2 Foreword

Richard Koshalek & Dana Hutt

4 Introduction
Thom Mayne
6 Project Descriptions
20 Site Map
22 Los Angeles PLAY Park
Mario Cipresso
38 L.A. River Park
Patrick McEneany & Susan Wong
54 HS[aRt] Network
Joe Baldwin
70 Re:LAX
Ed Hatcher
86 Red Line School District
Peter Kimmelman, Jae Kwon, Nishant Lall
& Andrew Scott
102 Urban Housing
Paul Andersen & Maia Johnson
118 UniverCity
Martin Summers
134 UCLA Architectural Jury Transcript

Volume Two
Shaping a New Vision for Downtown Los Angeles
Seven Proposals
Foreword

2
Los Angeles faces rapid, continuous growth in the new century.
Already, the estimated population of the city’s five-county area—
16.15 million—is second in the United States only to the New
York City region. During the past century, the population of the Los
Angeles area grew by an average of two million people per decade,
or over 500 people every day for the past 100 years. Even as
today’s vital infrastructure appears to be pushed beyond capacity,
the greater metropolis will receive an additional two million people
by 2005. Los Angeles must prepare now for this growth by retooling
current planning strategies and designing and implementing new
solutions for the city.
Since the urban center serves as the connective tissue for the entire
city, we believe the revitalization of Los Angeles must begin in its
historic urban core. By applying original thought and creativity
to the challenges of the downtown area, we can begin to plan now
for the real consequences of Los Angeles’s future growth.
Through this book, Art Center College of Design—as part of its “wall-
less classroom” initiative to bring new thinking to current issues
in architecture, design, art, and culture outside of the classroom—
presents proposals by UCLA architecture students, with the partici-
pation of fellow students at SCI-Arc, under the studio leadership
of Thom Mayne. These projects directly evolved from the larger
urban analysis displayed in the first volume of L.A. Now. While
these initiatives focus on downtown, they have been developed
in response to an understanding of the greater metropolis.
Designed to anticipate the future needs of downtown Los Angeles,
the proposals include a large-scale public sports park; a development
of parklands, basins, and research and warehouse facilities located
along the fifty-one miles of the Los Angeles River; a new convention
center located along a high-speed rail line; a satellite LAX terminal;
a school district that integrates the Metro Red Line; an extensive
upper-level housing and mixed-use development with rooftop
gardens; and a satellite university/night-school campus. These
proposals operate on a middle ground between idealized visions
for the city and the fiscal, infrastructural, and socio-political realities
of urban planning. The students bridge these seemingly opposing
concerns with rigorous analysis of the city’s existing conditions
and anticipated growth; specific flows of population, commuters,
resources, and capital; feasibility studies and projected revenues;
and careful consideration of precedents. As a result, we believe
these proposals are achievable and well worth considering in light of
the profound growth and change projected for Los Angeles by 2020.
As a series of next steps to these proposals, we strongly recom-
mend the formation of a unique task force of thinkers and civic and
community leaders to develop discrete programs of urban ideas
that can be implemented in the near future. We propose, as one
of many such programs, the following twelve ideas (with thanks
to Dan Rosenfeld for providing the first draft): (1) implement the
plans for Civic Center Mall—Los Angeles’s “Central Park”—and
Grand Avenue from the new cathedral to the Central Public Library
with additional cultural and entertainment activities; (2) create a
parkway along the Los Angeles River and rescue Taylor Yard, the
largest parcel of land currently threatened by unsympathetic devel-
opment; (3) restore El Pueblo as a vibrant cultural and commercial
center; (4) extend the subway down Wilshire Boulevard to the
ocean and down Ventura Boulevard to Woodland Hills through the
San Fernando Valley, connect LAX to downtown via rail, and imple-
ment the continuation of the El Monte bus line to LAX via the I-110
and I-105 high-occupancy vehicle lanes; (5) develop 10,000 new
residential units downtown; (6) plant trees that provide shade for
downtown sidewalks; (7) cover the Hollywood/Santa Ana Freeway
from Hill Street to Alameda, linking El Pueblo with downtown
Los Angeles; (8) develop the Staples Center/Figueroa Corridor
entertainment zone; (9) install historic street lamps through-
out downtown; (10) develop the Central Avenue Art Park around
The Museum of Contemporary Art at The Geffen Contemporary,
Japanese American National Museum, and the proposed Children’s
Museum; (11) develop a new Justice Center to replace our outdated
police headquarters; and (12) resurrect the Red Car surface trol-
ley and its route from Chinatown through downtown to Exposition
Park.
It is our great hope that the architectural proposals presented here
and in the L.A. Now presentation events will stimulate a citywide
debate on large-scale urban design initiatives. The encouragement
of such discussions will provide the means for civic and government
leaders, developers, planners, architects, students, and citizens
to consider long-range solutions for the next twenty years.
 But there is also a culture…that, in the moment of fluidity and decom-
position leading toward chaos, is capable of generating instants of
energy that from certain chaotic elements construct—out of the pres-
ent and toward the future—a new fold in multiple reality. That which
was many folds over on itself, manifesting an any than can arrive at a
one…. a conjunction whereby the lines of a limitless itinerary cross with
others to create nodal points of outstanding intensity.

Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary

Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997), 102.

Jean Baudrillard once observed that Los Angeles is but a collection

of points connected by a series of freeways. Although downtown is
the heart of Los Angeles in many respects—both by its infrastruc-
ture and by virtue of the political and economic interests headquar-
tered there—targeting it as a site of research should not be con-
strued as an effort to privilege or prioritize. L.A. is a city of multiple
centers, and one center cannot be addressed in isolation from this
larger network. So although we were commissioned to develop urban
Introduction designs for downtown, we found that proposals could not be effec-

4 tively formulated without first considering the city’s interconnected

nodes of intensity.
The dynamics of urban phenomena, the emergence of complex
orders, and the notion of permanent change as a kind of new con-
stant carry within them the need for the nature of urban planning
to evolve. If we acknowledge that the very models on which urban-
ism is organized are vulnerable to being outmoded, then we under-
stand that conventional tools of planning have also lost their prima-
cy. Rather than force process, formal determinations, or legislation,
urban design might turn to continually reappraising the contemporary
city’s transactions, interactions, and exchanges. The result of these
reassessments would be the evolution from ideal geometry to multi-
dimensional systems.
These burgeoning systems defy, fragment, and interrupt Euclidean
projections, yielding new organizational frameworks that supercede
plan-oriented strategies which privilege order over contingency.
Programmatic and spatial adjacencies, and the hybrids they engender,
call for a more three-dimensional organizational matrix that pro-
motes interconnectivity and allows the manifold logics of the city to
advance, recede, and cohere.
These were our premises as we developed urban proposals for
downtown Los Angeles. In a two-quarter-long studio at UCLA’s
Department of Architecture and Urban Design, we undertook the
project of understanding Los Angeles and developing urban propos-
als for its downtown. From the research and analysis compiled in
volume one of L.A. Now, we designed interpretive strategies that
would accommodate the city’s fragmentation, heterogeneity, emer-
gent orders, and non-linearity. The resulting projects have optimis-
tic and ambitious aspirations, but they are not utopian in ideology.
Operating with found logics, they engage tactics that promote
fluidity, flexibility, and interaction of economic, social, and financial
forces.
Piggybacking the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, Los Angeles
PLAY Park procures urban recreational spaces for local downtown
communities. Subsidized by professional organizations both in land
and capital, recreational parks are inserted downtown on land owned
by stadiums and professional leagues. PLAY Park and the city have
symbiotic goals in this respect: the bid mobilizes capital to initiate
a flagship PLAY Park, and PLAY Park creates the appearance of L.A.
as a socially responsible candidate since the proceeds from the games
will stimulate the social welfare of downtown’s inhabitants.
In L.A. River Park, an open space the size of Central Park is grafted
onto downtown, its transplanted configuration inflected by the local
conditions of Los Angeles. The resulting park links existing parks
through a green spine that follows a “liberated” Los Angeles River.
By excavating the concrete lining and re-greening the paved basin,
risk of flooding is drastically reduced and the now-barren river
becomes a vital, green public-recreation corridor.
Taking the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s mandate for public art
and radically expanding it, HS[aRt] Network inserts cultural institutions
such as museums and galleries into transit stations. Comprising
three tiers of transportation—high-speed monorail, Metrolink,
and Metro Rail—this system democratizes access to art and culture
and stimulates the use of public transportation in the Los Angeles
agglomeration. A proposed convention center located downtown
is the hub for these systems, stimulating economic growth and mak-
ing downtown a vital point of cultural and geographical interchange.
Re:LAX takes up Baudrillard’s observation of L.A. as a city of points
connected by a network of freeways. This project assesses the points
and lines that comprise contemporary Los Angeles and strengthens
the connection between two points that, in an era of radical sprawl,
risks falling out of the perceived constellation. A monorail between
downtown and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)—with the
attendant relief of infrastructural responsibilities on LAX—links two
Los Angeles centers and asserts the primacy of their relationship
to the welfare of the city.
Red Line School District takes as its premise a potential for symbio-
sis between the MTA and the Los Angeles Unified School District
(LAUSD). Subway stations become educational gateways, housing
more stable components (such as homerooms and faculty offices)
while the rest of the curriculum and associated resources are
navigated through sites along the subway line. This proposal radically
consolidates the distribution of space, resources, and programming
of the LAUSD, making the requisite expansion a more effective
and manageable prospect. L.A.’s metro system benefits from greater
use—and increased safety—while the school system becomes
a more integrated network of learning centers.
Urban Housing challenges two issues of contemporary urban
planning—sprawl and an unfeasible preoccupation with order—
in a proposal that takes advantage of low-occupancy buildings and
inserts housing into their upper, abandoned floors. By implementing
vertical fill rather than horizontal expansion, the project provides
enough residential units to house a town the size of Hermosa Beach,
California. Imagining additional elevated floor plates of program,
to be developed within a system of contingency and indeterminate
development, the project surrenders structured order to the itinerant
nature of urban growth.
In the UniverCity project, downtown becomes home to a University
of California (UC) campus to meet a burgeoning student population,
stimulate local exchange and investment, and reap the windfall
of the social and educational programs that typically extend into
a university’s vicinity. Reversing the flow of people, investment,
and cultural capital away from sprawl mode and back toward down-
town, the project examines the contemporary UC landscape
in order to strategize and extrapolate a series of social, educational,
and economic permutations in downtown.
Each of these projects works within the broader context of Los
Angeles. They draw connections to the city at large and should be
received in light of their interpretive abilities: taking information
from the L.A. Now research and formulating strategies for downtown
to draw latent potentials and connections. The academic context
of the studio allowed for the emergence of urban proposals incon-
ceivable within the logic of conventional planning and development.
In the initial research phase, programmatic and spatial adjacencies
were unearthed and revealed. The Red Line School project is a perfect
example: how might the needs of the local transit authority (MTA)
and school district (LAUSD) be found to coincide and overlap with
the desires of urban planners or developers, thereby producing
a mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationship?
With the age of large-scale urban master planning behind us—
the requisite land mass swallowed up by prolific development, and
the socio-political support too contingent and contentious any-
way—urban strategies must take current conditions as its starting
point. Challenging urban practices of contextualism and utopianism,
which both operate under the misguided convictions of fixity and
stability, our studio favored the metamorphosis of existing realities,
accepting fluidity, complexity, and discontinuity as possible points
of departure. These exigencies are the genesis of urban design.
Gauging and schematizing rather than inventing and imposing,
these proposals work with the unfolding trajectories of the city.
Schools of architecture are necessary to the production of much-
needed innovation and inspiration in the planning of our cities.
The intent of the L.A. Now proposals is to invigorate interest
in Los Angeles as a project
project, promoting downtown as a territory
for investigation. We are concerned with projects that instill this
interest, from which other ideas will follow.
 Los Angeles PLAY Park >>see pages 22–37
MARIO CIPRESSO
Downtown Los Angeles currently has the least amount of public open space of all major
American urban centers. This condition contributes to a shortage of quality playing fields
for youth and adult sports at both competitive and recreational levels. The situation is further
aggravated by the increased “privatization” of public parks: private teams and organiza-
tions pay premiums for field rights at public parks, depriving the general public of adequate
facilities. By mandating that professional sports clubs “adopt” their local community, quality
playing fields for the public could be subsidized. This would require an expansion of the way
arenas are currently programmed to allow their fields and courts to be used beyond the
limited seasonal hours of professional play, and to fund additional parks on existing club-
Project owned and operated land.
Descriptions

