Architecture of dislocation: the L.A. school - Los Angeles, California, architects - includes bibliography

Art in America, Feb, 1994 by Jayne Merkel

The confrontational strategies and cacophonous collisions that currently seem to characterize urban life in Los Angeles have had a curious parallel in the aggressive strategies of L.A.'s best recent architecture--work that has been showing up more and more in books, articles, exhibitions and awards programs all over the world. This brash style may be the product of a unique set of local conditions, but it clearly has provoked a response elsewhere as well. Its characteristics are most fully developed in a flourishing, midcareer generation of California architects whose major figures are Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi (of the firm Morphosis), Eric Owen Moss and Franklin D. Israel. But aspects of this California manner are also evident in a younger, more numerous group of emerging architects, mostly in their 30s, many of whom have worked for Frank Gehry, Morphosis, Moss or Israel. The younger generation is here represented in two surveys: Angels & Franciscans, the catalogue for a 1992 exhibition at 65 Thompson Street in New York (which also included some Northern California architects), and Experimental Architecture in Los Angeles, a book that grew out of a series of discussions sponsored in 1988 and '89 by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Many of these architects share stylistic traits with their elders but are scarcely homogeneous as a group, and it is difficult to generalize about their work at this early stage in their careers. What the two surveys do indicate, however, is that Southern California in recent years has provided opportunities and an encouraging atmosphere for architectural innovation--what Gehry, in his introduction to Experimental Architecture in Los Angeles, describes as "a level of excitement that's creating a lasting constituency for good design."

The architects of the older generation, whose work appears in monographic form as well as in Angels & Franciscans, and on whom I will focus in this review, are now in their late 40s and 50s. Though Mayne, Rotondi, Israel and Moss hesitate to see themselves as a school, an outside viewer cannot avoid noticing the stylistic affinities between them. Perhaps most typical is the way they all combine raw industrial materials with refined traditional ones and paradoxically wrench buildings apart as a way of putting them together. Morphosis, for example, has placed a skewed, open Cor-Ten steel grid over the old Spanish Colonial facade of the Angeli Restaurant on Melrose Avenue and jammed a heavy wooden sloping beam through the glazed wall above the building's front door. Frank Israel has torn out the ordinary 1950s insides and exterior finishes of the Arango-Berry House in Beverly Hills, sheathed the structure with bonderized sheet metal and stucco, and built a bright blue masonry wall that runs around the garden from the garage to the front door and then goes right through the living room. Eric Moss has cut apart concrete block warehouses in Culver City to insert offices for the Gary Group; he covered them with various odd-shaped skylights and hung chains, wheels, Plexiglas panels, pipes and a sloping extra wall on the outside.

Whatever kinds of buildings these architects have worked on--private houses, remodeled older dwellings, restaurants, low-rise office buildings (usually renovations of small industrial structures for entrepreneurs in advertising or the arts)--they have turned traditional notions of enclosure inside out. Their work looks modern. But in place of the stable modernist box they tend to use unstable polygons and ellipses, forms that sometimes slice through cubes and are sometimes tiltingly clustered as though the architects were beating an imminent earthquake to the punch. Rather than aiming for illusion, as the architects of L.A.'s Mediterranean villas once did, they build structures that reflect the constant change and abrupt dislocations of Southern California life.

Charles Jencks, in Heteropolis, sees connections between this California work and the volatile, fragmented, super-heterogeneous social and political climate of Los Angeles, which he describes as the city of the future because it consists of "only minorities." For him, the city's dividedness is reflected in recent buildings by Gehry, Morphosis, Moss and Israel.

Nevertheless, at a New School symposium before the opening of the "Angels & Franciscans" show in New York, Thom Mayne denied that there was anything regional about his architecture: "I think the whole idea of architecture being regional is preposterous," he said. "We live in a world of telecommunications. Our networks are global .... To me LA is very much the modern metrepolis, as is New York and Tokyo, heterogeneous. There is no majority. Politics is based on confrictional means. So is the architecture." He meant, of course, that each architect's work is different. But what he also revealed was the typical willingness of this group of architects to express and celebrate the idea of conflict in their buildings instead of attempting to blend differences into some form of unified whole.