The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism

394 Pages·2001·22.59 MB·English

by  Dana Cuff

The Provisional City
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The Provisional City
Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism
Dana Cuff
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Sabon and Frutiger by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia,
and was printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cuff, Dana, 1953–
The provisional city : Los Angeles stories of architecture and urbanism / Dana Cuff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-03276-7 (hc : alk. paper)
1. Architecture, Domestic—California—Los Angeles. 2. Architecture, Modern—
20th century—California—Los Angeles. 3. City planning—California—Los Angeles—
History—20th century. 4. Public housing—California—Los Angeles—History—20th
century. I. Title.
NA7238.L6 C84 2000
307.76'09794'9409044—dc21
00-030379
to Amelia and Julian
Contents
Acknowledgments...viii
I
No Little Plans
1 Extra-Large...4
2 The Decline of Modernity...20
3 Emergenc(it)y...23
4 Los Angeles in the American Scene...28
5 Convulsive Urbanism, or Lurch City...37
6 A Steady Instability...42
7 The Nature of Housing...45
8 What Ought Not Survive...49
9 The LA Stories...52
II
Siting Land: The Politics of Property
10 Introduction to the Politics of Property...62
11 Contention over Drastic Change...69
12 Ideologies of Land and Property in America...74
13 A Wilderness for Speculation...77
14 The Roots of Property Rights...81
15 Characteristics of Property Rights...89
16 Land Regulation and Eminent Domain...94
17 Finding Urban Slums...101
18 Policy and Property: The Federal Housing Administration...113
19 Conclusion...116
III
Provisional Places with Fugitive Plans: Aliso Village
20 Introducing The Flats...120
21 The Fine-Grained City...126
22 Turning Neighborhoods into Slums...133
23 Appraising The Flats...139
24 Emergency in The Flats...142
25 Creating Aliso Village...147
26 Aliso Village: Modern Housing, Modern Community...152
27 The Aliso Village Architects...158
28 The Aliso Village Residents...161
29 Modern Housing’s Demise...164
30 Fugitive Places, Provisional City...167
IV
Temporary Abode, Industrial Aesthetic: Rodger Young Village
31 A New Emergency Looms...172
32 From War to Peace: The Uncertain Social and Technological Future of Los Angeles...176
33 Rodger Young Village: “Quonset Hut Community”...184
34 Retaining the Provisional...198
35 Finding a Public, Calling Off an Emergency...203
V
Whose Dream, America?
36 Whither the American Dream?...210
37 The Postwar National Housing Scene...214
38 Two Men in the Los Angeles Picture...223
39 Architects and the Postwar House in the Convulsive City...228
VI
Convulsive Suburbia: Westchester
40 The Story of Westchester...240
41 Building Westchester...246
42 Sales Meets Manufacturing...253
43 The Airport at Westchester Today...264
VII
Chavez Ravine and the End of Public Housing
44 And 10,000 More: Remaking Chavez Ravine...272
45 Utopian Plans...282
46 Political Enemies...290
47 A Dodger Victory...295
48 Next, Bunker Hill...301
49 Convulsive City, Urban Krill...306
VIII
At the End, Playa Vista
50 Political Evolution of Property and Voice...312
51 The Playa Vista Saga...318
52 Implications for Architects and for the Architecture of the City...332
53 Constructive Contention for an Urban Architecture...335
54 The Los Angeles Sites Revisited, and Beyond...338
Notes...344
Bibliography...357
Illustration Credits...373
Index...374
Acknowledgments
I remember hearing my parents describe living in Los Angeles during the Second
World War. My father worked in an oil refinery, and my older sister had just
been born. They told of darkened streets, submarine attacks, Tin Can Beach,
victory gardens, and block wardens. Somehow it all seemed dangerous and ex-
otic at the same time, though highly remote. Perhaps that’s how this study be-
gan. Maybe it started when I watched our citrus grove, which had been my
grandfather’s before us, plowed under to make way for tract housing. I was in
the third grade, and I couldn’t believe we were going to move south to plant an-
other grove rather than stay to soak up what seemed like the start of a bonafide
city. Why leave a place about to get sidewalks? Before long, we returned to our
rural-community-turned-suburb, and I learned that the limits of roller-skating
were tied not only to surface but to destination. And the project is at least partly
due to my friend Lenwood Johnson, who introduced me the hard way to public
housing and community activism. The work has many origins, but they are all