6 Los Angeles PLAY Park is a working model for a subsidized hybrid park. Integrated with
professional, privately owned arenas, PLAY Park systematically knits public fields with pro-
fessional facilities. Utilizing a weave technique, the project creates an interplay between
green and hardscape that more effectively binds the sports arena to its downtown sur-
roundings.
Further incentive to implement this project is the city’s bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympic
Games. The Olympic selection committee considers a city’s existing infrastructure and its
potential for accommodating the projected demands of the games. More importantly,
it considers how the resulting flow of subsidies and revenues could benefit the commu-
nity. Los Angeles PLAY Park and the bid for the summer games have symbiotic goals in this
respect: PLAY Park could be an exemplary project in the eyes of the Olympic committee,
and the city’s mobilization of resources for the bid makes PLAY Park economically feasible.
PLAY Park initially targets as its flagship site the Los Angeles Convention Center and
the Staples Center, located at the juncture of several freeways and major public transportation
routes. The Convention Center’s 800,000 square footage is inadequate by current standards,
and the tight site adjacencies preclude any further expansion. The Staples Center is only
active the few hours during which professional events are conducted. PLAY Park proposes
to demolish the convention center and replace it with a National Football League stadium,
a professional soccer arena, commercial development, and, most importantly, a park for
public recreation.
The flagship site capitalizes on close proximity to the intersection of several freeways
and public transportation lines. The site is directly accessible via the upper deck of the Harbor
Freeway, known as the Harbor Transit Way. This artery is restricted to high-occupancy
vehicles and currently terminates just south of the downtown area. The Metro Blue Line,
located just east of the site, offers direct access to existing parking infrastructure located
in the financial district to the north.
Once these projects find a suitable venue, PLAY Park will quickly be self-sufficient, even
profit generating. Local tournaments can generate considerable amounts of revenue
and attract spectators from all regions of California. While a small tournament may bring
in $200,000 over the course of a weekend, more significant tournaments create an even
greater financial impact. For example, the city of San Diego organizes two annual youth
soccer tournaments that recently earned $700,000 in team fees, attracting 468 teams
and 100,000 spectators. An economic-impact study found that the tournaments poured
$10.5 million into the local economy, the equivalent of a regional NCAA basketball tournament.
The myriad youth clubs and state and national sports leagues in Southern California have
already proven to be lucrative, revenue-generating enterprises, garnering both profits
and corporate sponsorship. PLAY Park provides downtown leagues with quality local venues,
allowing them to generate profits for their communities and local businesses. The playing
fields are not exclusive to leagues and tournaments, but are also made available for public
recreation.
The realization of PLAY Park dovetails with L.A.’s bid for the 2012 Olympic Summer Games.
The bid for the Olympics presents a genuine opportunity to ignite development and interest
in downtown. The Olympic Village would require housing and associated amenities in the
South Park area of downtown, a district already identified by the Community Redevelopment
Agency as needing subsidized housing. One can look to Barcelona’s Olympic Park, built
for the 1992 Olympics, as a model of housing and parks developed in tandem with hosting
the games. PLAY Park and the Olympic bid could symbiotically benefit the local communities
in downtown and the city at large. Having hosted the 1984 Summer Games, Los Angeles
has proven its professional and financial acumen by being the first city to earn profits from
hosting the games. Mobilizing parks and housing, and further maximizing the resources that
have been made available for the bid, would only strengthen L.A.’s prospects on the merits
of the social improvements and community welfare that hosting the event would produce.
Ultimately PLAY Park fills downtown’s large deficit of green space for its residents. On a
bigger scale, it provides infrastructure on a regional level for sports organizations without
the resources to adequately support their constituencies. And finally, Los Angeles PLAY
Park engages in economic feasibility as it piggybacks the Staples Center and situates its
initial venture within the 2012 Olympic Bid.
 L.A. River Park >>see pages 38–53
PATRICK MCENEANY & SUSAN WONG
Compared to other major cities, Los Angeles has a paltry amount of open space: ten percent
of the city compared to New York’s twenty-seven and San Francisco’s twenty-five.
As a means of testing how more open space would transform the city, this project begins
by grafting New York’s Central Park onto downtown Los Angeles. The transplanted L.A.
River Park is programmed with three major components: open landscapes, drainage basins
for the Los Angeles River, and industrial roofscapes. The resulting 900-acre project reclaims
abandoned industrial areas and links two of L.A.’s largest parks, Elysian Park and Griffith
Park, via the landscaped and expanded banks of the Los Angeles River.
The L.A. River is a fifty-one-mile-long concrete channel that ends at the Pacific Ocean.
Project
DescriptionsThroughout most of the year the river is dry and unsightly, resembling a barren freeway.

8 In contrast, during the wet season 183,000 cubic feet of water rush into the Pacific every
second, fourteen times the flow rate of New York’s Hudson River. Because the riverbed
is surfaced in concrete, and because sixty-percent of the city is paved, water cannot
percolate to the ground, exacerbating the threat of floods during heavy rain. Unfortunately,
the historic response has been to raise the river walls with more concrete. Before flood-
prevention measures were taken, 215,000 acres in Los Angeles were at risk of flooding.
However, as a result of flood prevention and the subsequent paving of river walls, 325,000
acres of the city and ten million residents are now at risk. The next flood of the 100-year
flood cycle is now overdue, and porous surfaces, not paved ones, will be more effective
in mitigating the hazards of these rains.
Installing drainage basins can improve the efficiency of the river, and the resulting channel
could be transformed into an iconic green spine connecting all of Los Angeles and its open
spaces. This project proposes to widen the L.A. River, remove parts of its concrete bottom
and walls, and create more drainage basins along the riverbanks. The basins would fill
and filter into aquifers during the cyclical rainfalls, and serve as open landscapes during other
times of the year. The river and its adjacent recreational paths would connect Elysian Park
with Griffith Park, allowing cyclists and joggers to navigate the city and its parks along
a corridor of greenery.
In March 2000, voters approved Proposition 12 ($2.1 billion) and Proposition 13 ($2 billion)
in support of parks and clean-water bonds. Of these funds, $83.5 million was allocated
to redevelop the L.A. River. With this money, L.A. River Park could be implemented.
While one million square feet of existing industrial space would be displaced to provide room
for the basins and open park space, three million square feet could be relocated to adjacent
industrial-park zones, giving these areas a healthy density that doubles as substructure
for a roofscape park. The money for this portion of the project could be privately funded
by industries and through tax incentives for environmental preservation.
The new landscapes go vertical to green existing office buildings and rooftops and to cover
structures erected to promote inter-building connectivity. Roof meadows, roof gardens,
vegetated roofs, and eco-roofs capture and store rainwater in cisterns and dry wells built where
pavement has been removed. The system is designed to absorb water quickly and release
it slowly, producing multiple beneficial effects. Planted with native grasses and plants that
absorb, filter, and store rainfall, the rooftops double as an acoustic buffer. The heat emitted
from the asphalt is cooled by the evapo-transpiration of the planted foliage. Once this system
is implemented in twenty percent of the urban district, passive cooling would have a sub-
stantial impact on the urban heat-island effect characteristic to cities packed with dark
rooftops and pavement.
By grafting New York’s Central Park onto downtown Los Angeles and intervening against
the paved banks of the L.A. River, downtown becomes a vital connection in a newly realized
Los Angeles park system
system. Additional benefits of this strategic transplant include the commer-
cial district’s consolidation and interconnection, natural cooling, and the virtual elimination
of flooding due to overflowing riverbanks.
 HS[aRt] Network >>see pages 54–69
JOE BALDWIN
Taking the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s mandate for integrating public art and radically
expanding it, HS[aRt] Network inserts cultural institutions such as museums and galleries
into transit stations. Comprising three scales of transportation—high-speed monorail,
Metrolink, and Metro Rail—this system democratizes access to art and culture and stimulates
the use of public transportation in the greater Los Angeles agglomeration. At the heart
of this project is a new convention center for downtown Los Angeles. Compensating
for the limitations in the size and scope of Union Station and the city’s current convention
center, a new convention center would create a cultural, financial, and transportation hub.
The thesis of this proposal stems from two observations about Los Angeles. The first is that
Project
Descriptionscultural facilities such as museums and galleries are largely inaccessible to certain economic

10 classes in the city, particularly those who rely on public transportation. The second observa-
tion is that Los Angeles has increasingly become a decentralized city, which also makes cul-
tural engagement an unlikely and inconvenient prospect to those who live within the city’s
sprawling edges.
In an effort to rethink how the Los Angeles public can enjoy greater exposure to the arts,
this project proposes locating galleries, museums, and other cultural institutions within
transit stations. The introduction of a high-speed monorail connecting Los Angeles to
convention centers, cultural institutions, and parks in San Francisco, Sacramento, and San
Diego would establish a great economic and cultural web. The local Metrolink would then
connect galleries, recreation centers, theaters, and parks within the Los Angeles agglomera-
tion. Similarly, the Metro Rail would link “boutique” galleries, installations, and small parks.
The hub for these systems would be a new downtown convention center. By locating
the transfer system here, downtown’s cultural, recreational, and entertainment resources
gain increased exposure and use. A 2.5 million-square-foot convention center replaces
the smaller and outmoded one. Recent expansions have exhausted the old center’s real-
estate potential while its size remains grossly inferior to other regional and national centers.
Meanwhile, historic Union Station is unable to accommodate a broadened transportation
network. Located just a few blocks away, the new convention center is designed to receive
and connect these new transit systems. With its competitive size, amenities, and convenient
access, the new convention center would attract big business and revenue to downtown.
Straddling the Los Angeles River, the convention center also connects the downtown core
with the residential and industrial neighborhoods of East L.A. The transportation stations,
convention center, cultural centers, museums, galleries, housing, bicycle and pedestrian paths,
and parks transform the new convention center into a hub for the confluence of people,
transportation, and cultural forces in downtown Los Angeles.
Both as an attraction itself and as a key access point to local infrastructure, HS(aRt)
Network orchestrates downtown as a central node of culture, commerce, and transportation
in Los Angeles. The art network is especially effective in this respect—by exhibiting art
within transit stations, the public enjoys greater exposure to the arts and is inspired
to expand upon its engagement with both mass transit and the city’s cultural institutions.
 Re:LAX >>see pages 70–85
ED HATCHER
Jean Baudrillard once observed that Los Angeles is a city of points
points, connected only
by a network of freeways. Should we accept Baudrillard’s view, then our task as architects
and urban designers might be to insert additional, strategic connections between the few
critical points. Yet as Los Angeles continues the trend of sprawl as its principal form
of growth, the condition of a field with many centers expands and intensifies. As a result,
crucial junctions between certain centers are all but erased in the flurry of rapid develop-
ment. L.A. Now research identifies two key points in need of stronger affiliation: Los
Angeles International Airport (LAX) and L.A.’s downtown urban core. Re:LAX promotes a
practical and conspicuous transportation connection between LAX and downtown in the
Project form of a high-speed monorail.
Descriptions

