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Progressive Architecture • p."ton Pub lo ,.lIon May 1995

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THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL What's Its Lasting Contribution?

A movement that started with beach cottages and art studios in the 1970s is now

recognized worldwide as an L.A. design trademark. Do its practitioners constitute a school?

What have they actually contributed to their metropolis and to the world's architecture?

by John Morris Dixon

Metal-clad polygons teeter above conventional rooftops, glassy prisms burst through walls, raw-edged incisions reveal geode-like complexities. These are some of the archi­ tectural delights enjoyed by the sophisticated denizens ofL.A.'s Westside , noted around the world for their savvy and self-indulgence. The architects who produce this fragmented, often unsettling work constitute an identifiable group, with enough design char­ acteristics in common to be called a

)mpeti­ ws plus

IRIS

THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL: WHAT'S ITS LASTING CONTRIBUTION?

"school." In his 1993 book Heteropolis (Academy EditionlErnst & Sohn) the perennial style-labeler Charles Jencks speaks of an "L.A. School;' which he had identified in the 1980s, but the group's home ground is actually just a portion of L.A.'s Westside, now marked off as area code 310, centered on Santa Monica.

Of course, none of the leaders of the group - individualists all - see themselves as members of a school; there are, admit­ tedly, no traditional master-disciple rela­ tionships, but there is a more contempo­ rary role-model-and-peers arrangement, with Frank Gehry as the eldest , the trail blazer, the figure revered by all other mem­ bers of the school, even if they pointedly distinguish their own work from his.

The group has attained sufficient visi­ bility in the L.A. area, enough impact on students, and enough recognition world­ wide to invite the question: what are they contributing to their city and to the com­ munity of architects? Are the buildings they produce durable, workable, and satis­ fying to users - even those who are not patron-clients? Since their influence ex­ tends far beyond the narrow area where most of their buildings stand, are they set­ ting an example of value to the rest of the world? Are they showing the way toward a more responsive, responsible architecture?

The Place of Origin

To architects everywhere the locale where this work originated, the few square miles from Hollywood west to the Pacific, is known as a place where individualism is rampant, where image-conscious movie moguls and agents dazzle each other with the novelty of their ideas. It is also known as an area where a benign climate tolerates fragile, quirky building envelopes, where awkward gaps between self-expressive buildings can be quickly filled in with palm trees and bird-of-paradise flowers. To outsiders, this seems to be a locale where a self-indulgent architecture can flourish, supported by well-heeled pa­ trons, with hardly a thought to the social and economic agonies that plague other parts of the L.A. region.

At the modest launching of this design approach, it was applied mainly to the artist's studios and beach cottages of a few art-oriented sophisticates; it was architec­ ture-as-art for the low-budget collector. Like the arugula and the sashimi that were then becoming appreciated in the same

64

circles, this edgy, iconoclastic architecture was definitely an acquired taste. Although this design approach has since become more widely accepted, it has neverthe­ less retained elements of willfulness and menacing aspects appreciated only by cognoscenti, thus linking it more closely to the world of contemporary art than to the reality of most architectural commissions.

The members of the school. of course, have been eager to produce more than playthings for the rich - many of whom prefer Neo-Nouveau in any case. Like avant-garde groups before them, they have not been quickly accepted for larger, more public commissions. And the cultural pol­ itics of the L.A . area have raised special ob­ stacles: the Westside has for decades been set apart from L.A.'s Downtown power base, as a community open to unconven­ tional ideas, to foreigners involved in the movies, and to intellectuals attached to V.C.L.A. This is the only part of town where the word "subversive" might be used approvingly for art or design. (The Westside's liberalism has its limitations, but it is the place where America's most successful African-American architect to date, Paul Revere Williams, did almost all his work, and it remains the home of the first black female Fellow of the AlA, Norma Sidarek.)

