Think, Feel, Make Do: The Classroom of the Future

SCHOOL LIBRARY The library planned for this school in the San Gabriel Valley will occupy the ground floor while maker labs will reside at the second floor. The feeling of embedment within nature is important to the school.

Early in our practice Steve once said: “we should be able to design a building in the back of a bus.” This struck me as entirely true and it has stuck with me since. While only slightly an exaggeration, what is true is that what we do is all in our heads (hearts and souls), and to the extent that it doesn’t get in the way, the setting isn’t all that crucial. The setting may influence what we think, make, feel and do, it may enhance or facilitate it but for the most part it doesn’t inspire or drive it. It in no way enhances our commitment to our practice or our resilience in the face of its inevitable failures.

5898 BLACKWELDER IN TRANSITION Even as our building undergoes structural and other renovations,
the studio goes on. We make do.

We know something about how Socrates taught mostly through his student Plato.  According to Plato, Socrates professed to know nothing except that he knew nothing and that “learning” was only ever about asking questions, a constant pursuit. As far as I know we know nothing about where or in what setting Socrates taught. Perhaps crucially, he was supposed to have said that Athens was his classroom. Pictorial tradition and the popular imagination (or at least mine) have him placed with a group of students (or peers as he would have it) at the agora or in the shade of a tree under the Athenian sun. Not much else would have been necessary.

MINIMUM SETTING REQUIRED Whether it’s a conversation to get at the heart of a question, or a project to get something made, not a whole lot is required—perhaps the shade of a tree or the right tools.

HELLENIC GREECE Socrates, the original teacher in the western tradition, said Athens was his classroom.

Socrates’ student Plato went on to establish the Academy in the 4th century BC and fifty years later his protégé Aristotle founded the Lyceum. Then we got monasteries and cloisters, more academies and lyceums, then colleges and universities. Twenty-five centuries after Socrates we came to think of the teacher or professor as the possessor of knowledge (the smartest person in the room), the asker of questions only to the extent that students were tested on the knowledge the professor had imparted.  Most of us experienced school in a classroom: a one-size-fits-all, assembly line, teacher-centric, student-as-passive-receptacle-of-information-to-be-applied-later-in-life kind of place.  Not much went on in the classroom beyond listening, reading, writing and memorizing (to exaggerate only slightly)—and that’s all the classroom had to accommodate.

LEARNING BY DOING Traditionally less passive than active, learning was originally seen as a process of asking questions — sculpting or shaping one’s way to the root of an issue, or making something — sculpting or shaping one’s way to a result.

ROMANCING THE CLASSROOM With the rediscovery of antiquity in the western tradition, the settings within which the learned and the accomplished of the past were displayed became increasingly grand.

In the 21st century, educators from pre-school through graduate school say that more has changed in education in the last five years than the last fifty. These changes have centered around the growing realization that creativity, collaboration and resilience are those qualities of the fully participating whole person that will matter most. In the information age of today and perhaps the artificial intelligence age of tomorrow, those who will contribute most will be those who transform what little we individually know — through experimentation, sharing, failure and success — into something none of us yet knows. This is less something entirely new than it is a matter of emphasis and perspective.

ROMANCING THE TEACHER By the 20th century the teacher or professor had become someone authoritative, loved and feared.

ASSEMBLY LINE As great as the public education system in America has been, most would agree the time has arrived to rethink some of its most systemic characteristics.

LEARNING BY DESIGN The Stanford d.school was birthed in the 1970s. It’s increasing influence on the world of education is undeniable—perhaps inevitably given the influence of Silicon Valley on the popular imagination.

We seem to have rediscovered that making things (or “project-based learning”), whether in science or math, the humanities or art, individually or in groups is one of the best ways to learn. Traditionally the lab and the studio have been those places where this kind of (life-long) learning takes place. (The etymologies of the two words speak volumes: “studio” from the Latin studium, “place to study” and “laboratory” from the Latin laboratorium “place to work” or “work shop”). There’s nothing new about this except relative to what became the norm in schools in the United States in our lifetime — that norm perhaps being the exception rather than the rule. Socrates, we apparently do know, was trained as a stone mason.

LEARNING BY VOCATION Although the notion of school as a place within which to nurture a vocation is not new, the vocations are. (Above: The Anaheim Unified School District Magnolia High School (AUHSD) Center for Excellence project will accommodate a variety of programs in career technical education and training).

