Looking Down on L.A. Skyscrapers : Architecture Critics Call Downtown’s Newest ‘Ordinary’

If only they had stayed at the airport.

From there the city’s skyline, recently crowned by the tallest building on the West Coast, looked good enough to a group of visiting architecture critics who gathered here Saturday to survey the city’s latest attempts to beautify its downtown.

Up close, however, it was the same old story. Downtown Los Angeles, long a target of disdain by Eastern critics, took it in the chops once again.

“Ordinary,” said Michael Sorkin of the Village Voice. “We’re living in a fairly exciting time. There are some exciting propositions out there,” he said, referring to buildings in other cities. “How come none of them are appearing here?”

‘Developer Driven’

Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe replied that certain extraordinary cities, such as Paris, are full of ordinary buildings, but he seemed to find little about this city’s latest face-lift to get excited about.

Campbell said that the downtown’s newest and proudest achievement, the 73-story First Interstate World Center, made for “a pretty eloquent form on the skyline” but from street level was another matter.

“I don’t like what I see so far,” Campbell said of the building’s unfinished base.

John Pastier of Architecture Magazine described the building as “developer driven,” a structure whose shape was determined by financial considerations. For two-thirds of the way up, Pastier said, the building lacks distinction, its shape determined by the need for a large, uniform floor plan. Only toward the top, where the contours begin to change, does the building have some interest, he said.

Other critics on the panel were Diana Ketcham of the Oakland Tribune and Suzanne Stephens, the panel’s moderator, a former editor of Progressive Architecture and now a teacher of architectural criticism at Barnard College.

The critics, none of whom work for local newspapers, were invited here by LA Architect, the publication of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The critics, joined by the architects of three of the buildings under discussion, took part in a daylong symposium titled “Critics and Cranes.”

Island of New Construction

The purpose of the symposium was to focus on an island of new construction, surrounding the Central Library at 5th Street and Grand Avenue, which the city hopes will become a model for a prettier and livelier downtown. The neighborhood is important for a number of reasons. With the Biltmore and the library, it boasts two of the city’s most valued historic buildings. The area is situated between Bunker Hill and Pershing Square and is seen as a link between the downtown’s old and new quarters.

When all of the construction is complete, the neighborhood will be festooned with kiosks, plazas, open-air cafes, an outdoor stairway and other gathering places that planners hope will draw people from all walks of life and end the segregation that has made the area around Pershing Square a sort of Maginot Line between rich and poor.

Only two of the buildings discussed at the symposium are complete or near completion. They are First Interstate World Center, which was designed by architect I.M. Pei, and the Biltmore Tower, a commercial addition to the Biltmore Hotel designed by Thomas H. Landau of the Landau Partnership.

The symposium also focused on Norman Pfeiffer’s design for the ongoing expansion of the Central Library and on the California Gas Tower. The architect of that 54-story building, which is barely under way, is Richard C. Keating of Skidmore, Owings and Merill.

Keating, Pfeiffer and Landau attended the symposium. They discussed their buildings but, for the most part, did not debate the critics.

At least one of the critics, Ketcham of the Oakland Tribune, said that preservation of the Central Library had loomed too large on the architectural agenda and that the public’s demand for faithfulness to the design of the original library perhaps had inhibited creativity in the immediate neighborhood.

“When so much of the thinking about what is to be built next is colored by sentimentality over preservation, it can lead to architects feeling that they have to build background buildings,” she said.