do my reading home work

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BUILDING

( In )THE By Aaron Betsky

BRAVE NEW WORLD

The landscape of Southern California is all but devoid of monu­

ments in a traditional sense. In the same sense, it is also without a

clearly defined vernacular. Man has not elaborated the natural conditions of this semi-arid terrain into decorative orders, nor has

he built memorials to his achievements in subjugating

it. The architecture of Southern California exists largely outside of the realm of the age-old contest

with nature that turns building into an act either of the imposition of alien human form orofthe mediation

of natural forces. Instead, architecture here has been conceived of as an artifact at the end of the line, a technological invention.

Such statements, however, can only be made while whizzing by the multitudinous complexities of

this city. In reality, Southern California is no Eden for architectural rebirth, where one can pluck the

oranges of a post-Descartian architecture from holo­

graphic trees nurtured by pumped-in intellects. It is a city like any other, where a vast majority of practi­

tioners affirm the existing social and economic status quo through the design of pointless buildings, while a

small group of mainly young designers tries to figure out how to create an alternative to such a practice.

At the same time, the absence of controlling de­ vices, such as development patterns connected to

history, an untainted natural landscape, or objects

that have become cultural and social focal points, is indeed liberating.

Los Angeles lacks a clear civic architecture. Its government is housed in buildings undistinguishable

from the surrounding office buildings, its cultural 'institutions are broken apart into fragmented,

almost invisible, pavilions. The so-called civic center

of downtown Los Angeles has only one true focal point - city hall. This modest skyscraper, however, is

not at the end of any clear axis, but sits outside of the major thrust of development and is dwarfed by sur­

rounding boxes created in the 1950s to house bureau­ cracies. The latest government building, the Ronald

Reagan State Building, continues this tradition through dissolution into multiple towers enmeshed in

a globular base eaten out by the requisite atrium space. Even the much-vaunted Pasadena Civic Cen­ ter has lost its major axis, while the city hall there is a

stage set of civic rhetoric that is essentially hollow:

the tower is empty, and the solid front of the building is in fact a thin shell wrapped around a courtyard.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a series of pavilions hiding behind a large billboard, while the

Museum of Contemporary Art is buried in a parking

structure so as not to obscure the view from the sur­

roW1ding office buildings that paid for its construction. There are, however, alternative focal points in

the Los Angeles landscape: oil derricks, freeway overpasses, pleasure piers, and the Hollywood sign.

Yet all of these monumental markers are essentially meaningless. They are enigmatic results of systems

of communication, of marketing needs, or of the extraction of something invisible. Large community

foci such as shopping centers turn inward, leaving only mute scaffolding for the clothing racks inside to

face the adoring sea of parked cars. Skyscrapers, which in cities like New York perform a monumental

function, are here cut off from the life of the street,

entered through labyrinthine parking garages, and decapitated by a law that mandates helicopter land­

ing pads on top of all tall buildings. The result is a city organized around roads and signs, not solid objects that indicate the aspirations, memories, or self-image of a community.

But what about the field around these objects?

Wouldn't the vernacular richness of daily experience more than make up for the lack of a gTand architec­ t ure? Yet it is hard to find a Los Angeles vernacular.

In response to the climate, buildings here have a

tendency to turn inward, leaving lush vegetation in place offacades . That gesture is about as close as the

city comes to an architectonic response to its geogra­ phy. The remaining elements of -its vernacular are a

grab bag of wholly imported styles, including the fragments of an international style slapped together

in ephemeral constructions that are either torn down

or remodeled before they can accrue memories. There is a vernacular in terms of frequently repeated com­

positional patterns that are generated wholly by the economic pressures on them: the dingbat apartment

block, the fast-food stand, the strip shopping mall.