21ST CENTURY COMMUNICATION Less about books and periodicals than film and video, how we communicate going forward will focus more on imagery and the spoken word than words on a page.

SPECIALIZED LEARNING Those wanting to go into health and medicine will be able to start training as early as their teen years in this new facility that will train technicians in all areas of patient care.

The classroom of the future will incorporate more kinds of activities then when we adults were students. Its purpose will be to facilitate as many kinds of learning as we can imagine — even those we may not yet imagine. The classroom of the future will become more like the artists’ studio, the craftsman’s workshop and the scientists’ laboratory.  It will blend the classroom, music room, wood shop, homemaking, science and art classrooms of our day.  Its characteristics are simple: rectangular rooms of a certain size, well-proportioned and well-equipped. The length and breadth of the room, its furnishings, equipment and storage capacity will accommodate the variety of activities and informal ad hoc encounters that have come to occur every day in the dynamic, creative workplace that increasingly characterizes where we adults spend the day.  

21st CENTURY SECURITY The proliferation of the internet of things will necessitate its equal and opposite
reaction, securing the systems that enable it. (Above: AUHSD Magnolia High School Center for Excellence
Cyber Security suite).

COMPUTING AND MAKING Students born into the information age will employ computing as the foundation for innovations in robotics, appliances, alternate energy and mobility production. (Above: AUHSD Magnolia High School Center for Excellence prototype development/presentation hall and computing classroom.)

But how much of this is the province of the architect?  A well-equipped studio, lab, or workshop is a simple, messy place. Great, even good buildings are not required. A good conversation requires no building at all, not much more than the shade of a tree. We make do. Instead, isn’t our real contribution Athens? Who would Socrates, Plato and Aristotle have been without Athens (and vice-versa)? Is not the education of the whole person nurtured by the buildings and ensemble of buildings we inhabit — not the bus, but the campuses, towns and cities in which the bus circulates? Within the school buildings we design, our minimum obligation, to be sure, is to account for the classroom of the future — or is it the past? Regardless, it is the buildings and the accumulation of them for which we are most responsible.

SCHOOL STUDIO This room for a school in Los Angeles will accommodate activities associated with performing arts. It can be blacked out completely and opened up completely.

SCHOOL WORKSHOP A maker space is little more than what we use to call a workshop. The setting matters to the extent it facilitates what goes on in the room.

Revolve: Reconciliation in Our Time

LOGGIA There is no better word we know to describe the enclosing element that forms this museum’s main entrance (Museum of Redlands). There aren’t columns and arches but does it not perform as a traditional loggia would?

One hundred years ago, the poet T.S Eliot wrote an article “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in which among other insights he offers this one: “Tradition…cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature… has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

ARCH AND VAULT The underlying structural properties of brick and stone gave shape to the traditional arch and vault thousands of years ago. Our construction methods are different, but are the shapes therefore prohibited?

RUSTICATION As an elegant way since the Renaissance to render surfaces of an urban building that yield a sense of protection are there new ways to achieve the same effect?

Written in 1919, in the fledgling moments of what we now call the modern movement, this poet — one of the greatest of modernist artists — in these few phrases and those that follow argues for a conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written, that while the material of art never improves it is also never quite the same and what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.  

ROMANCE AND REASON 19TH century architects (left) indulged in romantic (and to them meaningful) adventures borrowing imagery from every corner of humanity and its history. 20th century architects (right) dispensed with all of that to instead focus on architecture in pursuit of solutions — programmatic, technological, societal and otherwise.

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE The Janus head (ancient Rome) and present day debates in the scientific community swirling around presentism v. eternalism, share an appreciation for the ambiguity inherent in what we mean by “our time”—is it ours alone, discretely wedged between an unrecoverable past and unknown future, or part of a continuum to which we have always and will always belong?

This is hardly “what’s past is past” or “what’s old is bad”— the kind of thinking that has come to characterize (or caricature) what we think of as the paradigm of art and architecture in the 20th century (with now the inevitable backlash in some quarters: “what’s new is bad”). Eliot, the modernist, instead argues for a relationship with the art of the past and further that the whole history of art is nothing more (nor less) than a train of thought that revolves. To be “original” may also mean to be “of the origins”.

