The Mansionization of Downtowns

Most of us know of a community – perhaps our very own – that is confronting the issue of “mansionization.” Especially if the neighborhood is blessed with growing property values but small lots, the problem can cause a lot of social tension, if not visual dissonance, as ungainly residences tower over the older homes. Often at stake are a place’s affordability, its history and character.

This problem is not restricted to residential areas. Certain downtown districts are undergoing their own version of mansionization. In Los Angeles, the $189 million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels complex has just opened. It will be joined a year from now by the $260 million Walt Disney Concert Hall. Both are highly theatrical architectural statements from a pair of Pritzker-winners: The Cathedral is designed by Jose Raphael Moneo, and Disney Hall is by Frank Gehry. Both buildings are considered crucial elements of the Grand Avenue Cultural Corridor, a five-block strip atop downtown’s Bunker Hill area that also includes The Music Center performing arts complex and the central Los Angeles Library.

Unfortunately, $360 million worth of architecture probably won’t prevent this key street from remaining a no-man’s-land of empty sidewalks once mass is concluded and the concert ends.

Despite evidence that grand buildings alone can’t revitalize their downtowns, city planners and cultural institutions still tend to rely on them, perhaps precisely because they make such dramatic statements. Both Los Angeles specimens scream for attention. The Disney Concert Hall is a flowering, fanciful conceit, with sheaths of titanium erupting from street level. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels is an imposing cluster of limestone boxes towering on three sides of its square city block.

Architecture critics will argue the beauty or functionality of the buildings. But few will deny these looming edifices attempt to impose their character on the street, as if they can bully their way to creating an active, cultural corridor. Although no one lives in them, they are mansions, rich and huge. Both are built right up to the property line.

Recently, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic Nicolai Ouroussoff verbally strained to rationalize this very problem by claiming that Gehry’s exuberant shapes “bridge the gap between the hall’s heroic scale and the scale of the solitary individual.” How they do this, exactly, he did not explain. And so the problem remains: Just because these buildings are designed by groovy architectural idols doesn’t mean we should forget that they leave the streets around them just as sterile and detached as ever. No amount of Pritzker aura alone will “bridge the gap.”

The New Yorker’s critic, Paul Goldberger, in his review of Moneo’s cathedral, more accurately characterized that building’s boxy dominance as a kind of “gentle brutalism.”

Of course, none of this is meant to slam a cathedral that, on the inside at least, is inspiring. A recent tour offered by Urban Land Institute L.A. District Council, hosted with a group of developers, planners and other urbanists, managed to stir rich and deep emotions. It revealed that the building’s exterior angles somehow invert into soaring perspectives from the nave.

What remains is the mansionization problem. The cathedral’s plaza is elevated and remote. Its fortress-like façade has more freeway appeal than curb appeal. And, like most of Grand Avenue, the cathedral seems sheared off from the fabric of the rest of downtown L.A. A year before Disney Hall will open, no plans exist for Grand Avenue to add retail activity from bookstores or cinemas, which would help.

The same problem applies to recent crops of museums and sports facilities. One of the original proposals for L.A.’s Getty Center art and scholarship complex was to build it at the historic, defunct Ambassador Hotel site on a busy stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. How much more dynamic, healthy and connected this could have been than what resulted: architect Richard Meier’s aloof acropolis, gleaming in the hills above Brentwood like that rich enclave’s largest mansion. Attendance has been dwindling since its high-profile 1998 opening.

The Staples Center sports and entertainment complex was wisely built in downtown L.A., next to the Convention Center in 1999. Immediately, business picked up for surrounding restaurants, with new venues popping up steadily since. But if a proposed adjacent “retail entertainment center” attempts to corral this business in a mansion-like mall, the restaurants outside can kiss much of this new economic activity goodbye.

Besides the Cathedral, L.A.’s other new cultural mansion is the Hollywood and Highland behemoth. This elaborate urban entertainment center, the new home of the annual Academy of Motion Pictures Awards, has been a disappointment in terms of traffic and leasing. This surprised some people, because Hollywood and Highland seemed to do many things right: It combined a variety of uses (hotel, retail, entertainment). It is at the heart of a busy auto and pedestrian intersection that also includes a subway stop. It is on a vibrant street that includes much smaller if much more tacky Hollywood retail establishments.

Maybe it’s just too big.

Jack Skelley is Public Relations Director for Roddan Paolucci Roddan, an Advertising and Public Relations Agency specializing in land use.