Their Westside identity has guaranteed the Santa Monica architects little chance to build Downtown or even at exalted insti­ tutions on their own turf, such as V.C.L.A. or the L.A. County Museum. Not until 1992 did the school's elder statesman, Frank Gehry, who had already collected a major share of the world's architectural prizes (Pritzker and others, see PI A, Oct. 1994) win his first downtown building commission, the prestigious Disney Concert Hall (PI A, Jan. 1993), construc­ tion of which is now indefinitely on hold . Younger colleagues such as Eric Moss, Thom Mayne, M ichael Rotondi, and Frank Israel are still handicapped - as Gehry long was - by the impression that this fragmented, angular, variously sur­ faced work somehow won't travel far be­ yond the sound of the Santa Monica surf.

The Time of Origin This school's emergence coincided

with some important changes in L.A. as an environment for architects. Architect Ray Kappe, who founded the Southern California Institute of Architecture in

EARMARKS OF THE SCHOOL

Willful sculptural forms, colliding or aggressively juxtaposed, are requisites for school membership. In Gehry's Chiat/Day/MoJo office building in Venice (2; PIA, March 1992), conference rooms occupy Pop binoculars (designed in collaboration with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen), which rise between two wings of radically different shape and cladding. In the Bright & Associates offices (4; PIA, Sept. 1990) by Frank Israel, nearby in Venice, a muffin-shaped conference room coexi.sts with other object forms within an old Industrial shell, a frequent setting for the school's efforts. On top of a rehabbed industrial building in Culver City (6), Eric Moss has recently completed NThe Box," a conference room of twisted geometry; another nearby sculptural incident by Moss is on this issue's cover. The Ecru Boutique interior in Marina del Rey by Michele Saee (1; PIA, April 1990) represents the school's more intricate, sinuous, and sleek qualities. The work of the MorphosiS firm has played complex games with Euclidean geometries, as

~ demonstrated In the model for the Crawford house in Montecito (3; PIA, Nov. 1991). The Nicola Restaurant in downtown L.A. (5), completed in 1994 by former Morphosis partner Michael Rotondi, sets fanciful organic forms, all neutrally colored, within geometrical matrices.

Pho:os: 1 Milrvin Riln d j2Glan t Mudfofd;

3 Tom Banner; 4 Gr.Ul.t Mudfo:d; 5 ASSC)~s.i Produc tioM:6 Tom Bonner

THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL : WHAT'S ITS LASTING CONTRIBUnON?

Santa Monica in 1972, points out that the region's cutting-edge architecture up to about 1970 was almost always located up in the hills or in such bosky suburbs as Pacific Palisades. In the early 1970s, de­ sign-conscious clients began colonizing the "flats:' the hitherto seedy Westside ter­ ritories of West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice, and Culver City. The Santa Monica school made these areas its arena and hardly ever broke into the hillier terrain to the north, even though the affluent contin­ ued to build there. Doing much of their work on narrow infill sites or in existing industrial structures, they had little oppor­ tunity to develop those intimate building­ landscape relationships that distinguish earlier L.A. Modernism. A certain brash­ ness of form was also in order, compared to the horizontality and the harmony of color and texture that characterized even the more adventurous of the hillside houses.

It is also no accident that the emergence of this Santa Monica group coincided with the establishment of new schools of archi­ tecture in the L.A. area . Up to the late 1960s, L.A. did not have schools that en­ couraged design innovation with enough faculty openings to give cutting-edge de-

juxtaposition. This alone wouldn't distin­ guish its products from fragmented forms generated in New York, London, or Rotterdam. But the Santa Monica work is largely intuitive and building-oriented, not abstract and theoretical. The school's buildings typically contain unmistakable references to vernacular building; con­ struction details are likely to be strikingly exposed, not suppressed. In form, this work is typically additive in its composi­ tion, not based on transformations of an ideal form, and its components are usually strongly varied in material and color, as well as in geometry. There are exceptions: Eric Moss's recent work has involved sub­ dividing spherical forms, as in his Lawson­ Westen house (PIA, May 1993, p. 68).