ETERNAL MATH As early as 1947 Colin Rowe demonstrated how seemingly revolutionary modern architecture could in the hands of a profoundly thoughtful architect benefit from and carry forward arithmetic and geometric systems of composition that have been with us in one form or another since the beginning of human experience (Left, Villa Rotonda, Palladio; right, Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier).

BRICOLEUR Axel Vervoordt, a contemporary Dutch interior designer, draws from both ancient and modern, western and eastern (southern and northern), man-made and natural. The results are both unexpected and familiar, beautiful and enlightening.

ROMANTIC RATIONALISM Le Corbusier was not like a lot of modernists; a romanticist as much as a rationalist, his love affair with the Mediterranean while not always appropriate influenced his work life long. In southern California, this is not so much romantic as it is a (somewhat) natural response to the environment. (Above, his Beistegui apartment in Paris; (below our Mandell residence in Los Angeles).

If architecture can be thought of as built thought, the embodiment of consciousness (events and ideas), then it cannot have a past, present or future. The history of architecture is nothing more (nor less) than the accumulation of thoughts — experience that with a little bit (or a lot) of effort belongs to all of us, and upon which we are free to draw at any time for any purpose or at least to the extent that it furthers our effort to create a novel work of art. Good, bad or indifferent, why would we choose to censor experience? Innovation is nothing more (nor less) than making new (hopefully unexpected and fruitful) relationships among things we already know. Here again Eliot is helpful: “the poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

ANCIENT MODERNISM Louis Kahn had a love affair with the ruins of ancient Rome (not the actual buildings but their ruins) and it influenced his work life long. Whether made of stone, concrete or plaster, the barrel-vaulted room is forever compelling (Clockwise from upper left: ancient Rome, Kimball Art Museum, our Museum of Redlands)

VICTORIAN DELIRIUM Redlands, CA was established at the height of the Victorian era when luxurious patterns flourished on paper, walls and buildings. The back side of the barrel vault that pierces the Museum of Redlands is faced in a three-dimensional die-cut pattern that recalls such indulgences of the past.

CAN’T WE PLAY? Children’s libraries seem safe places these days to imbibe in flights of fancy that were once considered more pleasurable than decadent. (Clockwise from upper left: Palazzo del Te, Giulio Romano; our Beverly Hills Children’s Library and wallpaper designed by Alexander Girard in the mid-20th century).

Architects more than perhaps any other kind of visual artist seem to have had the greatest trouble with this. Why the uneasiness?  Interior designers, who are bricoleurs at heart and by trade (accumulators, collagists), have no problems drawing from whatever they find wherever they find it to create what they call “layered” experiences. They instinctively know that a so-called “ancient” or “modern” object takes on a different meaning when placed in a context not originally of its own—and conversely “ancient” and “modern” contexts mutate when populated with objects not originally of their making. It’s harder than it sounds, and the better the designer, the better the outcome.

BLUE AND GOLD The Hedrick Study at UCLA (upper and lower right) sought patterns natural and man-made—a sunset, deep space, Portuguese tile—that would subliminally suggest school colors.

BAROQUE EXUBERANCE While it would undermine the seriousness of purpose with which Borromini pursued his work to say so, his work undeniably results in a kind of exuberance that’s enduringly sensual bordering on the lurid. (Left, Sant’ Ivo della Sapienza, Rome; right, our lobby of the Main Instruction Building at Chaffey College).

We architects are more (or less?) than bricoleurs. We are also partly engineers. We unlike poets do have to respond to economics and mechanics — and this may be part of the problem. Maybe in the last century, this our other role, our obligation to society, has loomed too large, devoured our interests as artists in anything other than what’s right in front of us. To this day, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we persist in the myth that the technology of today (and yes tomorrow!) — construction technology, environmental technology, computing technology — will do all the innovating for us. Or worse: that it’s all about us. We have engaged in willful ignorance as if somehow forgetting is liberating.

BAROQUE THEATER Deceptively simple, the theaters of 18th century Europe were boxes decked out in color and pattern. (Below, our children’s story time theater at Beverly Hills Library).

BAROQUE GARDEN Mastering nature, ordering it and employing it for the purpose of decorative patterns in the open was outlandish to say the least in the context of today’s tastes. Out of bounds today? (Below, our Chaffey College Main Instruction Building).

