MICHAEL MALTZAN

Michael Maltzan has just been selected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to design its temporary quarters. He designed the Harvard Westlake School’s Feldman/Horn Center for the Arts.

The architecture of the future school must be linked inextricably to our collective urban future. As more schools and education facilities are built in Los Angeles, they must be seen as more than containers to warehouse education programs. As potential cultural icons, high schools can help define and mark a neighborhood. In this context, we are proposing a series of high-school towers spread throughout Los Angeles, defining their districts in a primarily horizontal city. These houses of education would become orientation landmarks for all of us as we move around the city.

In our concept for the Hollywood/Marshall High School, we propose a tower with a connected low-rise structure to be built over the Hollywood Freeway. Positioned at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and the 101, the new building as school and community center could become both a metaphoric as well as literal “bridge,” stitching together two sides of the city torn apart by the cut of freeway.

The tower high school is meant to create many kinds of connections between neighborhoods. Visible from the highway or from Sunset Boulevard, it would have community functions in its bridge base, creating activity links along both the vehicle and pedestrian pathways. Perhaps most critical to the students, views from their classrooms out to the city beyond would give them a stronger perspective of the relationships among the many precincts within Los Angeles.

By placing most necessary school functions in the tower, the space not taken up by a more spread-out campus could be made into a badly needed park for the surrounding neighborhoods. This tree-filled green space would wrap around the high school and help knit together the school and neighborhood. It would also provide a setting distinct from most of the new schools in the city, and is a strategy that could be repeated throughout L.A.

Last, but perhaps most important, the high-school tower over the highway makes it clear that education is valuable and visible. With LAUSD in seeming retreat, our children being educated in portable trailers on asphalt lots and the architecture of new schools growing ever more banal, the high-school tower is intended to make it clear that education is both vital and unmistakably present in our urban and civic lives. *