One salient characteristic of this school is its virtually exclusive concern with the present. When Frank Gehry and a few younger coUeagues were developing their design principles in the early 1970s, the issue of Modernism vs. Historical Allusion was being debated from coast to coast; but these architects, recalls design critic Pilar Viladas, were totally indifferent to this de­ bate. Nor were they any more interested in the futuristic projections of teams like

While members of this group are generally liberal in their political views, their built work shows little evidence of environmental or social concern.

signers an essential income base. The 1967 establishment of the architecture school at U.C.L.A., in the heart of Westside, and in 1969 at Cal Poly Pomona, in the metropo­ lis's eastern extremity, changed every­ thing. When the Pomona administration failed to support an innovative school pro­ gram stressing community resources as well as academic requisites, dean Ray Kappe and other dissidents bravely estab­ lished the Southern California Institute of Architecture, in Santa Monica, in 1972. At 23 years of age, SCIARC is now headed by one of its alumni, Michael Rotondi, and has become if anything too mainstream ­ a school that generates faculty positions and has sent hundreds of graduates into firms in L.A. and beyond.

Identifying Characteristics Assuming there is a Santa Monica

School, what are its earmarks? Above all, it deals with fragmented, fractured, or folded forms, with abrupt slicing and

66

Archigram in London or the Metabolists in Tokyo. Their buildings may include some of the vaguely futurist imagery of buildings produced by L.A.'s big commer­ cial firms, such as DMJM and Gruen Associates, where Gehry had long worked, but for members of the school these struc­ tures simply joined other contemporary L.A. buildings as material to be trans­ formed by manipulations of geometry, texture, and color.

The group's use of geometry and color was undoubtedly linked to examples in the world of art. Gehry has 'long maintained that he was influenced more by contem­ porary artists than by arch,itects, and one obvious influence is the geometrical play, based on perceptual psychology, in paint­ ings by Ron Davis, for whom Gehry de­ signed a studio in 1972. Another art source is Russian Constructivist painting, for which Gehry designed a 1980 exhibition; this movement has appealed to rebels in every generation. (continued on page 68)

ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION

While not the oldest work of the school, Gehry's own house in Santa Monica (7; PIA, March 1980) has become its icon;

it still typifies the 5chool in Its form al moves, but the use of commonplace components such as chainlink fencing and raw

plywood is now much diminished. Eric Moss's 708 House in Pacific Pa lisades (8; PIA, March 1982) illustrates the more playfu l

Pop imagery that he originally brought to the group. The Sedlak house in Ven ice by Morphosis (9; PIA, March 1982) shows much

g reater subtlety in its geometrica l moves and Its materials palette. Restaurant Interiors were important commissions for most school

members, and Fama in Santa Monica (10; PIA, Sept. 1989) by David Kellen displays

characteristic forms executed in restrained materials. Josh Schweitzer, once in partnership with Kellen, applied bold colors to subtly modified cubic form In his 1989 desert house in Joshu a Tree, California (12). Chicago architect Joseph Valerio won a competition for senior housing (11; PIA, Feb. 1992) in Colton, a distant LA. suburb, demonstrating how sk illfully th e school's basic strategies could be applied by like·mlnded architects from elsewhere.

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THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL: WHAT'S ITS LASTING CONTRIBUTION?

One characteristic that the Santa Monica School work shares with some of its fore­ bears among Southern California Modern­ ist architects is lightness. Like the work of Neutra and the Case Study architects - and the commercial mainstream of L.A. firms - this work has thin, buoyant, often trans­ parent envelopes. While it is easy to relate this lightness to the minimal climatic de­ mands of building in L.A. and to the local conviction that buildings are merely temporary, there has nevertheless always been an opposing grollp of L.A. architects who followed the thick-walled tradition of the Spanish Colonial, of Irving Gill, and of Frank Lloyd Wright's L.A. area buildings.