Yet these building blocks of a Los Angeles vernacu­ lar, however glorified by the lovers of the architecture

during the 1950s, do not reflect the need of their inhabitants and are generally not specific to their

site. They are created because of economic necessity and are essentially mass-produced . If they are

expressions of the nature of Los Angeles, they are so only negati vely, as the lowest common denominator of

design , affordable given the tremendous development

pressures on almost every site in the city. The result­ ing evanescence of the man-made landscape is fur­

thered by the continually changing population of the

Basin, which is quickly becoming the most ethnically diverse in the world. There are few communities that

do not dissolve before one generation has a chance to grow up, whether under the pressures of develop­

ment or because of the mobility of its own population. The only constant in man-made Los Angeles is

technology. Like all cities, Los Angeles is built on

vast and usually invisible systems of infrastructure of irrigation , electricity, sewage, communication, and

transportation. But where in other cities a bend in the road might recall the memory of an old stream bed, in

Los Angeles it is the result of the meeting of two

different subdevelopments, and a major intersection is the result of a long forgotten juncture between two streetcar lines. The availability of water is not com­

memorated in bridges or fountains, but only in the

greenness of lawns. The places where infrastruc­ ture erupts form the only causes for architectonic

focal points in Los Angeles. Freeway exit ramps are increasingly ringed with castellated commercial

developments; the arrival of water from the Owens . Valley occasions a grand set of concrete forms cas­

cading down the Grapevine Pass; and electrical substations send out their ganglia of wires from a

spider's web of sparkling power. Freeways form

street walls at a larger scale, while the military installations that ring the Southland create its true gateways and mark the limits of its growth. Tech­

nology is the preeminent definer of the forms of Los Angeles.

The result of such conditions is that here,

more than in most cities, the notion of an indepen­

dent architectural object seems slightly absurd, as does the notion of either monumental form or a well-worn vernacular. Attempts to glorify the signs

and symbols of technology to turn them into a sys­

tem of monuments and monumental open spaces deny the essential character of these enablers of

artifice, namely their nature as scaffolding, not form . This does not mean that there is no possi­

bility for architecture in Los Angeles. It just

indicates the need for letting go of the idea that architecture is a solid mediator between individ­

uals, or between individuals and nature. The climate has already invalidated the latter, while the

historical place of Los Angeles as the end of the road, the haven of exiles, and the dreamland where

manifest destiny can be constructed , has made

short shrift of the former. What we are left with is a bricolage whose

true symbol is Watts Thwers, a meaningless monu­ ment pieced together from cast-off elements. We

are left with communities parachuted into the

desert, isolated from each other, constructed from the most shoddy materials, and open to continual

change. What we are left with is a city that will soon be the largest industrial base in the country,

sprawling into an endless sea of tilt-up sweatshops, whose accumulated wealth has not and will not

coalesce into any permanent form that will give it identity, but will instead disappear into the ever­

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spiraling worth of the landscape itself. What we are left with is a new kind of semidesert, a man-made landscape so extensive that it deserves that name.

In Southern California, technology has created a completely artificial alternative to the natural world. Here, streams are buried in concrete culverts, or exchanged for the sluggish rivers of the freeways, which gather into pools and waterfalls at crucial intersections. The surrounding mountains, so tall and absolute as to defy human comprehension, become a datum line visible only on a few clear days, and soon they too will only be interruptions in the sprawl, containing no remnants of castles or pleasure gardens. Our new mountains are magic ones in Disneyland, or they are formed by the accumulation of activity that pushes buildings up in concentric, if somewhat erratic, rings around freeway intersec­ tions. This new landscape is harsh and inimical, a

hostile environment where you have to learn how to burrow down or under to discover the sustenance buried in the rich interiors of homes, stores, or res­ taurants. The features of this landscape are hard to distinguish from the surroundings, and appear monotonous to the untrained eye, but, as in the desert, they reveal themselves to the trained eye as the crucial markers in dangerous terrain. Even the hues of our pollution mimic the rich ochers, purples, and browns that build up the subtle palette of the desert. c

The progeny of this desert appear slightly sur­ real to one accustomed to more temperate climates. They are prickly, hard, and without the kind of grad­ ual ascension from base to top that marks a well­ rounded tree or plant. They are often deformed by their specific function or type, and they are extremely inward-oriented, protecting themselves from all ene­ mies and storing up their precious resources. They are either minute and brightly colored, or vast and muted. Their spiky forms often take on the appear­ ance of armor plating, or of an armory of defen­ sive weapons.