12 In a field of generally non-hierarchical centers, the monorail asserts the primacy of the
downtown/airport relationship. A monorail between these two significant but isolated
centers would fortify an otherwise dim connection. Re:LAX challenges conventional notions
of adjacency and proximity. By giving these disparate nodes the ease and speed of access,
distances are collapsed and isolation is undermined. As a result, the performance of the city
is recalibrated.
Rather than perpetuating the necessity for all traffic to converge at LAX for departures
and arrivals, the monorail offers multiple points for boardings, easing infrastructural burdens
on LAX such as parking, shuttle service, and traffic enforcement. Re:LAX decentralizes
and diverts these space-consuming requirements to local points of connection along
the monorail route.
The basic diagram of the monorail strategy can be understood through two Los Angeles
icons: the Encounter bar and restaurant—a converted air-traffic control tower with
360-degree views of LAX and its environs—and the revolving penthouse lounge of the
Bonaventure Hotel, a downtown landmark. Both establishments are centers of a kind, offer-
ing panoramic views from privileged vantage points. They are emblematic of a city with
multiple centers—thematic nodes whose linkage further obfuscates the center-periph-
ery conventions common to traditional European city paradigms. The Encounter and the
Bonaventure are centers within centers, a vivid riff on Baudrillard’s characterization of L.A.
A secondary concern of this project is suturing the bifurcated downtown area. This split
is largely perpetuated by the grain of the 110 freeway, a wide swath of fast-moving bodies
through an intermittently dense fabric. The freeway has made social and economic cleavages
more pronounced: the west side is financially heartier than the failing industrial sector
to the east. Two interventions have been developed to address this condition.
First, a series of pedestrian paths weave around and wrap the 110 freeway between 1st
and 7th Streets. These routes mitigate the strong north-south grain established by the
freeway and promote slower, local movement across the fast-moving commuter traffic. The
second is an architectural intervention that functions as a gateway to downtown.
This gateway is a loose constituency of programs that hover above the freeway between
1st and 7th Streets, its building mass inflected by the existing vehicular access ramps
and proposed pedestrian walkways.
Thematically, Re:LAX proposes to weave, suture, and rein downtown into the constellation
of centers that comprise Los Angeles. The high-speed monorail linking LAX and downtown
re-figures the identity of metropolitan Los Angeles. As downtown is reunited with the
metropolitan field of multiple centers, LAX is relieved of infrastructural burdens. No longer
bypassed, downtown will become a vital stopping point for travelers into and out of the city.
 Red Line School District >>see pages 86–101
PETER KIMMELMAN, JAE KWON, NISHANT LALL & ANDREW SCOTT
Historically, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s response to overcrowding has been
to bus students to increasingly far-flung city campuses. By contrast, the subway system
in Los Angeles suffers from severe under-use, alienating potential riders with empty cars
and a perceived lack of safety. Red Line School District takes as its premise a potential
symbiotic relationship between the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and the Los Angeles
Unified School District (LAUSD). In this proposal, subway stations double as “educational
gateways,” housing the more stationary components of a school system (such as homerooms
and faculty offices) while the rest of the curriculum and associated resources are distributed
among sites along the Red Line. This proposal consolidates and maximizes the utilization
Project of space, resources, and programs for the LAUSD, making the requisite expansion a more
Descriptions

14
effective and manageable prospect. In tandem, Red Line School District activates L.A.’s metro
system during off-peak hours and integrates it with a network of learning centers.
Challenging the LAUSD are the limited ways it can respond to shortages of land and resourc-
es in districts where student populations are swelling. Predicated upon traditional organi-
zational models of geographic proximity and zoning, the LAUSD typically buses students in
response to overcrowding—a solution that merely transfers the burden to another school
district. Ultimately busing never resolves the problem, as LAUSD wastes energy chasing
shifting populations. As a result, schools no longer offer a distinct community presence,
eroding the relationship between the student body and the local neighborhood school.
This proposal enables the LAUSD to have the Red Line do the chasing for them. The Red Line
currently runs through the B, D, E, F, G, and H school districts. By treating these discrete
districts as one large campus and having students “commute” from core nodes to specialized
subject-based schools, shortages are essentially eradicated as the total student population
is uniformly distributed through a series of metro stations and local campuses. The school
district capitalizes on infrastructure, mobility, and access rather than geography. New
districts are formed based on their proximity to a subway station entrance, which serves
as an “educational gateway” for the school system.
The gateways contain the non-mobile portions of the program: the core-subject schools,
homerooms, faculty offices, and storage. These stationary outposts reinstate the neigh-
borhood-outreach aspect of schools—a traditional means for a school to establish its
presence in the neighborhood—while simultaneously providing a portal to the under-
ground school network. Operating both conventionally and virtually, these portals lead to
an extended field of classrooms along the Red Line.
Each high-school campus offers core subjects—math, science, English, and social studies—
and one or two immersion-elective subjects. Students commute three times a day on the Red
Line, which shuttles them to resource-center labs, library research, recreation, and electives.
By consolidating its student body, the LAUSD also maximizes its resources. Individually,
each node begins to integrate the attributes of its local civic identity. For example, the
gateway located in Little Tokyo not only offers a core curriculum for its students, but also
specializes in Japanese studies, which is available to any student in the Red Line District.
Inversing the idea of the magnet school, this formulation essentially “de-magnetizes” special
programs, making them available to all enrolled students. On a district-wide level, students
have access to more learning opportunities (languages, topics, resources) than one isolated
traditional school could ever hope to offer. In another way, major infrastructural needs such
as fields, sports facilities, and libraries that are not uniformly maintained from district
to district can draw from the financial resources of a much larger population, making the
district less susceptible to issues of land values (in the case of playing fields) or imbalanced
taxation levels.
While the Red Line School District promotes a regional and civic identity, the educational
gateways expand its presence on a local level. Potentially offering healthcare, vocational
training, and evening classes for neighborhood parents and constituents, the gateway sites
strengthen relations between the school and the community, parents and teachers.
Both a unified metropolitan system and a more localized presence, the LAUSD operates
in conjunction with the community along two seemingly exclusive strategies.
New facilities can develop without being dictated by local intensifications in population.
Instead, the attention can be focused on the needs of the LAUSD at large, advancing academ-
ic and extra-curricular agendas that benefit the entire system. By redirecting and collaps-
ing certain programs, the overhaul considers specific curricular agendas and local urban
conditions. Ultimately, the LAUSD can strategically distribute resources based on real-estate
prices, institutional adjacencies, and existing infrastructure. Reorganizing the LAUSD along
the Red Line will radically intensify the use of the city’s Metro system, making it safer
for all riders and increasing awareness of its routes and features. By pairing two unlikely
city and state agencies, both organizations—and the city—benefit.
 Urban Housing >>see pages 102–117
PAUL ANDERSEN & MAIA JOHNSON
During a time when the global rate of urbanization is on the increase, strategies dedicated
to cope with rapid expansion are conspicuously absent. Cities currently contain nearly half
the world’s population, compared to sixteen percent of the population in 1950 and a project-
ed eighty percent in 2025. Of the few strategies circulating in the urban scene, many are
preoccupied with order in an inherently volatile, provisional, and disorderly world. These
fascinations are out of phase with the sporadic and often haphazard fits of growth by
which cities actually develop.
Among issues most alarming to urban planners and concerned citizens alike, sprawl
is paramount. The trend toward a seemingly endless development of ever-widening
Project
Descriptionsoutskirts of land—suburbia, exurbia, and beyond—has a negative impact on natural

16 resources, infrastructure, quality of life, energy consumption, and ecology. As the fact
that fifty-four American cities doubled in population during the 1990s demonstrates,
sprawl is a persistent threat.
This urban housing proposal seeks to remedy these two pitfalls of urban planning—
sprawl and an unfeasible preoccupation with order—through a vertical thrust of develop-
ment at a flexible and adaptive pace in the center of downtown Los Angeles. Operating
between pragmatism and utopianism, the scheme imagines new programs and methods
for the development of abandoned and low-occupancy buildings.
Through our research we identified forty-eight, largely empty masonry high-rises built
during the 1920s as ideal candidates for downtown housing. Their proximity to one another,
similarity in construction, and near-uniformity in height make them strategic targets
for redevelopment. An early Native American footpath and the locus of downtown’s first
commercial and cultural development, the site has both topological and historical distinction
as well. The top stories of these structures are largely unoccupied, while the lower floors
and sidewalks remain active through commercial activity. By inserting housing into these
upper stories, the forty-eight buildings would provide enough residential units to house
a community the size of Hermosa Beach, California.
As a result of this programmatic graft, housing “sprawls” in an upward direction, thus main-
taining much-needed pockets of open space and provoking further sectional investigation.
Having inserted housing in the upper levels, the project introduces support programs—
necessary for a successful residential environment—through additional floor plates that
are built along the housing levels. The development of this space can respond to local
conditions and is not forced to comply or cohere with a larger urban vision. Soft commercial
zones, landscape, and circulation paths throughout the vertical grain of the project engen-
der a connective tissue of new textures, integrating these discrete towers into a more
cohesive urbanism and procuring the critical mass of density and diversity necessary for a
healthy social ecology.
The elevated floors are developed by the constituent parties that occupy them. The top
surface is programmed according to emerging exchanges and forces, such as the desire
for daycare in lieu of a convenience store, while the underside is exploited with graphic
treatments and ambient/tectonic devices. The eventual extension and linking of plates blurs
the formerly distinct boundaries between interior and exterior, public and private, occupa-
tion and circulation. A rich mix of uses and the emergence of new programmatic and spatial
typologies result, calibrated to the specific desires percolating on each site.
Departing from conventional hard-planning methods, this strategy pursues smooth
transitions in downtown’s development that resist specific programs in favor of zones
of indeterminate development. Free program—the result—is more inclined to address
the city’s use and growth over time. The soft organization of the built areas breeds
a hybridization of activities and events that are compartmentalized in typical urban-planning
methods. Sprawl in this scenario is not simply a radical densification along a vertical axis,
but a tactical insertion of vertical layers around which local constituents can cluster,
organize, and develop.
 UniverCity >>see pages 118–133
MARTIN SUMMERS
Los Angeles, like many American cities, faces the need to redefine its decaying downtown
during this post-industrial time. As the information age eclipses an era of industrial
production, many of those who have historically lived and worked downtown are
unequipped to succeed in the new economy. As a result, the downtown core has developed
a split personality: a daytime population of nine-to-five commuters and a professionally,
educationally, and economically disadvantaged resident base. The void left in downtown
by the loss of industrial jobs and wages, declining infrastructure, and decreased land values
has generated a mood of abandonment and despair. Without a lifeline, this condition will
only worsen as more new immigrants and low-income families continue to concentrate
Project and converge in downtown Los Angeles.
Descriptions

18 This project addresses one deficiency by inserting a University of California campus

in downtown Los Angeles. As California anticipates sizable population growth in the next
twenty-five years, one can expect the University of California to expand accordingly.
A university campus would be a catalyst to transform the latent diversity of downtown into
a knowledge base, attracting the investment of cultural and fiscal capital and reversing
the one-way flow of resources out of downtown. A university would suture the educational
and economic divisions in downtown, allowing it to cohere as a more balanced and equitable
community.
Introducing a university to downtown L.A. would counteract many of the entropic, even
repelling, forces currently in effect. UC-Downtown would attract the very white-collar class
that migrates out of the city at the end of each workday, recapturing the attendant resources,
capital flows, and social and cultural exchanges in the process. Interaction between
the night and day populations is thus facilitated, collapsing distinctions as the local base
becomes better educated and educated people are more attracted to downtown. Growing
alongside the traditional university would be a series of continuing education and evening
programs, local outreach chapters, and clinics for language and computer skills. The result
would transform the cultural, financial, and civic fabric of downtown. One can begin
to imagine a condition in which a university population forms the critical mass necessary
to retain a skilled, educated class of people in the downtown community while raising
the standards by which the local, formerly industrial labor class lives and works.
Recently, major American cities have been identified as locales for study-abroad programs
that redirect students’ time, energy, and creativity to the political and socio-cultural polem-
ics of urban design and planning. A critical aspect of this proposal would be the designation
of downtown L.A. as a destination for students studying “abroad.” In this context, down-
town becomes an interdisciplinary studio for the study of transactions within recently
blighted areas; solutions for stimulating exchange and activity; and the reversal of the
urban-sprawl trend. With a greater metropolitan area population of 13.1 million and a pat-
tern of growth common to many post-industrial American cities, Los Angeles is an exem-
plary case for this kind of projective research, the results of which have potential national,
and even global, ramifications.
 Project Site Map

