I first encountered the Bradbury Building in the way I assume most people do: as the murky home of J.F. Sebastian in Blade Runner. As soon as the building’s stoically self-confident interior appears on screen, it turns the film from something hectically over-stimulating into something really, truly ominous. The glass ceiling, open shaft elevator, and ornately tiered landings are too tangible to be a trick of clunky 80s technology. So I wasn’t surprised when I moved to Los Angeles and realized the Bradbury existed, not just as a movie set but as a three-dimensional downtown landmark. I was surprised, however, when I learned I had driven by the building at least twelve times without noticing it.

Seen from the street, the Bradbury looks old and ordinary. It stands at the corner of 3rd and Broadway and its vintage façade has been co-opted by the commercial bustle all around it. Bumble-bee colored Sprint banners and Subway signs hang above the building’s first story windows. The outside gives no hint of the building’s majestic interior.

The best architecture is like that: unassuming at first, but rewarding to anyone who cares enough to look closer.
George Herbert Wyman designed the Bradbury at the end of the 1880s, though, even after 120 years, the circumstances surrounding its construction are hazy. The legend goes like this: Lewis Bradbury, a mining and real estate tycoon, commissioned Sumner P. Hunt to design a one-of-a-kind office building. Unhappy with initial plans, Bradbury turned to Hunt’s junior draftsman, George Wyman. Wyman had never before designed anything that had actually gotten built and he worried about crossing his employer, so he consulted an Ouija board before accepting the project. The Ouija board gave Wyman a green light and he purportedly based his design on Edward Bellamy’s 1887 Looking Backwards, a sci-fi novel about the year 2000. Bellamy describes office buildings as being bathed in light from domed glass ceilings. Wyman must have taken this to heart, because the Bradbury Building’s whole atrium is sky-lit.

The Bradbury has become a celebrity over the years, a structure with enough of a fan base to keep it standing in a city that often confuses Modernization with demolition.

In the 1950s, however, the Bradbury’s future was in enough jeopardy that architect and editor Ils Reese used the pages of Progressive Architecture magazine to call for its preservation. He wrote, “In the name of ‘progress,’ the Bradbury Building is to be razed presumably for a new office building that will make full use of the space.” Reese continued, “As it is, the Bradbury Building is indeed wasteful.” The central court could be “floored at each level” to make room for any number of offices, and the meandering flights of stairs “could be more compact.” But efficiency, Reese suggested, is useless if it comes at the expense of a building’s dignity.

Reese used the same letter to argue for the preservation of another landmark: the Watts Towers, strange, spiraling structural collages in south central L.A. Italian immigrant and construction worker Simon Rodia built them. He began in 1921 and finished thirty-four years later, in 1954. He used steel rods, wire mesh, mortar, scavenged tiles and glass and he never let anyone else help him. The result was unlike anything anyone had ever seen and Rodia’s neighbors wondered if he might be a little crazy. Only a few years after their completion, the city labeled the towers an “unauthorized public hazard” and planned their demolition.

According to Reese, “Rodia was both a structural innovator and an artistic genius. How often in the course of a century does such a rare combination come to fruition?” Not often, Reese claimed, and called for “architects throughout the world [to] assist . . . in warding off city-planned vandalism.”

Like the Bradbury, the Watts Towers survived. A thriving community art center now sits beside them and Simon Rodia’s namesake jazz festival just celebrated its thirty-third anniversary. It’s as if Rodia, who approached his magnum opus like it was a private madness, had the greater good in mind all the time. The Bradbury Building has maintained its popularity too. It’s still a functional office building, home to a handful of architectural firms, and it’s also still a movie star, appearing most recently alongside Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in (500) Days of Summer.

Neither Rodia nor Wyman ever built another memorable building. Both men were one hit wonders, innovators who endeared themselves by actualizing strange fantasies about how the world should look; they were the sort of tenderly human geniuses communities can rally around.

Their breed of genius, however, is not the sort corporations and municipalities tend to rally around. Many of the architectural monuments that have sprouted up in L.A. over the past decades, as part of a push to modernize the city, have favored expansiveness over the obsessively detailed approach Wyman and Rodia both embraced in distinctly different ways.

When the Bradbury Building and Watts Towers faced potential demolition, it was because they didn’t fit within city leaders’ big-picture vision of what a world-class city should look like from the outside. But what if demolition could work the other way and people with no official authority could petition to raze buildings that obstructed their personal idea of how a city should look?

Mexico City based artist Gustavo Artigas explores this question in his new “Vote for Demolition” campaign. Not even an L.A. resident, Artigas has no legitimate authority to demolish city buildings, but he does have opinions about L.A.’s cityscape and he has invited the city’s citizens to help him turn opinions into action—or at least symbolic action.

