Downtown Los Angeles As An Architectural Mecca?

"The champion of stand-alone, sculptural architecture had delivered a surprisingly down-to-earth and practical scheme for the immense mixed-use program, to be built across the street from Gehry's own Concert Hall. While not entirely free of awkward details, and few projects covering nearly three city blocks would be problem-free at this early stage of design, the Gehry scheme acknowledges the constraints of both urbanism and commercial development."

..."Despite its large, conventional downtown, Los Angeles is notoriously a-centric, being a loosely packed shopping bag of different industrial clusters and ethnic communities.... The notion that Grand Avenue by itself will reorient Los Angeles towards downtown sounds like an idea hatched at a Chelsea pot party."

..."More tenable was the suggestion by real estate executive, philanthropist and fixer extraordinaire Eli Broad, that Grand Avenue would eventually join a circle of name-brand architecture in downtown Los Angeles that includes Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of Our Lady of Los Angeles and the future High School for the Visual and Performing Arts by Wolf Prix, aging bad boy of Vienna's Coop Himmelblau. This collection of architectural wonders will, predicts Broad, make Los Angeles 'a city of architecture second to none.' "

Thanks to Peter Slatin