When worlds collide in today's Los Angeles
By Robert Ivy, FAIA
The Hollywood lens continues to shape our contemporary viewpoint, saturating today’s people, places, and buildings with Los Angeles chroma. For architectural record, the cinematic city demands not one story, but an entire issue. The critical metaphor for the contemporary architectural scene rests in a recent Academy Award winner.
In the film Crash, which the critic David Denby called “brazenly alive,” multiple plots and people interweave in a sort of homage to degrees of separation. The movie follows the harrowing events of a single warm California day from multiple perspectives, in which characters, their lives and automobiles, crisscross through traffic, careening off each other like bumper cars. With a kind of wide-eyed wonder, the film chronicles the difficult reality of the kaleidoscopic, polycentric city nonpareil that is Los Angeles.
The city’s architecture reflects an equally refracted point of view: how else to pin down a place so intensely spread across mountain and valley, so variable, so spiced and insistent? As in Crash, the cast of characters in L.A.’s architectural drama defies easy typecasting. Two of its most prominent senior representatives, both revered Angelinos, stand out for their strong contributions to American architecture, maneuvering California’s architectural freeways, while influencing younger designers who have filled the hills and valleys with their work. While one may be better known internationally, both have changed L.A. Their paths may have been individual; their routes, complementary.
The stellar work of Frank O. Gehry, FAIA, for instance, has evolved from a professional oeuvre characterized by projects for real-world, commercial clients and developers through his well-documented chain-link era to the more expressionistic work that we recognize today. Though he has taught at Harvard and Yale, and his own studio has served as a kind of teaching laboratory for young architects, the world knows the architect by his signature buildings.
While it might be convenient to pigeonhole Gehry today as the by-product of the L.A. art scene who went on to create sculptural structures, contrary to preconceptions, Gehry studied urban planning at Harvard and is currently forging a role as an urbanist, with plans afoot for Grand Avenue in Los Angeles and for downtown Brooklyn. Gehry, first associated with flat Venice, California, is now traveling internationally: The practicing teacher has gone from the individual building to the street.
Ray Kappe, FAIA, a founder of two schools of architecture (first chairman of architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and SCI-Arc, in Los Angeles, where he served as director until 1987), has helped shape the careers of generations of younger architects from the university to the construction site. Kappe, who has always
professed a love of real building and has constructed many of his own projects, has shown the idealistic young that theoretical ideas find true expression in building materials and in details. Grounded in the work of architects like Greene and Greene, Wright, Irving Gill, Neutra, and the California school of later architects like Rafael Soriano and Harwell Hamilton Harris; informed by ideals that we now label as “sustainable”; reverent of tectonics and the telling detail, Kappe has affected the work of a galaxy of starry architects. His home, an iconic L.A. residence, embodies the best of his ideas, with its interlocked spaces articulated through post-and-beam construction. Nature shows through in all his construction: Kappe, up on the mountains and hillsides—professor, builder.
Though Gehry and Kappe, both teachers in their own way, may not literally have crashed their automobiles, they’ve spent professional lives interlacing their work, their students, and their structures throughout their adopted hometown, in high and low land. It’s a big place now, populated by newer generations who know each other, work out their own ideas, yet continually collide, with heat and light, dynamism and energy as the by-products. The newer cast has had strong leading architects as role models.
Crash. The current metaphor for L.A. |
Fashion Institute of Design by Clive Wilkinson