Of course, they are just the buildings or the plants. The true inhabitants are the nomads, those who cannot rest in the desert, but must search con­ tinually for water or, in the case of Los Angeles, for

something more ephemeral to keep them going: the future, always out of reach. That future is the very engine of modernization , that which fuels the rise in prices, the influx of immigrants, and the physical sprawl of the city itself. It is symbolized by the Pacific Ocean, the unconquered West towards which the multimillion dollar homes that line the coast turn their plate-glass eyes adoringly: it's out there, some­ where past the sunset, under the water, beyond the water, beyond the edge. The modern nomads, mean­ while, are not quite human anymore. They have been married to their technological devices. In Los Angeles, you really need your sunglasses. You really shouldn't breathe unfiltered air. You need your air conditioning. You need your car. The inhabitants of the Los Angeles deserts are a kind of satyr- half­ human, half-machine.

First, the densification of Los Angeles is changing the more amorphous, spread-out character of the city. Over 50,000 people in Los Angeles live in garages. Two-story apartment buildings are making way for four-story condominiums. Downtown is developing

into a dense core. Taken together, these develop­ ments should make the city look more urbane. Yet this replication of the larger grids at a smaller scale and the filling-out of fraglnentary forms into larger non­

wholes in fact intensifies the confusion. It is now almost impossible to create isolated objects. Archi­ tecture in Los Angeles, as in most other cities, has become a question of transforming the laws, regula­ tions, and structures of the city. Here the game seems only more abstract and absurd, given the current and deracinated nature of the so-called context to be addressed by the architect. The chaotic nature of the city becomes more evident, and thus one could say its destiny as the first city beyond the bounds of reason, and thus of humanistic urban planning, seems ever more imminent.

Second, this tendency towards post-humanism is not to be understood as necessarily bad. In fact, making value judgments about such developments is dangerous since it leads to the proposal of the kind of "solutions" that have pockmarked our cities with well­ intentioned disasters. An attempt to understand the

nature of the evolution of humanity beyond the defini­ tions established by seventeenth-century rationalism might be of greater interest, and in fact Los Angeles could act as a laboratory for the development of methods of critical evaluation as much as it can create new and interesting mutations of form. Such an approach does not absolve architecture, whether as a drawn or built construction, from its responsibility to take a political stance, that is, to- participate actively in the development of the city in such a way as to prevent the complete abrogation of rights by those in control of its physical resources. Rather, it is the role of the architects to create compelling visions of transformation that can be erected against the purely destructive forces inherent in the economic and social

structure of the city. Finally, nature always threatens to reassert

itself as a defining factor. The earthquake faults are near, and periodically send out their warning tremors. Much of the architecture of Los Angeles is, in fact, deformed by anticipation of "the big one," so that the old role of architecture as a bastion against a post-Edenic world sneaks in through the earthquake codes. Less dramatically, water remains scarce, and the fear of its disappearance gives an edge to those who wish to place artificial limits on the development of the metropolis. Yet, to those willing to keep dream­ ing, the Pacific once again is the future - an endless horizon of water waiting to be transformed into sus­

tenance for the man-made desert. Given such a daunting landscape, how are

young architects performing? First of all, they are building on an indigenous tradition. Architects have been making sense out of the seeming chaos of Los Angeles. In fact, one might argue that they have found themselves confronted with processes of mod­ ernization before many other cities and, as a result, have developed a more pronounced modernism. Irv­ ing Gill's reductivist aesthetic - based on the sparse anonymity of whatever local vernacular was still pre­ sent at the turn of the century, and married to the inexorable logic of tilt-up construction - predated the more affected form of the Viennese heroes of classical modernism. Schindler, building on the work of the Greene brothers, created an architecture expressive

