Scott Johnson Opines On The Importance of Community In World Class Architecture

Scott, national and international critics of architecture often divide on the issue of "big architecture versus urban design". You've written & commented extensively on the subject. Parse the alternative paradigms for us and elaborate on the significance of the either/or approaches for the architectural work you most admire.

It's a very complex question. But, if you were going to make a bumper sticker on the subject, it would read "Big Architecture is not Urban Design." The issue is ambiguous in the minds of many, but you can read some of the major newspapers around the country, and their architectural critics, and they often seem to be ecstatic when someone comes in and puts a big, shiny, ratcheted thing down. They say, "this is fabulous for the city." Well, maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe it's a great media piece. Maybe it's a great piece of global architecture. Maybe, even by its own rules, it's a very spontaneous and magnetic and multi-layered experience. But is it good for the city? Does it absorb and take in the concerns and the needs of the city?

Michael Sorkin, who teaches at the Cooper Union in New York and writes in a number of magazines, wrote an article last month that highlighted many examples of projects in that city that may be very interesting architecture, but do not necessarily take into consideration the needs of their pre-existing neighborhoods. There is probably nothing more important than the consideration of neighborhood needs. With the enormous growth here in downtown in Los Angeles, everybody participating in creating this next generation of infill building needs to address this question. There's existing fabric, there's existing circulation, there are existing service systems, and there's existing pedestrian life and land uses. All of that needs to be absorbed, thought about and processed before you do your next big thing. And sometimes it's done successfully, in my view, amongst designers and builders, and sometimes it's not. It alienates the community if it's inappropriate, and there is frequently a coterie of tastemakers who try to convince us that what our eyes are seeing and what our brains are thinking just isn't so.

Scott, your firm serves many clients worldwide. Give us a sense both of what your clients and the communities that you're working in architectually value, and how you attempt, as an architect, to satisfy both your clients and the needs of the communities effected.

As an architect and as a designer, you're always looking for a connection with the client. The client comes to you. The client is the one that makes something possible, and you learn from them. And so you want to connect, and you can do that on a number of levels. You can connect on the level of pure form and the joy of architecture. And you can also connect on a conceptual level. You can connect with an idea about what pre-exists, how we listen to the ground before we begin, so to speak. In my view, that's a natural way to initiate a conversation with a project sponsor or a client.

It's also very natural to go to the community of relevant stakeholders and say "We've come here, we've listened to you. We heard this, we saw that. This is what our understanding is about, what precedes us, and this is how we're trying to deal with those things, and weave them into our building." So, it's a terribly important part of the conversation of making architecture.

We're working on a Native American museum in Oklahoma City. It's a 300-acre site at the edge of downtown, on a former brownfield site, and it has a whole set of environmental concerns, climatic concerns, technical concerns, and, of course, cultural concerns. But, in each case, we start with a conversation about what was there before we arrived, and how do we take care of that as we add our project to it.

To return this conversation to Southern California and Los Angeles, there are a host of public facilities projects on the drawing boards in the metro area. For example, the region's largest developer-the Los Angeles School District-is about to build 160 new schools in our most densely populated inner city and inner suburban neighborhoods. Also being planned, because of service demands, are a large number of new parks, police stations, and libraries. How does one practically inspire and enrich the city planning conversation at a metropolitan level so as to improve the chances of architects being asked by school districts, for example, to design vital & healthy places, rather than just stunning buildings that keep the rain out?

LAUSD is in the First Phase of a huge school construction program. Some of those schools have been finished, and many are in construction. The First Phase of schools absorbed nearly all of the most available sites that were large enough to put everything down on the ground and, in many cases build athletic fields; and everybody was happy. It was, in a way, a vision of suburban Los Angeles as it has been.

Now, we're beginning a second phase, another layer of about the same size. As we do the second layer, larger sites like those before are generally not available. We have to put schools on smaller sites, in more urban sites, and on more complex sites. We may need smaller schools. We may have to stack the schools. Maybe schools now will be more than two and three stories, maybe now we have mid-rise and high-rise schools. Maybe we have to put schools in conjunction with mixed-use projects, because they are in a more urban, more compressed environment. And so the school program becomes inherently more complex, but potentially more interesting.

urther, I would suggest that anybody who's interested should get involved in the public review process for the design of these schools. From a design point of view, there are two types of review. In the First Phase of design and construction, there was an architectural Design Advisory Board, which was lead by Bob Timme, the Dean of USC's School of Architecture, which was very interesting and supported the notions of quality, sustainability, and architecture as public art. That's an important review process that the LAUSD should not lose going forward. Also, all of these schools have to be presented and reviewed in community meetings, and everybody should go out to these meetings and make their positions known.

To have a better civic dialogue re design and development, what needs to happen to convince our public agencies to take more responsibility for holistically integrating new schools into the neighborhood fabric of a built out metropolis like Los Angeles?

I would like to see the City get involved. When it's just a binary relationship with the LAUSD and the architectural design team, it's very much in our DNA as designers to try to open up these schools to make them community-oriented, to look at segregating out the academic portion of the school by giving it the privacy that it needs for study and opening up the common facilities for community involvement. The LAUSD, on the other hand, is inherently concerned about enclosure and security. City participation would help in identifying those facilities in the school program that are more civic in character, and supporting the comfortable ingress and egress of the community.

