within this open space framework, roads, transit networks and infrastructure of all kinds should be designed to contain sprawl and to support pedestrian precincts of all kinds. Special climatic, ecological and cultural influences on the design of open space in this region should be taken into account in order to safeguard its local character. Internationalist diagrams of urban and territorial organization favoring the automobile and all other forms of machinery should be discarded once and for all.
3. Architecture that Marks Time and Place – The architectural project today is most typically an isolated act that depends on objectives that benefit a limited cast of characters. And yet it is the means by which the city and the countryside are constantly and incrementally constructed day in and day out. Its effects, therefore, are essential to the well-being of all. Marking time and place is a means of fulfilling Architecture’s most noble purpose; that is, the establishment of the identity of a society through their constructed and natural surroundings. A mere personal expressive gesture is not enough to elevate Architecture towards such a goal. Single buildings must be supported by a local typological code that takes into account both historical precedent and accepts the possibility of introducing new formal patterns. The linking of both typological memory and individual expression can relieve Architecture of its consumerist burdens and revalidate it as an instrument for re-building the city.
4. Catalytic Projects as Transformers- The city grows relatively slowly. At the same time, this process of change is a potent, relentless and permanent one. For half a century, the dominant paradigm for city-making has been the violent imposition of formally complete, self- referential and spatially isolated objects onto the body of the historic city and the open countryside. It is now time for the acceptance of a new paradigm that is the reverse of our current practices. We should be designing the collective body of the city and nature, not exclusively its individual architectural parts. Buildings, landscapes and open space projects should be designed as small and incomplete interventions. Their programs should accomodate with equal passion client interests, the interests of the public and the invisible interests of the unrepresented. Their completeness should be defined by reference to their physical relationships to existing objects and places. All new projects should be considered as catalytic in promoting positive physical change, further economic investment, and improvements in the daily life of all beyond their property boundaries.
5. The Promise of Public-Private Cooperation – The State and the Market as we have experienced them in the 20th century are the principal promoters and sponsors of “nowhere’. The first priority for Architecture is to reject both the State and the Market as isolated agents of urban growth. States by themselves are capable of little more than establishing normative standards. Similarly, the unchecked market produces mindless uniformity and repetition through the statistical validation of marketing recipes applicable everywhere and usually framed under limited ambitions and singular purposes. Long-term economic prosperity and the construction and maintenance of beautiful cities are linked. Private and public interests must actively cooperate in the regeneration of this region.
Neighborhoods and buildings should become the ultimate means of empowerement in our society, the illustration in one place of our best social intentions. However diverse the population of Los Angeles becomes, only dialogue can generate the agreements upon which a common, public future can be delivered. The public sector can sponsor a neighborhood framework for political participation. The private sector can make it its responsibility to deliver architectural and urban form based on the common ground that such citizen involvement would generate. The Fifth Los Angeles can only become the place of our dreams if the needs of individuals and the many diverse groups that comprise the city are met, at the same time as a sense of community is re-established by the deliberate rebuilding of the physical world within we all exist.
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