146 · 2017. 9. 20. · language of the cinema or the language of flowers. The real scientific leap will be achieved when we can speak of the language of the city without metaphor

A08146

marco le donne

the city as an idea expressed in contemporary

architecture

examples of buildings within cities

and of cities within buildings

foreword by vincenzo melluso

ARACNE

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I edizione: luglio 2007

“… It is now time to reevaluate the one-horrifying statements of John Ruskin that architecture is the decoration of construction, but we should append the warning of Pugin: It is all right to decorate construction, but never construct decoration”. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas

“… In the same way that we have learned to

read genetic code from DNA, one day we’ll be able to read the genetic code of a city from its architecture. If architecture is packed with information in the manner of holographic images then perhaps when we have a deeper understanding of the holographic model that has been suggested for the universe we’ll be able to apply that to reading buildings in a new way, to mine them for their information. I think that Frank Gehry’s buildings are a holographic memory of Los Angeles that describes every condition of the city. The cultural, social and political and spatial information that is enfolded into his buildings will allow them to function as a holographic memory of the city. This is the way in which Los Angeles is becoming a new paradigm”. Michael Rotondi, Visits, Meetings, Explorations

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Foreword: Cities In Change Vincenzo Melluso

In a scenario where the urban condition and the contemporary city are undergoing great mutations, the purpose for new design strategies is a need that comes out strongly. Although encountering difficulties and deficiencies, these new strategies are committed, with rigour and lucidity, to give back the sense of contemporary living, with the tools and the ideas of our time. Tools and ideas that surely have to be applied with competence and identified in the instances of modernity.

In 1990 Pasquale Culotta, in one of his

editorials on the pages of the architectural magazine “In Architettura” was urging so: «the individual responsibility is to train practicing a very clear task, that is also difficult and special, while the collective and institutional one is to identify and favour the opportunities, that is to keep the “heart” of architectural design beating».

What city then? To this question it is necessary to answer removing in advance

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the reserves and the fears that, to certain extend, have been going through the architectural debate, specially in Italy, often outlining a defensive logic that has produced a sterile idea of conservation. It is this counterproductive attitude towards careful and rigorous studies, that are engaged, on the contrary, to interpret the instances of our contemporainety in a significant way.

Rather it is necessary to restart, with

consciousness and conviction, giving back strength to the architectural design as the true tool able to explore and resolve the questions related to the transformations of the city. In fact, only through the design of finished parts, the urban modification process will reach solutions able to urge society to revive that fundamental sense of identification and membership.

The proposition of a designed city

through the definition of clear domains is perhaps the way to bring the individuals' needs back to a collective interest. Maybe this is the way to give back dignity to whole parts of our cities, which seem fated to a perennial state of precariousness and degradation.

Palermo, july 2007

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the staff of the 99/00 Housing & Urbanism programme at the Architectural Association in London, particularly, the programme director Jorge Fiori, and the tutors for my dissertation Lawrence Barth and Hugo Hinsley. I thank Emma Nugent for reviewing the manuscript and helping me to write understandable English. I wish to thank professor Giuseppe Fera, my sister Maria Le Donne and university researcher Olivia Longo for their useful suggestions for the publishing of this work. My sincere thanks are also due to professor Vincenzo Melluso for his Foreword. Lastly, I have to acknowledge the publisher for agreeing to this publication.

the city as an idea expressed in contemporary architecture

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Prologue: has the city a genetic code?

Since the end of the last century there

has been a significant change in the relationship between architecture and the urban. It seems that the city doesn’t provide any more that functional and morphological basis on which the architecture is developed. Neglecting the overall framework of urban preconditions, the architectural design has now taken the responsibilities once attributed to the town planning. This roles exchange between the architecture an the city has not, as might be thought, denied the relevance of urban analysis. In fact, the interpretation and the understanding of layouts and fabrics, spaces and places, settings and contexts, as well as cultural, social and political information seem to be adopted and assimilated by the architectural construction as its genetic code, an invisible substructure that influences its meaning.


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Architecture has gained a supremacy that gives it a dominant role in determining the image of the city. “There is no longer an architecture of the city, nether for the city nor in the city, but an architecture/city… Synthetic and total, architecture has taken the place of the city, representing an ambiguous duplication of it”1.

Architecture no longer depends on a set of urban preconditions. It is no longer forced to base its own theoretical and practical reality on a preliminary framework of urban circumstances. Its validity is ensured by the fact that it internalises a synthesis, a symbolic representation, of the city. “Thinking about the city today means thinking about it as an ideogram or, what amounts to the same thing, as a logo, to use Rem Koolhaas’s expression”2. The ideogram is a dynamic scheme. It is necessary to counteract the weight of the city’s history and the obstacles of some of its incomprehensible meanings. The ideogram is far more than a model. While a model has a predominantly analogical content and relates explicitly to the object to which it refers, an ideogram is something much more abstract with more autonomy from its reference. It can be considered a synthesis of the city and, at the same time, the principle of its evolution. An ideogram can be thought of as the DNA of the city.


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The conceptualisation of the city: structural and post-structural thinkers, new architectural procedures and the Gestalt theory

This notion of the city as an ideogram

is in part connected to structural and post-structural concepts, particularly Roland Barthes’s semiotics, Jean Baudrillard’s simulations and the Deleuzian diagram. According to Barthes, a wide variety of social and cultural phenomena, not just traditional art forms, can be gathered and interpreted as systems of signification. To the structuralist critics and theorists of the 60s and 70s, architecture, like language, was recognised as a social construct. It was in this sense that they saw the analogy between architecture and language being pertinent as it regarded to this newly fashionable discipline of semiotics. This branch of knowledge has had origins in the early 20th century work of the pioneering linguist Fernand de Saussure. He asserted that any semiological system would basically consist of a signifier, the sign or symbol in the system in question, and a signified, that for which the signifier stood. Following from research on many different languages and on other symbol systems, Saussure had realised that in any elaborated system, such as language, the


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fundamental relationship of signifiers to their signifieds is an arbitrary one. The words arbor in Latin, arbre in French and tree in English are three different signifiers that all stand for the same signified. In his Cours de linguistique generale in 1916, Saussure discussed remarkable analogies between the city and the sign system of language.

Such analogies were developed in the work of Barthes, who has studied further systemic relations and semantic structures, which might justify the description of the city as a semantic field or a text. “The city is a discourse, and this discourse is actually a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it. Yet, the problem is to extract an expression like language of the city from the purely metaphorical stage. It is metaphorically very easy to speak of the language of the city as we speak of the language of the cinema or the language of flowers. The real scientific leap will be achieved when we can speak of the language of the city without metaphor. And we can say that this is precisely what happened to Freud when he first spoke of the language of dreams, emptying this expression of its metaphorical meaning in order to give it a real meaning. We too,


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must confront this problem: how to shift from metaphor to analysis when we speak of the language of the city?”3 Roland Barthes argued that the incapability of understanding all the information about the city is precisely because of the lack of a technique for semantic interpretation. He claimed “a new scientific energy in order to transform such urban data, to shift from metaphor to the description of signification”.