of the lack of a center, static dividers, or the object quality of local form. The Case Study program of the 1950s produced kits of parts that were meant to integrate architecture into the technological marvel that had created this modern metropolis out of defense industries, romantic illusions, and available land. Frank Gehry later synthesized much of this city into enigmatic objects that refuse to complete themselves or to make sense. Most recently, the for­ mer employers of many of those whose work is collected here, such as Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi, Craig Hodgetts and Robert Mangurian, Eric Moss, or Frank Israel, have been struggling to create an architecture that either draws on research by artists into the relationship between artifice and experience, or which transforms itself into set design at an urban scale. The vitality of their work is a testimony to the fact that Los Angeles does produce architecture which at its best does not look like building, but is an abstract interruption in the city, a piece of technology honed for living, or a self-consciously vivid set for modern

living. The work of the younger generation builds on

these traditions, but is also informed by more clas­ sical notions of architecture that these designers, all but a few of whom grew up and were educated elsewhere, brought with them to California. Their visions can be said to oscillate between two ideal images of man, not including that of the da Vincian Renaissance hero squaring the circle and thus resolving the conflict between man in nature in favor of man's projective, abstracting capabilities. Rather, one finds the image of the naked man first postulated by Schindler, released from nature, standing naked on the shore of the Pacific. The inhabitant of the ramshackle beach shack, the surfer, is the prototype of this new man, and his undressing is mirrored in the unclothing of structure started by Schindler and brought to full flower by Frank Gehry. This new Adam is the conceptual client of what might be called the Gehry-schule, an ever-growing group of young designers who either worked for, or moved to the city because of the reputation of, "the godfather of

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the Los Angeles avant-garde." The other model is the

man/machine satyr, depicted at the end of the first Star Trek motion picture and consummated in what Elizabeth Diller has called "an architecture of pros­ thetics." This satyr is served by another school, this

one focused around the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the work of Morphosis. Between these two poles stretch the tentative assemblages of built and drawn form that are the oeuvre of a new

generation of Los Angeles architects. On one side of the spectrum are the new

primitives - the Los Angeles branch of a national movement back to the ranch , back to basics, and back to materials. Produced by those who assimilated the teaching of the Italian and South American rational­ ists such as Mario Gandelsonas and Jorge Silvetti during the 1970s and 1980s, and who then applied the new reductive, memory-driven forms to a perceived American vernacular, their work relies heavily on simple, geometric shapes, cubical volumes, unclut­ tered planes, and a fondness for concrete, concrete­ colored stucco, and concrete block, held together by a muscular armature of metal trusses, window sur­ rounds, and roofs. This is architecture pushed back to a defensive position, a desperate attempt to make monuments in a world that does not need them. Where such work succeeds is in its very anguish. In Los Angeles, however, such monumental commen­ tary often becomes as ironic and wistful as its neo­

!'Spanish, stage-set civic centers, except that the

methods of destabilization are here distinctly mod­ ern. The stark planes are undercut, float in space, or are skewed to activate the grand volumes. Architec­ ture is reduced to almost nothing, but that small something threatens to destabilize the whole, and thus creates an appropriate strategy of subversion.

The plot thickens with the emergence of forms that are joyfully thin and highly colored. Several of the young architects working in Los Angeles delight in the cheapness, mass production, and blandness of the basic building blocks of architecture here, but only because the material is so pliable. In the end, they produce sophisticated gestures without any content. Their colorful cutoffs are just active partici­ pants in the city, except that these actors are stripped

down, muscular, and thus more powerful than the dainty forms all around them. This is architecture for the brightly colored, well-toned denizens of Gold's

Gym and Muscle Beach, except that the client turns out to be an "industry" executive writing the script of his own life.

