LOW CONTRAST CITY
by Michael Maltzan with Hannah Hoyt
While our work is marked by exploration of program and inventions within the many scales and functions of houses, schools, museums, parks and bridges, the essence of our practice lies in a return to and concentration on the “city”. In particular, we are focused on how the idea of the city can be inserted back into the buildings we work on.
The relationship between city and building is a longstanding fascination and focus for architects across the discipline’s broad history. The location of our city is Los Angeles, a place that is perhaps more persistent than permanent. It is inconclusive yet definitive, energetic in all its restlessness. In its complexities and constantly evolving realities, Los Angeles has crafted an identity and an image specific to itself.
It can also be argued, however, that Los Angeles is a form of contemporary city, one that is increasingly common around the world. Los Angeles’ questions and imperatives are shared by many fast-growing global cities – blurry boundaries between city and region, mounting demands for affordable housing, and infrastructure straining to keep up with the sprawling city. These cities at the same time possess remarkable potential through their inherent diversity and creative energy. As such, we believe that the approaches and experiments that take place here might have resonance more broadly.
To find productive influences from this place, and to also develop approaches to engaging and working with this type of city, we have come to a series of protagonist ideas, or maybe at the very least, fascinations, that are prompts and catalysts for our work and by extension potentially applicable to a wide range of contemporary cities.
Characteristics vs. Context
The first idea begins from a discussion of how to look at and read this type of city. Traditional definitions and formal approaches to studying context, which create connections between history and the present day physical forms of a city, do not easily hold in Los Angeles. As a result, it has usually been looked down on as a city lacking in form, densities and hierarchies, but perhaps we can understand it differently, as more of a “low contrast” city. The blurry repetition of strip boulevards, the undifferentiated blocks, the sprawling carpet of single-family tract homes, the ubiquity and seeming repetitiveness of expedient materials form the distinct visual soundtrack of this city.
Rather than impose traditional ideas of “context” we have preferred to use the term “characteristics” to allow this “soundtrack” to permeate our work and to release us from having to fit Los Angeles into a type of analysis that did not anticipate this sprawling, postwar, late-capitalist, laissez-faire metropolis. Characteristics allow us to broaden the scope of study, to linger on the qualities that are specific to this place, ones that are often more fugitive, more fleeting, like the specific color and quality of the light, the relentless distances one travels, the unfinished and the informal, the prevailing thinness rather than robustness of many common materials.
This need for new ways of reading context has been true for generations of semi-urban “cities”. Certainly, it was true of Levittown, New York (a place I am originally from). Levittown, like its offspring, was an instant town, rising out of potato fields, and anticipating the needs of a generational growth in population.
Observed from a distance and through the lens of a traditional formal urban analysis, Levittown, Los Angeles and places like them are often described as repetitive, banal, and soulless. But life on the ground is different. Amidst the repetition of houses in Levittown, it was the spaces between the buildings, the side yards, left over parcels, and storm basins that over time developed their own kind of wild, almost feral quality. On the one hand those landscapes were artificial, accidental, but at the same time they were real, organic, and in many cases beautiful and unique. One needs to first redefine the approach to observing these places related in perhaps a similar way to Robert Irwin’s sentiment that “seeing is forgetting the name of what one sees” – to first witness the great subtlety and specificity of place, some of it accidental, some of it informal, some of it intentional, embedded within these types of cities, and then to make something of value from those forces.
The House as Microcosm of the City
Many architects throughout history have written about the idea of the house as a microcosm of the city. Yona Friedman in his book Pro Domo (2006) wrote, “When I was a schoolboy, I discovered that a house alone does not exist, that it does not end at the outer limits of the ground floor, but continues on to the streets, the garden, then, to the house across the street. The house across the street itself continues into what is in front of it, and so forth. To imagine one house is to imagine the whole world”.
Historically, the house has been the essential unit and building block of, and synonymous with, Los Angeles. Great invention and experimentation in the modernist house took place here – from early Irving Gill to Schindler’s Kings Road House, and then through the post-war Case Study program – but this history is perhaps a romantic ideal given the realities of housing need in today’s city. As Los Angeles contends with very real and urgent questions of densifying a predominantly single-family urban fabric, one that has kept individuals, entire communities, and different types of uses separated politically, socially, and economically, we are interested in speculating on what it means to build this new housing in a manner that reflects and builds on the diversity of the city. We have begun to think of this as not so much simply putting housing into the city, but rather putting the city back into the house.