A key part of Barthes’s theoretical apparatus was, as it was for Saussure, the conceptual relationship of the signifier to the signified, which was fundamentally based on its arbitrariness. It is precisely this arbitrariness that gives symbol systems within society, such as language, their social flexibility and fluidity. Arbitrariness also makes their relationship contingent and highly susceptible to manipulation. It is this last aspect that has so preoccupied Baudrillard, focusing on the role of symbols in a society saturated with media. He asserts the limitless readings of any given signifier, especially in the era of the multiplicity of media in which now we live. For Baudrillard, all social and cultural referents are simulations that have lost any relationship to any original meaning they might once have been thought to possess. Simulation “is the generation by models of the real without origin or reality: a


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hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory”4. Baudrillard’s theory of the precession of simulacra brings him to deny any tangible reality. “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself”. But at the same time he recognises that the process of simulation is a genetic miniaturisation of reality. “The real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices and memory banks”. So, do Baudrillard’s simulations really neglect reality or are they just a synthesis of it?

The contradiction may be solved by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s definition of the diagram, which, as an abstract machine, gives up its original representative status. Its “function is not to represent something, still less something real, but to construct a real future, a new type of reality”5. The Deleuzian abstract machine conceptualises internally the changeable and non-static condition of contemporary realities. A diagrammatic approach to architectural design (now very common thanks to the widespread use of computer-based tools) was suggested by Koolhaas since the time of Delirious New York. Questioning the conventional technique that


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uses graphical representations of plans and sections, the diagram was introduced as an instrument in the design process ideally suited to the generation of concepts. As he wrote, “analysis becomes the same thing as creation”6. According to this approach, the architectural practice is changing in a dynamic process that “is concerned not so much with forms or objects but with shaping the conditions under which forms or objects emerge”7. The architect’s design world has consisted of a singular and stable system of hierarchically scaled drawings: from the scale-less sketch to the working drawing, then to the construction process and the building in itself. This design process, firmly fixed in the traditional practice, is the model against which the Deleuzian diagram is defined.

Out of this has come a new conceptual procedure, in which the computer is given the task of organising an uninterrupted flow of information, analyses and representations into a dynamic system, structured through continuous integrations in which no particular disciplinary aspect prevails. This changeable and extensive state makes it possible to postpone architectural decisions, such as the final definition of the relations between idea and form or the choice of any typological system that will inevitably arrest the process. On


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the other hand it emphasises the potentialities of the architectural design, fed by the accumulation of data. Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos have stressed the significance that computer technologies are capable of assuming in architecture, through their modification of three essential parameters of the traditional design process: the exploration of completely new spatial configuration; the subversion of the traditional hierarchies (that elevated the function of the plan above other designing elements); the involvement of other knowledge disciplines in the whole process. The new architecture is characterised by the sinuosity of its unusual geometries, the uninterrupted flow of its internal spaces, the continuity between inside and outside, the blurring of boundaries and the ambiguity of its forms. Van Berkel and Bos have tried to describe the different effects that these works of architecture might have in our renewed experience of the world. Effects that can be “anticipatory, unexpected, climatic, cinematic, time-related, non-linear, surprising, mysterious, compelling and engaging”8. These effects are precisely those produced by the new technologies of communication, entertainment, advertising and fashion.

There is a contradiction in the use of computerised procedures of collecting data.


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Their application (supposedly constructed upon an empirical approach) shows that the interpretation of such data can be conditioned by their conceptualisation. What seems to be a purely rational process, based on the definition of reality by the assimilation of information, is on the contrary a machine for a new type of creativity and imagination. Since the mid 70s, O. M. Ungers opposed to an empirical mode of thinking, which concerns itself with reality, as it is, “the search for an all- round idea, for a general content, a coherent thought, or a overall concept”9. For him and the Gestalt theorists, the facts derived simply from experience are purely descriptive. Their isolated, measured and justified condition lets them transform into mathematical formulae, which destroy any imaginative act and conceptualisation of reality. “Physical reality has value only in so far as it is analogous to the world of imagination”10. Ungers asserted that empiricism reduced architectural theory to a pragmatic functionalism, into a 3rd rate science. This was also the opinion of Colin Rowe, author of Collage City, who saw empiricism as a failure of the intellect and of its capacity of imagination. He was against architecture which “lacked any ideal referents”11. Empirical thoughts and notions such the ones in Gordon Cullen’s book


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Townscape obsessed the Gestalt theorists. For them, the common sense and the simple association between space and social relations described in Townscape were not based upon an intellectual idealisation of reality. Ungers and Rowe’s research looked for a deep understanding of urban realms inevitably avoiding “the founding of pleasure in the immediate perception of things”.


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Buildings within cities: new cathedrals of the 21st century

In the view of contemporary

architects, the city has undergone a process of idealised conceptualisation. Urban complexity seems to be reduced into something dense and concentrated, limited and absolute. The city becomes an idea of a reality, which avoids any investigation of its nature and constitution in order to operate in a concrete way. The complexity of the city solidifies in a sort of simulacrum that then generates urban interventions. This simulacrum is like an instrument that seems to be capable of replacing the city Master Plan. So the fundamental problem of the relationship between the urban structure and the architectural object is supposed to be solved by condensing the city into a self-contained figure which an analytical and typological approach is no longer able to do. The growing loss of meaning of urban space, its increasingly anonymity and its dramatic discontinuity, typical of post-industrial cities, has induced architects to condense the complexity of functions and activities that were once specific to urban spaces within the closed perimeters of buildings. “These buildings function like magnets in the complex and chaotic field of urban spaces, giving shape to, keeping alive


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and stimulating the needs, which still exist, of the citizens of a collective life”12. Their sculptural shapes, such as the severe geometries of certain works by Peter Zumthor, some sophisticated and ambiguous envelopes of Herzog and de Meuron and the dramatically broken volumes of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, as well as the plastic manipulations of Frank Gehry, appear in the panorama of the city as signals, as accumulators of meaning.

This architecture with its strong identity, often discordant and heretical towards the urban scene, is capable of creating a element of stability in the city landscape. The buildings become points where this stability, based on a powerful architectural presence in the urban space, functions as anchors, around which urban relationships, even the most distant and sporadic, are tied. Proclaiming architecture’s supremacy over urban planning, this tendency already exited in an embryonic form in the redesign of Barcelona and of its public spaces. Oriol Bohigas, one of the key players in the rejuvenation of the Catalan capital, stressed the important role of architecture in our cities in a speech he made at the award ceremony for the RIBA’s Golden Medal given to the whole city of Barcelona. “The urbanistic instruments for


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the reconstruction and the extension of a city cannot be limited to normative and quantitative general plans. It is necessary to go further and give concrete definition to the urban forms… It is a matter of replacing urbanism with architecture. It is necessary to design the public space - that is, the city – point by point, area by area, in architectural terms”13. This supremacy of architecture is today expressed in European cities by a network of new museums, which seem to substitute the old dominant presence of the ancient cathedrals. Along with this, of course, there is an important commercial factor, which sees culture and art as crucial in the economic rebirth of post-industrial cities. In this sense the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is one of the most important ingredients in the plan to redevelop the Bizkaian capital.