This mixture of stripping and acting, the reliance on the expressiveness of malleable materials, and the creation of a more muscular, honest dance of basic forms in a city of affectations are the hallmarks of the work of many from the Gehry-schule. Working with the tortured forms and telescoping volumes of the master, they push his undressing of the basic forms of the city one step further, creating haunt­ ing fragments of drywall, stud walls , roof planes, and skylights that dance away from convention. Unadorned and clad in only the most minimal mate­ rials, this work starts to take on some of the quick­ cut, pan-shot, fast-edit character of a music video. Beyond Gehry's sculptural honesty, born in the Venice Beach culture of the 1960s, lies the poly­ morphous perversity so apparent on today's beaches.

Some of the most creative work in Los Angeles, in fact, mixes its metaphors, combining the dance of perverted forms with an interest in the grids of technology that can hold it all together. This is indeed a kind of prosthetic architecture. For many young designers, Los Angeles is the site of an archaeology where they find both the kind of abstract, molded forms of the desert and the mountains, and the mass­ produced frames and connections that turn the end­ less suburbs into a formless web of technologically defined habitation. This is work that is ambivalent about whether it prefers the man-made or the natural desert, but this indecision seems to vitiate, rather than incapacitate, the work. Narrative replaces pro­

gram for young architects of a more theoretical bent, and in these stories architecture becomes the transformation of what is already there- a landscap­ ing job rather than the erection of hopeful new edifices of human reason. Beyond stripping down and getting back to Adam, architects here see the possibility for rewriting the history of The Fall as a new Genesis.

Beyond such multiple strategies, many of which

have been adapted at various times by several of the architects shown here, there are those who have a more focused notion of the role of architecture in the city. Those that I would call technomorphists accept the man-made landscape as a given and merely want to create the appropriate form for a world of post­ humanistic artifice. To them, the world is an uncer­ tain and vaguely threatening place where the solace of good forms has no place. By emphasizing the work­ ing of machined surfaces and by mimicking the human body in their buildings, they make the

machinery of the city into the image of man, while creating a mechanized man at the scale of the city. When they create objects, they are not so much buildings as giant machines. Ominous and over­ whelming, these mechanical beasts have come to replace the human body with something larger and more sophisticated, but still imbued with a dream of conscious control over reality. This is work that delights in the dawn of a fully technological land­

scape, that glorifies the many machines that are necessary to survive on that seemingly arid plain, and that actively seeks the disappearance of the solid forms with which we are so familiar. Gleaming and

dangerous, their forms promise something beyond comfort, as uncertain as their theories of chaos.

The work of the design firms shown here, as well as that of countless other young practitioners, stretches between the naked forms of the new primi­ tives and the humanoid machines of the technomorph­ ists. Nothing ties their work together except that they live in the peculiar design laboratory of Los Angeles. Their designs are, therefore, conscious of the technological deformations of the human land­ scape. Their forms are almost all tortured, deformed, and skewed by this consciousness. They are reso­ lutely modernist in their faith in the ability to con­ struct an alternative physical framework that both refuses to accept the constraints of the memory of tradition and projects us into an unknown future that validates our current activities. It is an architecture produced in a city that has invented itself. The work is local in that it delights in raw building materials that have never coalesced into either monuments or a vernacular. Instead, it closes itself into enigmatic,

surreal, or purely defensive gestures against the man-made desert. What is preserved inside these forms is, as often as not, light. The very abundance of sun that has created the desert is turned into an excuse for a concentration on the kind of perceptual self-consciousness pioneered by the "light and space" artists of the 1960s, so that the human abil­ ity to experience is cultivated even within tech­

nology. Even when such optimism is replaced by the dark forms of technology, a faith remains that, beyond the creation of isolated objects, but within

Los Angeles, and through the transformation of the physical conditions in which we live, an architec­

ture can be found , projected, and constructed.

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