Red Line School District >>see 14, 86-101

Peter Kimmelman, Jae Kwon, Nishant Lall & Andrew Scott

Re:LAX >>see 12, 70-85

Ed Hatcher

L.A. River Park >>see 8, 38-53

Patrick McEneany & Susan Wong

Site Map

20

Los Angeles PLAY Park Urban Housing >>see 16, 102-117

Mario Cipresso Paul Andersen & Maia Johnson
>>see 6, 22-37
HS[aRt] Network >>see 10, 54-69 UniverCity >>see 18, 118-133
Joe Baldwin Martin Summers
Los Angeles
PLAY Park

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PLAY Park

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PLAY Park

26
Los Angeles
PLAY Park

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Los Angeles
PLAY Park

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Los Angeles
PLAY Park

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Los Angeles
PLAY Park

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PLAY Park

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L.A. River Park

38
L.A. River Park

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L.A. River Park

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L.A. River Park

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School District

86
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School District

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School District

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School District

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School District

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School District

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School District

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School District

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 Excerpts from the
transcript of the final UCLA
Architectural Jury
22–23 March 2001

22 March 2001
Jury Members
Joseph Giovannini, critic and architect
John Kaliski, architect
Rick Keating, architect
Jury Sylvia Lavin, chair, School of Architecture, UCLA
Transcript

134 Greg Lynn, architect and professor, UCLA

Eric Owen Moss, architect and professor, SCI-Arc
Merry Norris, art consultant
Wolf Prix, architect and professor, UCLA
Richard Weinstein, professor, UCLA

