Frances Anderton: Last month, L.A.’s own Thom Mayne was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the Nobel of the architecture world. Thom Mayne and his firm, Morphosis, have designed bracingly innovative buildings, like Caltrans in Downtown, the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, and the Science Center School in Exposition Park. About Tom’s work, the jury wrote, “He’s sought throughout his career to make an original architecture, one that is truly representative of the unique, somewhat rootless, culture of Southern California.” I was struck by this characterization of Los Angeles as “somewhat rootless,” and decided to ask a few experts what they thought about it. I started with Thom Mayne himself.
Thom Mayne: It’s not rootless; it’s multiply rooted. That’s the issue of L.A. That’s the relationship of the polyglot, and it’s what makes L.A. so interesting, and it is this incredible heterogeneity of the city. And the issue is where to take this and how do we deal with this and what are the potentialities and what are the issues within this set of complexities.
Anderton: So, when people look at your buildings, you’re expecting them to look at them with that understanding of L.A. being this place without a strong, coherent architectural tradition.
Mayne: Yes, but, you know, I think that the public is very confused about how it even looks at architecture. In one sense, it’s interested in ideas and continuity within a European context, say, a Paris, or a London, or a Madrid, or a Barcelona, but if you really look at how that continuity was formed, it had to do with a time in history when there were more monolithic forms of government: monarchies, aristocracies—Versailles, Champs-Elysées, the Louvre, etc., etc., L.A. is what you’d expect. You’d expect a very discontinuous number of things in terms of the visual characteristics or what architects they represent, and that differentiation which the public seems to have a problem with is a direct reflection of the nature and the richness of the culture. And you can’t have it both ways. Right?
Anderton: That was Thom Mayne. Next I spoke with Annie Kelly, a decorator and design writer living in Old Hollywood.
Annie Kelly: I’m indignant that the jury for the Pritzker Prize claimed that California culture was rootless. It just is a typical East Coast attitude, because they’re aware of their culture and its ties to England and the founding of the country. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have our very own ties and links. After all, California did once belong to the King of Spain, and we have centuries of traditions: The beautiful Spanish colonial buildings all through Los Angeles and Southern California and Santa Barbara are really firmly rooted in the traditions that were started by the Spanish when they came here in the seventeenth century. But if you want to look at it in a slightly narrow view, historically speaking, then you can look at the icons of the twentieth-century modernists, like the Neutra house and the Schindler house on King’s Road that were hugely influential, and you could call that the roots of modernism, if you want to go that far. I think the thing is that we’re diverse, not rootless.
Jeffrey Herr: A lot of cities are characterized architecturally by skyline architecture, and yes, L.A. does have some of that . . .
Anderton: Jeffrey Herr is Arts Manager for the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles.
Herr: . . . but I think we find our best architecture not so much in that skyline architecture, and in terms of the rootless aspect of it, I think you get to the point where all the architects that have been working in Los Angeles have brought a myriad of ethnic thoughts with them that have formed what’s been actually built in the city. And, in a sense, it’s rooted now, but it was the rootlessness of the people coming here.
Julie Taylor: I would say that in L.A. our culture is unique but not necessarily rootless.
Anderton: Julie Taylor is editor of the newsletter of the Society of Architectural Historians, Southern California chapter.
Taylor: What really intrigues me about L.A. are the different layers of history that are here that sometimes other people don’t see; I mean, it’s not like any other place. We’ve got our mid-century architecture, which might still be thought of as contemporary by someone in New York, or Spanish Revival work, you know, of the 1920s, which is very historical to us in L.A., but someone in Europe might laugh and say, “Don’t you mean 1620?” L.A. has always been a place where people come to reinvent themselves, and here I think we also reinvent what history is, and what that means.
Anderton: I asked Thom Mayne about the perception of L.A. as a place that, in fact, has roots: Spanish, early Modernist, and so on.
Mayne: It’s a critical-mass problem. If you looked at the sixteen-and-a-half million people over the ninety-mile horizontal distance of L.A. as a metropolis, unlike the European city, where there’s not just history but a critical mass—in L.A., you could find those roots, little fragments of Pasadena, fragments of Long Beach, fragments of Downtown, but essentially to look at the city as a whole, it’s a post-World-War-II city, and the newness, or the construction which took place within a very rapid period of time, completely overpowers. There just isn’t the density of history that can make that argument convincing.
Anderton: That was Pritzker Prize-winning L.A. architect Thom Mayne. Alan Hess is architecture critic for the San Jose Mercury News. He’s also author of many books dealing with post-war L.A. architecture, including Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture and The Ranch House.
Alan Hess: I was surprised that the old cliché about rootlessness in Southern California has been dredged up again. Yet this is, apparently, the perception of the area from Easterners, and perhaps many Southern Californians accept it. I think the facts, though, go the exactly opposite direction. Thom Mayne’s work is just one example of a very well-rooted, very long-standing, very well-developed concept of architecture which Southern California has evolved over the past hundred years or so. You see the same sort of forms, the same sort of dynamic shapes, the same sort of anti-gravity architecture in, for example, the work of John Lautner. Lautner, of course, was a great Southern California architect who worked from the 1930s into the 1990s. Take such houses as Lautner’s Garcia house, a great arching wave on Mulholland Drive, or the Chemisphere house, a spaceship perched atop a pylon on a hillside of the Hollywood Hills.
Another aspect of California architecture which reflects this are the Googie coffee shops, like the Norm’s—there’s one still standing on La Cienega—floating roofs that were jutting out in different directions, dynamic angles, huge stretches of glass that enveloped the buildings in unusual ways. They were teaming with modern materials, which at the time were plastics and plate glass and different forms of metal and beams and so forth. And, remember, that these are buildings that were meant for the average person, the average Angeleno. And the average Angeleno loved them and embraced them, because they did give a sense not of rootlessness but of a very specific place. You knew you were in Southern California when you were in these sorts of buildings.
Cara Mullio: I’m glad I was asked to talk about rootless culture, because when I first heard this I almost became defensive . . .
Anderton: Cara Mullio is the co-author of Long Beach Architecture: The Unexpected Metropolis.
Mullio: . . . and I understand that the Pritzker Jury made it as a compliment, and, when you think about Los Angeles, you think about its history, you think about Frank Lloyd Wright coming to Los Angeles to be liberated, for a sense of freedom, and Los Angeles provides that. And I think that architecture here in the city is liberated. It’s so fresh, the ideas here are being looked at from around the world, and things that germinate here you see setting precedents for other places and other forms of architecture.
Anderton: Alan Hess.
Hess: The ultra-modern homes of John Lautner, certainly the work of Frank Gehry today, the Googie coffee shops, the ranch house found in hundreds of tracts all over Southern California, these also have been taken up by other people across the country as a new way of living. So, we are not rootless here, we are the base of the root. We are where the plant starts growing, and it stretches out across the country.
Frances Anderton is host of 89.9 KCRW radio’s DnA: Design and Architecture and the producer of To The Point and Which Way, LA?, Warren Olney’s current affairs shows also aired on KCRW. She is the Los Angeles Editor for Dwell magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Times.
Originally published 2nd quarter 2006 in arcCA 06.2, “L.A.”
