Martha Welborne has an agenda…an agenda of accomplishment. As a highly skilled architect and urban designer, that accomplishment is measured in terms of achieving improvements to the urban environment. “Although I never actually met him, I learned a lot about the art of city building from Nat Owings, one of the original founders of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It is a part of SOM’s culture, and I learned it well while I was there.” What she learned was the very real and technical side of city building. Not just making beautiful buildings and urban spaces, but addressing the sometimes unglamorous yet necessary supporting components of implementation: traffic, utilities, economics, even politics—the requirements for accomplishment in building cities.
As architects, planners, and urban designers, we are trained to solve problems, create solutions, but not necessarily to push them through the political process, to make them happen. Martha Welborne has come to realize that, if you want to practice the art of city building, you often have to be an advocate.
Some have even called Martha Welborne a “crusader,” and it is certainly true that she has forcefully advocated and overseen the implementation of a number of powerful ideas to improve the urban environment. But that’s not the whole story about this straight talking, MIT educated architect and urban planner. Her stellar career with some of the country’s most outstanding architectural and planning firms—with a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard along the way—has led her to the understanding that achieving real impact in urban design and planning sometimes requires extraordinary, perhaps unorthodox techniques. She’s simply found that “it is often more about politics than it is about good planning.” That doesn’t diminish the need for quality in the design of the urban environment, but without the support of the political and governmental community, there will be no realization of the dreams.
Grand Avenue rendering by A.C. Martin Partners.Martha’s most recent crusade is Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. As the managing director of the Grand Avenue Committee, a non-profit organization focused on improving the civic and cultural district of Downtown Los Angeles, she is charged with creating a vision for and implementing improvements to the cultural core of the city. A public/private partnership, the Grand Avenue Committee was established as a fund at the California Community Foundation, and Martha Welborne was invited to lead the effort based on her recent success in advocating a “Rapid Bus” system in Los Angeles. Located in the heart of downtown L.A., Grand Avenue is home to the city’s music center, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Colburn Center for the Performing Arts, over 3,000,000 square feet of private sector office space, and LA’s civic and government center (second in size only to Washington D.C.’s). Add to this mix the soon to be completed Walt Disney Concert Hall, by Frank Gehry, and the Cathedral of our Lady of Los Angeles, by noted Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, and you have the ingredients of an enormously powerful urban center.
With all these significant components, the street nevertheless lacks the simple urban amenities and supporting uses, such as restaurants, cafes, and housing, that an urban cultural and civic district demands. Under the auspices of the Committee, Martha is leading a group of design consultants in creating a plan to fill these gaps: first, designing a pedestrian-friendly street with widened sidewalks, street trees, and lighting that links together this unique series of cultural and architectural venues; second, planning for the development of vacant publicly owned land through the private sector, with uses that will give life to the district; and, finally, revitalizing the civic center mall to become a true “central park” for downtown Los Angeles. Creating the vision is the easy part; orchestrating agreement among a committee composed of the city, the county, the music center, and wealthy citizens, coupled with securing funding across multiple jurisdictions, is another matter. But, as Martha has observed, this kind of leadership is often the only way good design in the public realm can be achieved. Still in the process, Martha has her hands full.
Martha Lampkin came to Los Angeles in 1994 to marry John Welborne. At the same time, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill had asked her to head their local office as managing director, where she was responsible for a variety of architecture and urban design projects.
After several years, when SOM decided to change the orientation of their office in Los Angeles from large-scale urban design and architectural work to interiors, Martha’s first opportunity in urban design advocacy presented itself almost by coincidence.
During the course of a casual gathering in her neighborhood one evening, the subject of Curitiba, Brazil, had come up, since one of her friends was preparing to attend a board meeting of the W. Alton Jones Foundation in that city. Martha mentioned that she had met the Mayor of Curitiba, Jamie Lerner, also an architect, and had studied their innovative and wildly successful transit system.
The concept combines the best features of both rail and bus. Express buses occupy dedicated lanes running down the center of the street, with stations approximately every mile. Traffic signals give priority to the buses, and, with the multiple wide doors, passengers are loaded and unloaded rapidly, making the system speedy and efficient. During the course of the afternoon’s conversation, Martha also suggested that this type of “rapid bus” system might in fact translate quite well to Los Angeles.
After the trip to Brazil, the W. Alton Jones Foundation board enthusiastically agreed. They suggested that Martha submit a proposal for a grant to study the idea of applying the Curitiba type rapid bus system to the streets of L.A.
The concept of busways was hardly new at the time, but the possibilities they offer had not been fully understood by many of the key decision-makers. Martha decided to apply for the grant with the purpose of educating key public officials about surface transit possibilities and ultimately building portions of the system in Los Angeles. During the course of the next few years, Martha organized several trips to Curitiba for transit officials, the mayor, and county supervisors, all of whom became avid supporters. She also worked closely with MTA staff to adapt some of the Curitiba ideas for Los Angeles streets and rights-of-way. Ultimately, two demonstration lines were created and implemented to test some of the concepts and their acceptability in Los Angeles (see arcCA 01.3).
Today these two demonstration lines have been an outstanding success and are being expanded to other areas of the city. Martha modestly takes credit only for the politics, since, as she points out, the technology is not new. However, if, as she notes, “transit systems are designed by politics, not by planning,” then she certainly did an outstanding design job.
Prior to coming west, Martha honed her considerable skills as an architect and urban planner while working for some of the premier architecture and urban design firms in the United States. She learned to love “the nitty-gritty of cities,” living in Chicago, Boston, and now Los Angeles, reacting to each city through her work in architecture, urban design, and planning. Her interest in urban design and planning had its genesis earlier, while she was an undergraduate studying architecture at the University of Notre Dame. One of her undergraduate years was spent in Rome, where she became enamored with the idea of architecture at the scale of cities. Several years later, she entered the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, where she received masters degrees in architecture and in city planning. After graduation, she joined the Boston office of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill, working on a variety of large-scale urban revitalization and planning projects, including Boston’s Downtown Crossing and Post Office Square. During her years in Boston, Martha began to understand the value of pro bono work through the AIA. She found that, by using the bully pulpit of the AIA, she could make far more impactful statements about city building than simply as a project advocate. Moving to the Chicago offices of SOM, Martha continued to work on significant urban design projects, such as the Chicago World’s Fair and major urban streetscape improvements.
In 1983, Martha was lured back to Boston to become a principal in the firm of Sasaki Associates, directing institutional planning and design for major university campuses and continuing to lead major downtown urban design projects.
In addition to her notable professional career, Martha Welborne has taught and lectured around the country on urban design and transit issues, served as president of the Architectural Guild of the University of Southern California and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She is currently an appointed member of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and recently served on the Alumni Council of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In recognition of her contributions to the profession, Martha Welborne was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1993.
In the last several years, Martha Welborne has been exploring ways to practice the art of city building without necessarily having a traditional client. Through her pro bono work back in Boston, she found that she had greater credibility in this type of role being perceived as what she calls an “honest broker.” Architects, planners, and urban designers, she notes, are often looked on with some suspicion when they advocate for a particular idea, under the assumption that they may have some vested interest in its implementation. Martha has been testing whether working for non-profit organizations might remove some of this suspicion and allow her to operate with more credibility and to move projects forward more effectively. She still does not know if it is possible to maintain a practice as an urban designer and architect in a non-profit setting, where the primary client is the public good, but, so far, the results look promising.
Author Richard Thompson, AIA, AICP, is a principal and director of urban design and planning at A.C. Martin Partners in Los Angeles.
Originally published 2nd quarter 2002, in arcCA 02.2, “Citizen Architects.”
