A Tale of Two Urban Plans

There has always been robust competition between New York and Los Angeles. Or more precisely, between New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers, since many Angelenos originated in the city which they now reject with all the fervor of a convert to a new creed. That being so, one might expect that, in regard to these two latitudinal antipodes of America, there would be energetic competition in the matter of architecture as well. And yet that is not the case. Among those New Yorkers who care about things architectural, the serious competition has been coming out of Chicago, rather than points farther west, for the past century or so. And though Los Angeles does possess architecture — it is, after all, a city — you don't have the impression that the majority of its citizens care greatly about their buildings, and surely these do not enter materially into any assessment of the Angelenos' municipal identity. Indeed, the argument could be made that venturing out West in the first place was in large measure a rejection of architecture, especially those big agglomerations of it that usually define a city.

In part this has to do with the respective origins of each city. New York, a few centuries older than Los Angeles, represents the organic evolution of a trading post that grew and grew until eventually it encompassed the whole of Manhattan and beyond. And though its progress above 14th Street was influenced by the central planning of a grid, promulgated back in 1811, there has always been something higgledy-piggledy about its development, with the all-powerful real estate market dictating its progress.

Los Angeles, by contrast, was scarcely on the map before 1900. What put it there was the movie business, and what caused it to expand exponentially was the automobile — as opposed to New York, whose growth was determined, after the Civil War, by elevated trains and then the subway.

But the nature of Los Angeles's expansion was entirely different from New York's. The conceptual premise of Los Angeles was the Garden City so dear to turnof-the-century urbanists like Ebenezer Howard and his disciple Lewis Mumford. In what would one day become better known as suburbia, the Garden City aspired to redeploy the urban population into a mass of green plots, each with enough lawn in front of it to give home-owners the feeling that they were in nature. That was in part the ideal of Robert Moses as well. This long-time commissioner of New York City's parks elevated the automobile to an almost sacramental status, conveying people from their green patches in suburbia to their office towers in Midtown. The result was, in varying degrees, a disaster.

Nevertheless, the consequence of this two-track evolution was that the defining architectural fact of New York was the building, in a multiplicity of vertical forms, while that of Los Angeles was the private home, a largely horizontal affair. And a further consequence was that, whereas New York, and especially Manhattan, is perhaps the most pedestrian friendly urban center in the world, few cities are as antagonistic to the pedestrian as Los Angeles. Locomotion there is so much the province of the automobile that mass transit scarcely exists.

The architectural style of Los Angeles is largely determined by such circumstances. Lateral expansion on the mainland, as opposed to vertical expansion on an island, results in an air of greater freedom from regulations and from citizen groups. Whereas everything in New York is regulated to the hilt, in ways that are often fatal to imaginative architecture, in Los Angeles structures and architects have room to breathe and dream. It is no accident that Frank Gehry — the most famous of Los Angeles's architects — could build his warped titanium Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. This enormity, which served as the template for his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, would have been unimaginable in New York, where Mr. Gehry's one completed structure to date, the Sails, on 18th Street and 11th Avenue, is a far tamer and inferior product.

Half a mile south of the Sails stands Richard Meier's one completed project in New York, three residential towers on Perry and Charles streets. Though well turned out, they are far less bold and imaginative than his Getty Museum, even though that very different project is itself far from perfect. It would seem then that there is a kind of gravitational drag that weighs down on architects in New York that is not present in Los Angeles.

This is especially true as regards the private home, a building typology with little or no relevance to New York City. Here again, Mr. Gehry is a representative example, above all in one of his early works, the deconstuctivist house he built for himself out of chicken wire, corrugated aluminum, and cinder blocks that first earned him the international reputation he enjoys today. For such an architectural act, there is no equivalent and there can never be an equivalent, in the city of New York.

jgardner@nysun.com