Intentions for a new cultural institution for Bilbao date back to the late 80s, when the Basque administration began formulating a redevelopment program for the city. The administration's goal was to change the city’s economy that was based upon its traditional shipbuilding and heavy manufacturing industries. A museum of modern and contemporary art was conceived as a major element of this plan. In 1991, Basque officials approached the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to


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propose its participation in Bilbao's redevelopment program. In December of that year, a preliminary agreement was reached leading to the establishment of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Foundation to manage the independent institution. On February 1992 this agreement was formalised with an official agreement signed by Basque President José Antonio Ardanza and representatives of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The choice of Bilbao as the place for one of the Guggenheim European centres is best understood in the context of the initiatives implemented by the Basque authorities as a contribution to the process of revitalising the Basque Country’s recession-plagued economic structure. These initiatives were also seen as a means of increasing the chances of the city’s metropolitan area becoming the major reference point for European regions on the Atlantic coast.

The redevelopment plan of Bilbao also involves other projects conceived by some of the world's most prestigious architects. There is the project of the Sondika Airport commissioned to Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava (who is also designing a footbridge crossing the river at Uribitarte), a new Conference and Performing Arts Centre by Federico Soriano and the construction of a metropolitan railway, much of it


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underground, designed by Sir Norman Foster. The plan also includes the work now in progress to increase operational capacity at the city’s port. The development of an extensive area running along the river is even included in the plan and is the brainchild of architect César Pelli. According to the planners, the construction of this new cultural area and business centre, in a 348.500 m2 site in the very heart of the city, will reflect the traditional urban values of a European City. 80.000 m2 of offices, a 31.000 m2 shopping area, a hotel, an extension of the Universities and 600 apartments, will give birth to an area of multiple international activities. The site will be surrounded by more than 200.000 m2 of gardens and open spaces stretching along one kilometer of the riverside, where both the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum and Euskalduna Conference and Concert Hall are already located.

Culture and art, represented by an architecturally strong presence, are clearly the key elements for a socio-economic regeneration of Bilbao as expressed in the words of the president of Bizkaia Council for the presentation of the Conference Centre and Concert Hall. The building is one of the key cultural and services amenities in the revitalised metropolitan area. Located between the International Exhibition Centre


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and the Guggenheim Museum it characterises the creative powers of a dynamic society where a top class programme of social and cultural events can be availed of by the whole community. It furnishes Bilbao with a distinctive complex, the flagship of a new initiative whose principal aim is to revitalise the economy and lifestyle in the urban area or in what is the head of Europe’s Atlantic hinterland. Its versatility both as a conference centre and as a music and arts centre will give a boost to Bizkaia and the Basque Country as a whole in their determined effort towards modernisation and progress. The project developed by architects Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacios on the site of the old shipyards, a former source of wealth and prosperity, will undoubtedly prove to be the dynamo of a new era in Bilbao, Bizkaia and the Basque Country. The construction work started in 1994 and the building was inaugurated on February 1999. The Conference and Concert Hall will enhance both musical performances and congress activities as Bilbao not only attracts commercial tourism but also generates a very large amount of business through its International Exhibition Hall, one of Spain’s leading exhibition centres. Euskalduna’s gigantic complex includes a versatile and fully equipped Conference Centre, a


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magnificent Auditorium with the latest stage facilities, designed to cater for the most ambitious opera settings, and is also home to the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra which has its own spacious rehearsal hall. It basically combines three independent functions with facilities in common under one roof.

But, of course, Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum is the emblem of the renewed city of Bilbao. As Jorn Utzon’s Opera House is for Sidney, the building becomes the new symbol of the Bizkaian capital. The construction itself is an amazing combination of interconnecting shapes. Orthogonal blocks in limestone contrast with curved and bent forms covered with half-millimetre thick titanium panels, which are guaranteed to last one hundred years. Glass curtain walls provide the building with the light and transparency it needs. Owing to their mathematical complexity, the sinuous stone, glass, and titanium curves were designed with the aid of computers, using a program called Catia, developed by a French aeronautic factory. As a whole, Gehry’s design creates a spectacular, eminently visible structure that has the presence of a huge sculpture set against the backdrop of the city.

The building is supposed to become the new core of the city. People coming


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from the calle Iparraguirre, one of the main streets bisecting the centre of Bilbao diagonally, are led directly to the main entrance; the idea was to bring the city right to the doors of the building. A broad flight of steps takes pedestrians down to the Museum hall, although descending flights of stairs are not a frequent feature of institutional buildings. This broad stair way that goes up to the sculptural tower, is conceived as a device to absorb and integrate the Puente de La Salve into the overall architectural scheme of the building. This is also an inspired response to the differences in height between the level of the river and the level of the city centre. It also enables a building with a surface area of 24.000 m2 and more than 50 meters high to be slotted into the city landscape without it towering over the neighbouring buildings. Inside, the museum works as a city within a city. Visitors passing through the hall to the exhibition area comes immediately to the atrium, the real heart of the Museum and one of the most idiosyncratic features of Gehry's design, which has a sort of metal flower skylight at the top that allows a stream of light to illuminate the space. Exhibition galleries are organised on three levels around the central atrium and are connected by a system of curving walkways suspended from the roof,


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glass elevators and stair turrets. All in all, a spectacular vision that one critic has described as a metaphorical city.

The strong impact of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum to the post-industrial Bilbao seems to confirm, not deny, its urban realm. “When you see the new Guggenheim from the surrounding hills, it seems like a silver magnet drawing a grey city together”14. The museum building occupies and uses the site in a remarkable way. Actually the exposed position chosen by Frank Gehry, at a slight turn of the Nervion River, is an intricate point, a juncture between two different urban pressures. A point where disused naval docks, railroad yards and a highway bridge with four lanes of traffic clashes with the medieval fragments of the city and its massive 19th century Classicism. The location of the building is also addressed by visual lines suggested by the large hills, which flow down towards the mess and heterogeneity of the existing urban structure. This point gives Frank Gehry’s museum a pivotal position in the city and countryside, “like occupying the centre of a chessboard with the queen. No other building in Bilbao can beat this position, it is the final move in the end-game of the city”15. Actually, on a more pedestrian level, Gehry has related the museum to three urban scales. The scale of


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the bridge, achieved by an entry tower that snakes under it. The scale of the existing roof tops, whose heights are acknowledged by the atrium and lower forms. The relation to the Bilbao River, an important historical waterway, which is taken in the scheme of the building, both literally, through its large pool on the waterfront, and metaphorically, through its viscous and slivery forms. Clashing against the dark masonry background of Bilbao, the dominant presence of Gehry Guggenheim Museum could remind us the Chartres Cathedral proclaiming itself in the landscape and the city or the Palazzo Pubblico commanding the piazza in Siena. Besides the anti-monumental skyscrapers, the 20th century has produced many failed monuments, but the new Guggenheim seems the first recent urban monument to be convincing. When it is seen from the surrounding hills or from the narrow streets of the 19th century classical city, it appears like a steel cathedral of the 3rd millennium, an anchor to the whole urban fabric, a new Notre Dame for the contemporary city.

There is controversial meaning in this new urban realm, which goes beyond a simple economic interpretation. Replacing religion, culture and art seem today to be the new metaphysics. The domain of culture and art in recent years has been


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interpreting and expressing power even more than politics and economics. Along with the creative resources, which artistic thinking has made available to architects, there is a sort of global totalitarianism in this presence of culture and art, which permeates the whole of Western society, providing it with new spiritual and aesthetic models, new models of behaviour, even new imaginary worlds. In Bilbao this global totalitarianism is further emphasised by an American cultural imperialism, which the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation imposes on the local culture. But to the Basques this seems a marginal issue. They have one of the great monuments of this era, which might give Bilbao an important role in Europe, which could regenerate a declining industrial city, along with other buildings by significant architects such as Foster, Calatrava and Soriano. It is not much use banishing the immanence and ambivalence of this phenomenon. On the contrary, it is necessary to interpret this powerful and diffuse presence and turn it to the advantage of the city and its architecture. For that it is essential to acknowledge culture and art as emblems of the freedom of thought and imagination separate from culture and art as pervasive vehicles of a new global authority.