The competing new movement on L.A.'s Westside as this Santa Monica school emerged was the quintessential Post­ Modernism of Charles Moore, who was architecture program head at U.C.L.A from 1978 to 1985, and his followers. Although Moore had developed his basic design strategies in other parts of the country, the L.A. area was fertile ground for them; he and his disciples wove to­ gether the local tradition of ersatz Spanish Colonial with elements of retail strip ver­ nacular and Disneyland theming in pro­ j;ects that cu lminated in the ironically Baroque but obviously thin-skinned Beverly Hills Civic Center (PI A, April 1993, p. 98), where the open spaces are clearly the design objectives and the build­ ing sO llids mere backdrops. While the Moore school work suggests the transient monumentality of a Cecil B. DeMille movie set, the Sal1ta Monica work recalls the backs of these sets, with their ragged edges, improvised bracing, and accidental spatial effects.

There have always been two faces to Hollywood's movie productions: the up­ beat message of films that stress virtue and heroism and the film nair aspect embodied in detective movies and thrillers. When Santa Monica architects display abrupt transitions and menacing angles - not to mention a penchant for exposed metal ­ they are joining film nair visual devices to their back-of-the-movie-set imagery.

Critic Mike Davis, in his perceptive book on L.A., City of Quartz, links this image of toughness to a defensive posture assumed by affluent Westside L.A. against the poor, threatening population of nearby districts; while a siege mentality has been increasingly evident throughout this pe­ riod, there is no indication that these ar­

chitects and their clients feel any more de­ fensive than those who design and live in buildings of mainstream Modern or Rococo inspiration.

The Distinctions Among Them Of course, not all members of the school

design alike. While Gehry's work tends to be intuitive and sculptural, the work of Morphosis, for instance, has always been based more on spatial order derived from grids or other geometrical devices, generat­ ing a play between repetition and inter­ ruption. The order in Morphosis bui,ldings is at least as apparent on the interior as on the exterior, while in Gehry's sculptural forms, interiors may seem to be almost accidental outcomes of exterior form­ shaping. Other members of the school are generally neither as geometrically focused as the Morphosis partners or as willfully sculptural as Gehry.

The group's design also differs in the degree to which it refers to vernacular buildings. The work ofThom Mayne or his former partner in Morphosis, Michael Rotondi, shows little reference to the ver­ nacular, as does that of Morphosis alum­ nus Michele Saee. Frank Israel's work, too, deals mainly with abstract forms, but often as interpreted in Modernistic design that represented glamour in 1930s Hollywood. Eric Moss initially used a lot of Pop im­ agery - ironic gables, supergraphics ­ which he no longer does, but he still makes unconventional use of off-the-shelf win­ dow frames or other standardized parts. As Gehry's dients and budgets have changed he has largely stopped llsing chain link fencing, exposed lath, corru­ gated cardboard and other pointedly com­ monplace materials, but the memory re­ mains in unexpected use of materials by the school's members - and by architects thousands of miles from Santa Monica.

There is also a wide range within the group of intuitive vs. intellectual design methods. While Gehry presents his work as the product of an aw-shucks spontane­ ity, backed up with characteristically squiggly sketches, Mayne and Rotondi present theirs as the product of geometri­ cal manipulations, stressing this through drawings with intricate overlays of regulat­ ing lines in plan and section. The intellec­ tual in the group, however, is acknowl­ edged to be Eric Moss, who ingenuously cites Joyce and Melville in conversation; in his work, Moss deals with Jungian essen ­

