Los Angeles

Los Angeles requires periodic examination like a patient with high blood pressure. And because of a growing consensus that it represents an urban typology of the future, the frequency of those checkups seem to be increasing. While these vary in scope and relevance, few if any test the condition of contemporary architecture there in any detail, or the degree of probability with which it may be assumed that it has any connection with the massive changes now affecting the city. There will undoubtedly be an attempt, at some point soon, to use charts and graphs to trace historical and stylistic cross-currents which, however well meaning and skillfully done, will be off the mark. Good diagnosis requires intuition as well as statistics, and architecture in Los Angeles today is about issues as well as influence. Those issues, in this admittedly selective sectional slice through the LA corpus civicus at the moment, seem to revolve around the shifting perceptions of the growing multitudes who live there about the character of their city, and the reaction of the established residents among that group about the changes that are out of their control. Los Angeles seems doomed to legitimacy: the mother of 'edge cities' everywhere is reinventing herself again, and this time she wants respect. Her past, however, is predictably embarrassing, and now persists, to haunt her.

As its most visible and pervasive remnant, freeways arguably remain the most characteristic and memorable feature of a city now determined to circumvent them. As historian Paul Zygas has said: 'despite the clarity of the gridiron and (the) prominence of the urban set pieces in Los Angeles' downtown, neither coalesces in our minds as a memorable Gesalt. By contrast, visitors to Los Angeles most often remember its freeways, either with admiration or disgust. And for better or worse, it is the freeways (rather than individual buildings, or grand avenues, or public spaces) that remain ineradicably associated with Los Angeles. Because the freeways create the total Los Angeles context and because they condition the perception of Los Angeles' architecture, eclectic or not, we must give freeways their due.

If the freeways condition the perception and memory of visitors, they are even more of a psychological determinant for the people that must use them during every day they spend in the city. The local axiom that everywhere you go in Los Angeles takes at least half an hour by car, should be extended to include the guarantee that the majority of that time will be spent on the freeway. Rayner Banham, in his now canonical Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, defined these 'ecologies' as 'Surfurbia', 'Foothills', 'The Plains of Id', and 'Autopia'. The last of these he felt to be an unavoidable category in any description of Los Angeles, because of the 'sheer vastness of the movement pattern' in the city, and the predominance of freeways. As Banham describes them: 'There seem to be two major reasons for their dominance in the city image of Los Angeles and both are aspects of their inescapability; firstly that they are so vast that you cannot help seeing them, and secondly, that there appears no alternative means of movement and you cannot help using them. There was once a time, before these gargantuan, contemporary aqueducts were layered onto the constellation of cities over which they pass, when people actually depended upon what are now known as 'surface' streets. These landmarks, permitting a sense of sequential passage through contiguous residential areas, once allowed a unified mental image of an urban texture to be retained, even if that texture was more grainy than most. This sense has now been destroyed by freeways, which only connect with the neighbourhoods below them at major intersections, thus reducing entire communities to a name on an exit sign, and the experience of visual interaction to one of channeled speed, where other cars are the only remaining reference. The disturbing thing is that successive generations have now made freeways the conveyance of choice, and now a majority of time time-concious Angelenos see 'surface' streets as an annoying waste of precious seconds. There are certain times during rush hours, when the freeways are so jammed that the cars, with their colour and model eradicated by the low angle of the sun, seem to blend together into a river of molten metal moving slowly in two directions at once. The popular aversion to 'surface' streets is now so strong, and the dependance on freeways so complete, that even the longest, most frustrating, delay is seen as preferable to the staccato indignity of the traffic lights on Sunset, Melrose or Pico, in spite of the fact that they might actually save time.

The freeway has consequently become the one inescapable social experience that all Angelenos share, with rules and conventions all its own. Indeed, these have become an intricate set of social rituals. The anthropologist Walter Burkett, in his well-researched study Homo Necans, has shown how ritual preceded speed as a means of human communication. He argues that such rituals have always been employed as a means of ensuring the psychological resolution of potentially debilitating conflicts, thus benefiting both individuals and the community of which they are a part. Ritual, he argues, is a biological behavioral system that has transcended its original purpose and has resulted in the repetition of a series of interrelated stereotypical actions intended to communicate important information about the original experience. Repetition is a key factor because it ensures that the information is not misunderstood, and that community or society, through clear understanding, will not suffer. When suffering did occur in traditional societies, and the community was threatened as a result, the related ritual would be discarded. In the case of the freeway, the threat has come from LA's astounding population growth, a phenomenon that has also shown a significant impact on every other aspect of the region. There are not only many more cars than there were 30 years ago, in a system that is increasingly unable to handle them, but the cultural mix of drivers on it is now totally different. Imagine rush hour in Mexico City, Seoul, Bangkok, Cairo and Istanbul all happening in the same place, in more powerful cars, and that approximates the condition on the LA freeways today. Each of the multitude of cultures now flooding into the city also brings its own peculiar variations of the driving ritual, with hair-raising results.

The highly publicized shootings of the recent past have now escalated to more sophisticated techniques, such as 'car-napping' or 'bump-and-stop', in which thieves preying upon drivers whose normal tendency is to stop to exchange paperwork upon the slightest impact, take valuables at gunpoint instead, and usually include the victims car as well. Regular impulses, such as concern for others in an accident, are now subverted into self preservation; and competition rather than mutual co-operation is the rule. The result is that the rituals of the freeway are now separated from their historical, sociological function, as a means of mutual support.

Because of the high speeds which are now typical, accidents are rarely minor, with horrific results. Cars flipped upside down, catapulted over barriers, totally flattened or crushed like an accordion are a daily sight, so that Banham's long-range confidence that 'an accident would never happen' to him, now seems like saying: 'I know a lot of people die of cancer, heart disease and Aids, but because it hasn't happened to anyone I know or to me personally, I'm confident it won't.' Rather than off-ramps being like a front door, and the exit from a freeway resembling 'coming in from outdoors', the sensation is now more like coming off a battlefield, and one of relief.