This is especially critical because for most of its history, Los Angeles has been able to sidestep this question of the collision of urban realities. Partially this has been due to the endless sprawl outward from its many “centers” whenever threatened with the beginnings of density. Almost all of the functions of the city could take place “democratically” on the boulevards, streets, and avenues without the challenge of interactions.
While we can and should bridge these divisions at an urban scale, by working to make blocks and neighborhoods that are varied and active, it is critical to bring this diversity into individual buildings themselves, considering how a mix of uses, communities and individuals can animate a single building, creating an energy that can radiate out into the surrounding neighborhood.
Lifted Terrain / Transposed Ground Plane
Early modernists speculated in their planning on how to manage the diversity of the city, envisioning the functional uses of daily life (work, home, leisure) separated or “delaminated” into horizontal layers as a way of isolating the messy collisions of urban life. These tensions – social, political, economic, programmatic – could be re-engineered in those early proposals to live in a more harmonious form of zoned stratifications. The effect of course was to largely separate and isolate the functions that are inevitably at play in any city. Even if they have been tamped down into the city’s subconsciousness, they are still boiling away, separated by wafer-thin physical and psychological boundaries.
As Los Angeles contends with reaching the functional limits of the region’s physical boundaries, growth in the city has begun to fold back onto itself, creating a new pressure to move from a city of a single horizontal layer to one that requires us to imagine how new layers and complexities of the city might be formed into a palimpsest on top of, and intertwined with, the existing city. As opposed to simply creating an alternate “ground” above the existing fabric, we are instead more interested in the potential of a new type of “in-between” space, one that becomes a more lively and complex space of interaction, rather than a zone of separation.
At Star Apartments, this space between the existing roof of a former one-story manufacturing building, and the new residential units suspended above, becomes a shared community space which includes classrooms, community kitchen and vegetable garden, pickleball court, and jogging track. Drawing from the activity of the street, and from the community living above, a form of semi-public space is manifested, with an amplified density of community emerging at this in-between.
Simultaneity
The extraordinary experiments in modernist housing that inform our thinking on the relationship between the city and the house also lead us into a conversation about the relationship between public and private that was so central to many of these projects in Southern California. Richard Neutra was a main protagonist of this exploration, and his Dorothy Serulnic house from 1953 in the hills above L.A. is a quintessential example of the modernist ambition of dissolving the lines between public and private through a highly transparent glass exterior.
As we think about our contemporary moment, however, we wonder whether this gesture no longer aligns with what we need from a house or architecture generally. Our own time is one of enormous social transparency and connection to things around us. Our private lives are more and more blurred with our public lives, as the transparency that was almost a moral imperative for Neutra has become increasingly fraught. I have grown more interested in how to achieve a kind of socially connected visibility while also exploring what it means to be private. Today, without ever leaving home, we exist in multiple places simultaneously: wherever we are, we are almost always connected to something else. Even if those connections are not physical, the spaces in which they occur are nevertheless connected to one another in a very real way, and this can and should be explored for its implications in architecture. If transparency was the great spatial challenge for modernism, simultaneity is the most compelling spatial challenge confronting architects now, the spatial characteristic that perhaps best defines our time.
The Pittman Dowell Residence we designed is almost the total alter ego of Neutra’s Serulnic residence, which sits just 30 meters away, and yet the seeds of a kind of simultaneity were already embedded in the site by way of the relationship Neutra imagined among the compound of three houses he plotted to construct there. The original Neutra house is “connected” to our new one by a single large tree, the iconic element that became the mediator between the two. While the Neutra house was wrapped in glass, our design is opaque on the outside, with just a few apertures through which you see in and see out. The outside is solid and opaque, but the inside is almost completely transparent. The inside walls are mostly glass, and most of the rooms do not have dividers between them. This means that when you are inside the living room, the courtyard, kitchen, bathroom, and master bedroom are all very visible. It is as if we took the Serulnic house, which has its fireplace and dense core in the middle and glass on the outside, and reversed the diagram to fold it in on itself, with all of the exterior transparency, all of the publicness, now being brought inside the private world of the house.