68

PUBLIC-ORIENTED WORK

Members of rhe Santa Monica School have foul1d it hard to get public or Institutional commissions, and even now their success with such projects is little recognized. Frank Gehry's Loyola Law School on the fringe of Downtown LA . (13; PIA, Feb. 1985) combined remodeled academic buildings with inexpensive new buildings to create a lively intown campus, but one that doses out its troubled neighborhood; Gehry has continued to add buildings to the complex. Koning-Eizenberg made modest use of the school's design devices to enliven scattered-site public housing in Santa Monica (14; PIA. Oct. 1988). Morphosis

designed ingeniously luminOUS spaces for the largely underground Comprehensive Cancer Center at Cedars Sinai Hospital in West Hollywood (15; PIA, July 1988); in this well­ functioning facility, sculptural impulses were limited mainly to a few objects set in a context that is regular but not boring. Morphosis's proposed theater (16; PI A, Jan . 1990) was one of several components designed by the school's architecls for the Arts Park complex proposed (and not executed) for the San Fernando Valley. Eric Moss designed the Cenlral Housing Office for the University of California. Irvine (17 ; PIA, May 1989), where expansion In the late 19805 induded works by Gehry

and Moore.

THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL: WHAT ' S ITS LASTING CONTRIBUTION?

tials such as universal archetypes and the collective unconscious, whereas Gehry more often displays overtly Freudian sym­ bolism, as in his recurrent fishlike forms .

Michael Rotondi, since his 1991 depar­ ture from the Morphosis firm, which Thorn Mayne is maintaining, has been ex~ ploring improvisational design, decision­ making on the site as the building goes up (see his CDLT 1,2 House, PIA, Jan. 1992, p. 70). He is also increasingly involved in projects with a strong social or philosophi­ cal agenda, such as a school for a Native American group in South Dakota or a rus­ tic arts camp in the California mountains (facing page); meanwhile, he is applying his ad hoc design procedures to the rede­ velopment of some industrial buildings near downtown L.A. for a patron-client somewhat comparable to the one who has kept Eric Moss busy revamping light in­ dustrial structures in Culver City. The on­ going joint client -architect efforts of both

pee ted angles to enliven otherwise homo­ geneous envelopes. Even Michele Saee, who generates a lot of formal activity within his typically small projects - all, he says, in the service of the client's public image - tends to use rather low-keyed and consistent palettes of materials .

Of course, the formal earmarks of the Santa Monica school are related to design impulses that developed in many other places during the same period. The most obvious kinship is to the middle genera­ tion of San Diego architects - Rob Quigley, Tom Grondona, and others - and to some Bay Area firms, but many characteristics of this work are simply in the air almost all over the world. Often the formal relation­ ship seems apparent, but the influences are hard to sort out, as in the housing develop­ ment illustrated here by Joseph Valerio of Chicago; Valerio's work had already shown related characteristics before he won a de­ sign competition for some Southern

We don't necessarily want to carryon our lives inside tilted cones or angular crystalline forms.

architects suggest strategies for urban revi­ talization. Although these architects as a group are known for self-contained build­ ings with little urban connection, Moss's Culver City efforts, on-going for several years now, suggest a promising urban de­ sign strategy of sculptural incidents inter­ spersed in an mundane physical fabric.

Younger practitioners whose work ar­ guably places them in this school differ from their elders mainly in not seeing their work as art. Having executed relatively few jobs before the current recession hit, they're acutely aware that the market for freewheeling design experiment is limited. Such architects as David Kellen, Josh Schweitzer, Kate Diamond, and the part­ ners Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg all portray themselves as simply building buildings to suit the client and the situa­ tion. Careful design, yes; architecture as art, no. Koning Eizenberg are admittedly at the edge of the school's influence, with work that is relatively calm and disci­ plined, subtly manipulating vernacular de­ sign; only at a few points do they introduce angular juxtapositions and changes in color (the only variation some of their budgets permit). Kellen and Schweitzer usually get more playful with their forms, but typically rely on color and on unex-

California housing and executed a project (page 66) that rates honorary membership in the school. The partners of Coop Himmelblau, widely recognized for their meticulously crafted interpretation of the fragmentation aesthetic in Austria, have long maintained an L.A. area office , but the Malibu house that would have been their first American building (PI A, Jan. 1991, p. 85) hasn't been realized.

