As reported on Wired.
BY TIM MALY
Courtesy Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical GardensThe 1939 World’s Fair was held in New York but Los Angeles wanted it. The tower would have been 150 feet wide and 1,290 feet tall (the current tallest building, the Burj Khalifa is 2,722 feet). “It would have been the tallest structure in the world at the time,” writes Lubell. “It was going to be made of metal and plastic, with laser-like lights radiating from its top. A helixical walkway, totaling 3 miles in length, would have allowed visitors to climb to the top.”
Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin are creating an exhibition of Los Angeles’ buildings that were never built.
It’s hard to build a building. Every project must be ushered through a gauntlet of approvals, zoning codes, committees, clients, and criticism, to say nothing of the laws of finance and physics. As much as some architects might dream of the purity of will that allows Howard Roark to dynamite his tower when it’s not as envisioned, the real world is full of buildings that must find their place in the public sphere, in a compromise between the visions and needs of architects, financiers, planning committees and nearby residents.
In the end, only one structure can occupy any given space. So history is littered with the detritus of never realized plans for revolutionary structures. Finding the right balance of power between all these forces is probably impossible. Sometimes those non-constructions didn’t happen for good reason. Sometimes it’s a real loss.
In association with the A+D Museum, Lubell and Goldin are proposing an exhibit celebrating LA’s history of buildings that might have been.
Wired: How did the project come about?
Greg Goldin: It all began nearly two years ago when the Getty Research Institute asked the Architecture and Design Museum of Los Angeles if they’d be interested in displaying models the Getty owned of unbuilt projects. That soon morphed into an examination of projects from the 1990s through the early ’00s — not necessarily in the Getty’s possession. And that, in turn, morphed into a thoroughgoing look at projects spanning the decades going back all the way to 1900, because the more you look the more you find. The more you find, the better — and more potentially game-changing — the ideas and past proposals seem, which only leads you to do some more looking. In the end, we spoke to a slew of experts and historians and then we combed every major archive in the city to find the best unbuilt projects.
Wired: What is it with Los Angeles and mega scale architecture?
Goldin: Los Angeles had room to grow, with few geographical limitations, except the Pacific Ocean. All that open space engendered a spirit of wide imagination, and the two fed off each other. Los Angeles has also always been a place to jettison the past and begin anew, and from the beginning the city developed a reputation for embracing originality and reinvention. The happenstance of early aviation and aerospace and the creative, sometimes over-the-top spirit of Hollywood, only further fueled the imagination. Everything seemed possible.
Wired: How close did the projects you chose come to reality?
Sam Lubell: It’s a mix, but we tried to focus on projects that had a good shot at becoming reality. These kinds of schemes reveal not just the creative ambition in the city, but the constant hurdles that stopped them in their tracks. Of course we do have a few truly pie in the sky projects, which capture the imagination and underscore that every city needs to have impossible dreams.
Wired: Why do cities need impossible dreams?
Lubell: Architects and planners and even developers propose speculative work because it prods everyone, from common citizens to elected officials, to think about the city in new ways. A perfect recent example is Thom Mayne’s proposal for the Cornfields, just north of Chinatown and downtown. He would move Dodgers Stadium off the hill in Elysian Park and put it in the flats — at the southern most tip of the Cornfields park. He would replace the stadium with high-rise luxury condos. This is smart land-use and transit planning.
Another example would be Schindler’s prefab shelters from the early 1930s. These were an attempt to see how small, modular homes could be inexpensively and quickly constructed to address their terrible housing needs of the Great Depression. The project was speculative not just because it proposed prefab or modular but because the homes were engineered as a kit of parts — and builders were then (and now) reluctant to adopt such a formula.
But both of these speculations, at opposite ends of the building spectrum, push ideas forward. Schindler playing with prefab and interlocking plywood units has led to the inventiveness of Frank Gehry’s early work. Mayne’s radical reordering of downtown will force the city to think more about its future land-use policies — perhaps to the better.
Furthermore many of these projects seem impossible today, but at certain points in the city’s history they seemed utterly doable. Our culture has changed, and there is less of a spirit that anything is possible in Los Angeles. It’s a sentiment that the city has always to some extent held and it needs to embrace it. Los Angeles needs to be a city of dreams in order to thrive and to embody its most effective attribute.
Wired: Some people say that while LA was made possible by mega-projects it is now crippled by them and by a powerful NIMBY lobby. Does this assessment seem right to you?
Lubell: Certainly some of the over-reach from past mega projects — from Bunker Hill to Chavez Ravine to the Freeways — has certainly helped create a culture of NIMBYism in which residents are terrified by the prospect of any new development, no matter how innovative or benevolent. One of our goals with the show is to open Angelenos’ minds to bold projects that will also improve the city. It’s not true that all large scale work has to be a thorn in the city’s side.
It is also true to a large extent that the city is mired in ancient zoning laws, dating to the time when the city’s core was surrounded by light industrial uses and the suburbs were developed around freeways. So, in many ways, the city is trapped by its vestigial infrastructure and its outmoded infrastructure (freeways).
On the other hand, there is a growing awareness that this cannot withstand the pressure of change. The effort to green the L.A. River, to restore some of its concrete bed to an actual river; the idea of freeway caps to use the air rights of freeways for parks; the spread of residential adaptive re-use throughout the east side of downtown (the old light industrial sector); all indicate a shift in frame of mind.
These kinds of changes are slow, to say the least, and not everyone agrees with them. As NIMBYism, it is confined to very specific projects, and not to sweeping visions. The city electorate has voted for massive bond issues for transit, for libraries, for new schools. On a wider level, then, the city seems willing to shed its “infrastructural” past to make a new one.