Middle Landscape & Anticipatory Scale
There are two scales of buildings that are of particular interest in our speculations about the contemporary city. The first is the scale of the “middle landscape”, which is closely related to our understanding of Los Angeles as a “low contrast” city. Neutral foreground as background, this cityscape is marked by the seeming continuity of its palette of forms and textures. More ambient than apparent, making architecture that relates to this scale creates provocative questions of a building’s identity, is it a singular building or urban design, or both? How does a building have a dialogue with the continuity and repetition around it? Does it stand out, blend it? In this ambiguity we find a productive ground for an expansion of architecture’s definition, and a place for potential invention of new forms and relationships in the city.
A second related focus is around the projection of an “anticipatory scale”. Here the challenge is as much temporal as it is physical. How do we build for the future, both near and far, in a city that is rapidly transforming in mass and density?
In a low-density city there is often a concern that newer and larger developments will be out of scale in an existing district or neighborhood. If the area in question would remain fixed or static, then these concerns and criticisms have a greater validity. But if we believe that the city is changing and will continue to evolve into the future, then it is a responsibility of the architect to speculate, to anticipate, to meet the future of the city with invention, not just reaction.
One Santa Fe is located in one of these rapidly changing districts. When the design became public, we faced substantial criticism. Many thought the project was too big and out of scale to its mid-rise predominantly industrial context. Nearly a decade later however, the district has grown up and around the building. While our work tried to anticipate this broader transformation, our efforts to anticipate and project forward were also highly specific, tuned and calibrated to the individual site and local planning context. We lifted a portion of the building up to form a gateway within the building that frames an opening towards a future Metro rail station. We designed into the building places where bridges could span out across the adjacent rail yard to connect the LA River, which is reestablishing itself as an urban and civic resource, and created two levels of parking that have the floor-to-floor height to be converted into residential units in the future as car ownership declines. In that sense, the architecture of a building can be an active protagonist in the city, helping to provoke many possible futures for our urban trajectory and enabling the building itself to continue to evolve over time.
Responding to the Edge Rather than the Center
Los Angeles throughout the development of its postwar narrative has usually portrayed itself as a multicultural city where the diversity of the communities here creates a greater collective and cohesive energy and spirit through their very coexistence. With the Watts Riots of 1965, the Rodney King Uprisings in 1992, and the straining of the city’s social framework over past decades due to explosive growth in homelessness, and growing economic and social divisions, it has become clear that Los Angeles is not so much a multicultural city as it is a city of many cultures, vibrant but separate, with both real and imagined boundaries encircling and siloing different communities and cultures.
What form can architecture take if its motivation is to situate itself not in the middle of one community but instead on those very boundaries and lines of division? Rather than acting as a gateway between each side, can architecture fold together those protagonists into a third form that produces connections and positive complexity within a neighborhood?
In the port city of Long Beach, one of our most recent permanent supportive housing projects, 26 Point 2 Apartments, sits along the Pacific Coast Highway, whose name conjures an overly romantic image of Southern California beach life, but is instead a quintessential commercial strip boulevard forming an armature of single-story commercial buildings and speeding vehicular traffic. This road bisects two radically different landscapes. To the east sits a field of oil storage fields and to the west an undifferentiated grid of single family houses.
The form of 26 Point 2 is an aggregation of its neighbors. A long, single-story form slides in adjacent to the used clothing shop next door. Pitched roof forms tumble up from the low scale of the adjacent neighborhood to eventually form a new taller façade along the PCH. A parking lot under the building doubles as a gathering space on the ground floor, the pitched roof of the community room and kitchen shares a scale with the retail next door, and an outdoor mezzanine opens over the roof of the community room below to be eye level with the oil fields on the opposite side of the street.
Individually these are prosaic pieces of the building’s program – community room, kitchen, parking lot – but taken together they begin to aggregate new relationships of forms and spaces that suggest a more interconnected and dynamic form of diverse community at a place previously defined by separation and apartness.