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Culture and art are also concerned with another of Gehry’s works on the opposite side of the globe: the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The setting of this Concert Hall is going to become the largest American city in the 21st century. Its dynamic economy is mainly based on high technology, communications and media, and the entertainment industries. In this context, Los Angeles also leads California’s equally rapid cultural growth. Fifteen major museums and galleries have been built in the state in the last decades of the 20th century. Among them are the Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As with many other cities in the world, Los Angeles has recognised an economic value in the implementation of such cultural institutions, specially emphasised using the image of impressive constructions. For the local authorities and leaders, to enhance the efficiency of these cultural attractions, it is essential to create a single magnetic pole, which Los Angeles’ huge metropolitan environment does not yet have. This centralisation is needed in order to re-create Los Angeles’ image as one of the greatest city of the world. One of its leader, Eli Broad, president of SunAmerica, states: “We possess multiple, inherent economic advantages such as our international


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leadership in the entertainment, high-tech and trade industries that cannot be fully replicated by any other city. In addition, we are a nationally renowned cultural leader, home of premier cultural institutions such as The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Performing Arts Centre of Los Angeles County. All of the world’s leading cities have achieved recognition through such confluence of commerce and culture, but none came to be considered great without having an exciting, magnetic downtown. Disney Hall represents a critical step not just toward transforming the Centre, but also for initiating the renaissance of Downtown Los Angeles. That is why Disney Hall has become a rallying point for a new generation of civic leaders that recognise the project’s great importance to our city. These outstanding corporations, foundations, and individuals have offered their support because they believe that Los Angeles needs and deserves an icon worthy of its promising future, and that Disney Hall should be that icon”. If Los Angeles was the first important decentralised city in the 20th century, now the aim is to transform it into the great American City of the new millennium by building a vital and attractive centre.

The Walt Disney Concert HallPhoto credit: Michael L. Magat / Gehry Partners, LLP

The Walt Disney Concert Hall reflecting a distorted city

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In order to develop downtown’s new geography, Los Angeles’ civic leaders are working together to forge this common vision. An unusual partnership of city, county, and private institutions are planning Los Angeles’ new landscape, investing in the urban events that will attract millions of new visitors annually to the city’s core. It will evolve along a north-south spine, with new facilities for entertainment, conventions, and sports activities in the south end and homes for the visual and performing arts clustered in a north side arts district. The Walt Disney Concert Hall will enhance an arts and cultural corridor on the northern end of downtown. This corridor now includes the Performing Arts Centre of Los Angeles County, The Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Central Library, the Geffen Contemporary, the Japanese American National Museum, the Los Angeles Theater Centre, the Latino Heritage Museum, the new Colburn School of Performing Arts, and a host of restaurants and other amenities. Los Angeles’ downtown will be home to some of the world’s most important buildings. It will soon be able to boast within a two square city block area, three works by Pritzker-Prize winning architects: Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels by Jose Rafael


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Moneo, and the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. This latter building will be at the centre of these prestigious architectural works. Many feel that it will become the definitive architectural symbol, and perhaps the international cultural symbol, of Los Angeles. The arts district will be balanced on the city’s south end by the new Staples Centre sports arena, and a new Convention Complex and Entertainment Centre. In the vision of the local civic leaders this downtown massing of new activity centres will enhance Los Angeles’ other urban assets and solidify its image as America's great 21st century city.

The arts in America are an economic powerhouse. They comprise 6% of the nation's industrial sector, larger than agriculture or construction. They comprise 2.7% of the national work force, equivalent to the defence industry. They generate 5.4 billion dollars in annual taxes, far more than the government grants they receive. They sell 5 billion dollars in tickets, 40% more than sports events. Since its founding in 1964, the Performing Arts Centre of Los Angeles has been the principal venue for the performing arts in California. Serving millions of people annually, it is the North American second largest performing arts centre, with an annual budget exceeded only by Lincoln Centre in New York. Its


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success helped spawn dozens of other centres across Southern California, including suburban centres that ring Los Angeles in Thousand Oaks, Cerritos, Orange County and Escondido. Sports enjoy more visibility, but the arts have a far greater impact on the city’s economy. The Performing Arts Centre’s importance in Los Angeles might best be understood by comparing its paid attendance at the downtown complex of more than one million spectators to the average annual attendance for a playoff of the National Football League. It has a greater attendance than a full season of L.A. Laker games. When the Centre expands with the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its attendance is expected to increase from 1.6 million spectators to 2.2 spectators per year. Los Angeles’ population has diversified and exploded at a phenomenal rate since the Performing Arts Centre was opened in 1964. Many people cannot be served adequately by a 35 year old centre in which programming is limited to three theatres. By contrast, Lincoln Centre in New York opened with five theatres in 1960 and has since expanded to ten. Diversifying significantly the Centre’s programming, the Walt Disney Concert Hall will not replace the existing theatres, rather it will enable an expansion into popular programming and events for new audiences. Frank Gehry’s


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Concert Hall has encountered many problems during its initial planning years. It has survived rancorous press coverage and several false starts, and it will cost more to build than any concert hall in history.

Challenged by the complexities of the program and the site, Frank Gehry has created a bold and superb design for the new Walt Disney Concert Hall. Its extraordinary concept and presence in the historic Bunker Hill area will surely help the realisation of the civic leaders’ vision of a renewed downtown Los Angeles. The building itself possesses an imposing and dynamic design, and much of the site is devoted to gardens and plazas accessible from the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the adjacent streets. From stage to lobby to two outdoor amphitheatres, the architect has created an environment of physical and visual accessibility, reflecting sensitivity to the art form itself. Gehry’s Concert Hall will be located immediately south of the Performing Arts Centre’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on a full city block bordered by First and Second Streets and Hope Street and Grand Avenue. The 3.5-acre site has been leased to the Performing Arts Centre by Los Angeles County, which also financed a 2.188 car-parking garage. the garage was completed and opened to the public in March 1996.

Walt Disney Concert Hall model at the Venice BiennalePhoto credit: Marco Le Donne

Los Angeles Grand Avenue modelGrand Avenue Project (center right)Los Angeles Music Center(bottom center left)Walt Disney Concert Hall (bottom center right)

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Disney Hall’s dynamic and provocative exterior structure will be clad in stainless steel, and will provide Los Angeles with a striking new landmark. An extensive urban park featuring ornamental landscaping, walkways, benches and shade trees, creating an inviting space for the public, will surround the complex. Inside, the Walt Disney Concert Hall will house the main concert hall auditorium, other performance spaces, backstage areas for musicians and house management staff, several refreshment and beverage bars, a restaurant, café, gift shop, and other amenities. The 2.290-seat main auditorium was designed to achieve both visual and acoustic intimacy. Unlike traditional theatre stages with proscenium arches and curtains that present physical barriers between the audience and the orchestra, the concert hall features an open platform stage. The 360-degree range of seating around the stage enhances the feeling that the artists and audience as a group are participating in a singular creative experience. Among the interior’s most distinctive characteristics are the sail like forms of the wooden ceiling, which suggest a great ship. A large window at the rear of the Hall will allow natural light to enhance daytime concerts. A pipe organ, designed in conjunction with the interior, will occupy a central position between


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seating blocks at the rear of the stage. In addition to the main auditorium, the project will feature a range of other indoor and outdoor performance spaces. They will include a 600-seat pre-concert foyer, a 266-seat theatre for CalArts, a 100-seat amphitheatre and a 300-seat Children’s Amphitheatre, and a chorus rehearsal room which doubles as a 120-seat theatre. The Gehry design will also meet the Philharmonic’s needs for rehearsal space, storage facilities, and dressing rooms. Two additional architectural components that were added in 1997: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Centre and the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatre.

