Walking the Walk: Sci-Arc Director on Creativity in the Big City

Eric, what is SCI-Arc's mission and how is it aided by your new location in downtown Los Angeles' industrial and commercial center.

I think that SCI-Arc is still working to understand its mission, its interests, its responsibilities, and its obligations in Downtown Los Angeles.

Downtown is the most heterogeneous, mixed piece of this city, and I think part of the purpose of coming into Downtown was to bring the students into a world which was very much emerging. We have encouraged them to participate outside the school and conducted outreach programs.

When the idea of SCI-Arc coming downtown was pushed by Mayor Riordan's development team – with the support of Councilmember Jan Perry – there was a sense from the city administration that the physical presence of an institution like SCI-Arc in a city is important, because it defines its interests differently than a private developer with respect to land and what is developed on it. The theory was that SCI-Arc would not only help to regenerate its surrounding area with housing and commercial development, but that it would be an advocate for the development of the sites to the west.

It's a great site. We can look to East LA. Nearby are the LA County Hospital, the city administration offices, USC, the train tracks, the river, and Bunker Hill. The bridges are spectacular up and down the river, and one could imagine all sorts of businesses locating over there. My sense is most of the people who live in the city have never seen that view. This is a unique place from which to understand the city.

SCI-Arc, strangely enough, has been competitive with schools that are considered to be fancy schools. I don't know that it competes now as well as it did, but it still competes. Part of the problem is, paradoxically, where it's landed. Parents from the suburbs are concerned about where their kids are going to live. I think there are pragmatic issues that SCI-Arc has to be attentive to, such as housing, parking, and the ability to be competitive with other institutions that offer different sorts of amenities along with unusual academics.

Have your students been involved in SCI-Arc's negotiations with the landowner and with other developers in the school's vicinity regarding future plans for the area?

Well, it's a question of how much they know and when they know it. I think what we have tried to do is to make sure that the academic side of the school continues to be what it is. The students are part of these discussions. They're informed periodically. We know there's a problem with parking, and we negotiated it and solved it. There are things that come up and go away, and other things come up.

What are SCI-Arc's options today regarding this downtown site? Is there a deal with the developer that you could describe?

We are trying to come to an agreement about the future conceptual and organizational model of the site. Not numbers, not how many units, how high, how wide, but the physiology of it, without doing it architecturally, but doing it organizationally. It would deal with the developers' needs, SCI-Arc's needs, the neighborhood's needs, and however the councilwoman wants to define the district's needs. I think we have a reasonable chance of actually coming out with a spectacular plan that will confirm the original decision of the business team to put SCI-Arc here, to use this as a point of departure and development for a key venue in the city, which can then extend very readily to the east and to the west.

Is there a time frame for this conversation?

I think it ought to be resolved pretty quickly. As a matter of fact, I thought it was resolved already, but I'm learning not to jump too fast.

Changing the focus of this discussion, it's often suggested that there is very little planning that takes place in Los Angeles, a lot of negotiations, but very little planning. What has your experience been with the city and with the planning department?

You could argue that this project is of the scale that would constitute an architecture problem, as opposed to a planning problem. We looked at it as a planning problem.

I think what we have a chance to do is to influence the direction of this piece of the city, to tie it into this nexus of Santa Fe, First, Grand Avenue, and the tracks, and the river, and maybe Boyle Heights.

What is the capacity of the City of Los Angeles to engage in such planning?

I think it is actually growing, and maybe that has something to do with some kind of maturation process. When you're advocating planning, what you want is to anticipate an organizational idea for livability, use, purpose, and direction. There are people who argue that you make it up as you go, and then, when we worked in Culver City, we stopped that, and now we've started again, and we actually advocated something called the architecturally free zone. This means that a given area has no intrinsic rules. It has only extrinsic rules. Each piece as it's developed, or each area, not necessarily property by property, has to make its own case. If you get to build a one hundred-story high-rise, I won't necessarily be able to build the same thing. I may have to build a park. So, it's not how high, how wide, how much is the setback. This is the idea.

You have had experience with revitalization in Culver City and now with the SCI-Arc site. Do you expect a public-private visioning process in downtown's industrial zones, given budget shortfalls and all of the changes that are taking place in the governance of Los Angeles? Is it possible in LA? Are we too big?