based in an intermingling of intellectual contradictions, everyday life, and polit-
ical biases that coalesce in the architecture of the city.
The ways cities change and the way land is manipulated in that process
seem to me more significant to urban form than most urban observers admit. I
wanted to catch something of the interchange between real estate as a cultural
and economic practice and the designers and planners who work their optimism
into episodic utopias. Big schemes began to seem brutally clear just by the scale
they assumed, and thus scale seeped into all my thinking: from the size of the
chapters that follow to the size of the projects they cover. The irony of our
predicament was inescapable: the grander the plan, the more it seemed to un-
dermine its own pretenses. This reflects my dual inclination toward cultural
study as pure observation and uncompromised architectural propositions.
Good design seems to require both but permit neither.
The moment when this book began can be pinpointed, however, to one day
in 1996 when I went to the Los Angeles Public Library to look at photo archives
of public housing. Getting there had been a typical LA experience—a twenty-
minute trip extruded into an hour of unbearable traffic and impossible parking.
When I arrived, Carolyn Cozo Cole haltingly informed me that she was unable
to locate the requested files. To soothe me she dropped off a foot-tall stack of
folders called “LA—Slums.” There, as you will see in the pages beyond, was
a startling Los Angeles that had existed alongside the victory gardens and
blacked-out city, all gone by now. It became so much rubble beneath the public
housing I was trying to track down. The struggle to make a home, with almost
no means, was viscerally evident in these images. The places depicted were vul-
nerable and temporary in every aspect. It occurred to me that early low-rent
housing advocates faced that same struggle, until they successfully comman-
deered federal funds to make what they believed would be permanent. Over sub-
sequent decades, the public housing they built had deteriorated in turn to such
an extent that land sharks were now swarming for the real estate. The appraisal
photographs in the succeeding chapters reinforced these observations.
In my studies of contemporary urban debates between homeowners and
developers, with designers skewered in the middle, I saw how people came to de-
fend their small stakes with such vehemence. The faces in some of the appraisal
photographs registered that same posture, as the origins of modern-day con-
tentiousness took shape. Thus a story began to emerge about urban change and
architecture’s role therein, about homeplaces and their provisional status, and
about the ways our conceptions of property filter into every spatial act.
Many individuals and institutions lent support to this project: the USC
School of Planning, Adele Santos and my colleagues at the short-lived UCSD
School of Architecture, and Sylvia Lavin and colleagues at my present home in
UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design. The staff there has been
helpful beyond words. In 1992, Tridib Banerjee and I received a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts to write “Form in Contention,” together with
Ken Beck and Achva Stein. That is when the Playa Vista study began, though it
seems it will never end.
Along the way, I have received inspiration and assistance from able stu-
dents. Sylvia Darr, José Gámez, and Ken Gutierrez deserve special mention.
Their help with the research and images was essential over the past four years.
Wendy Bone provided powerful illustrations of the fundamental ideas of the
book based on her own research; Sasha Ortenberg created the fine maps of the
city; Tulay Atak and Therese Kelly conquered the bibliography; Duane Jackson
drew early Playa Vista graphics; and Patricia Solis, Chuck Saltzman, Mark
Fredrickson, and Karen Adhikari helped in the initial phases. The students in my
“Provisional City” course at UCLA in the winter of 1999 gave me a needed in-
tellectual boost with their creative energy for the subject.
It was my year as a Scholar at the Getty Research Institute that defined this
work. There I was afforded not only the luxury of time, but the insight of
others contemplating Los Angeles in its myriad forms Michael Roth, Roger
Friedland, and Harold Zellman offered valued friendship and critique. The
thoughtful weekly seminar and a number of its members were particularly help-
ful: Robert Davidoff, Brenda Bright, Phil Ethington, Bill Deverell, Susan Phillips,
Becky Nicolaides, Mike Davis, David James, Robert Carringer, Doug Flam-
Acknowledgments ix