Urban Visionaries Coming Into Focus

A year after the hype that accompanied the near-simultaneous openings of the Getty Center in Brentwood and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, architecture has gone through a series of more subtle but telling shifts. As a younger generation of architects begins to capture significant commissions, they are testing the profession’s limits with projects that reflect increasingly complex understandings of our urban context. This is good for architecture and good for the culture at large. It signifies a new openness to ideas, a broader understanding of how architecture can not only enliven the cultural landscape but also reassert its role as a force that can shape our common values.

This year, Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam and Zaha Hadid of London, two architects who are reshaping the architectural landscape worldwide, won their first major commissions in the U.S. In February, Koolhaas was awarded the commission to design the McCormick Tribune Student Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago. The project will allow Koolhaas to tinker with the school’s landmark campus, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1940. Mies van der Rohe’s glass-and-steel buildings were emblematic of Modernism’s desire to create a stripped-down architecture of utopian refinement, one that represented an industrially based social order, and Koolhaas’ scheme is a challenge to that earlier Modernist ethos. In his design, the collision of various paths, both on an urban and pedestrian scale, reintroduce the chaotic nature of human life the early Modernists so rigidly opposed.

A few months later, Hadid got the commission for the Cincinnati Center for the Arts. Hadid’s design is a thrilling take on the vertical city that also seeks to meld the energy of the urban street with the inner life of the building, albeit on a smaller scale. There, the museum’s lobby is conceived as an immense public forum, one that seeks to create a seamless bond between the chaotic life of the city and the viewing of art inside. The galleries, stacked on seven floors, are an extension of that thinking, with large ramps that lead you from the lobby up into the building.

Both Hadid and Koolhaas have long been outsiders among the architectural establishment. These projects finally will expose their work to the public on a much broader scale. Both are scheduled for completion in 2001.

In Helsinki, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by New York-based architect Steven Holl--one of the profession’s most original talents--opened in April. Holl’s architecture is more spiritually based than Koolhaas’ or Hadid’s, and the Kiasma Museum has a more monastic feel. It seeks to quiet the soul, not to excite it. Holl’s design conceptually twists together two parallel structures into a wonderful melding of public life and the more private contemplation of art. In a poetically symbolic gesture, visitors enter the galleries by climbing a long, curving ramp that winds its way up between the two colliding forms.

Holl’s museum opened to much less fanfare than either the Guggenheim Bilbao or the Getty Center, yet it is a breakthrough project for the architect. It is his first major public commission and prompts the hope that Holl may soon be working on projects of some civic importance in his native country.

Locally, a younger generation of emerging architectural talents gives hope that Los Angeles could once again become an epicenter of architectural invention. Despite the dizzying recent success of Frank Gehry, one of the few architects in recent memory to become a legitimate international celebrity, the city’s architectural community remains a fractured one.

Since the 1980s, when architects such as Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss emerged as the new stars of a budding architectural scene, L.A. has seemed on the verge of becoming an important enclave for architectural creation, one that could someday produce an architecture of genuine historical weight. But the reality has never quite lived up to the hype. Unlike Los Angeles at mid-century--when architects such as Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra and, later, John Lautner were at the center of a vibrant architectural scene marked by a plethora of competing visions--the contemporary architectural community remains dominated by the presence of one man, Gehry.

Slowly, that has begun to change. The so-called second generation of contemporary architects that thrived here during the building boom of the ‘80s is attracting increasingly large-scale commissions. Mayne, for example, has recently designed three Los Angeles-area schools, two of which are scheduled for completion in 1999. This past year, Moss completed two major office structures, both in partnership with developer Frederick Smith, an active supporter of eccentric architectural talents. And the Santa Monica-based Hodgetts + Fung won a competition for the design of a fine arts building for Otis College of Art and Design, while their renovation of Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater was completed this fall. These are all firms known for their experimental--some would say radical--work. They are breaking through into the mainstream.

More important, however, has been the slow emergence of a group of younger voices eager to challenge that old guard: Michael Maltzan, Wes Jones, Guthrie + Buresh. All are beginning to broaden the definition of what popular magazines have long dubbed “L.A. architecture.”

Maltzan, in particular, has had a breakthrough year with the completion of the Feldman/Horn Center for the Arts at Los Angeles’ Harvard-Westlake High School. The project forgoes splashy imagery for a more mature, restrained architectural language reminiscent of the work of Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza. Like Siza’s works, Maltzan’s design seeks to reveal the social forces that architecture often unwittingly conceals.

All of this is good for Los Angeles. It suggests that the city is maturing into a haven where many competing cultural values can coexist, where ideas have a place in the formation of a more fertile culture. In a country that is becoming increasingly polarized politically, it is perhaps idealistic to suggest that such a condition can endure for long. But architecture is an art that, at its best, always represents the deepest values of its creators. Those ideals are then inevitably tested in the world. In a healthy culture, even seemingly opposed visions can not only coexist, but also succeed.

For that trend to continue, the city will have to recognize the talent that is growing here and find ways to nurture it. And it will have to remain open to the inevitable contradictions of the creative mind.