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Originally Posted by alki
What do you like about downtown LA?
And when it comes to buildings, are there any buildings new or old that you prefer?
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downtown la's got a decent collection of midrise architecture. still though, as with anything non-residential in this city, nothing groundbreaking (for example, no home insurance bdg or casa mila's, or ironically even, no dancing house) but standard urban design faire of the day is always welcome by my book - good contiguity, balanced setback, and human scaled.
as i've stated before, i'm a big fan of craig ellwood's philosophy. he captures to me, the optimistic side of los angeles' suburban modernism before it became the contentious geopolitical issue of today. in a sense he fused modernism with flw's garden city spirit. elwood embraced the architect's duty to recognize the limitations of materials and rationality, such that the architect could understand first what he is working with in order to create spaces that are inspiring by the graceful efficiency through which they address real every day human needs. unlike gehry and most "brand name" architects of los angeles today, ellwood and his la contemporaries refused to hide behind style or remodel architecture into another branch of the visual arts (as gehry has unwittingly built an entire career on).
every post and beam serves a structural and space-defining purpose that stands independently from whatever visual impact is extracted from (and yet balanced to) that function. there is a pleasing lightness to these spaces that results from each carefully proportioned beam, post, slab, and opening. ellwood, and other contemporaries like neutra or schindler more or less captured the spirit of la before architecture was bastardized by the prevailing spirit of hollywood commercialism and subsequently branded the "la school", as though there were a singular morality or conviction that unified likes of gehry, moss, and mayne the way the chicago or bauhaus architects were.
so being the city of fabricated images, los angeles architecture inevitably departed from this kind of delicate material truthfulness into what is now just a bunch of crass visual one-upsmanship with only secondary concern for what was the primary object of commission (the building's purpose) to begin with.
modernism is now a stylized caricature of itself, like every other highly fashioned knock-off - la becoming the architectural equivalent of a cheap sound-byte compendium. little to no understanding or care for the true meaning of things
so unfortunately there isn't much to be excited about in la. most critics rightfully note la's dearth of good architecture aside from it's collection of private craftsmen and modernist residences. even la's "brand name" buildings the latest of which is the bcam are mediocre failures when compared with projects by those very same architects elsewhere.
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Originally Posted by alki
The attachment may be outdated but its hardly cartoonish.......if for no other reason than too many people, sophisticated or not, still see the center of the city as the heart of an urban area. And that includes cities in Europe as well. While its true bigger cities in Europe like Paris and London don't have a true downtown per se but that's because they are large, world cities and are the exception not the rule. When my German friends moved to Bonn, they wanted to be near downtown because it was convenient to shopping, daycare, his office and the train station. It was only downtown where all those amenities could be found. In a typical, average sized city those functions usually are concentrated in the CBD. Its part of the desirability of a CBD.
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i think you're equating a cbd (district of primarily office buildings) with the much more general concept of an urban core. first of all, the word "downtown" has a different meaning in different places. in a relatively small city like bonn, "downtown" is large enough relative to the rest of town to capture the majority of the region's major cultural, business, and retail amenities - it's urban core and it's "downtown" are functionally synonymous. but in a large metro like ny or la, what is referred to as downtown tends to be a office district containing the seat of municipal services (courts, hall, civic center, etc) but in actuality, ny or la's functional counterpart to bonn's "downtown" would actually be manhattan or the dtla-santa monica basin respectfully.
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Originally Posted by alki
I think that's what contributed to its negative image nationally and why the city is working to change that image by focusing on its urban core.......the CBD......and reinventing it. At least that's how I see it.
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the problem with that is it's a "two wrongs make a right" approach. you're using one incorrect view about urbanism to address another. as mentioned above, the functional urban core of la is alive and healthy - it's the area roughly contained within a triangle drawn between dtla, hollywood, and santa monica. investing billions of dollars of misguided redevelopment money, taxpayer financed subsidies and tax write-offs over the past few decades in one neighborhood (our cbd) represents billions that could have been spent over that same period on brownfields, public transit, bike lanes, park space, landscaping, and other improvements that could have unified and enhanced the broader aformentioned core. but more importantly, it ignores the vibrant city that los angeles already is outside of the cbd. the downtown=the city concept is a simplistic idea based on a chiefly american phenomenon of equating skyscrapers with urbanism - a subconscious worship of the new york archetype that continues in the minds of la politicians and developers, and prevents la from breaking true ground in its own right.
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