We are talking about a city that is intrinsically piecemeal. We aren't talking about Manhattan. There are fifteen council districts, and those districts are the preserve of the people who preside there. So, you have at least fifteen perspectives. Granted, you have to have some collective effort, but to some extent the collectivity is political: if I support your initiatives, then you'll support my initiatives. You could argue that this reinforces the fragmentation. The question is probably at what level is it possible to plan for items that are substantial in scale like the river or the tracks, which cross these boundaries.

In an institutional sense, the tools are not readily available. In terms of personalities, who the mayor is would make a substantial difference in this discussion. Who the councilperson is in this district could make a difference, because if the councilperson is interested in this discussion, then you could begin to talk about putting a stadium here or a housing project there. I think what we are looking for is a city's ability to influence big issues that transcend districts and allow a certain kind of conceptual vision to be part of the thinking in the city.

If Los Angeles were to host a conference on urban planning in the year 2005, whom would you invited to speak?

It depends on the city and whether the structure exists in terms of a central voice. You could look to Robert Moses or Baron Haussman and the people who make those kinds of arguments, but I think the political instincts of a city like this run completely contrary to that. You could make an egalitarian argument that the instinct is right. There is an argument that says the more voices the better.

Such a process runs counter to advocacy of any general conceptual vision. People fight the vision, and they fight each other. It is symptomatic of the spread of democracy. Even if Robert Moses were around, he could never get a park in Flushing today. He could never get the Grand Central Parkway. I think it is very difficult to do that and the difficulty is endemic to the rights of all of the people who will be affected.

What is the urban design vision that your students and faculty are most attracted to at SCI-Arc?

They are watching a process. They are watching Jan Perry get involved in a discussion of SCI-Arc and the relevance of SCI-Arc to this city. They are watching the city business team bring an institution into the city. They are watching the city set up something called the unified plan, which is virtually toothless, which is really the point, but nevertheless there is a concept and a vision. They brought the institution, they put up the money, and they brought a plan that the neighborhood was supposed to share in. They didn't really make a mechanism to deliver it. What we are trying to do is to come in and make the plan. We make it. It exists, and it is agreed to. What is not agreed to is the means to implement it between the parties, and the public sector has a role in this.

What I am hearing you say is "think small," because thinking big brings out all of the disparate parties with no ability to mediate and move a project of scale. I also hear you saying one must take into account the influence of the market in public-private planning. Is that an accurate digest of this exchange?

SCI-Arc was about ideas that had to do with building and design. So, one could argue that there are all sorts of visions and conceptual models and ideas that you can advocate. What I have to figure out is who is going to help us to implement it and how do you do it. If you have a traffic problem and you can't get up and down the Santa Monica Freeway, it probably won't help you to imagine a Robertson off ramp. It is probably easier, in a pragmatic way, to work on things in a piecemeal way, and once you do that, you almost inevitably lose a conceptual model that has any strength. I am not saying that is a good thing. I am not stating I am for that, and I am not saying that is practical.

If the city leaders wanted to hire you for a year to be the acting planning director for Los Angeles, what would be your priorities, and what would you do first?

The problem with the jobs you are talking about is that there is no job there because the capacity of that person, the legal capacity, the visionary capacity, the advocacy capacity, is not really built into the process. It is at best a kind of facilitator of small things, a negotiator between disparate parties and all of that. So you are asking somebody to do planning, and then you are putting them in a situation where you can't do anything. You would have to do is you would have to make a job with the financial resources, the staffing resources. There would have to be a concession of the fiefdoms, the council districts. They would forego certain responsibilities in order to make sure that a vision of the well-being of the aggregate took a priority. The problem with planning is not that there aren't plenty of people who have lots of ideas about what the city should be. There are. However, the means to implement these ideas requires some modicum of authoritarian or controlling influence.

So, in closing, how do your students handle this fragmentation of planning authority when they are confronted with it?

I think we are advocates of conceptual ideas that take on big subjects and deal with them. There are two different issues here. One is the idea, and the other is the politics of implementation. In some ways they are different, and that is why some make a distinction for physical planning.