We choose otherwise; we choose reconciliation. We choose  El Lissitsky and  Edwin Lutyens, Antonio Gaudi and Giulio Romano. We reserve the right to be as inspired by the Parthenon as we are the iPhone. More importantly, we choose to seek how our experience of the iPhone changes our relationship with the Parthenon (and vice-versa), how Lissitsky changed (without obliterating) our relationship with Lutyens, or Gaudi, Romano. We choose to play a part in and be played by all history or better yet since we are Americans all our histories that are and will always be alive. We choose to be of one mind with all human experience, a mind, which to paraphrase Eliot, both changes and abandons nothing en route. We choose to be conscious not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

NEOCLASSICAL BEAST 18th century architect LeDoux created buildings intended to read as massive, impenetrable, heavy blocks of stone. 20th century architects have sought to lighten the load, making buildings thin and transparent. Do we not ever get to indulge in weight and solidity again? (Left, his Royal Saltworks; right, our Doheny residences, West Hollywood, CA).

Opting Public

INVESTMENT IN COMMUNITY Why would a city and its taxpayers go to the trouble to build a community center— a building that will never generate a profit nor even pay for itself?

On the UCLA campus in Boelter Hall, the engineering building, there is a room that has been converted into a small museum.  It was once a research lab led by Professor  Leonard Kleinrock where the first “e-mail” was sent across an electronic communications system (then known as ARPANET, now known as the internet) in 1969 between UCLA in Los Angeles, CA and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto, CA. As a practical application of his team’s seminal research in the fields of computer science and electronic communications, this was the first of that which became a messaging system among colleagues within the academic world, a modest, quick and easy way to share research among peers working at a distance. 

INVESTMENT IN THE ACADEMY Professor Kleinrock and his colleagues at UCLA and Stanford Research Institute invested their time and our public dollars in research that ultimately led to a revolution in communications and transformation of our economies world-wide.

PRIVATE ENTERPRISE BUILT ON PUBLIC INVESTMENT The communications revolution was popularized, monetized and advanced by highly motivated and highly performing individual entrepreneurs.

Thirty years later, the internet became available to everyone. It got commercialized and popularized as the “world wide web”. Websites were created, dotcom became a thing, we got the cell phone and apps and all that.  Start-ups became big tech, the world changed.  “Making the world a better place” was often the stated motive and profit was the incentive. And since 1995 in the fields of computer science and digital technology both the motive and the incentive have driven innovation ever since.

INVESTMENT IN SCIENCE American taxpayers funded the mostly unglamorous work of over 400,000 people who together put a man on the moon and returned him to earth.

INVESTMENT IN PEOPLE Steve Johnson’s father, a mechanical engineer, worked at NASA in the 1960S on the Saturn program — the precursor to the Apollo program. Above: Steve (second from left) and family at Cape Canaveral Florida; Below: Steve’s father in the control room (third from left).

ENTREPRENEURS TAKE ON SPACE TRAVEL Neither Musk, Branson nor Bezos (top to bottom) invented space travel, nor its associated technologies nor anything close to it. They are personalities, figureheads, building businesses that rely on the experience of scientists and engineers whose knowledge was built on the foundation of years of public investment that preceded them.

But all that innovation—the appearance, dissemination and now ubiquity of so called “high-tech” (or “smart technology” driven forward, we are led to believe, by smart people) was preceded by a century of behind-the-scenes, blind alley wandering, fits-and-starts enduring, plodding and grinding, incremental innovation driven forward mostly by the desire to expand the boundaries of scientific and technological understanding and knowledge. At places like UCLA, a public university, and Stanford, a private university with lots of post war federal funding, the foundations laid for all that came later.

INVESTMENT IN INFRASTRUCTURE The federal government funded the transcontinental railroad and its expansion into a nation wide system. Railroad entrepreneurs then built business empires based on that infrastructure (Above: the transcontinental railroad under construction; Below: clockwise from upper left: Leland Stanford, Walter H Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie).

IT’S NOT THE TECHNOLOGY, STUPID Elon Musk and his team at Hyperloop (the technology of which is at least 200 years old) don’t get that the challenges of a transportation system are less technological then they are societal, governmental and political. The challenges facing the bullet train aren’t flawed technology, but rather logistical having mostly to do with property ownership and civil engineering.