Besides this clear intention by Los Angeles’ civic leaders to improve the urban economy upon the constitution of new cultural industries, there is another important issue that has to be considered in this determination to construct such a pretentious public building such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Traditionally public buildings, such as churches or city halls, have always claimed to represent the values that a society shares. Public buildings basically portray an institutional authority, and aim to unify people. The power of religion or politics has been, after all, their ability to characterise a particular society and its cultural manifestations or, in a more


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individual level, a way of thinking. Today, this power seems to lie in the hands of art and culture. Apart from the economic confluence, local authorities also perceive the ascendancy that these new kinds of institutions could have in managing Los Angeles’ multicultural realm. As it is expressed in the words of the Mayor, Richard J. Riordan: “This is a call to action to our civic leaders to help unite Angelenos and local organisations in an important community enterprise… one that reaches from the heart of our great city to the diverse neighbourhoods that comprise Los Angeles”. The Southern Californian metropolis has a multicultural population that rivals any other city in the world. Los Angeles has the largest Latino population of any major American city. It is also home to more Koreans than anywhere else outside of Korea and more Filipinos than anyplace outside Manila. 35% of its population is African-American. Spread out in a series of villages, high-rise centres and edge cities, the overall pattern resembles a map of Europe on a small scale. It is as if each district area such as the Hispanic Barrio or Beverly Hills were a tiny country with a separate language, set of customs and style. Yet there are no border crossings and in some of these tiny nations many different populations mix together. The L.A. Nation


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as a whole thus has a more dispersed ethnic mixture than many entire European countries. For this reason there are only minorities. No single ethnic group dominates the scene. This condition is considered a threat to the civic order of Los Angeles. Problems such as the presence of different languages and cultural expressions or, more dangerously, multiethnic tensions and riots need a solution that an overall common institution might provide. Art and culture, which seem now come before religion and politics, could help to solve Los Angeles’ dilemma of multiculturalism. They could provide a sort of cultural super-structure, whose prototype relies on the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture, set against the desire for subcultures to flourish. This phenomenon seems to reflect a tendency of the entire Western world from the United States to the now united Europe. I do not think that this is the new face of a capitalistic hegemony, as many have seen in the utilisation of mediation technologies for communication and entertainment, advertising and fashion. The economy generated around art and culture should be seen as a vehicle, which lets them spread out all over the globe as a superstructure of invisible power. This condition is a response to a general crisis of ideologies but also, in my opinion, to an


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increasing weakness of the institutional significance of the city, which is particularly expressed in Los Angeles. If Gerhy’s building will become the new symbol of Los Angeles it is also because it will represent an institutionalisation of art and culture, which will give more power and meaning to the city. “Few buildings in the history of Los Angeles are more important to the life of the city than the proposed Walt Disney Concert Hall on Bunker Hill. Disney Hall is important for several reasons… Most of all, it will affirm Los Angeles’ coming of age as the West Coast’ major cultural centre”16. The author of this journalistic legitimisation continues emphasising the importance of an impressive architectural gesture in affirming this new institutionalisation: “For such a vital public building we need an architectural masterpiece, and architect Frank Gehry’s design is exactly that”. Once more, culture and art stand also as emblems of a free thought expressed by creativity and imagination, which democratic potentialities challenge the totalitarian institutionalisation they could have in our Western Society. This may make art and culture different from other absolute powers generated by religions, politics or economics. In this contradiction and ambiguity there is the hope for a more democracy.


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Cities within buildings: a new approach in workplace design

If some buildings, such as the future

Walt Disney Concert Hall, attempt to symbolise the renewed life of the city, there are also some others that try directly to internalise an urban structure in order to create new social environments. Some L.A. architects, as Frank Israel, Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss and again Frank Gerhy, have showed this tendency in their office building, designing workplaces, literally or metaphorically, as urban villages. Indeed, considering an office as a small city turned inside out is today a common inclination in architecture, which has been taken up all around the world.

A recent publication, defined by the authors as “an inspiring survey of the latest design and architectural solutions for the modern workplace”, emphasises this tendency by a re-discovered parallelism between workplace and sociality. “Offices were once rooted in a work ethic in which conviviality and comfort had no place. Workplaces were functional and impersonal and frowned on social contact. But in the creative office, there is growing recognition that work has a social dynamic which is productive and valuable. Old-fashioned adjacencies are replaced by a new approach


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to the office interiors, in which the buzz and colour of the real city life is simulated by the design of neighbourhoods and piazzas, cafés and boulevards as spaces in which to work. The compact communities and good neighbours that result from such thinking frequently produce more creative and collaborative work styles”17. The aim of this approach is to foster a spirit of community and promote great social cohesion within the workplaces.

On this line, the Nortel Brampton Centre in Toronto is one of the most representative projects. The architectural firm, Helmut, Obata + Kassabaum (HOK), has converted a digital switching factory built in 1963 in the worldwide headquarters of telecommunications company Nortel. They managed both the volume and orientation of the old structure by adopting a town planning approach to break down its scale and create a new sense of community. The space has been divided into areas based around neighbourhoods; each as conference facilities, privacy nodes and a special space such as a war room, in which to plan competitive strategies, or a lounge area. These neighbourhoods provide people with a choice of work settings and in effect the citizens are free to design their own local work environment. This process seems to have had the consequence of producing a


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Cities within buildings: a new approach in workplace design

If some buildings, such as the future

Walt Disney Concert Hall, attempt to symbolise the renewed life of the city, there are also some others that try directly to internalise an urban structure in order to create new social environments. Some L.A. architects, as Frank Israel, Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss and again Frank Gerhy, have showed this tendency in their office building, designing workplaces, literally or metaphorically, as urban villages. Indeed, considering an office as a small city turned inside out is today a common inclination in architecture, which has been taken up all around the world.

A recent publication, defined by the authors as “an inspiring survey of the latest design and architectural solutions for the modern workplace”, emphasises this tendency by a re-discovered parallelism between workplace and sociality. “Offices were once rooted in a work ethic in which conviviality and comfort had no place. Workplaces were functional and impersonal and frowned on social contact. But in the creative office, there is growing recognition that work has a social dynamic which is productive and valuable. Old-fashioned adjacencies are replaced by a new approach


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to the office interiors, in which the buzz and colour of the real city life is simulated by the design of neighbourhoods and piazzas, cafés and boulevards as spaces in which to work. The compact communities and good neighbours that result from such thinking frequently produce more creative and collaborative work styles”17. The aim of this approach is to foster a spirit of community and promote great social cohesion within the workplaces.

