The insurance adjusters have come and gone, the rubble of thousands of looted businesses has been cleared away and Los Angeles is physically ready to start the enormous task of rebuilding (to put it in perspective, however, the total estimated damage from five days of rioting was put at $735 million, less than 5 percent of the value of property destroyed by Hurricane Andrew). But is it psychologically ready? The city council has enacted only one significant measure affecting reconstruction efforts, streamlining most permit procedures while setting stricter standards for liquor stores. Architects and planners, though, are thinking hard about what kinds of buildings should be built in the wake of the riots-both replacements for what was destroyed, and as new construction in other neighborhoods-and asking how they can avoid the fire next time.
“We’re talking about the development of private fortresses,” says Mark Baldassare, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of California at Irvine. He sees steel and concrete as the new materials of choice; 12-inch windows (too small to climb through) and 12-foot fences (too high to scale) as the decorative touches of the future, along with the ubiquitous swivelbased security camera. Baldassare finds it a sad irony that southern California, with a congenial climate for open-air living, should be shutting itself in like this, and he describes it in the most damning term imaginable: “Manhattanization.”
This is a longstanding trend in Los Angeles 2architecture. It is evident in most new downtown commercial developments and even in buildings designed to serve the public, such as Frank Gehry’s imposingly fenced and blockhoused Goldwyn library and the walled, sunken Museum of Contemporary Art. In private dwellings, the all-consuming quest for “security” has given rise to the ludicrous development of what architecture critic Mike Davis calls “stealth” buildings. These are fashionable homes that dissemble their opulence behind facades of picturesque poverty or grim industrial functionalism, like the Dixon residence in Venice. Architect Brian Murphy gutted the modest structure on the site but retained its graffiti-covered exterior. He sealed the windows with plywood and tar paper, and then built the luxurious, skylit house behind it. In the house he designed nearby for actor Dennis Hopper, Murphy erected a windowless, corrugatedsteel wall facing the street and then planted a white picket fence in front as a coy counterstatement. Murphy is a strong believer in this kind of playful brutalism-studding concrete with purple marbles, for instance, to make a blank wall seem less ominous without compromising its ability to repel Molotov cocktails. “You can address the elements and still be user-friendIy,” he says. The Dixon house, which had been broken into five times before Murphy’s treatment, has been burglarproof in the 10 years since.
But not everyone is convinced that the same architectural solutions that worked-or, as it happened, didn’t work–for the Kremlin are right for southern California. A group calling itself the Design Professionals’ Coalition is examining the relationship between buildings and people in light of the riots. They want to know why specific buildings were torched while others nearby escaped damage. In many instances, naturally, the reasons had to do with the type of business or the rioters’ feelings toward the store owner. But residents mention a building’s appearance with surprising frequency. Ugliness is a fairly universal value; even those who have had to live with it all their lives can recognize it and rebel.
Or maybe the problem isn’t architectural ugliness per se, but the alienating quality of the shopping avenues of semiurban Los Angeles, as wide and treeless as runways, and dotted with a few miscellaneous structures. The city’s new director of planning, Con Howe-whose last job was with the New York City Planning Department-wants to encourage greater density in the rebuilt neighborhoods, by steering returning businesses to specified blocks. This, he believes, will result in a livelier streetscape and a greater feeling of community among residents and merchants. Others are calling on architects and planners to supply more local and ethnic flavor to the rebuilt communities. “Los Angeles isn’t really a city, it’s a constellation of cities,” says architect Jon Jerde, one of the principal designers of the 1984 Olympics. He advocates distinctive architecture, signs and landscaping for each of the dozens of Los Angeles neighborhoods, so that residents can identify with their own “micropolis.” Frank Villalobos, an urban designer working in East Los Angeles, thinks buildings should be “relevant” to the ethnic group that inhabits the neighborhood: postmodern in trendy Anglo Melrose; Spanish colonial, presumably, in Latino East L.A. The only tiny flaw in this prescription is that Los Angeles neighborhoods have been known to turn over their entire population and ethnic makeup in approximately the time it takes to build a single theme restaurant. This raises the awful possibility of an entire community of, say, Laotians lost among the adobe-walled cantinas left behind by the neighborhood’s previous tenants.
Finally, one has to ask whether it really matters all that much-whether garish plastic signs and cheap aluminum storefronts are the real problems facing poor Angelenos, rather than drugs or unemployment. Gehry is one of those who thinks that architects are, as usual, overstating their own importance: “The story is that [poor] people are not getting their rightful place … their only recourse is violence. Until we change that, I don’t think architecture has anything to do with it.” But Michaele Pride-Wells, a cofounder of the Design Professionals’ Coalition, disagrees. “We are inspired by our environment,” she says. “When the environment is negative and dirty and hopeless, we feel hopeless. I think architecture can inspire you to riot.”