Earlier in the 1960s over 400,000 people employed either directly by the federal government or by companies contracted with the federal government worked individually and in teams to rocket a man to the moon and back. It was a heavy lift. It was expensive, paid for by the American taxpayer, not at all a sure bet.  At government’s highest levels it was perhaps primarily motivated politically and ideologically (to best the communists), but the dividends since then have more than made up for the initial investments. The technology now firmly established the private sector (with typical fanfare bordering as always on hubris) has taken up the task of commercializing and popularizing space travel, once again ostensibly “for the sake of mankind” and justly to make money.

INVESTMENT IN EDUCATION The wisdom of the Americans from the founding of the colonies has been an on-going and consistent investment in public education. This more than anything has fueled our quality of life, the prosperity of our economy and our seemingly endless ability to remake ourselves. (Above: Boston Latin Public School the first public school in America established in 1645; Below: The Los Angeles Unified School District serves 750,000 students at 1,000 schools across 750 square miles).

This is an American story and not a new one. Abraham Lincoln got Congress to pay private companies to build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and expand the railroad system which in turn spawned the railroad industry, “civilized the west” and enriched highly performing and motivated individuals (of which Leland Stanford was one).  Taxpayers paid for roads and highways in the 1950s then, while General Motors, Ford and Chrysler thrived.  (Sometimes it worked in reverse: In the early 20th century Andrew Carnegie paid for hundreds of libraries across the country, while local governments ran them. And, in the early mid-century health care in America started out as a entirely private affair, led by innovative companies like Kaiser Steel--whose empire was built on America’s investment in WWII-- but now seems headed toward a public system, optional or otherwise). We now mostly honor innovation but never in this country has innovation occurred without the systemic framework of public investment.

INVESTMENT IN LIBRARIES One of two buildings first built on the UCLA campus almost one hundred years ago, Powell Library — like every library on every university campus in America — has been at the heart of the university ever since. Over the years that followed it expanded into a system of 10 libraries serving specialized communities across campus.

RE-INVESTMENT IN LIBRARIES Young Research Library, a mid-century bunker of a building, is the largest library on the UCLA campus. It requires some work to bring it to life, to become a place that’s more integrated into the life of the campus, a place where people want to be.

NEW LIFE FOR AN OLD LIBRARY The traditional idea of a great reading room such as that which can be found at Powell is here transformed into a glass membrane embedded in landscape and filled with light.

Around 1980 we began to believe that innovation was an entirely individual thing, that we didn’t need the supporting framework of public investment (“government is the problem not the solution”).  All we needed were highly motivated, highly performing, incentive seeking individuals and a “free” market to push innovation. We could do it all on our own and the market would make it so. This, we now know, is not supported by the evidence. Not even Bill Gates (who certainly made a profit off years of prior public investment) believes it to be entirely true especially in areas where he has focused his philanthropy — such as education and healthcare. (Although his billions are a mere drop in the bucket compared to what we as the public could invest and in turn achieve).

INVESTMENT IN SCHOOLS The LAUSD is so large with so many campuses that it by necessity engages in a perpetual building and rebuilding enterprise, renewing campuses on an equitable basis continuously over time throughout its sprawling service area. (Above: campus redevelopment with new classroom building at Canyon Charter School, a public school in an affluent neighborhood in Rustic Canyon between Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica.

As architects, how many individuals have we met through our work with government agencies—counties, cities, school districts—who do what they do because quietly and without much monetary incentive they want to make the world a better place?  How much innovative thinking within local government and school systems have we witnessed where the only incentives are wanting to do a better job?  How seemingly thankless is the job of a librarian or a teacher who must know but rarely gets to directly experience the influence of their work?  And yet, how many times have we heard from a tech billionaire or a prize-winning author that it was the local librarian or that special teacher that changed their lives?

INVESTMENT IN SOCIAL SPACE La Cienega Park in Beverly Hills, CA will soon reside less than ¼ mile from a major subway stop of the Los Angeles metropolitan subway system connecting downtown to Westwood. This will engender increased pressures on land development, land values and put a premium on open space. Open spaces in cities are vital for unstructured social interactions that strengthen the fabric of our communities.

