ARCHITECTURE : Dream of California Good Life Comes Alive at Farmers Market

Real estate developers used to promote Los Angeles as the place where you could reach out of your kitchen window and pick an orange. Over time, that image has been replaced by other dreams of the good life. At Farmers Market, the old myth of an abundant agriculture meets the current image of the world as a type of giant shopping mall where everything is available and appearances are everything, and the dreams of a future world where we all live in dense and vital environments.

Farmers Market started as a showplace for local produce, organized by real estate promoter Roger Dahljom. An ad hoc market had grown up on a plot of land owned by oil magnate Earl B. Gilmore (whose house, the Gilmore Adobe, is now the headquarters of the Farmers Market), and in 1934 Dahljom reorganized this lively produce mart into an informal grouping of stalls protected from a sea of parking by a ring of clapboard buildings. The market announced itself from the corner of 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue with a windmill (now a clock tower). The parking, containment and advertising formalized the reality of agricultural splendor into a preserve or image of itself.

As with most preserves, the Farmers Market is richer than anything you would find in the wild. Walk in through the narrow slots architect James Dolena left between his versions of Central Valley farm buildings and you will find yourself assaulted by colors, textures and smells that reach far beyond those created by native produce and include everything from tacky T-shirts to Hungarian wine and Chilean honey. There is barely room to move inside the Casbah-like market, and that is exactly what makes it such a live space. Most important, you are continually confronted with other people, ranging from the 10 million tourists who visit this site every year to the screenwriters at Kokomo Cafe and local residents buying their groceries. This is a fragment of a real city.

To achieve this success, Farmers Market had to break a few rules. None of the buildings are beautiful in themselves, and there is no clear order to their arrangement. The asphalt of the parking lot continues all the way through the market, so that you never really feel inside even when you are always surrounded by walls. The fire marshal would never allow you to build such a dense space these days. Worst of all, Farmers Market turns its back to the street, leaving only a recently planted row of birds of paradise and palm trees to guard the outside edges of the parking lot.

You might say Farmers Market presents a different model for Los Angeles. This model does not look like the polite pedestrian-oriented streets of the East Coast or Europe, but it provides their amenities within the walled-off spaces that we know from the presidios of Spanish California and our own shopping malls. It is not a pretty and coherent picture of good form, but a collage of often disparate elements brought together to create an intense experience out of an overlap of many visual clues and contrasting forms. The market is not a grand public space, but it is a place where you feel as if you are part of a public.

The current recession has put plans to turn the market into a food court for a giant mixed-used development into what I hope will be a permanent hold. Instead, we should expand the market. There is no reason why it cannot obtain housing, offices and schools. I do not mean that we should abstract its principles into stucco rectangles, as the Gilmore Co. itself did when it added the North Court to the complex, but that we should just let the market ramble on. It could be as dense and large as the site allows. I would gladly sit in traffic or worm my way through a narrow passage if I knew I could pluck an orange from my window.