Moderator
Thom Mayne, architect and professor, UCLA

I. Berengut

I. Berengut
Introductory Remarks
Thom Mayne: For the few of you who haven’t been here before,
let me give you an idea of what we’ve been doing. This is a two-
quarter class, in which we spent a large percentage of the first
half gathering and analyzing information about the city. There have
been a series of bridges between a professional staff and the class.
Julianna Morais is here today from the professional group. She has
been working with me and directing the effort to quantify, evaluate,
and get her arms around this thing we call L.A.
Behind you are bits and pieces of a study in progress which, at this
point, evaluates the city within four parameters: people, capital,
infrastructure, and habitat. The goal was for the students, as they
began their urban work, to identify a broad agglomeration problem
that was confined to what we call downtown, which all of us accept-
ed from the get-go as one of the centers of a multi-centered mega-
lopolis. This work will become part of the data that they’re using,
and you’ll see it showing up in all of the work.
There is also a series of case studies that serves as an appendix.
We looked at large-scale projects around the world. The smaller end
of the scale would have included the World Trade Towers as large
architecture, and the upper end of the scale would be Brasília
or the urban work in Barcelona for the Olympics. Then the middle
might be Battery Park or Lille, France. We’ve taken those and
quantified them. We talk about their economic structure and a
basis of understanding the nature of the project in terms of scale
and construction and its relationship to uses, etc.
We were doing this specifically to bring in some sort of reality.
Because while we’re not interested in ability or reality at that level,
we are interested in what Richard [Weinstein] came up with—
plausibility. It seemed like a reasonable idea that the projects
be plausible, and it’s also a grounding mechanism for the students.
S. Latty
Los Angeles PLAY Park
MARIO CIPRESSO
Sylvia Lavin: I’m trying to get a sense of what your sensibility
about this is. When you describe something that’s got 6.5 million
square feet as a humanizing element, you should at least be ironic.
Even though it’s not vertical, which we associate with bigness,
it’s still big. Your ambiguous treatment of scale relates to a per-
haps more perplexing issue. Despite the fact that your project is
in downtown, it operates on a suburban model, expansive parking
where you dump your car and unarticulated mall-structures where
you move as a pedestrian. It does not yet have the density and
complexity of an urban condition.
John Kaliski: I don’t have any problems with the idea, and I don’t
have any problems with the bigness of it. I think that Mario Cipresso
is having a real struggle figuring out how to do something this big
and still relate it to what you call “humanizing” elements, such
as the size of the population, the size of activities that occur in
downtown, etc.
In any case, 7.8 million square feet of commercial space, that’s
mostly retail is extreme and to humanize it is a challenge.
Mario Cipresso: It’s retail, hotel, a mixture of everything, and office
space as well.
Kaliski: I think that’s about twice the size of South Coast Plaza
in Costa Mesa, which is the largest shopping mall on the west
coast. You must have a better sense of the scale of the operation
you’re dealing with. If you look at Costa Mesa and you look at it
as a footprint, it’s spread out. Your scheme is vertical. Vertical retail
experiences are very difficult to design successfully.
Because it is vertical, it’s very internalized. That’s where the logic
starts breaking down for me.
All of these events that you are suggesting should be aligned
and programmed so that they begin to create some type of public
experience of space that’s absolutely unique. I think there is a space
that can be the generator of this in your scheme and it is under-
developed: Figueroa Street.
I. Berengut
 As I see the scheme right now, a lot of it is an environment that
centers on itself, as opposed to finding a civic locale that is activated.
My suggestion would be to go back to each of your elements
and relate it to the site and surrounding streets in a more effective
manner. The diffuser bar for example would have to really be
a diffuser. That boomerang would somehow have to dump out on
the street and should in plan and section be designed in a much
more amazing way. The soccer fields and the health club could be
related to Figueroa Street.
I do really love your bringing the Harbor Transit Way right into
the project, which I think is a zoomy and public idea. I think that
would be fun, a great e-ticket ride.
I’m not so convinced about the need to remove the convention
center, though I understand from a practical standpoint, you probably
thought, “How can I possibly put all these soccer fields here?”
I suspect you could just basically drive the structure right through
Jury
the convention center and put the platform over it.
Transcript
136
Richard Weinstein: Do you feel any responsibility, when you’re
building something that is basically the size of the existing down-
town, to think about what would happen to downtown if you did
this? Have you thought about that as an issue, or have you just said
from the beginning that you’re going to focus on a programmatic
intervention of this kind without regard to its influence and impact
on the territory surrounding it?
Cipresso: I definitely considered that. The idea was that this area
right now is only alive for about two to three hours at any given
time when there’s a sporting event at Staples Center, and Staples
Center is basketball and hockey, which is seasonal during one part
of the year. Football runs at a different time and soccer runs during
the summer. The idea for Los Angeles PLAY Park is that the activities
that happen here would activate the area year-round. I know for
a fact that the fields at Balboa Park are running until late at night
every day, and the only reason why activity stops is because they’re
not lit. If the facilities were lit, they’d be active till midnight.
This area here is already zoned for housing. The CRA redevelopment
association is already looking at this as housing, and I look at this
as the catalyst to begin this development, looking out this way.
Weinstein: But everything you’ve said has to do with what you’re
doing. It doesn’t have to do with what’s happening adjacent to you,
including the point that the CRA has zoned that for housing. Anyone
who has the nerve to put an intervention of this size in there also
has the obligation, I would claim, to say, “Is that the best use of the
area to the east?” Why don’t you question it and decide yes, that
S. Latty
should be housing, or maybe it should be something else. In other
words, I don’t see any effort to assess the influence that this could
have on a big piece of L.A. I think all of your thinking is basically
confined to the enclave that you’ve created.
If you did something this big, it would have enormous consequences
for everything within miles, and an understanding of what those
consequences might be would, in turn, influence what you would
do. There would be a kind of reciprocal relationship between what
you’re doing and the influence it would have, and then you might say,
I don’t want to have that kind of an influence, and that might change
the way you would program the space and even make the shapes.
Mayne: That’s interesting. The basic strategy from early on was to
use two broad formal or conceptual devices to deal with the problem
of connection. The line and the idea of blurring the infrastructure
of movement with the infrastructure of buildings was one, and it was
about a radical connectivity, and with that there was a kind of porosity
that worked against the grain because of the linear nature of it.
The second one was the plane, and the dealing with the layering
of both these things had to do with the suppression of the freeway
and its singularity as a first growth or primitive early development
of the city, and to attack the boundary condition and the singularity
of the freeway and to make it much more secondary as a condition.
Greg Lynn: I think Mario’s analysis has taken him to discover
the fact that parking is the thing that drives every sports stadium.
Every team owner only comes in on the construction of a stadium
if they get the parking concession. It’s the thing the city always has
to pay for, not the stadium. They build the parking and it drives
the whole thing.
It’s also where you spend most of your game. I always spend two
hours in the parking lot tailgating. One spends an hour and a half
in the game, and usually leaves early to go back to the parking lot
again. So parking is the thing, not the stadium.
In terms of urban design, you’re really close to a lot of experiments
like Paul Rudolph’s in the 1970s, in which New Haven was thought
of primarily as a problem of getting off the freeway, through a parking
garage, to filter into the city. So I think all that is very good. I think
your parking garage is big enough now that it could start to contain
a lot of your sporting fields, a lot of your functions.
I think everybody’s pointed to the fact that it’s probably too big
from a development standpoint, but from a massing and urbanistic
standpoint, it’s got some good things going for it.
So I would say that instead of thinking of this like Berlin, where
you make space through building mass and that the interior of the
building just gets filled up with malls or retail spaces or parking,
that you really should think of this thing as a landscape surface
and think of parking as not just a building mass but as a surface
you occupy.
You’re going to have to work out—which Rudolph never did—
how you get from the ten-story parking garage down to the city,
which is why New Haven didn’t work. But I’m sure, if you came up
with techniques like you’re doing with some of your ramps and
shoots circulating from that big, hulking mass through sporting
fields down into the city, it’s going to work.
Also, as far as I know about downtown, the big problem is parking.
You can rent a space on the 20th floor of a tower for a dollar per
square foot, but then you end up paying $300 in parking fees
for everybody that works for you. So there’s no economy in being
downtown till there is more parking. The Staples Center parking
doesn’t work for offices because of the overlap of the games.
So clearly, downtown needs parking facilities on this scale. The free-
way needs an address, and you’ve got a lot of techniques for devel-
oping open urban space. But I think all your pieces need to be one
piece. Like your stadium, your garage, and the boomerang need to
be one system rather than three figures that frame an urban public
plaza.
Lavin: Don’t you think it would be fair to say that he actually needs
a landscape strategy? The least developed part of the project is
the distribution of playing fields that are not designed but abandoned
to a grid. Without being activated, the landscape, as a kind of design
factor, isn’t working productively.
The project needs a range of intermediary scales, like a secondary
transportation system to get you from where you park to where
you play. A landscape strategy doesn’t preclude operating on a
big scale, but can activate all of the other scales that would work
together to support the big one.
Weinstein: But the big scale isn’t working well enough. I don’t
complain about the big scale. If you took the parking garage
and integrated it with the freeway, which is the big-scale element
in L.A., you could double the capacity of the freeway for the length
of the parking garage by simply having a turnoff into the garage.
Kaliski: It’s true that if you built 6.5 million square feet of retail
space and all of this other stuff in one place, you’re just simply
delaying the revitalization of the rest of downtown because you’ve
sucked all the development energy into your little corner of the city.
Maybe the project should not be quite as big as you put it—maybe
it’s only 2 million square feet of retail space instead of 8 million.
Mayne: I think the idea of it, the strategy, has to be flexible and
elastic enough to absolutely challenge the uses, because I don’t
agree at all with the uses. I think the uses should be flexible,
and they have to be in terms of the way cities develop today.
This isn’t linked to a particular use.
I didn’t mention this, and I have to say it, at least in a general way.
The initial idea had to do with a condition that’s taking place today,
one that’s coupled with the demise of urban studies as a discipline
and the reality of the increase in scale of projects.
What I was interested in was finding a space between the analytical,
information-laden approach of the planner and that rationale, and
the more spatial, intuitive, and qualitative sensibility of an architect
and finding a seam between those sensibilities.
Lynn: I think if the parking deck and recreation deck and slab worked
flexibly, we would just say this is great. It’s a street, it’s a parking
garage, it’s a playing field, and it’s a place to tailgate. It does all
these things in a flexible way where we could redevelop it through
a kind of hybrid strategy.
Lavin: That’s the problem with having so much green space and
having no landscape strategy. If you’re going to mention Lille,
for example, you have to recognize that when going from the train
station to the shopping mall or from here to there, you can’t
differentiate when you’re on a street from when you’re on a public
plaza, and when you’re in a parking lot from when you’re on a playing
field. All of those things exist simultaneously. Lille develops a design
strategy that deals with the multiple programs and events that can
happen on thick horizontal surface.
L.A. River Park
PATRICK MCENEANY & SUSAN WONG
Kaliski: I’m looking for the image of this project to become more
plausible, in the sense of seeing more variety in the type of strate-
gies of keeping old things and introducing new things.
For instance, another strategy within certain portions of the flood
plain might be that you’re not allowed to build unless you build up
on stilts. Vegetal roofing might be another strategy. There might
be strategies that allow existing buildings to basically stay right there
where they are within the flood plain. For instance, berms could be
built around buildings instead of the river. When the flood comes,
the water moves around the buildings.
 I can also imagine, as opposed to doing this project all at once,
completely reinventing that landscape over twenty, thirty, or forty
years with a series of architectural and landscape strategies
that are quite incremental in nature which, when added up, would
actually be quite significant.
And then the last thing I can imagine is that if you are approaching
this project incrementally, you could become more discriminating
about, as you put it, the point at which the scraping occurs, because
I have no doubt that you would want to do some of that. But right
now the proposal seems indiscriminate.
I think that you’re introducing a concept of amenity into an industrial
zone that doesn’t typically exist but is becoming more and more
important. And I think that’s what I’m curious about in your scheme,
when amenity becomes overarching design strategy versus incre-
mental design tactics.
Mayne: I think they were able to find three layered problems that
Jury
had to do with very different scales. One had to do with the infra-
Transcript
138
structure of the river, and the fact of exploring a potentiality that
already had a funding source of $1.5 billion. Another had to do with
the immediate issue of use and the revitalization of an essentially
nineteenth-century kind of ad hoc structure that would then be
moved into some sort of a modern condition.
The third one was the park and the idea of actually returning,
of scraping and subtracting and finding open space there. This
production of a park has micro-environmental implications and,
although it is somewhat tertiary here, it is an important local issue.
But it’s absolutely strategic and it’s tactical and it’s organizational
for sure. The development has some sort of coherent idea that deals
with complex problems.
Lynn: I think there’s something sinister and provocative about
the urban-renewal aspect of your scheme, which says that the way
you do development—which everybody knows is the way to do
development but nobody admits it—is you go in and you demolish
a lot. You introduce schools like SCI-Arc or whatever to gentrify
the demolished areas, and then it develops. It’s a cycle of running
neighborhoods down then investing in in them while their value
is diminished to make a profit in redeveloping them.
I think if you thought of this in terms of cycles, there are a lot of
very provocative things about your scheme. Starting off with the
fact that your design does not address development but demoli-
tion. We’re going to target an area of the city. We’re going to start
to demolish it. We’re going to do it in a way that plugs into master
narratives of ecology and green space so that that image is an
arresting image, to see this big sweep of green and water flowing
through the city. It makes demolition and urban renewal seem really
friendly and good.
S. Latty
It’s fabulous. And if you look at Detroit, the major industry in Detroit
for five years was brick recycling because they were demolishing
buildings, cleaning and dusting off bricks, and reselling them for
new construction and shipping them to other places in the U.S.
I think that your agenda of transforming buildings into sewage
treatment, chemical reclaiming, and other detoxifying uses is a mis-
take, as probably every one of these buildings is so toxic and polluted
already that you have to abate every section of soil ten feet below
them before you put a house on it. Say this is part of a thirty-
year cycle and it’s going to be sensitive and progressive in certain
aspects.
But it’s an urban-renewal recycling preparation for a development
scheme rather than saying, well, we’re going to put two million square
feet of industry here. I find that actually naïve.
I think that if you just took the kind of urban-renewal track you’re
on and said, well, this is part of a pattern, and it’s going to generate
development in other places, it’s going to generate jobs, it’s going
to generate ten years of work demolishing the city: that’s an inter-
esting proposal. Like what do we do downtown? Let’s make fifty
million dollars tearing down and recycling an area. And it actually
plugs into plausibility
lausibility and reality in a way that we already know.
This is the way cities develop.
Weinstein: It also creates the basis for housing downtown because
without a move of this magnitude, you’ll never get the kind of housing
development in the downtown area that, at least from one point
of view, is desirable.
The other thing that would strengthen the project would be to run
the green space from the Music Center all the way down. It practi-
cally touches the boundary that you now have. This is the biggest
unused green space in L.A., all of this. All the way down to here is
basically green, mostly green and mostly unused. So just one more
block and you’re in your park.
HS[aRt] Network
JOE BALDWIN
Wolf Prix: I’m intrigued that you guys are so against density. For
me, urban projects entail dealing with density, basically. Maybe it’s
because I’m a European architect. In Europe now, train stations are
the most valuable areas you can build on. Everyone at every train
station is building big shopping and commercial centers. They mean
to densify on a minimum amount of space a lot of buildings. Never
would we do a convention center in this valuable area. So I’m asking
why. Where does this come from?
Joe Baldwin: The strategy is to take advantage of the potential for
bringing people from San Diego to San Francisco to meet in this area,
where literally they don’t have to get on a bus to go to a convention
center. They’re in the convention center once they get off the train,
and it’s an efficient way for business transactions to happen
at the convention center. It’s a connection for the agglomeration.
It becomes a way to bring it all together.
Lynn: What made you put all these pieces together? I’m sorry
that I keep trying to move your project so many miles away,
but you could make this project denser at LAX than you could
in downtown, and that’s why I would move it there. If you put this
thing at LAX, you could put hotels, convention center, shopping,
big-box warehouse sales.…
Kaliski: You mean in LAX?
Eric Owen Moss: The premise of the project is completely different.
The premise of the project has to do with building up downtown and
sustaining and adding to what downtown is.
Lynn: I just think this keeps slipping out.
Prix: You can bring LAX to downtown.
Lynn: In London you check your bag downtown at Victoria Station
then get on the train, and your bag gets on the airplane mysteriously,
which is how a lot of the airports do it.
Rick Keating: Why would you set up something with such extreme
programmatic centrality over on an edge?
Lynn: Because the edge is denser than the center.
Kaliski: No, it’s not.
Lynn: In L.A. it is.
Moss: The answer may be the center, and that’s the point.
The question is whether there’s a center here and whether you
ought to sustain it.
Lynn: The whole premise of this studio is how do we make the cen-
ter behave like a center with density?
Moss: In other words, how to make this a conventional city, which
it isn’t. It’s essentially composed of multiple centers.
Lavin: Except you can’t deny the fact that downtown, even if you
say it’s one of many centers, is uniquely determined by the desire
to be the symbolic center. Moreover, it is important to acknowledge
that the desire for centeredness frequently intrudes on discussions
about Los Angeles.
It seems to me that one of the reasons you’ve placed this here
is you want it on the river in order to produce the visual centrality
provided by a skyline. This project is driven by the effort to give
a formal identity, a skyline-type identity, to downtown L.A. That
may be a terrible or at least nostalgic idea, but it’s nevertheless an
idea in which much of downtown urban design in this city has been
invested.
Moss: So for whom is it desirable? Who is pushing it? Who wants
the development of downtown and downtown as a center?
Kaliski: While I agree that part of this is political will—“because
it’s there, you have to make it there”—part of it is also the fact that
the entire transportation system of the region literally dumps into
downtown. I think that you can make the argument to take better
advantage of this situation. What I would argue is that you were
correct in noticing on a gross basis where the infrastructure was
going and using the high-speed rail to reinforce the opportunity
of this centrality and density.
However, I think understanding where to maximize its impact once
you are downtown is not resolved. I think it’s somewhat odd that
you slipped the project down river from where Union Station is.
I think that if you are going to do this, part of the justification for
doing it is to create the type of dense experience or hyper-density
that doesn’t exist in downtown. I also think your effort is an
opportunity to create a type of destination that’s a California/
Nevada/Arizona-type of destination that doesn’t exist anywhere
else on the west coast.
Re:LAX
ED HATCHER
Lynn: How much cargo goes through LAX?
Ed Hatcher: $207 billion.
Lynn: And in terms of volume in numbers, how many takeoffs and
landings? What percentage—it’s big, right? It’s not half, but it’s big.
Hatcher: It’s in the belly of the plane itself. Something like sixty-five
percent of the cargo through LAX is carried in the cargo holds
of passenger planes.
Lynn: One tends to see airports near things like shipping-container
ports and rail lines. So wouldn’t downtown be the perfect place,
where goods are moving in and around, to put them on something
like a monorail that would move it out to LAX? Wouldn’t this be a way
to revitalize existing cargo capacities downtown?
Mayne: The issue was that by anticipating the doubling of passengers
to and from LAX, the problem as a delivery system had to do with
parking or accessibility. The requirement was the redistribution or
decentralization of that problem. It’s exacerbated by the airport
being on an edge and that you’re only getting half the radii, and then
by any number of topographical conditions causing infrastructure
 problems in terms of automobiles.
The idea was to distribute the parking link. One link was moved
to the midpoint between LAX and downtown, creating a twofold
solution that decentralizes the parking problem while creating
an increased linkage to the downtown area. So downtown became
an obvious hub for the development of commercial hotels, etc.
One was able to locate exactly how far one was from the hub,
say in terms of minutes away as opposed to miles away. The idea
becomes an extension of the light-rail systems used in places like
Atlanta, except it extends the connective tissue from a mile or two
miles to seven or eight miles.
Lynn: It’s clear that an architect could intuit a new kind of typology
that connects cargo containers, train lines, air traffic, hotels,
convention centers, housing—any number of things. It’s so in the air air.
Every architect in the world is trying to put his or her finger on what
this typology is.
Jury You go to every city and you find, next to the port, next to the air-
Transcript
140
port, a big Ikea with a hotel, with a sports complex, with all these
things, and they’re all sitting in a kind of suburban stew, and L.A.
seems like the perfect place to put one of these hybrids downtown.
The thing I’ve been trying to grasp on every project is where does
somebody make the architectural proposal that says by putting all
these things together in a low-density urban core you get this new
kind of architectural type.
Lavin: I have a question about the growing nodes that combine all
of those multiple functions and programs. It seems to me that they
operate on the following logic: they captivate me because I’m cap-
tive at the airport. I’ve got a four-hour layover or a one-day layover.
They don’t seem to be about getting from here to there or about
travel or even about mobility. They are about stasis, and the question
for architecture is how can stasis be generative.
These emerging typologies are borne from pressures that are
already producing an audience, but this audience has not yet
been captured by architecture. The question is, how do you make
it into an audience for architecture. How do you turn waiters into
architectural consumers?
That’s why I’m thinking I’m not sure this is being articulated in the
right way, one that makes it interesting to architecture. Somehow,
those typologies have a lot to do with other pressures that are already
producing this audience that has never been captured. It’s sitting
there with nothing to do. You’re turning waiters into consumers,
S. Latty I. Berengut
which you may have some negative feeling about.
Kaliski: There is always going to be a captive audience at LAX or any
airport that will demand care and consideration.
There’s also another type of traveler who goes on a trip that doesn’t
necessarily need or want to spend time at the airport. If you think
about all the different functions that you do at the airport that could
be decentralized in some way—check-in, ticketing, luggage handling,
security, etc.—it’s possible that one could begin to shift these
functions off the airport property and distribute them throughout
the region—almost an emptying out of the airport.
I could also imagine that many people want to get the optimum
flight in terms of time, cost, etc., and that within a region with
many airports like Los Angeles, there might be some demand
for a type of centralized airport hub that isn’t necessarily at any
one airport but is an adjunct to all of the area’s airports. This might
also be a justification for this kind of program.
Lavin: To try to think about it in the terms that Greg was describing,
as a fundamentally new kind of typology that operates on a scale
that is unprecedented, that produces this hybrid, heterogeneous
condition which has to deal with the fluid movement of people
and goods and commerce and entertainment and so forth; that seems
to me already an enormously rich and provocative problem. Even
if LAX is not located in the ideal place, it’s already a really interesting
thing to try to solve.
Lynn: There is something that happens when you analyze things
on a typological level. HOK Sport was asked to do their first
convention center, along with a stadium. By looking at the typology
of the convention center and the stadium and combining it with the
problem that you can’t have natural grass in an air-conditioned
stadium, they came up with the idea of rolling the grass on a concrete
pad on oil rollers out into the landscape and using a subsurface
for the convention center, so that by building one building instead
of two and solving the problem of the grass, they could double the
use of space.
But that’s a thing you would never come up with through regional
planning or statistical analysis. You’d only do it by looking at the
typologies and saying we need to move goods in this end, we need
to move athletes in that end, we need to seat here, we need to
circulate there. Now there’s a hybrid type that could do both
convention center and football stadium with a new technological
initiative and a new real-estate and economic plan.
Joe Giovannini: I think Sylvia’s notion of stasis is an interesting one
that would enable you to move toward an architectural solution.
There seem to be a number of constituencies in the airport. You might
have the twelve-hour guest, but you might also have the convention-
eer who’s going to be here for five days. So you can capitalize on
these constituencies that want to stay in place—perhaps at the
airport because that is, after all, a port. It’s a place of arrival.
Concluding Remarks
Mayne: Last comments? Closing comments?
Lavin: I have to say I’ve been really surprised and impressed.
You began by describing how urban design as a profession was
disintegrating, but the students have actually done a great deal
of the labor associated with traditional urban-design professionals.
Quantities, sociologies, logistics, and statistics have been front
and center.
That’s a little bit worrisome in some ways. It’s enticing to produce
provocative statistics, but hard to translate them into something
that’s compelling. I would encourage this project to step back
from its techniques of implementation and establish a stronger
theoretical perspective on this new urban center that has been
produced collectively.
The discussions have been really specific and focused on particular
moments of, for example, the intersection between this street and
that street. And while those locations may well be where design
techniques are most effective, it is equally important to conceptual-
ize what motivates your collective vision of the new possibilities for
the city—what makes it different from other visions of metropolitan
culture that have existed before.
Keating: I would add that I think the projects break into a couple
of categories. There are those that I think will happen inevitably,
one way or another. The L.A. River somehow, some way, will be
different from what it is today, because I don’t believe the Corps
of Engineers can continue to build concrete walls. And eventually,
because of the centrality of downtown, we will have more and more
urbanization that focuses on potential residential spaces. So it’s
a matter for the architect to get in the way and try to make it bet-
ter, to take that inevitability and really transform it. I think that’s a
big deal. I think that’s absolutely true also of the high-speed rail.
There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s going to happen.
But it’s different for the Olympic proposal, and it’s different for this
V. Stump
one off the tracks. So I think there’s one other ingredient you could
add, and that is that the architect, often without power but with
vision, needs to latch onto those with power to control the inevitability
of what will happen. That’s the premise that’s also hidden in this,
and it’s really a good one.
But there is a slight difference between those that are going to
happen anyway in some form, for us to get in and channel it towards
a greater success, and those that are somewhat dreamy or vagary.
Kaliski: I was struck with the notion of bridging. How do you bridge
or create metaphors for information that end up being architec-
ture? And conversely, how do you take architectural forms
and understand how to endow them in some way within a dialogue
about information? I think that’s what all the projects struggled
with, and I think it’s what architects increasingly have to do.
In all of the projects, the information all of a sudden makes a leap
into form, and this is always a leap of faith. That leap of faith, I think,
is the architectural act. I think you’ve done a very unusual and good
urban architecture studio, and I’m impressed.
Weinstein: Political influences, community politics versus institu-
tionalized political policy issues, issues of implementation, are
necessarily connected to the economics that Sylvia mentioned,
and all of those things, when understood, if we can ever understand
them, will affect the way form is made. The way you implement
a project of this scale and understand plausible ways to implement
it will then feed back into certain formal decisions and strategies.
Mayne: It has also made me extremely aware of the degree of intu-
ition by which one works. I’ve always hovered between operations,
being somewhere in the middle. I don’t belong in either camp because
I can’t go even close to somebody like Frank O. Gehry in terms
of his intuition. I’m much closer to Peter Eisenman or somebody
in terms of an interest in operational strategies.
But finally, when you work, you realize you’re just who you are, and
I realize how intuitive I am and that that intuition starts failing you
on this scale because you no longer can bring a group of people
along collectively nor can you solve necessarily the types of problems
you have to solve at this scale which still seem operational, even
for large architecture.
Lynn: For me, with some of these projects I would have drifted
for a minute into big-scale topologies—like looking at a nineteenth-
century train station, a twentieth-century train station, and an
airport—and asked where is the typology going and what are its
V. Stump
 strategies. In this project, a kind of regional urban planning, which
is sensible, for me falls down when it loses its statistical information
and pattern. The minute there are no patterns, a plan has stopped.
It suddenly loses a certain kind of force it could have had if it had
a typology.
So for me, I wouldn’t actually say it’s intuition versus strategy
but mostly just where you discover a typological diagram and where
you can modify and reinvent a topology
topology. Because urbanistically
speaking, all these are questions of spatial adjacency, distance,
corridor, access—it’s all there. But then, when you get on a site,
they suddenly just turn into empty boxes.
base that exists. When this knowledge is brought to bear early
enough within the context of a project it will likely shift what the
ultimate form agenda is going to be.
I would further argue that sophisticated cities, corporations, publics,
and developers understand more and more clearly, earlier and earlier,
the need to formulate and explore this knowledge base at the very
beginning of the design process and want to include the contributions
of architects in this work.
Mayne: Okay. Thank you very much for your time.