INTEGRATION OF COMMUNITY The complex of recreation and community facilities planned for the redevelopment of La Cienega park will put in one place an array of activities so broad and so rich in social interaction that the place will become another center of life for the Beverly Hills community apart and distinct from its shopping district, performing arts center or even civic center. (Above top to bottom: aquatics, community center, recreation center, tennis center).

There are some systems—our social infrastructure—where the rules of the market do not apply, where unceremoniously and without celebrity innovation lives, free of market incentive, and where nevertheless, the foundations are laid for markets to thrive, where our society and our economy are made possible. Our systems of public education—our schools and libraries, our network of community, civic and cultural institutions—are perhaps foremost among them.  If architecture is a way to both reflect and enable our priorities as a society, then it is for this reason that we as architects have opted to do what we do and chosen with whom we do it. What is architecture as an art form if not, after all, mostly public?

WHY COMMUNITY This community center in Rancho Palos Verdes will never yield a profit, it will probably never pay for itself and yet dividends yielded to the community will benefit generations to come.

Talking Up: Colloquy on Design Within the Body Politic

DEFERENT Imagery driving the design of this building suggest a precisely crafted object both situated in and disappearing into the landscape.

Why does it look that way?  Where does this stuff come from? What are you thinking? These are questions which when producing civic architecture in a community driven design process we hear and to which we are obliged to respond with authenticity and respect.  When tax-payer dollars are invested in buildings meant to serve everyone in the community they deserve to know how and why a building has come to look the way it does and what it has to do with them.  

FORMIDABLE Pre-war buildings along Mission Inn Avenue in the historic core of Riverside, CA are mostly rough-hewn stone and board-formed concrete. They reflect the rugged fortitude of the pioneers who founded it.

EXUBERANT First made prosperous by the citrus industry and the arrival of the railroads the people of Riverside created architecture that, it turns out, has come to reflect the diversity of cultures that now populate the city. The Mission Inn especially and the annual months- long Festival of Lights are wildly indulgent in the diversity of imagery from which they draw.

A confluence of forces conspires to inform how a building comes to look the way it does.  These are internal and external forces which we seek to hold in balance: principally the site in which the building or buildings are to reside and the purpose or purposes (utilitarian, cultural or otherwise) for which they are to be built. For sure these forces alone offer a complex and subtle interplay of considerations which when put into play can lead to any number of results.  No two architects will come up with the same design.

ASSERTIVE The idea of the new library on Mission Inn Avenue just down the street from the Mission Inn is simple: a big white marble block resting on two massive concrete pedestals.

 And this is partly because whether we choose to acknowledge it or not a building’s site and its purpose cannot entirely determine what a building will look like. It is never enough (although always necessary) to have an idea. We must also have an image (or images) in mind.  Is it therefore ever enough to respond to those questions with the site made me do it, or it’s the building’s purpose that makes it look that way?

PRIMARY Ancient and vernacular cultures worldwide employ decorative schemes consisting of bold patterns and colors. Examples are found all along Mission Inn Avenue (Above, the City Archive at the Riverside Main Library).

MOD In the west from the era of the Renaissance forward bold patterns and colors went on hiatus until the modern revolution of Europe and America. Eastern and indigenous cultures never really abandoned them. (Above, Riverside Main Library’s children’s library).

A work of art should not and cannot ever be explained away. It must in the end stand on its own. And yet architecture perhaps more than any other is fundamentally a social art. Painters, writers and musicians do their thing then put it out there where it is received or not. We too put our work out there where it must stand on its own, but we unlike the painter or the writer or musician are obliged to collaborate with all sorts of people (who pay us and pay for the work) from all sorts of walks of life with all sorts of interests and points of view as we are making it. This, it turns out, is part of the art. It is less an obligation to be endured and more how we get better at what we do.

LIT Street fairs, festivals and carnivals worldwide for as long as Riverside has been a city have indulged in night- time displays of colorful electric lights in whimsical configurations. (Above, the Riverside Main Library children’s library with lighting inspired by the city’s Festival of Lights).

It is in the articulation of what we’re thinking and then listening to how it is received that design within the body politic advances.  This is a matter of talking up not down to whom we serve, and it is a two-way street. The success of the outcome depends on the quality of the colloquy which in turn depends entirely on the quality of our articulation: what are we thinking and why? And the quality of the articulation depends less on words than on imagery. What we share either resonates or it doesn’t.  In an iterative process from which we learn as much as we share our job is not so much to determine the outcome as to curate it.