“Vote for Demolition” has been underway since September. Artigas selected the targeted buildings with the help of a group of local architects he chose himself (some of them purportedly from SCI-Arc, SoCal’s progressive architecture school), and then he pasted unembellished white campaign posters on poles and buildings around the city. Angelinos can vote on least attractive L.A. monument at votodemo.com or in booths set up at LAX Art, the Culver City gallery that sponsored the project, and the Standard Hotel.

Once voting is complete, Artigas will petition the city to demolish the building with the most votes. He also plans to virtually simulate the demolition and project it on the façade of some as yet unnamed Los Angeles landmark. This way, the demolition will take place in spirit even if city officials reject Artigas’ petition (as they undoubtedly will).

If the six buildings chosen by Artigas and friends had been more diverse in scope and history, the project might have struck me as benign. As it is, “Vote for Demolition” presents as a direct attack on the sort of urban monuments that seem hell-bent on impressing, but only marginally interested in embracing their visitors. The list includes the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), the Pacific Design Center, the Disney Music Hall, the Staples Center, the Kodak Theater and the Rodeo Drive boutiques.

When it opened a year ago, I found BCAM, designed by Renzo Piano, to be like much of the art in it: impenetrable, sleek and audacious. It had a showy red series of intersecting elevators and platforms leading viewers in and out of its glass doors. But the interior was tamer. It provided a space big enough for the big art that Eli Broad, the philanthropist who funded the building, initially filled it with. Likewise, the Disney Concert Hall, a composite of futuristically curved steel plates, has such a loud exterior that the interior, impressive as it is, can’t help but feel conservative. That seems to be a primary theme on Artigas’ list: exteriors with so much bravado that their insides seem un-ambitious (though the Kodak Theater, with its fairly bland façade, may be the exception). The secondary theme? Money.

BCAM cost $56 million. The Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, cost over $240 million. Then there’s the Pacific Design Center, designed by Cesar Pelli and built in three phases. The final stage alone cost $195 million. The Staples Center? $375 million. The Kodak Theater? $94 million. The Rodeo Drive Boutiques? $200 million (though, according to the shopping site Seeing Stars, that’s money well spent, since an average visitor to Bijan, the men’s fashion store at 420 Rodeo, might spend $100,000; Seeing Stars also suggests that visitors stay away on Sundays, because most of the shops are closed and “the usual crowd of sophisticated shoppers is replaced by hordes of tourists gawking in the windows of the shuttered stores”).

The prospect of demolishing any of these buildings fills me first with self-righteousness, then with guilty pleasure, then with straightforward guilt. While their designers and backers presented them as city-bolstering projects, they never had anything to do with LA as a place people lived. They had to do with LA as a place that could contend with the grandeur and expansiveness of other large-scale cities. They’re well-built, striking buildings, and they aren’t inherently unattractive, but they share an imperturbable attitude that seems the antithesis of community.

When I visit the Bradbury or the Watts Towers, I’m just one of many people who want to feel connected to the legacy of these structures, designed by men bent on making something intuitive become physical. But when I visit the Pacific Design Center, I feel dwarfed by the building’s grandiosity. It’s a fancy shell—or, as John Chase of the Los Angeles City Planning Department calls it, “a beautiful, glossy, shiny object” and “the world’s largest toy”—with an inside that feels like any upscale shopping mall.

I eventually vote to demolish the Design Center and it gives me a thrill, like wresting success away from an ambitious former classmate who smooth-talked her way to perfect grades. But then the guilt sets in. Destroying oversized, expensive things is just as indulgent as building them, maybe even more so, and wrecking balls won’t change the thinking of people who commission and build “the world’s largest,” “glossy, shiny” toys. But, if it’s futile, why does Artigas’ project feel so poignant?

At the end of Michelangelo Antoinioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point, there’s an explosion that looks the way I imagine Artigas’ simulated demolition might look. Daria, the film’s protagonist, has just fled an angular modern mansion, frustrated by the people inside of it, who seem to care only about self-image and smooth business—cares that strike her as trivial. When she turns back to look at the house, it blows up in slow motion. Then it blows up again. And again. Watching this masterpiece of modern architecture repeatedly, violently erupt in flames fills her with satisfying finality. Though the blow-up occurs in her imagination, it seems real enough and it allows her to leave a whole lifestyle behind without any regrets.

Artigas’ project has a similar effect. The campaign, petition, and ultimate simulation may not physical alter L.A.’s skyline but they do offer a symbolic liberation. Knowing what we want to destroy tells us about what we want to keep and the subliminal message that hovers beneath Artigas’ Vote for Demolition posters seems to be, “Decide what you want in your world and go find it.”

>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Business, Architecture, Art & Design, Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.