A LOOK AHEAD * Critics say the new window air conditioners at Lincoln High ruin the school’s classic lines. And they question the wisdom of . . . : Placing Cost Savings Ahead of Aesthetics

Los Angeles school officials are facing pressure to rip out much of a $2-million air conditioning installation at Lincoln High School because of protests that the bulky window units and wiring conduit have disfigured one of the city’s best examples of Depression-era public works architecture.

Community leaders in Lincoln Heights say that heavy-handed bureaucrats in the Los Angeles Unified School District rejected their pleas to change the design earlier this year after the first cooling units were placed inside offices.

Since then, dozens more of the boxes have been set up outside classroom windows where they rest on metal racks. A band of steel tubes that carry power to the units now spans the main classroom building midway up, contrasting sharply with its delicate Art Deco lines.

“It’s truly disgusting what has been done there,” said Michael Lehrer, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architecture.

Lehrer, a member of the citizens committee that oversees the district’s $2.4-billion school construction bond that funded the air conditioning project, said he will recommend removing the equipment, no matter what the cost.

“My position would be that it has to be ripped off,” Lehrer said. “Lincoln has this wonderful dignity. The violation is so egregious that I personally have no interest in compromising on this.”

The Proposition BB oversight committee is scheduled to take up the proposal Wednesday. Although the committee lacks the authority to order demolition of the work, the school board has almost always acceded to its recommendations.

Lehrer said he hopes the waste of precious repair funds will wake up district bureaucrats to the necessity of changing their habit of putting economy ahead of quality.

“The value to the district, to the city and the community of knowing that this way is unacceptable I think in the long run will save a lot of money,” Lehrer said.

Steven Soboroff, chairman of the committee, said it will consider a 12-point plan that would require the work to be redone under exacting attention to aesthetics and historical significance.

Officials defend the work at Lincoln as a necessary sacrifice of aesthetics in a massive and underfunded program to repair hundreds of neglected schools.

Installing coolers on the building’s roof and running ducts between floors would be twice as costly, said Lynn Roberts, head of the district’s bond construction office.

“Doubling the cost of the project is not within our fiscal ability,” she said.

Roberts said a community meeting is planned Monday to consider low-cost refinements that might make the equipment more palatable.

“I hope we can work out something with them to make it appealing, because I sure don’t want to do anything to harm the school,” Roberts said.

But she offered no hope that the district would meet the demand to tear out the current system and build a more expensive one in its place.

While sympathizing with the district’s financial pinch, Soboroff agreed with Lehrer that the work at Lincoln illustrates the district’s disregard for its role as steward for important civic assets.

“If aesthetics are compromised, at least it should be discussed,” Soboroff said. “Let the community say they would rather have eight classrooms air conditioned with wall units rather than four rooms with central air. It shouldn’t be the district.”

In the northeast area of Lincoln Heights, the school is the community’s most prominent and most architecturally striking structure.

Much of the campus was built in the late 1930s under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, which sought to pull America out of the Depression by putting the unemployed to work erecting public buildings.

The project gave Los Angeles dozens of its most attractive school buildings, the most striking of which reflect the era’s Streamline Moderne and Art Deco styles that emphasized an optimistic view of technological and social progress.

John Thomas, of the state Office of Historical Preservation, said Lincoln combines elements of both styles, along with some classical touches. Evidence of those styles remains intact in the reliefs, murals and inscriptions incorporated into Lincoln’s distinctive poured-concrete walls.

Two original murals and Art Deco stainless steel railings, for example, still line the main hallway of the administration building despite being in easy reach of the thousands of teenagers who pass through daily.

The beauty of the campus is only part of the heritage that endears it to the community, said Carlos Reyes, a 1976 Lincoln graduate who now heads the alumni committee.

As the site of student walkouts of 1968, Lincoln provided the spark for the Chicano rights movement across America.

“This building is history,” Reyes said. “The walkouts inspired me to go to college, to go to school.”

Michael Diaz, president of the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood and Preservation Assn., said the campus qualifies as a historic landmark on three grounds--its age, its architecture and its position in history as the spawning ground for the Chicano rights movement.

Seven of Lincoln’s buildings have been determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, said Thomas of the state preservation office.

Although the campus is not yet on the list, the designation alone brings into effect rules that should have prevented any disfigurement of the buildings, Thomas said.

Roberts, the head of bond construction projects, said the district was not aware that the campus had been designated a potential landmark, and apparently no one bothered to check preservation records when the division of the state architect approved the project.

Principal Lupe Sonnie didn’t need a landmark designation to know that something was amiss when she returned from Christmas break in the first week of January. Metal cases about seven feet tall and three feet across stood in the main office, blocking one of the three windows. Several other offices were even more squeezed, including a tiny nurse’s cubicle barely large enough for two cots. In all of them, industrial-style sheet-metal ducting hung over employees heads.

Sonnie said she was pleased to be getting air conditioning but not at the cost of the school’s aesthetic and historical legacy.

Her protests went unheeded. Both the contractor and architect told her the units were the kind approved for all schools, and that the district would not make exceptions, she said.

As a last appeal, Diaz and Reyes took their case to the citizens committee last month.

Dropping by the school to see for himself, Lehrer of the American Institute of Architects said he was disgusted, though not surprised.

“Unfortunately it’s not shocking,” he said. “It’s the way business has normally been done.”