CONFUSING When formulating a design for the Manhattan Beach Library they said make it “fit in” to which we responded fit in with what? The architecture of this city is all over the map offering no clues for how an important civic building should look. (Below rhetorical speculations on the many styles to choose from were we to merely replicate what’s found in the city).

This is neither a surrendering of authorship nor an entirely democratic process.  We don’t vote on design. But neither do we impose our will on it. Inevitably we enjoy our own interests, we nurture an inner life that carries with us from project to project and we don’t share everything about it. Like the accomplished actor who nuances her performance with an inner dialogue that may have little or nothing to do with the words she says the outcome is rendered rich by the intersection of the personal and the social.

TRANSLUSCENT Instead it was the coastal environment, the ever changing quality of light throughout the day and the year that inspired one of the few movements in modern art indigenous to southern California (the Light and Space movement with artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell), that also inspired the look of this building.

MACHINED The precision in craft and highly technical nature of the construction of the building happened to resonate with the engineering culture of the city whose history includes participation in the aerospace and computing industries going back to the 1950s.

MAN-MADE While affluent the city of Manhattan Beach is neither San Marino nor Beverly Hills. It’s a beach town, informal and low key.

We like the actor want to connect.  We want to disappear into the role even as the work is recognizable as ours. Not only do we owe it to the people and places for whom we work but the work is better for it.  In the wildly diverse, dynamic and democratic places we live populated by the equally diverse peoples of a wide variety of cultural and socio-economic circumstances and backgrounds this is our challenge: to create high quality public buildings in partnership with people and tailored to place, less signature more singular, true and at home.

HAND CRAFTED Imagery driving the design of the West Hollywood Library’s reading room ceiling included the coffered ceilings of the great American metropolitan libraries and the artisanship of early California craftsmen such as the Greene brothers in turn-of-the-last-century Pasadena.

Ok Sure But Who Designed Greenwich Village?

WHAT PLANNERS AND DEVELOPERS ACCOMPLISHED Twenty-five years ago we offered a way to enhance a neighborhood in the heart of Los Angeles through increased densities and a mix of uses. We got big box development instead.

NOT WHETHER, HOW California’s got a housing crisis! CA SB-50! The sky’s falling! The issue facing us is not whether increased housing densities are a good thing or not, it’s how we do it. Housing in place of car repair anyone?

Among the observations we remember from Jane Jacobs” famous book THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES are “the ballet of the sidewalk” and “eyes on the street”.  Another comes near the end of the book (never quoted probably because few people have actually read the book): “a city is not a work of art”.  She was referring to three ideas which had gained prominence in the early modern era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which she had spent the previous 400 pages berating:  The  Garden City (English, Ebenezer Howard), The Radiant City (French, Charles Jeanneret) and The City Beautiful (American, Daniel Burnham)

NO MAN’S LAND TRANSFORMED Streets that seem too wide now when framed with appropriate densities will spring to life.

IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME RIGHT NOW Homes don’t have to be one story bungalows or condominiums in a tower—we have at our disposal a whole array of possibilities: townhouses, flats, lofts and garden units.

These were movements led by architects who had concluded (on their own) that maybe we needed to rethink cities in the context of all that had gone wrong in the wake of the industrial revolution.  All three assumed that traditional cities didn’t work and couldn’t work in humanely accommodating burgeoning populations and modern industry and therefore needed radical reconfiguration. Jacobs saw these speculations as top down, anti-city, artistic abstractions devoid of considerations for real people and real life.  She called it the Radiant-Garden-City-Beautiful problem.

MID CENTURY SOUNDING OF THE ALARM Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson were contemporaries. Together they introduced concepts associated with complex interrelated systems (“biodiversity”, “sidewalk ballet”) in thinking about our natural environments and large cities. Clearly the science of systems was in the air however dubious its application to the planning and design of cities has proven to be.

THE TOOLS MATTER. A 450-page book of words is not the way to plan or design a city.

It is thought that Robert Moses—who replaced thriving neighborhoods with highways and towers all over New York --was Jacobs arch enemy but he barely rates a mention in her book. Instead, her enemies were established high modernist architects (and architects in general) all of whom in her mind had failed to understand the complex, organic and diverse systems of the American metropolis, didn’t value it and therefore were intent on obliterating it. She blamed them. They were Moses’ enablers.