On this line, the Nortel Brampton Centre in Toronto is one of the most representative projects. The architectural firm, Helmut, Obata + Kassabaum (HOK), has converted a digital switching factory built in 1963 in the worldwide headquarters of telecommunications company Nortel. They managed both the volume and orientation of the old structure by adopting a town planning approach to break down its scale and create a new sense of community. The space has been divided into areas based around neighbourhoods; each as conference facilities, privacy nodes and a special space such as a war room, in which to plan competitive strategies, or a lounge area. These neighbourhoods provide people with a choice of work settings and in effect the citizens are free to design their own local work environment. This process seems to have had the consequence of producing a


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diverse and dynamic environment that responds to the changing needs of the community it houses. The workstations themselves seem almost incidental, in an environment designed to bring people together and encourage continuous movement and social interaction. Clear, colour-coded street signs and overhead banners help orientation and define journeys through the space. Materials have been used to differentiate areas emphasising a hierarchy in the pseudo-urban structure. Main streets have been surfaced in concrete and stone, while side streets and alleyways are covered with vinyl. This differentiation extends to other aspects of the interior fit, where walls of public buildings, such as conference rooms and food amenities, have been constructed using concrete while the office areas have walls made from traditional gypsum board. Still, the interior reflects an industrial heritage with bold use of colour in solid blocks and exposed structural ceiling grids. Without the usual voids in which to hide technology and services, utilities have been left exposed, carried to the work areas on open trellis structures that line the main street.

Nortel employees’ new social scenario is picturesquely described in a recent article of the American magazine U.S. News.


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“Among such employees is Gary Wong, a senior software engineer at Nortel Networks, a global telecommunications giant based in Toronto. There, on a recent winter afternoon, Wong took a break for a game of chess only a few steps away from his workstation on a sun-dappled plaza outside the Java.cup cafe at the corner of 20th and Main streets. That address doesn’t appear on any map of Brampton, the northern suburb where Nortel relocated two years ago. But for Wong and 3.000 of his colleagues, it serves as one of the landmarks inside the company’s new global headquarters, a former digital switching plant now transformed into a vast indoor cityscape. With a $50 million makeover, complete with street signs and flag-decked departmental neighbourhoods, each boasting its own distinctive, and democratically selected, décor. Nortel is the ultimate example of the urban metaphor that has become the trend du jour in workplace design”18. The result is an “idealised transposition of a contradictory reality”; to use Jean Baudrillard words. An indoor city with streets punctuated by plazas, whimsical artwork, and five distinctive cafes that practically force the 3.000 inhabitants into chance encounters. “I’ve met hundreds of people I’d only talked to on the phone for years, says Helen


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Bellamy of Nortel’s employee services. After six months, a 1997 survey reported a 75% satisfaction rate, and other Nortel employees are now clamouring to be transferred there. For some, like Gary Wong, taking time out at the giant chessboard inlaid into the tiles of one intersection is only one of the attractions. Strolling down Main Street, he can polish off his personal chores at the full-service bank, travel agency, dry cleaner, video vending machine, and, on his way home, even pick up a prepared dinner at the Satellite Dish takeout counter. Should Wong feel the need for solitary contemplation, he can duck into an enclosed Zen garden or a spirituality room. It makes us relax so we’re not as stressed out, he says. It’s just more fun to come in to work now”. This recent example of how a workplace could be designed seem actually a Disneyland version of an office space, which goes father than the early examples that some Los Angeles architects designed at the end of the 80s and the early of 90s.

Frank Israel, Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss and Frank Gehry have converted large warehouses into workplaces where internalised streets and squares have created a sort of urbanity that seems to substitute the one lacked in the Southern California’s metropolitan environment. “Los


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Angeles public places, its few parks and plazas, are poor and neglected, and seems to be essentially marginal in the life of the huge regional metropolis”19. Here the inner pseudo-urbanity, always filtered and characterised by personal interpretation of each architect, is not at the level of Disneyland’s hyperreality, even if this internal spaces turn their back on the real and hostile streets of Los Angeles. Interiors made by stained and rough concrete, crude and aggressive metal structures, artfully twisted and over-detailed with a thousand of bolts and unnecessary constructional elements, suggest more the presence of a post-industrial society than that of ersatz reality of CityWalk. Nevertheless, in this approach there is the recognition that an office, where most of the labour force in the Western society will spend most of its time, should be more than a one-dimensional factory for work. So it should incorporate other building types and places for relaxed entertainment. This seems to be true during the digital revolution where many people find it more practical to telecommute. At the beginning of the 90s, Los Angeles had more office-at-home space than other cities. Whereas most metropolitan areas have 20 square feet of office space per person, New York has 28 square feet, the electronic cottages of L.A. have reduced in-town office


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space to 15 square feet. In this context, the workplace should become ambiguous and domestic, attractive and heterogeneous to survive.

Heterogeneity is exactly one of the key words to describe Frank Gehry’s office building in Venice, California, for the advertising agency Chiat/Day/Mojo. It is situated along Main Street, which connects Santa Monica with Venice running parallel to the ocean but a few blocks inland. The construction is laid out on three floors above ground, used for offices, and on three underground levels for parking. Owing to planning restrictions and the client’s requirements of space, it occupies the whole area of the lot. While the façade at the rear is very simple and ordinary, the main front is composed, besides the original entrance that has the shape of a pair of binoculars, by a curved white façade on one side and a series of copper-clad pillars on the other. Both are the response to the need to create a double façade toward the south. Inside the pair of binoculars, illuminated from above, are located a number of small meeting rooms, connected whit a main one. The building is a mixture of conflicting architectural languages. High-tech clash against a vernacular style, figurative to post-industrial, classical to pop, modern to post-modern.

The advertising agency Chiat/Day/Mojo by Frank Gehry From Lotus’ Documents, Frank Gehry: America as Context, Milan, 1994

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To a certain extent Gehry’s collection of fragmented forms summarises the spirit of the place, mixing ordinary and anonymous boxes with slightly veiled images: a fish-form white boat; binoculars; copper trees. The metaphors are not so clear, and are ambiguous and somewhat appropriate, both to the context and the function. The white modernist boat-image, to the left of the converted warehouse’s main front, is an understated reference to utilitarian workplace within and to the near ocean, while the copper trees, to the right, are sunshades that service another type of office. Even the most explicit image, the binoculars designed by Cleas Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, serve appropriate functions, as a triumphal archway to the underground parking lot, and a very sardonic emblem for an advertising agency.

But the relevance of Gehry’s office building lies in the organisation of its interiors. The plan is a collage of pseudo-monuments and faked urban elements set in a background reassembling fabrics and layouts of a city. There is a mixture of informal and regular schemes. The workstations are organised on a grid, while the conference rooms are placed in a free-form configuration. Internal squares punctuate the fabric. The refurbished warehouse’s plan is composed by this


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pseudo-urbanity, created by major avenues, minor streets and monuments set into the fabric. Because it is an agency where the owners collect art, and display some of the products they have featured, one walks through a strange forest of symbols and signs. A real car, a red Mini, is on the street. A basketball net, maybe for playing or just for looking at, is in the square near a sculpture. One conference room is a typical Gehry’s fish.

