Is it to be business as usual on Grand Avenue? What has been announced so far is only a business plan in three dimensions. Absent is the urban design and architectural substance without which it is impossible to assess the merits of what is to be built or its larger significance for the future of the downtown.
All is obscured in an embarrassing mist of platitudes and empty assurances.
The same was the case in the late 1980s, when a major competition for the development of Grand Avenue was decided on the basis of a real estate deal alone. Maguire/Thomas, whose visionary design proposal was the loser, went on to build the tallest structure in L.A. and endow the Central Library Gardens, among other accomplishments.
We were left with California Plaza and its wretched sunken plaza, an architectural mediocrity and an urban wound on Grand Avenue that has never healed.
It is not a mistake to establish the financial credentials of a developer in order to increase the chances that a proposal will be built. But those acting for the public must also have an equally reasonable expectation that our interest will be served by what is built.
Architects and urban designers help us visualize and understand the implications that real estate deals have for civic life. It is impossible to assess these implications without the kinds of information that so far is lacking about the Grand Avenue project. This introduces the ominous possibility that when a proposal emerges it will already be constrained by an agreement between the Joint Powers Authority and the developer without more desirable alternatives having ever been considered.
This is a second mistake because it precludes upside protection the development of ideas outside the box, which have transformative power over the project’s direction. These are precisely the kind of ideas that we rely on great architects to provide. And yet so far, we are asked instead to accept the assurances of politicians, developers and businessmen-turned-philanthropists (however well-intentioned) that everything will be fine. But they can’t provide or judge the essential creative component.
The transformative power of design is evident in Disney Hall. Subscriptions to the L.A. Philharmonic are said to be up by 20 percent, helping increase the value of real estate on neighboring properties that make the future development of Grand Avenue possible.
This is not to denigrate the many formidable abilities that a major developer brings to the table. But without the equally important abilities that the architects and urban designers bring, we are in danger of making the same mistakes on Grand Avenue as we did before.
To bring appropriate urban life to downtown L.A. is problematic. Only from a productive interaction between the greatest talent available and the strongest and most innovative development team can we make something grand out of such a confused beginning.
*Richard Weinstein is the former dean of the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA and is acting chair of Architecture and Urban Design.
