Follow LA Observed on Twitter here
Architect Frank Gehry doesn't update his perspective on Los Angeles very often, it sounds like. In an interview with Anne Taylor Fleming in Los Angeles magazine, the 84-year-old architect talks down the recent reawakening of downtown as a city center. He's not completely uninvolved with efforts to make downtown the center of something again — he has been involved with the Grand Avenue Project, for instance — but he predicts that critical mass may not be reached for 30-40 years, if then. One reason, he tells Fleming, is that to him, Wilshire Boulevard remains the true heart of Los Angeles.
I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns. If you drive from Figueroa to the ocean on Wilshire, and you go up and down a few blocks along the way and then go back to Wilshire, you will see that it’s a very ethnically and economically diverse population and that people relate to the iconicity of Wilshire. They say, ‘Oh, I live two blocks south of Wilshire; I live on the Wilshire Corridor.’ There are blacks and Mexicans and Koreans and Poles and Irish and Jews. Everyone is strung along there. I myself live two blocks north of Wilshire in Santa Monica.
Blog pickups of Gehry's remarks — such as this dismayed post at Curbed LA today — focus on his remarks that Los Angeles has missed too many opportunities to move its recent architectural icons out of Downtown into districts along Wilshire. Gehry says that the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels should be located by MacArthur Park, and MOCA should be on Wilshire across from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to form a true museum district. His signature Walt Disney Hall should have been built in Westwood Village, Gehry says.
Writes Adrian Glick Kudler at Curbed: "He's right that the city doesn't value iconic architecture the way a world city should (see: the giant but pretty bleh towers set to dominate Hollywood), but his other complaints are, at the very least, terrifically outdated."
Maybe so, but for certain it's consistent. Gehry has been pitching more or less this same take since at least 2003. In an interview that year with Dave Gardetta in Los Angeles magazine, Gehry said that Disney Hall should be next to the Wadsworth Theater on the VA campus in West LA (probably not coincidnetally, ten minutes or so from Gehry's house.) Here's what he said then:
Gehry has always had a prickly relationship with downtown's elite. For years no major corporation offered him a commission of any size, and the architect thinks the program to redevelop the city's core is wrongheaded—a sputtering attempt to rebuild Rome that has left L.A. with "a mediocre Dallas." He believes the city's power brokers missed out when they didn't capitalize on Wilshire Boulevard's rolling potential, developing a swath, six blocks wide, from Figueroa Street to Ocean Avenue as a downtown that traversed the city. If Gehry had his way, he would place MOCA across the street from LACMA, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels near MacArthur Park's lake. Disney Hall he would set next to the Wadsworth Theater.Instead, Gehry has just gifted downtown with its most potent symbol of renewal: a hall that crests like a ship's prow atop Bunker Hill, breaking over the city as Sydney's opera house first breached Sydney Harbour when it opened in 1973. Before Disney Hall, Los Angeles lacked a building that could stand in as the city's proxy the way the Chrysler Building sums up the century for Manhattan or San Francisco's TransAmerica Pyramid—seemingly caught in mid stride over the Embarcadero—evokes movement into the future for the Bay Area. Such architectural monuments are expansive gestures of what it means to belong to a city. Urban life would be hard to imagine without them. In L.A., though, the Getty Center is more a place to visit than it is a building, and City Hall hasn't hummed in the psyches of Angelenos since the first Dragnet went off the air.
Photo of Disney Hall: LA Observed