Finally, in the office-village there is a place set apart from the noise and bustle of the city and workplace, an inner sanctum, something similar to a sacred or meditative space. This conference room, made with cardboard and corrugated paper, is a sort of mystical place, as original and peaceful as those of another L.A. architect, Eric Owen Moss. But here there is more emphasis towards silence and thought. The room cut down any sound and reverberation. It is “so silent you can hear your heart beat”20. The light of the Californian sun comes inside the room through a hole in the conical dome intensifying the sacredness of the space. This idea of a mystical and sacred place inside in the large office is not so absurd. The workplace is the equivalent of an urban village and giving to it one area to silence and contemplation makes, after all, some sense.


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Gehry’s eclecticism, particularly evident in this project, allows the interior space and image to change several times, mediating between the old and the new, between the regularity of the pre-existing industrial warehouse and the informality of the added cloistered space. In this sense the office complex as a whole has not only the structure but also the richness of an urban village developed over time. The interesting point of Chiat/Day/Mojo office building in Venice is not simply in the multiplicity of the parts but also in the way they are organised and mutually combined. Different elements and objects are linked together creating a structure rich in ambiguous and multiple meanings. This richness or depth of meaning is created by the transformation of themes and by a high degree of resonance through the self-similarity between different figural shapes and objects. Each time we see a similar conformation in a new context it gains in depth and resonance of meaning. This makes the forms open to multiple interpretation and use. As a matter of fact the construction is permeated by a strong ambiguity. One is never sure what building type it is. The environment shifts from one category to another, from house to workplace, to church to museum to bazaar, and thus conviviality reigns throughout.


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This category of no-category or of all categories could recall the post-modern notion of carnivalesque. Indeed, this concept was developed by a Russian social historian, Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote while Stalin was in power. He tacitly opposed Stalinism’s strictly modernising programme by arguing that carnivals, as a survived phenomenon of pre-modern period, expressed social energies suppressed in modernised everyday life. For Bakhtin, carnival contains a utopian urge in displaying an inverted social order. Carnival is a time that encourages different bodily needs and pleasures restrained by the ordinary rhythm of labour and leisure. It represents an escape from the habitual norms of existing social realms.

Venice is also the location of another interesting workplace building, which follows the architectural tendency of cities within. Here the designer is Frank Israel, who died prematurely at the age of 50 in June 1996. He has converted several warehouses into offices and has understood the genre as much as his fast moving clients, such as advertising agencies, design companies, film and record businesses, all typical of the post-industrial labour force. Situated at 901 Washington Boulevard, the project for Bright and Associates involved the renovation and transformation of a group of


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three building dating from 1929, which had served originally as a train-shed, then as a funeral parlour, and most recently as the office of Charles and Ray Eames. The scheme of the plan is developed in a processional sequence with a beginning, middle and end. At the exterior, a steel and glass canopy defines the start of this sequence with a dramatic entrance. After this and other acknowledgements of an aggressive environment, one enters a tiny urban village turned inside out. The interior entry courtyard is a skylight, two-story space similar to a Tuscan cortile, except that here no plane is parallel to another. Once inside, one passes through a dark sheet metal tunnel that ends with an inverted cone conference room of birch plywood in the largest and oldest building on the site. One moves from this interior main street of the village past the executive design offices, into the largest design room, and on into the production area. An obelisk, marking the photo reproduction area, which is illuminated from above, terminates the axis. The interior atrium is visible as it pops up above the roof. Outside, some sculptural objects have been placed in strategic relation to the existing structures. Composed of steel, glass and sheet metal, they link the building to its Venice context and mark various crucial pieces of the


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building, such as the entrance, fire stair and street address.

Frank Israel’s project for Bright and Associates reveals all the conventions of post-modern space that have been current since Venturi and Moore developed the tradition in the 60s: juxtaposition of skewed and distorted figures, positive and negative variations, ambiguity, collage and paradox. “When I first saw Venturi’s work, I found it utterly obtuse. But at the same time I was drawn to it: I felt there was something extraordinary about it, something I needed to understand better. I was able to understand it by hanging around Bob in his studio, by following his classes, and of course reading his book. When I read Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, I realised that I wanted to study with Bob more directly, so I left Pennsylvania and I went to Yale, where he was doing the Las Vegas studios. It was a very exciting time to be there”21. But Frank Israel’s post-modern paradigm is done with a sensitivity that effectively separates him from other highly publicised architects in Los Angeles. However he has shared, with his acknowledged mentor Frank Gehry, a desire to create idealised communities in the city in which vast distances, fragmentation and unpredictable environment elude less informed attempts


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to achieve human scale of the kind usually associated with the East Coast of the United States or Europe. “Los Angeles has always been a city comprised of separate towns and villages. The film studios, and more recently, the theme parks and shopping malls, have reinforced this character. Famous people enjoy living here because the city encourages its inhabitans to build walls, isolating themselves in their own domains”. In Israel’s work the character of workplace’s miniaturised urban enclaves has changed to eloquently defensible cities within. This is particularly evident in the hostile exterior of Bright and Associates. His reconstructions are different from the abstracted conurbations created by Gehry. Israel’s pavilions relate to a divers frame of reference, with an individualised choice of symbols and materials to match. As Gehry has said: “Frank and I have a lot of common ground. Both of us absorb our surroundings, recast what we see, and examine how these realities impact on the human psyche”. That recasting revolves around a personal interpretation and an idealised conceptualisation of the urban realm, which is manifest in the whole, the unusual treatment of spaces, forms, objects and colours.

8522 National Boulevard Complex plan

8522 National Boulevard Complex by Eric Owen Moss From www.ericowenmoss.com

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Among the many workplace conversions that have created the distinctive Los Angeles type, another one stands as an ideal example of this art of reinterpreting warehouses as inner micro-cities. The 8522 National Boulevard complex in Culver City, California, by a quintessential Los Angeles character, Eric Owen Moss. In this office space five warehouses confine forming a single building. The fist construction was built in the 20s and others followed during the 30s and 40s. All were long span spaces with clerestory windows facing either east or north. There was never any attempt to co-ordinate the design of the earlier building with the later ones. Buildings were simply added as additional square footage was required. In 1986 the building, used as a plastic factory, was filled with partitions, hung ceilings, conduits installations and rooms of every size. The exterior had deteriorated. The owner decided to have the building re-constituted and make it available for commercial use. The new plan designed by Moss reveals once again the office as an urban village with is Central Street, which is in the shape of an L, two public piazzas and four semi-public spaces, conference rooms or juncture points, within the separate office areas. At the main entrance an elliptical court was cut into the original building, exposing a piece


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of the truss structure to the street. The wall of the ellipse is constructed of concrete blocks, and both truss and ellipse are partially covered with steel. A pedestrian entry ramp from the street leads into the court, then through the entrance door to a street organised around an existing column system. The route conducts to a middle lobby-piazza, which is related in plan form to the entry ellipse. Turning south the L-shaped street continues to a large meeting room. A third ellipse, now inclined in section, has been built into an existing room with walls of concrete blocks. The original block is sometimes painted, sometimes sandblasted. The new meeting room walls are in birch plywood, attached to the studs with brass screws. These studs are partially exposed to reveal the mechanism by which the room was constructed. The ceiling is plastered, while the floor is in the original concrete. The street, lobby-piazza and semi-public space organisation allows the owner to sub-divide and lease to a number of tenants in a variety of ways or to simply lease to a single tenant. The definition and conception of such office-village partially relies in Moss’s collaboration with the developer Frederick Norton Smith. Collaboration began with the renovation of part of 8522 National Boulevard and continued form ten on with many projects,


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including the ambitious S.P.A.R. CITY, which re-defines an abandoned Southern Pacific railroad tract, a 50-acre parcel containing 1.390.000 square feet of building, approximately half of them controlled by Smith. “Eric Moss has found a Haven, and it’s in his own backyard. Not just home to his practice, Culver City, an independent municipality on the southwest edge of Los Angeles, has become the architect’s personal land of opportunity, thanks to Frederick Norton Smith… Culver City contains large stretches of under-utilised industrial buildings once occupied by the defence and aerospace industries that were vacated as businesses went bankrupt or relocated near cheap labour – an area Moss says was given up for dead by local officials until he and Smith started to gradually turn things around”22. The development of Moss’s architectural practice in this years is tied not just financially, but also conceptually to his agreement with Smith.

