LA of the future

The following is something that recently made its way into the architecture headlines here in LA.

Eric Owen Moss has recently won a state-wide competition on the visions for the city of Los Angeles of the future. The public now gets to choose their favourite of three cities - New York, Chicago and Los Angeles here.

Here's a bit more on Moss's future vision of LA, from The History Channel's Engineering an Empire:

"The primary organizational components that define contemporary Los Angeles are enormous works of civil engineering - the railway tracks and bridges; the power grids; the "v" shaped, concrete L.A. River; and the ubiquitous steel and concrete freeways.

The infrastructure, when successful, solves the technical objectives of its design engineers: moves trains; moves power; moves water; moves cars.

But in Los Angeles technical means often become both visual ends and operational limits the original problem solvers never imagined. The cumulative effect of the existing infrastructure is to sub-divide the city, delimit zones of use and purpose, and to segregate by race, and economic capacity.

The freeways, tracks, power grids, and concrete rivers originally designed to connect a horizontal city, often deliver the opposite: the piecemeal city, with infrastructure as a consistent obstacle to the integration of the disparate civic parts.

The solution: reconceive the city by multiplying the purposes of its infrastructure. We intend to build over, under, around, and through the freeways, rivers, power grids, and tracks, to use the existing rights of way as the foundations for a series of new, infrastructure-scaled conceptions of building form, habitation, and public and private purpose that will redefine Los Angeles by strategically re-associating the sociologies, the uses, and the sense of the civic whole the civil engineers have long precluded."

While Moss Architects are probably not the first to have identified Los Angeles's urban problems, the italicised paragraphs succinctly underline my personal observations of the city. The civil engineering efforts in constructing the city's transportation infrastructure (in particular, freeways) have done more damage in cutting up the city into "piecemeal" fragments, rather than linking up the sprawling sub-cities / suburban centres.

Somewhere at the back of my head lies the intention of using Remapping LA as a stage for critiquing this phenomenon, and perhaps as a means of alleviating the situation (although given its own location - disjointed from other parts of downtown LA by virtue of the rail lines and the LA river that borders it - this would require a masterplan that would involve the site's vicinity as well.)

The State Historic Park, for instance, could be conceived of as a microcosm of the city's distinct cultures, sans the boundaries that segregate present-day Los Angeles.

In re-reading the final paragraph of the above blog quote though, it is difficult to conceive how the problem can be solved by multiplying the agents of the initial problem. It seems, on first impression, like a megalomaniacal architect's pipe dream - of designing more than what might be necessary, in the hopes of further saturating the city with built transportation infrastructure that may now further segregate the city on not just a horizontal plane, but on the vertical plane as well.

Here are the images from the above website:

From the rendered perspectives and physical models, what seems to be the design intention, at least as far as the formal solution appears to be, is to saturate the riverine banks with high density development, in the hopes of creating urban vibrancy that might more clearly define the metropolis that Los Angeles is, or at least allow it to fall within the conventions of a metropolis. Gargantuan arching forms over the city's urban layer are reminiscent of what the post-modernist Archigram movement would do, albeit in a different setting and with a different formal language.

While there seems a clear-cut aim of intensifying the city by means of urban form, and in pushing for, in reviewer Daniel Libeskind's words, "a big urbanist idea in which habitation, public and private space are fused together in order to create a civic whole; one which has eluded the piecemeal construction of the city", it remains to be seen how such a future city would address the segregation of cultures that, if left uncontrolled, could lead to eventual dystopia.

My comments right now might be premature, given the following: my take on it is purely founded on observation of low-resolution images, and that the project itself is a concept-in-progress. Yet it is my aim that the strategy for the LA State Historic Park in the Remapping LA project would involve community participation - or at the very least, a consideration of the communities - for the design of the interactive park.