Kaliski: Forget the form for a second, because you can always
do it in different ways. For me the point is that I don’t think twenty
years ago anyone would have understood how to successfully design
a large infrastructure in the middle of L.A. Yet, twenty years later—
whether you agree with the details of the design that’s there or
Jury not—the systems, checks, balances, and will exist to successfully
Transcript digest huge chunks the city. That absolutely did not exist twenty

142 years ago.

I think that dealing with the design of giant infrastructure is now

a type of architectural challenge. The type of conversation that
we’re having here about how you bridge these incredibly complex
systems of statistics and information is no longer about singular
engineering concepts or land development schemes but architectural
ideas, metaphors, and concepts.

Mayne: I spent the morning making a first presentation to a cli-

ent of a fairly complicated project, and I’m finding that in all of our
work, there has to be a consistent idea towards multivalence, that
no one today can produce work that deals with singular ideas. It has
to have overlapping, parallel possibilities that expand investment,
expand energy, etc.

The proof of one’s intelligence as an architect, one’s viability, has

to do with that. So if I want to construct this and make it real,
I have to do it within cultural terms, political terms, economic
terms, tectonic terms, grammatical terms…

All it’s doing is using an intelligence that I think we’re prepared

to bear as architects/planners/urban designers/thinkers, and
to bring that intelligence to uproot opportunity, to make use
of latent possibilities, and to broaden those possibilities within
humanistic terms.

Kaliski: I think that there is a type of new information-knowledge

S. Latty V. Stump
S. Latty
 Excerpts from the transcript
of the final UCLA
Architectural Jury
22–23 March 2001

23 March 2001
Jury Members
Frances Anderton, “Which Way, L.A.?,” KCRW
Dana Cuff, professor, UCLA
Phil Ganezer, Metropolitan Transit Authority,
Jury
Transcript Los Angeles
144 Tom Gilmore, real-estate developer
Joe Giovannini, architect and critic
Con Howe, director, Los Angeles City Planning
Department
Marta Male, visiting professor, UCLA
Nicolai Ouroussoff, critic
Dan Rosenfeld, real-estate developer
Robert Somol, professor, UCLA
Anthony Vidler, professor, UCLA
Richard Weinstein, professor, UCLA