Undoubtedly, considering the office spaces as cities within is a response to the growing management interest towards more informal ways of working. Today there is the recognition that office design could be used to address those issues of social dynamics and individual psychology traditionally suppressed by Fordism and Taylorism. These twin management schools


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of the early years of the 20th century elevated profitable goals over individual psychology, reducing people to units of production. Neglecting an obsession with functionalism, new approaches to office space design have broken away from the efficiency of the rectangular grid in favour of more innovative and unusual solutions that create unexpected environments with the buildings. Where corridors or circulation routes were once straight and narrow minimised for the sake of efficiency, they are now regarded as valuable spaces and given prominence in workplace designed to encourage movement and collaboration. Primary circulation in these offices is unusually generous, often including spaces, which aim to let people meet informally. Frequently these spaces are located at the intersection of converged circulation routes or in a central focal point or at the atrium area. They are also completed with public amenities and, in some cases, works of art. All the old measures of space design efficiency, such as density of occupation or net usable space, are cast aside for a design encouraging social interaction. There is a transfer of investment and influence from individual workplace to communal space. Areas are generously given to common activities or shared facilities and these central spaces that are publicly owned have


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been given names to reflect their status. The market square, the piazza and the street with its connecting lanes, for example, all describes a new design paradigm that has redefined space within the workplace and which is based on a controversial interpretation of the complexity and heterogeneity of the city.

Epilogue: Are the idealised representations of the city a manifestation of its public and private realm re-configuration?

What these examples of buildings

within cities and cities within buildings share is an idealised representation of the city. They do this through two different ways of interpreting the urban entity. One is by trying to condense in a building a conceptual miniaturisation of the city, of its meanings, in order to re-vitalise it, not just economically, but also, I guess, politically and socially. The reason for this phenomenon may lie in part in a possible decay of the political significance of the city, as a domain of civic institutions, and, more particularly, in an ongoing re-configuration of its public and private realm. In the volume Variations on Theme Park, subtitled The New American City and The End of The Public Space, a group of authors including


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Margaret Crawford, Edward Soja, Trevor Boddy and Michael Sorkin have tackled this letter issue vigorously. But most of these commentators fall to the pessimistic side of the question. “The cautionary essays collected here describe an ill wind blowing through our cities, an atmosphere that has the potential to irretrievably alter the character of cities as the pre-eminent sites of democracy and pleasure. The familiar spaces of traditional cities, the streets and the squares, courtyards and parks, are our great scenes of the civic, visible and accessible, our binding agents. By describing the alternative, this book pleads for a return to a to a more authentic urbanity, a city based on physical proximity and free movement and a sense that the city is our best expression of a desire for collectively”23. Curiously enough, the request for an authentic urbanity comes from the conceiver of a retirement community completely decontextualised, spatially and temporally, from our reality. American culture critic Kurt Andersen describes Michael Sorkin’s recent project as “a combination of the pre-historical and the post-historical in one. The Flintstones meet The Jetsons”24. However, in a late essay, Margaret Crawford, who has contributed a chapter to Sorkin’s book, reconsiders her position regarding this pervasive narrative


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of loss. Although she recognises the contemporary crisis of the public domain in our cities and the authenticity of its symptoms described by this narrative, she disagrees with the nostalgic conclusion it draws. “This perception of loss originates in extremely narrow and normative definitions of both public and space that derive from an insistence for unity, desire for fixed categories of time and space, and rigidly conceived notions of private and public… Pessimism and ambiguity led me to seek an alternative framework, a new way of conceptualising public and a new way of reading the city”25. Nevertheless, traditional public spaces are deteriorating in our cities and new buildings, which appear as signals in the urban landscape, seem to be accumulating the meaning that once belonged to those spaces, functioning as social attractors for a still existing collective life.

In re-constructing an urbanised social entity, the cities within buildings might also emphasise this incapability of the city to give its citizens rooms for sociality traditionally achieved by its public spaces. For this purpose I quote part of Charles Moore’s essay You Have to Pay for The Public Life, issued in 1965 by the Yale architectural journal: “Disneyland must be regarded as the most important single piece


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of construction on the West in the past several decades. The assumptions inevitably made by people who have not been there is widely inaccurate. Instead it is engaged in replacing many of those elements of the public realm, which have vanished in the featureless private floating world of Southern California, whose only edge is the ocean, and whose centre is otherwise undiscoverable. Curiously, for a public space, Disneyland is not free. You buy tickets at the gate… Disneyland is enormously important and successful just because it recreates all the chances to respond to a public environment, which Los Angeles particularly does not any longer have. It allows play-acting, both to be watched and to be participated in, in a public sphere”26. Probably, if Moore could write an essay about the new approach in office design today, he would argue that you have to work for the public life. Nevertheless, it seems that both my examples, buildings within cities and cities within buildings, could be responses to a re-configuration of the city’s public and private realm. Moreover they, both, respond to this through a re-conceptualisation and re-interpretation of the city as an abstract idea, of its complexity and contradiction, that becomes a persuasive material entity in contemporary architecture.


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Notes 1 Purini, F., News Awaited for some Time, Lotus, 2000 2 Purini, F., ibid. 3 Barthes, R., Semiology and Urbanism, Naples, 1967 4 Baudrillard, J., Simulations, New York, 1983 5 Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., Mille Plateaux, Paris, 1980 6 Koolhaas, R., Delirious New York, New York, 1978 7 Speaks, M., The Singularity of OMA, ANY, 1999 8 van Berkel, B., Bos, C., Move, Amsterdam, 1999 9 Ungers, O. M., Morphologie: City Metaphors, Cologne,

1982 10 Scalbert, I., Townscape Fight Back: A Report from

Holland, AA files, 1999 11 Rowe, C., Koetter, F., Collage City, London, 1976 12 Brenner, K. T., Architettura della Metropoli, Milan, 1990 13 Bohigas, O., Ten Points for an Urban Methodology,

Architectural Review, 1999 14 Jencks, C., The New Paradigm: Non Linear Architecture,

Lotus, 2000 15 Jencks, C., Ecstatic Architecture, London, 1999 16 Whiteson, L., High Note, Gehry’s Crown for Bunker Hill…,

Los Angeles Times, 1991 17 Myerson, J., Ross, P., The Creative Office, London, 1999 18 McDonald, M., Workers might mingle if offices looked like

Main Street, 1999 19 Whiteson, L., Young Architects in Los Angeles: Social,

Political and Cultural Context, Los Angeles, 1991 20 Jencks, C., Heteropolis, London, 1993 21 Steele, J., Interview to Frank D Israel, Architectural

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