Still, the present program and design standards for LAUSD schools are to basically enclose, securitize, and control the school during school hours. I would hope that collectively we can develop a more inventive and open way to involve the community and to expose the students to the community. We can, for example, zone a given property in terms of a more public portion and a more private portion, and I would hope that those standards could evolve over time. If we got some of the city administration and some of the city leaders involved, I believe they could help encourage that openness.

Scott, some have said that Los Angeles is without a vibrant civic conversation re architecture and urban design. If true, is the void a result of our news media's focus on the cult of personality to the exclusion of function and urban context? If not true, what is the civic conversation addressing?

That's definitely the old L.A. story. Historically, so many people moved here for weather, privacy, and the ability to have their own home, and all that. That often translated into design being focussed on the single family dwelling with a garden patio. So, there are definitely roots in that culture, a kind of fantasia of memory about that suburban dream of home ownership.

But, for the last 20 to 30 years, there's very much the realization that a more urban life exists and it's very attractive. Those streets that have generated enough density, enough layered mixed-use in Los Angeles, are the streets that everyone loves to come to when they have free time. In fact, we've even modeled many of our theme parks after streets, realizing that the urban street is actually the most interesting and fun place to be. So, I think it's very much in the Los Angeleno mind today that the street is a great place to be.

There are also people from other places in the world who live here, who have always recognized that the city is a very exciting, highly serviced place with a lot of entertainment and a lot of interest. Walk down Spring, Main or Broadway on any given day, and you'll realize that those traditions are alive and well here.

Scott, as a partner in a well-known and distinguished firm, Johnson Fain, you've just made a decision to relocate your offices to the northern edge of downtown Los Angeles. Elaborate on that location choice and on what it portends for gentrification of all of downtown L.A.?

We have been downtown for the better part of the last decade in the cross hair of the traditional downtown core at Wilshire and Flower. Being there, we watched a lot happen around us. While much has been made about the rejuvenation of the central core, there's also a vast amount that's going on around what I would call the edges, the very soft edges in our case, in downtown Los Angeles. South Park is one of the most obvious examples, with Staples and all the rejuvenation and new building going up there. That's easy to see. There has been, over a long arc of time, a lot of development on the eastside near the L.A. River-SCI-Arc, the Artist Loft District, Little Tokyo. Central City West has developed as well, particularly with housing in the area of Good Samaritan hospital and our new Central High School. We've seen all of this stuff happening, and we're very interested in it. Historically, we haven't thought of ourselves as doing a lot of our work in downtown Los Angeles, but, we have been here for a considerable time now.

In our own particular case as architects, our choice to move to Chinatown was, in a sense, a nexus between growth and poverty. This is a tremendously interesting and diverse community. There's huge potential and we're seeing that even in the time since we bought this property and developed it into our office. The poverty aspect is that we're architects. We can't afford to do this at Wilshire and Flower. That area is already largely built out and land values are what they are. But we can do it here, thankfully. And we can control our overhead costs going forward and plow it back into the design work and our terrific people.

Could you describe the building you have bought, the Basso Chrysler-Jeep dealership?

When we went out looking for a space, we were fairly simple-minded about it. We had criteria and we had a budget. Then we found something we liked and discovered that there's a seller and that the seller has an entire life story here. All of a sudden, the building and property have a much more complex history than we ever imagined at the outset of our mission.

Dominic Basso was a racecar driver from the very beginning. He drove racecars rather famously on the East Coast, moved to Los Angeles in the 1920's where there was a budding automobile racing community, as well as very early auto sales and manufacturing. I've been told that this may have been the first automobile showroom in America. The showroom opened in 1928 and it has remained in the hands of the family since that time. When we were looking at the property, the Basso family understood that it was a less viable location for a large car retail sales operation than it once was. A lot of that has moved both out of Los Angeles and down the Figueroa corridor. I think the Bassos had been thinking of selling for some time. So, it was a very beneficial thing for us, and I believe it was for them as well.

Changing subjects, the Los Angeles Times is looking for a new architecture critic. What ought to be this writer's professional profile?

It should be someone with a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of Los Angeles, with a very widely traveled life experience; someone who understands what the new Berlin is like, has seen what's happened along the SouthBank in London, understands Central Europe, the former Soviet Republics, Africa, and Asia. However, this person also needs to understand Los Angeles for what it is, which is a very unique place and still, very much a global city. There are people presently in Los Angeles who probably fit that bill, and there are some people that could be brought in from other cities that would be delighted to come to Los Angeles and expound.

Let's close by asking about your new position at the USC School of Architecture. As Director of the Graduate Architectural Program, the position formerly held by Robert Harris, what will be your priorities and focus?

There are about 100 students today in the program and it's growing very rapidly. I'd like to do several things in this role. First, I would like to continue to reinforce the orientation of graduate architectural education as studying the problems of urbanization and urban issues. USC's graduate architectural programs, of course, are right in the southern sector of downtown, so we have our laboratory laid out at our feet.

Second, I would like to bring a wide diversity of fields to bear on the study of architecture. Life sciences, philosophy, linguistics, music theory and the fine arts. Innovations are being made in the spaces between traditional fields.

Third and finally, I would like to encourage and begin to map out the notion of architecture as a culture, not only an individual's flash of brilliance. In fact, the exercise of architecture invokes a rigorous attitude, specific tools, and a desire to heal. As a culture, this is something that can be largely learned and lived. The students at USC, as you know, are extraordinarily diverse. Architecture is a culture we can gestate in Los Angeles and then send out with the graduate students to their homelands in the far corners of the world.