GARDEN CITY Ebenezer Howard thought industrial age cities had become unlivable and thought we should all live in small towns surrounded and permeated by gardens. Frank Lloyd Wright was a proponent too.

But Moses was (recklessly and indiscriminately) employing ideas in the 1950s that had been formulated a generation earlier in the 1920s and that most architects by the 1960s already knew did not work. Jacobs seems not to want to acknowledge that by the time she wrote her book these ideas had already been dismissed. In architecture school none of us were taught that those early modern speculations were anything other than intellectual failures interesting only has historical object lessons on what not to do. (Although some architects still do to this day perpetuate the habit with speculations on wholesale interventions, giant projects that are supposed to solve a city’s ailments all at once.)

RADIANT CITY Charles Jeanneret found metaphysical truth in proposing a model of the city based on modern technology: tall buildings and automobiles. How has this worked out?

In her 450-page book Jacobs includes not a single drawing (except four diagrams about city blocks on pages 179-182).  Instead she uses words to describe how she thinks a city should be “planned” by which she means policies, incentives and economical models that will ensure that streets, parks and neighborhoods will teem with life. She understands that a thriving city—especially a metropolis—is made up of complex, interconnected systems of people that organically evolve, but which also need monitoring and sometimes intervention to maintain.

CITY BEAUTIFUL Daniel Burnham adopted Baroque planning principles at a huge scale to create entirely composed cities (left). These principles in practice have given us some of the most beautiful civic spaces and parks in America, of which Pasadena, CA has one of the best examples in its city hall (right).

Jane Jacobs saw the planning of a city in the way one might plan a party: invite the right mix of people, have something for them to do, make sure they intermingle. The party requires a host (a government), but one who, paradoxically, is just there to manage the spontaneity. The setting is secondary (maybe some flowers, a tablecloth, a candle or two) and if the setting is only secondary no wonder she thinks a city can be planned with words.

WHAT’S WORTH PRESERVING. Activists and city planners saved Greenwich Village (left) and Old Town Pasadena (right). But architects designed them.

Jacobs disdain for modern (obsolete and long discredited) theories of city planning and worse her appropriation of the word “planning” to mean something other than what it had meant 5,000 years prior partly explains the tenor of our relationships as architects with cities and communities in our work. Jacobs managed to sow the seeds for the (self-defeating and unproductive) animosity we feel almost daily in our interactions with “city planners” and “community stakeholders.” Parroting Jacobs they think cities can be planned with words and numbers – social policies, economic incentives, development incentives, zoning regulations, design guidelines, height limits, setbacks, FARs.  If we just MANAGE things right, our cities will turn out, ignoring the obvious that while, yes, cities are lived they are also MADE.

PARKING LOT TO NEIGHBORHOOD. This demonstration project from 25 years ago, before Culver City was on anyone’s radar, showed how to transform underutilized land in the heart of metropolitan LA into a livable, desirable place to live.

SHOPPING CENTER TRANSFORMED No sacrifice in commercial space was required to accommodate hundreds of new residents on the site of this shopping center.

Neither Jane Jacobs nor any “city planner” (as we now know that to mean today) designed Greenwich Village. Architects designed it just as they have every place in the world that we value. We are architects-- not writers, planners, developers, lawyers, managers, economists, big tech, activists or politicians—who design cities.   Thankfully, Jacobs saved Greenwich Village from the decimations of Robert Moses who didn’t know what he was doing anyway and who was certainly neither an architect nor planner (as we used to know that word to mean).

THERE THERE Enhanced density improves the environment of the surrounding streets.

SOME PLACE TO LIVE Must our streets really succumb to the back sides of big box stores? Can’t we live on them?

A city is a place for people to be sure, but the place matters, it effects people as much as the people effect the place.  The physical environment creates culture as much as it is a result of it. The physical artifact that is a city is a collection of buildings and the spaces between them, the better the buildings the better the cities. The more buildings and the spaces between them are works of art, the more beautiful the city and the life within.  Any city we value is as Jane Jacobs stated “not a work of art” but it is made up of works of art.

RECLAIMED SPACE Not every open space we experience has to also accommodate our cars.