What Lasting Contributions? Why has the work of the Santa Monica

school impressed critics and other archi­ tects? Why are the group's members in great demand to lecture and teach in archi­ tecture schools? Why do these architects continue to attract clients with exceptional design sophistication?

I think it is because they found a promising way to adapt Modernism to this post-dogma era. At a time when Post­ Modernism was offering nostalgia tinged with irony, the Santa Monica group started with the premise that the present was actu­ ally okay. They drew on the abstract formal principles of Modernism and combined them with pragmatic local construction methods in work that is at once lively and unsettling - rather like an amusement park as depicted in a (continued on page 112)

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Frank O. Gehry & Associates design for the Guggenheim M useum branch now under construction In Bilbao, Spain (19) , shows the freewheeling sculptural approach the firm is still taking where

the context does not impose strong constraints. Computer­ aided design helps make such sculptural forms possible at

large scale, and it is playing a key role for some other members ofthe school. David Kellen is applying advance

CAD techn iques to shape the exotic spaces of Star City (1 8), a themed entertainment complex in Singapore

(designed with Jefferson Eliot Concept DeSign , Panatom, and Design Team PTE). Thom Mayne and

his firm, Morphosis, are using CAD to generate the angular "Stealth" contours of the Diamond Ranch

high school in Pomona, California (22; designed with Wi ll iam Blu rock Associates of Newport

Beach). Mayne's former partner, Michael

Rotondi, i.s taking the very different approach of on- site design decision­

making, with such projects as the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony (21 ). The influence of the Santa Monica School is evident in

work by local architects who have not had direct affiliation with it: the

prominent new control tower at LA. International Airport by Siegel Diamond (20) displays a

sharp articulation of parts, with overhangs. outriggers, and a

variety of materials rare ly found in such structures.

PhotO!.: ISfl.rdt:lect'i, 19 Ioshud Whl~. 20 ,oV("!1f'(1J; r Ai),U~ P'odU(f~

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THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL

(continued from page 70) Hollywood film nair. There is

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and h

the Sant

great ap· peal in their work's sense of liberation and abundance, spikea with elements of irrationality and instability.

One of the serious criticisms directed at this body of work i, that its sculptural preoccupation takes precedence over tht shaping of effective interior spaces. We don't necessarily want t carryon our 'lives inside tilted cones or angular crystalline forms. Like many other 20th-Century architects, these Santa Monica architects can miscalculate badly when it comes to inte· rior proportions, daylighting, or any of the qualities that make room pleasing to be in. Mayne, Rotondi, and their followers, a noted, design with more consciousness of interior volumes, bu; their geometrical order can generate inescapable cagelike ef· fects. All of the leaders of the school, however, have produce some interior spaces that are both inspiring and well suited t their purposes - the dramatic, luminous galleries of Gehry' Vitra Museum, for instance (PI A, May 1990, p. 94), or the reas· suring volumes of Morphosis's Cancer Center (p. 69) .

Another common and justified criticism of this group's work is that it is self-contained, with little apparent sympathy either for urban neighbors or for exurb an landscapes. This genera weakness is obviously related to the setting of the school's semi­ nal works - along with their offices and their principal teaching posts - in the flat, haphazardly developed portions of L.A .' Westside. And, rather than asserting their superiority to the re­ tail strips and "dumbbell" apartments of this territory, their

Younger practicioners whose work arguably places them in this school differ from their elders mainly in not seeing their work as art.

works strove to maintain a kinship. In recent years, of course Gehry has found himself working in some settings - notably if" Paris (PI A, June 1994, p. 27) and in Prague, (PI A, Jan. 1995, p 25) where uncurbed individualism just would not do ­ has developed some elegant contextual responses, without sub· merging his formal inventiveness; in other situations, he sti finds sharp sculptural juxtapositions to be the answer (pages T and 72). Meanwhile Eric Moss, doing a series of interventions i an existing fabric has, as noted, worked out an instructive inci· dent-in-context strategy (page 65 and cover).

