Architecture Under Glass

Los Angeles, once vigorously promoted as the city of the future, has suddenly discovered it has a past. And that realization arrives none too soon for those who are bent on preserving the city’s architectural legacy. Not long ago, the entire city seemed to tremble in fear of the developer’s wrecking ball. Today, cultural landmarks as disparate as the Italianate St. Vibiana’s Cathedral and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Barnsdall House are being slowly restored.

Much of that shift has been due to the diligence of the Los Angeles Conservancy, whose efforts to document and protect threatened landmarks in the face of one of the country’s weakest preservation laws have led to a deepening public awareness of the city’s architectural heritage. It is now an open secret that Los Angeles is a city scattered with architectural gems, including one of the world’s great legacies of Modernist residential architecture.

But that newfound respect for architectural history also signifies a deep shift in the city’s identity. One of the features that has long made Los Angeles a remarkable forum for architecture is its indifference to tradition. While the merits of preserving the city’s growing cultural heritage are beyond dispute, the question is, when does respect for the past slide into lifeless nostalgia? And can a city newly focused on the past remain an experimental workshop for the future?

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The birth of the American preservation movement begins with one of the great architectural crimes of the century: the destruction, in 1963, of New York’s Pennsylvania Station, McKim Mead & White’s Beaux Arts temple to mass transportation. On the heels of that disaster, New York’s cultural and social elite rallied to the defense of another threatened landmark, Grand Central Terminal, which developers hoped to bury under a high-rise tower.

In 1978, the battle reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in a landmark decision upheld a city’s right to protect its legacy against the bottom-line interests of property owners. The decision acknowledged that a city’s architectural monuments were a critical component of its cultural fabric, something that could never be recovered once lost.

By then, Los Angeles, a city built on the relentless drive of developers, had already lost many of its architectural treasures. Among the most shameful chapters in L.A.’s legacy of self-destruction: the 1970 bulldozing of Irving Gill’s 1916 Dodge House, one of the great, early masterpieces of Modernist design, and the 1971 demolition of Richard Neutra’s 1935 Sternberg Residence, built for director Josef von Sternberg.

But it was the battle over the fate of Bertram G. Goodhue’s downtown Los Angeles Public Library--saved from the wrecking ball in 1978, the same year as the Grand Central Terminal Supreme Court decision--that led to the founding of the Los Angeles Conservancy. Since then, the conservancy has proven a critical force in preserving the city’s physical history. True, there were more tragedies to come. Cotler’s Department Store, one of Wilshire Boulevard’s most recognized landmarks, was torn down in 1980. The 1906 Philharmonic Auditorium that once overlooked Pershing Square is now gone, demolished in 1985. But the victories are impressive: the Bradbury Building, Broadway’s movie palaces, the Ambassador Hotel, St. Vibiana’s--all would likely be gone if it were not for the watchful eye of the conservancy.

That fact is all the more remarkable when you consider the relative impotence of the city’s preservation laws. Unlike New York, whose powerful Landmarks Commission can protect a historical building indefinitely unless owners can show proof of economic hardship (rarely the case), Los Angeles’ landmark legislation can only prevent a property owner from tearing down a structure for one year. After that, the owner is free to do what he or she wants. (The conservancy has had to rely on the state’s Environmental Quality Act, which can prevent demolition of a historic property for up to three years if it is deemed an important cultural component of the urban environment.)

Equally absurd, the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission, which makes decisions on landmark status, does not include a practicing architect or anyone with serious training in the city’s architectural history. Without such expertise on the commission, the city is ineligible for federal preservation grants.

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Now that L.A. has found the will to begin preserving its physical legacy, however, it must confront a more complex set of issues: How exactly should these structures be restored? What to do with a building whose cultural significance outweighs its architectural merits, such as St. Vibiana’s or the Ambassador?

The answer lies in the ability to distinguish between a structure’s architectural and historical value. A case in point is a project that will transform the Exposition Park Armory into a shared education facility for the adjacent California Science Center and a future Science Center school. A simple brick shed with a long central skylight, the structure has a quaint nobility, but little true architectural significance. The project’s architect, Thom Mayne, had hoped to weave a new structure through the old one. Instead, the Office of State Historic Preservation, which oversees the state-owned property, essentially has forced the architect to restore the armory to its original state, limiting his penchant for experimentation to the design of the future school building.

A more enlightened view of history is reflected in the rehabilitation of Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater by the architectural firm Hodgetts + Fung. There, the scars from earlier renovations were preserved, and the cinema’s new, mechanical frame was inserted into the structure’s shell, suggesting a layering of historical memories rather than a cautious retreat to the past. A similar strategy is being considered for St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, although developer Tom Gilmore has yet to hire an architect for the project.

Architects often cite the work of the late Italian architect Carl Scarpa as a model of historical reinterpretation. In his 1973 design for the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy, for instance, the delicate connections between Scarpa’s concrete and wood forms and the historical fabric of the original building were meant to play up the fragmentary nature of history, its shifts and jolts. By comparison, many re-creations of the past seem more like fake fantasies of another age than authentic treasures.

A bigger threat to Los Angeles’ future, however, is the creeping desire to re-create a past that has little to do with the eclectic spirit that has been a key to the city’s architectural achievements. The best example of this is the militancy of Santa Monica’s Architectural Review Board. Santa Monica’s design guidelines go far beyond the preservation of historic buildings. They seek to establish a historical context for new construction. To that end, the city now forces architects to conform to one of three styles: Craftsman Bungalow, Mediterranean or International Style.

In one recent case, the board forced a homeowner to conform to its interpretation of what an International Style house should look like, only to change its mind and strike the design down later because it didn’t fit into its Craftsman Bungalow context.

Around the same time, it rejected a proposed renovation design for a former Home Savings Bank on Wilshire Boulevard, because it significantly altered the exterior of the building. The building, a bulky 1970s-era eyesore framing a drab plaza, has a sort of gruesome nostalgic charm, but it cannot be called a work of meaningful architecture. What the board seems to be trying to enforce, in fact, is not higher architectural standards but arbitrary defense of the past at all costs.

That level of meddling not only goes against the grain of Los Angeles’ ethos of the new, it kills the creative spirit in its tracks. The city’s Modernist legacy was founded on an almost unbounded ability to test the limits of that spirit. Wright, Neutra, Gill, Rudolf Schindler, Gregory Ain, the Greene brothers--these architects were encouraged to take risks by a climate that celebrated individual expression, a landscape that seemed open to anything. It is fair to say that the house Frank Gehry designed for himself in Santa Monica in 1979--a defining moment in late-20th century architecture--could never be built there today. The city’s design regulations, in fact, outlaw the use of chain link and corrugated metal, two materials Gehry popularized in the design of his house.

In the end, a city should be a repository of memory but not a graveyard for buildings. As Los Angeles grapples with what to preserve and how to preserve it, it must also preserve the openness of spirit that created the great architectural experiment that runs from Gill to Gehry. The two goals are not incompatible. They only require a subtler understanding of history’s role in the collective memory of a city.