Moderator
Thom Mayne, architect and professor, UCLA

V. Stump V. Stump
Red Line School District
PETER KIMMELMAN, JAE KWON, NISHANT LALL & ANDREW SCOTT
Thom Mayne: The system essentially overlays an existing infra-
structure with multiple layers of education programming and,
in doing so, more than doubles the capacity of the infrastructure.
The idea was that each school would be directly linked to the subway.
The rule is that there had to be an exit from the subway that led
directly to the school campus. There was no middle ground. And
what they’re showing you, as the second part of the study, are three
specific sites and how you would approach the idiosyncrasies and
the contingencies of these different sites.
Nicolai Ouroussoff: But is the basic idea that this is one school
in four pieces, or is it four different schools? How often does a stu-
dent travel, for example, between schools if they take English
classes at one and social studies at another every day?
Andrew Scott: There can essentially be three or four major move-
ments in a day. Students could specifically go to each core-subject
school, because there’s enough transition time in between each
class for them to go in and access the system. The largest distance
being to an athletic field, say, out in North Hollywood, at a maximum
travel time of twenty-nine minutes.
Ouroussoff: All these schools use the same athletic field in North
Hollywood?
Scott: Well, it’s not limited to North Hollywood. We have athletic
facilities at North Hollywood, Universal City, and MacArthur Park,
those being with the largest fields. Each school in itself will still
provide an enclosed athletic program, such as a gymnasium harbor-
ing volleyball and basketball and exercise or weight-lifting pro-
grams.
Joe Giovannini: At what age do the students start coming?
Scott: They can start between grades six and eight with more
of the special elective programs. But the core movement doesn’t
really begin until high school.
Dana Cuff: So you don’t imagine that you’re running special cars
on the Metro system as if they were school busses? The high-school
kids are going to get on the Metro with everybody else?
Scott: Right.
Robert Somol: You said that the sports are somewhat broken up over
the remaining sites, but are different subjects taught at each site?
Scott: The main difference between the schools would be the work-
room itself, where you get immersed in a subject-specific area.
All schools would generally provide all the subject matter, but we
would require that at least once a day, the students would go
V. Stump
to this workroom immersion, where they’d either access some
programs in the surrounding vicinity or they would get it within
the school itself.
Somol: Like magnet schools.
Richard Weinstein: What is the workroom? Does it belong to a place,
or is it anywhere on the net?
Ouroussoff: It’s a freestanding resource center. One of the most
important parts of it is that it attaches to existing institutions.
The workroom is the kind of magnet.
Weinstein: I think what we’re unclear on is what some of us per-
ceive as a conflict between taking classes in three or four geo-
graphically separated places. And then when we ask you that, you
say, “Well, no, everything is available in each of the locations.” And
then you say, “Well, we’re going to require them to take a certain
number of classes so that they have to ride on the subway.”
So the question is why is it on the subway? What advantage is it
to force upon a student the necessity of traveling in the subway?
What is the advantage that the subway offers that you wouldn’t
otherwise have? And if the only way you can take advantage of it
is by forcing the kids to take a subject they could take in their own
building ten minutes away—either I’m not understanding some-
thing, or there’s a problem with the idea.
Jae Kwon: Each of the high schools have the basic requirements
for a typical, generalized high school. But for advanced-placement
classes, for example, or a student who wants to specialize in athletics,
one can get on the Metro and take the class at wherever it is on
the Metro Line without spending two hours trying to get to the
North Hollywood site from the downtown area.
Cuff: I think this idea is working in many of the ways you’re saying,
but you could take it a step further programmatically. Imagine a
slightly different kind of education system where there’s no reason
a student would go to the social-studies center when they’re
thirteen and stay there until they’re eighteen. Why should they?
That only happens at magnet schools because there’s no fluidity
between institutions.
But in your Red Line School District, you could specialize one year
in social sciences and another year in sciences and each time be
immersed in a cultural or a civic institution that would give you
exposure to that form of education that you couldn’t have otherwise.
Then the possibilities of moving through this all the time seem
much more possible and the returns seem greater.
Mayne: The big idea, though, that hasn’t been clarified is the idea
of the relationship of the school district programmatically
to the infrastructure of the Red Line. It gives an elastic solution
S. Latty
 for the demographic shift in population, and the difference of one
high school to the other is now more or less negligible, given the time
on the subway. And it also immensely increases access to more
sophisticated programs at the exact time they’re diminishing
in an area where over twenty-five different languages are spoken
and that represents an immense heterogeneity. And the idea wasn’t
that you go from school to school. It was about augmentation.
And after that, we don’t have to solve it. We’re limited in solving.
We’re looking at broader issues, but the key is the elasticity that’s
given to the system.
Somol: I think it’s a smart idea, this form of “demagnetized school.”
Giovannini: I have much less resistance to the project if I think
of the age shifting from late high school to college, junior college.
Then I think of the Latin Quarter in Paris, where the schools are
really integrated into the city as opposed to a campus of a higher
education, on which most of our schools are predicated.
Jury
Transcript And then when I think of this as an education infrastructure where
146
adults are sort of scooting around between classes and they come
and go as they wanted, it makes more sense to me. Then I think
you needn’t confine this to an educational infrastructure. It can
become a sports infrastructure and ultimately a civic infrastructure
that you’re essentially dispersing to stretch along the Red Line,
and it shouldn’t only be that but wherever the Red Line is going
to be going.
And then it’s a way of densifying and urbanizing the urban fabric
instead of the suburban fabric. I think the brilliance of your idea
is using the infrastructure as a magnet for civic programs,
but it shouldn’t only be an educational program. It should serve
diversified, educational, civic things, or collective entities that
require transportation and aggregates of people.
Urban Housing
PAUL ANDERSEN & MAIA JOHNSON
Mayne: The whole basis of this is to absolutely challenge singular-
ity The first thing they do is they tell you that the latent ability of
ity.
unused space in downtown is the size of the city of Hermosa Beach,
and it has to do with the critical mass of 20,000, and the discussion
starts “What happens when you can energize a city, a city within a
city, Hermosa, with 20,000 people?” What are the consequences of
that? It has to do with some sort of a connecting fabric, and what
does the connecting fabric have to do with human use, which has
to do with some sort of activity to the exterior.
Ouroussoff: But I think the point is that there is a quality of the roof-
S. Latty
scape, and it’s kind of unique. I think the problem is you went a few
steps too far, and so you get a basically uniform space and inevita-
bly it becomes kind of archaic.
Tony Vidler: I also think there has to be much more attention to the
connectivity. The street is an incredibly important zone, and if all
the attention, where you want to get to, is always to the top, I think
the problem is how you get between the two and what happens
between the two.
Mayne: I would have gone much further. Not as a solution. I do that
as a part of the process, because I think one has to push to the
extremes and then one works back. To find the extreme, it defines
an issue that allows you to talk about it in a certain way.
Tom Gilmore: But I think there’s something important about not
going much further—at a certain point in this, the plan becomes a
lot less about the city and a lot more about an alternative to the
city, and having four schemes is starting to illustrate that. Scheme
four is showing that, at a certain point, we are leaving the city
behind and saying, all right, screw the city, what are we going to do
up here now that we’ve pretty much abandoned the fact that this
city works on ground level?
Somol: I think you’ve got to turn away from the pragmatics
for a second. Let’s table pragmatics and talk about polemics, and you
need to turn up the polemics. I don’t know whether that means going
to three or four other schemes, but you need to say that your project
is a challenge to the premise of this competition, which says that
the downtown is the place to fix.
In other words, your project uses downtown as a way to undermine
the ideology of saying that downtown is where the vision needs
to be, and that’s what I like about it. Also, it says the problem
with L.A. isn’t that it’s not urban enough, but that it’s not suburban
enough. In other words, it takes something like L.A. and says
some form of sprawl constitutes its genetic code, and to hell with
Manhattan. We’re not a wannabe Manhattan. L.A. ideology is
completely different, and to extend it, you need to do this. I think
those are the two things.
Then I would get away from preservationism, because in any case,
it’s going to be a Jon Jerde-Fremont street, and maybe that’s okay,
but don’t pretend that it’s historic preservation. It’s going to be
a themed façade street under lights, and that could be okay. It could
be a great experience. But it’s not this goody-two-shoes project.
You need to make it much more polemical or political about the
radical suburb.
Gilmore: I actually buy in to what Bob’s saying. I prefer that more
radical theory and that concept to the middle road. I think the middle
road is truly the most unacceptable road in all of this, and you are
either going to do something that is inherently urban and inherently
urbane, or you are going to do something that is entirely anti-urban
within an urban context. I can live with those two ends. It’s the middle
part I hate the most.
What I do love about this—and I hate to keep making this point—
is the fact that you are treating the urbanism of downtown with
a certain respect by saying that there has to be a one and a four
and everything in between, and maybe something beyond four,
to be able to have this discussion rationally without downtown simply
being another pallet to overlay some idea on.
If downtown is simply another pallet and it is neither better nor
worse than any other pallet, then you’ve fundamentally missed the
idea of what downtown and urbanism is. This gets you a little bit of
all of it. I think that your effort towards it is a very rational effort
that brings you an extremely, in my opinion, irrational end, but
that’s what I love about it. You get to a point where it’s absurd to
me, but it’s a rational path to that absurdity, and I like it.
Cuff: To make that polemic clear, though, we should take the
underlying ideas of suburbs more seriously, in the way Bob’s talk-
ing about. Moreover, you could avoid this whole question of “How
dark is it—is it like Grand Avenue?” by showing that it’s actually
Universal City Walk under there or something else that would be
another urban possibility.
Ouroussoff: I think that’s where the polemical argument comes in.
You have to decide what you want it to be. Maybe you want it to be
Blade Runner. I still think that the idea of accessibility is kind of key
in this. As soon as you make this kind of tapestry and lay it over
downtown and say this is accessible to the people who live in these
buildings, I think that’s maybe a weird way to go and also isn’t par-
ticularly original.
On a certain level, the kind of roofscape that’s always been acces-
sible to people who live in high rises and places like that is the same
here. I think it might be more interesting if you’re trying to set up
an argument that says maybe we give it all over to the public, that
the roofs are no longer part of the real estate. They’re public space.
We’re giving it to the public because that’s the most beautiful
suburban urban space downtown, and not only that, we’re going to
start to link it together.
Vidler: I think the question is how you design the link. It’s actually
very, very important. It seems to me it would have equal, if not more,
interesting validity if you didn’t upset the old housing in the modern
metropolis, which is that high, and if you did not accept the datum,
that that was just a middle ground, and then there were other
opportunities which allowed this to be a visual landscape for those
above ground, so that you would pop up above this thing.
Cuff: Now, the real estate around this project would rise so high in
value that you would end up with towers all around the residen-
tial units and their open spaces, as happens around Central Park.
That’s an interesting set of narratives to go through. For instance,
would you reproduce this scheme elsewhere? If so, then Nicolai’s
question about access becomes critical. It could easily become
a totally privatized park because it would be so attractive in the
downtown area that they would feel the need to restrict access.
Gilmore: You’re at the end of this sort of odd second level of
a Corbusian urbanism where the roof level becomes the flat space
between large towers now growing on the four corners of it.
Then it starts to get really odd, because now you’ve got the worst
of urbanism and the worst of suburbanism all wrapped up into one.
So this could actually be a formula for disaster if you really work it.
Mayne: That’s an excellent way to move on.
UniverCity
MARTIN SUMMERS
Ouroussoff: Since the site is critical to this, because it’s a dense
program, why did you pick that site and what are you trying to stitch
together in terms of what’s around it, as opposed to having put
the UniverCity in East L.A.?
Summers: What I’m trying to do is to bring the communities that
are around downtown into downtown. What is interesting about
all these communities that exist around here is that though this
is an extremely diverse area, it’s in fact one of the least diverse
areas in the city because communities are isolated.
Vidler: What gave you the sense that a university, as a stitch, will
cause East L.A. to want to walk to West L.A. through a university?
It’s usually conceived of as a rather exclusive domain.
Summers: The idea is to layer it so that UniverCity becomes a place
for research around these ideas of community. But then on top
of that, to have another system that’s generated out of that, one
that is more related to continuing education that would provide
opportunities for people to come back and get their high-school
education and, if they decide to continue on, to get an education
that would allow them to either advance in their existing jobs
or switch careers….
 Giovannini: There’s a vector that’s happening here in terms of your
situating it looking east. Everything on the Gold Coast is toward
the Harbor Freeway and toward the west. There’s a huge magnetism
toward the Westside, and this is a gesture to the Eastside that I think
is very welcomed.
I do think that what all of L.A. has in common is downtown,
because there’s the old surface-road network that actually con-
verges there. There’s the bus network as well. Downtown has much
more in common to many communities than most people on the
Westside think. This orientation, I think, is appropriate because you
don’t want to be on the other side of the river because it becomes
ghetto-ized. It starts bringing in the Eastside.
Con Howe: Another interesting thing is that this is actually
a community that is kind of isolated because of the highway here.
This is Mariachi Plaza, right?
Summers: Yeah. There’s a beautiful little area right through here
Jury that’s alive.
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148
Howe: At least it’s trying to link it.
Ouroussoff: Yeah. It’s really a shame, because it’s got kind of a
megastructure scale to it, but basically, this project relates so
completely to its immediate context, and it really would be great
to be able to see where [The Geffen Contemporary] is. If there’s
a public-housing project going up there already, that seems pretty
key.
What you’ve done in terms of the stitching is you’ve packed it with
a program that’s meant to make that happen. So you’ve got every
kind of social condenser you could possible imagine. You’ve got
a park, you’ve got community projects, you’ve got public housing—
everything that’s supposed to bring these people together.
Giovannini: It seems that the locus of invention for downtown
is on the east side of downtown, and this project brings to mind
the cornfields that are also a comparable area. The river has so
divided the city that the idea for Westsiders to go to East L.A.
is so unthinkable. I like these gestures to the Eastside because
it takes the ghetto out of the Eastside in a very positive gesture
by relating MOCA and Little Tokyo and the art district to East L.A.
There’s a blur starting, which I think is really laudable.
Vidler: It’s the only one that escapes the barrier of the freeways.
It seems to me that one of the problems that Thom mentioned
in the very beginning is that we’re stuck with downtown. It would
be nice if the studio just crept a little bit outside those freeways
in order to “define” downtown a little bit differently from the maps
that define it now.
Because only the big, radical gesture that cuts through under,
through and above, through and out of that little loop is going to
give you a downtown L.A. That’s what’s so exciting about the river,
which in your scheme potentially does not become a cut. But as
Joseph talks about it, it goes the other way too….
Weinstein: So one could imagine that under a different governor,
like Pat Brown, who initially built up this university, it’s conceivable
that somebody could convince him that the thing to do is to put
one of the new campuses right where you put it. So that meets
a plausibility test.
Also, if you wanted to look at two things that would make
the downtown work financially and economically, I would say it
would be the river and this scheme. Because as I’ve said a thou-
sand times in this room, the average American has two careers and
six jobs. So it means that we’re becoming a knowledge-based soci-
ety where the problem of the polarity of income levels can only be
addressed with “up-skilling” those who come in uneducated so that
they can have a chance at a decent job.
But on the upper end, it also means that people keep going back
to school—doctors, architects, lawyers. In the case of some of
those professions, they’re required to take an exam ten years after
they took their last exam. So I think if I were one of the smart
people downtown, I would support these two projects because they
both involve the investment of public money, not private money,
and what that does is make all the private land valuable.
You plunk a university down next to me, it’s a $4 billion proposition,
and the river is a $10 billion proposition, and in the real-estate
business, people are always hoping that someone’s going to invest
in the plot next to theirs.
Ourossoff: I would say that’s the strongest aspect of the project—
the care you took in siting it. When you actually look at the park’s
relationship to Boyle Heights and then the commercial buildings,
and then all of a sudden there’s a jump—and you even have a line
there where it changes from black to white—and then you’ve got
the university buildings and the housing on that side, you can see it
actually not accomplishing what it’s meant to accomplish, which is
bridging that gap—that actually, the parks and the commercial part
become part of this world, and the UniverCity stays part of that
world, and the connection between the two, because of the way
you distributed the program, is actually very tenuous.
Weinstein: How about the fact that there are no buildings in Boyle
Heights? Wouldn’t I, as someone living in Boyle Heights, find that
problematic? You would be forced by political reality to put some
of the good stuff on the other side of the river, but more important-
ly, it would seem to me that the idealism behind the project would
ly
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require you to think about what you could do for Boyle Heights
as part of this.
Giovannini: This is a paternalistic siting, actually.
Weinstein: So that’s a problem.
Summers: I fought with that issue for a long time because I was
trying to scale the project back at a certain point while still trying
to extend it.
Ouroussoff: Then the third issue is the issue of scale, which you
started to bring up, in terms of big buildings in Boyle Heights.
But I think that is powerful, in the sense that the way downtown
is laid out now you have the much looser, more small-scale fabric
as you go further and further east. Then you’ve got Grand Avenue
with the monumental buildings at the top of the hill. To suddenly
say, “I’m going to build on that kind of scale”—and, obviously, with
that kind of investment and a different kind of program in another
part of the city—is pretty straightforward and very idealistic.
Vidler: You don’t have to worry about that mountainous idealistic
thing, because if you see the way the financing of universities
works now, it doesn’t work like it used to in terms of huge injec-
tions of public funds. It’s policy to shift the number of students in a
number of institutions to a particular site.
But the actual building of the university doesn’t happen unless
it’s the Ronald Reagan Hospital or it’s the Eli Broad Art Center.
This university gets, what, twenty-one percent of its funding from
the state? It’s hugely private. Both Berkeley and UCLA could walk
away and be private tomorrow and not really suffer economically.
So in terms of what you’re talking about, this kind of thing is no more
idealistic than any development plan put forward in order to inspire.
It’s the population that the developers are looking at—the shift
and injection of a lot of different and concentrated users, consumers,
and classes. That’s what’s happening.
Concluding Remarks
Weinstein: If you were looking for “grand
grand projets,”
projets you’ve got two
here, I think, and possibly three by the freeway.
Somol: “Grand
Grand projet”
projet in the Burnham model, as you identified,
right? The late nineteenth-century City Beautiful model of parks,
civic centers? I think that there may be projets here, but there are
no projects. And what I’m looking for today is a project. In other
words, let’s put aside the Mr. Fix-it problem of here’s a problem,
and it needs to be solved.
Thinking more broadly and ambitiously seems to me to be what
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speculative ideas, competitions, exhibitions, and vision plans should
bring up. How are these proposals different or similar to other sorts
of interventions around the city? What’s specific about L.A., what
can you say very polemically? What’s at stake for the discipline?
Vidler: It’s what would urbanism be if it were today? And if it’s not
Townscape, if it’s not Burnham, if it’s not Radiant City, if it’s not
projects, and if it’s not free-for-all development, where is urbanism?
Not urban planning so much, but urbanism, thinking about the city
and how do you think about it?
Mayne: From the beginning—and I don’t think I mentioned this
in the introduction—I was interested in trying to find a seam
between a spatial, architectonic, more intuitive and qualitative
approach to the architect and a more analytical, quantitative
approach to the planner. And I was looking for this middle ground.
On one hand, I’m working with spatial ideas. For instance, in the
housing proposal, I would have taken that much further into an
architectural solution because I was not interested in it just as
an idea but its implication as a large-scale, spatial, organizational
mechanism of developing a new typology for the city. I was interest-
ed in weighing the analytical, the social, the political criterion with
its architectural potentiality.
Ouroussoff: But part of it, I think, is actually at the other end too,
which is the analytical side, where the analysis is so broad instead
of having a clear point of view and then work from there. For example,
to listen to ten, fifteen minutes of analysis on the immigrant popu-
lation in the city and how it’s growing and all of that, you completely
in a way miss the point, which is that, if you paid attention to the
census that just came out, the idea that L.A. and New York
are the centers where immigrant populations are going is totally
wrong. That’s a very dated idea.
Mayne: But the analysis was required to ground and locate the
problem, because no one was allowed to proceed. There was
a litmus test of being able to articulate the value within your work
in political, economic, urban terms before you could proceed,
and they had to fight for something. If they had nothing to fight for,
they couldn’t be pursued. And it required information, and it required
an understanding of that data, and it required it on somewhat
multiple levels in the case of, say, the school.
Somol: I think you need the research and that empirical side.
I would certainly endorse the methodology. I just think that then
if the statistics are leading to “A,” your proposition almost demands
you to say the conclusion is “B.”
Weinstein: Why is that?
Somol: Because I think the job of design is not to simply reproduce
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 the world and that’s one way you can make it propositional. To say,
for example, “I was looking for the most specific thing in L.A. and
what I discovered is that it its most generic aspect, its ability to be
a cinematic backdrop for anywhere.” Or, “I was looking for the most
metropolitan thing, and I realized that actually L.A. is not suburban
enough.” In other words, that’s what makes it propositional at the
level of urbanism for me. That would be my technique.
Ouroussoff: But that’s just an easy trick, though, in terms of setting
up an argument.
Somol: But what we do is to come up with tricks. In an age of endless
information we need techniques to channel and make that significant,
to produce an argument, an identity, a vision—whatever—within
and against the noise.
Weinstein: A woman is a man and a man is a woman and hate is love
and love is hate.
Jury Ouroussoff: But it immediately implies a certain kind of project,
Transcript a certain kind of outcome in a way.
150
Weinstein: A certain test.
VIdler: It’s testing ideas against other ideas, and they’re both—
Bob and Thom are quite close in the sense that they want to push
things to an extreme as a kind of testing of where they get to
and what happens to them.
Weinstein: But the only way to push to an extreme is not to do
the opposite. That’s only one way of pushing to the extreme.
Somol: It’s not necessarily the opposite of A. I just think it’s other
than A.
Mayne: But I don’t even see it in those terms. I don’t see left/right
radical/conservative in operational terms today. That’s 1920s,
1930s maybe. I see it much more objectively in that you’re looking
for solutions. And I agree with you totally that your methodologi-
cal operation is useful precisely because you don’t have an a priori
solution, and that the solution emerges out of both a strategy and
an understanding of the multiple problems that are in front of you.
And the problems seem to be rich enough and complex enough
that certainly one could anticipate solutions that one has never
seen before if that’s interesting to you. I particularly don’t care
if it’s historic or not. Whether it looks like something or it’s been
done before in some other way or it hasn’t to me is irrelevant.
Maybe sometimes, maybe sometimes not. I think there are many
ideas in architecture that are transcendental and will keep reappear-
ing, and I could frankly care less. I’m interested in the specificity
of the problem as it’s been stated and a clarity to that problem
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and a general coherency and approach that leads to something that
would be of your ilk. Just personally I’m interested in things I haven’t
seen before, of course.
Somol: How do you overcome the dichotomy of cold planning and
hot design and not simply reproduce cold planning and hot design?
That means the research needs to be more designed and the design
needs to be cooler and more bureaucratic in a certain way.-You
can’t simply do both things serially, because that keeps both intact,
but you have to use each as a way to transform the other.
Mayne: You intuit the research and you rationalize…
Ouroussoff: But my point is not to abandon the research.
The research has to be more specific, focused on something.
Mayne: This is interpretive because the whole notion is your ability
to expand upon data, because data is nothing. It’s your ability
to somehow make leaps, linkages, etc., that’s valuable.
Weinstein: I would agree with the last thing that Bob said, and
the conclusion I would draw from that is that an enterprise like this
needs other kinds of people involved so that the formal vision
affects the data collection.
Somol: You mean in the beginning?
Weinstein: You have an impulse to do something, and then you talk
to the data cruncher, and you say, “Look, the data of the census
suggests that the flow of immigration is not going to New York
and L.A.,” which I, by the way, doubt very much. But let’s just say
that. And what could justify trying to bring these communities
together? And there’s another way to cut the data that probably
would suggest rationalizations, and those rationalizations might kick
the hot intuitive part of the brain to work.
Vidler: But it’s the other way around too, Richard. The data
is sometimes formal. When you mentioned Reyner Banham—what
Reyner Banham did with the Four Ecologies book in 1970 is come
to L.A. as a traditional architectural historian. That’s basically what
he was. Trained by [Nikolaus] Pevsner, “Buildings of England,”
and stuff like that. And he saw everybody going out from downtown,
looked at the downtown buildings, the historic center of L.A.,
and then walked a little bit or drove a little bit out and found hor-
rible suburbia.
And he looked, but it wasn’t that, right? The formal structure of L.A.
had nothing to do with downtown. So it’s polemically reduced to a
“note”, right? But that reconceptualized L.A. for generations, for all
of us actually, as an ecological network of basins and developments
and over-developments and as a spread, right? And that’s a differ-
ent kind of city.
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Now, the question here, when you now focus back on downtown—
and it’s very interesting that this group was criticized because it
was bringing suburbia back into downtown, so to speak, or turning
downtown into suburbia. But according to the Banham analysis,
that’s the only thing left to do.