The near indifference to landscape architecture amon members of this group is cited by David Gebhard, the architec· tural historian who has repeatedly updated his definitive guid to L.A . Architecture. In contrast to a strong tradition of subtl indoor-outdoor relationships in the L.A. area - from Greene Greene through Richard Neutra to the present ­ Monica stars give only routine treatment of the open spac. around their buildings, where there is any (in the larger hous or campus buildings by Gehry, for instance) with virtually nl porches, courtyards, or any such mediating elements. In their recent work, however, both Mayne and Israel show substantia. efforts to nestle their structures into the terrain in ways tha members of this school have not previously tried.

While the members of this school are generally liberal i their political views, their built work shows little evidence of en vironmental or social concern. Energy (continued on page 114

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THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL

(continued from page 112) conservation is admittedly not criti­ cal in the balmy climate around Santa Monica - even less so than a few miles inland - but the modest amount of the school's work elsewhere exhibits the same kind of convoluted volumes. There is no question that fragmentation and exaggerated artic­ ulation of form are harder to justify in the harsher climate of, say, Minneapolis, where Gehry has done two substantial build­ ings (PIA, Dec. 1987, p. 60, and Feb. 1994, p. 24).

In the area of social concern, Frank Gehry expresses relief that he has finally landed a subsidized housing commission - in Frankfurt - but Koning Eizenberg have been applying some ot" the school's design principles to a social center, an SRO, and some fine housing (page 69). Other good housing architects, such as John Mutlow in the L.A area and Davids Killory in San Diego, show a free use of form and color that has some sympathy with the Santa Monica mode, and Midwesterner Joseph Valerio adapted related forms in a local housing complex (page 66).

Yet another criterion on which the validity of this school's work can be tested is the adaptability of their design approach to other regions. Shorn of their regional connections, his works look even more ,like overscaled sculpture than they do in L.A. ; no wonder a faculty member of the Toledo Center for the Visual Arts (page 72) refers to the building as "a GehrY:' In his Paris and Prague buildings, however, Gehry has wedded his design

_

principles to local traditions so effectively as to set an example for the host country.

The Santa Monica group has been inconsistent about offer­ ing intellectual underpinning for its work _Gehry's plays on the psychology of perception have more to do with art that he ap­ preciates than with written theory. Mayne and Rotondi make intellectual documents of their intricate drawings. Only Moss makes a point of relating his work to theoretical debates in the world beyond L.A. One could argue that some of the group's sado-masochistic imagery of iron hardware and corroded parts, which peaked around 1990, gave their work more gravity in academic circles_ Now a formal device of subtle, obtuse­ angled folding is seen in new projects by Mayne and Israel; both refer to this as "Stealth" imagery, as in the military aircraft, but on buildings these angles look more gentle than menacing.

Santa Monica Pros and Cons How then to summarize the contributions of the Santa

Monica school? Its drawbacks: it does little to address serious environmental, energy conservation, or social concerns; with some notable exceptions, its buildings are isolated from their context; it can produce some mean interior spaces. A qualified advantage: its principles can be adapted brilliantly to distanl settings, but in very few instances so far - almost all by Gehry Its clearcut advantages: the approach is adaptable to ordinar~ building techniques and to low-budget commissions.

And now for its outstanding contributions: the work of the school verifies that today's architects can still be inventive, tha freedom from convention can be positive; its diverse forms ana textures could be said to express the pluralism of our society ­ along with the dynamism and the liberation from hierarchy We would like it to have. Working in a period of doubt and nostal· gia, these architects have encouraged all of us - architects, crit­ ics, and the public - to ponder the potential of innovative form­ making to enrich our lives.

PIA