So at least that’s the kind of thing, as a formal analysis, that can

reconceptualize the data in order to make the data sharper in order
to say, in fact, whether that is the only thing to do. Is there some-
thing that is a middle ground between suburbia and not suburbia?
What do you do with these old buildings that are, in fact, becoming
backdrops for Blade Runner
Runner, and so on and so forth? What do you
do with the city at night? And these kinds of questions. Is that a
form of suburbia? This is the data, right, that is both formal and sta-
tistical. And I think that’s very important.

Weinstein: And an instance of that would be the fact that Banham

regarded the freeway isolating a community into a ghetto as a plus
because it permitted ethnic subcultures to concentrate and be what
they are. He actually liked that fact.

Vidler: But he also said it’s also a way for ethnic cultures to get out
of the ghetto and go to work because, in fact, it’s a way out.

Weinstein: But as a critical position, he did not want to homog-

enize and have French-Chinese food and Korean-Italian cuisine. He
was clearly against that, and he said the freeways are protecting…

I’m just saying that that was one of Banham’s observations about
the freeway. Instead of saying the freeway is terrible, he looked
at the freeway and said it’s preserving cultural identity, which is
a value that I have.

Somol: So there, Jane Jacobs.

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Weinstein: No. That’s a B response to an A inquiry, right?

Ouroussoff: Jane Jacobs actually says the same thing—you’re

wrong on that—in Boston, the freeway basically is what preserved
the north end.

Somol: She didn’t seem to like it in New York.

Ouroussoff: No. But the argument you made is closely tied to her
other point.

Somol: It’s important for the journalist to call the academic wrong
now and then, and vice versa.

Mayne: I thank you all for your time.

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