LA is a complex city.
Not that it's necessarily a good thing, but it definitely seems more of a "delirious" city than New York's been since they passed the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901.
It's at once a generic city and a prototype for the mega cities of the 21st century. (New York is not one of them.) A thought which comes from a Richard Marshall essay I read recently, "The Elusiveness of Urban Design: The Perpetual Problem of Definition and Role".
When things like CIAM (Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne) where going on, NYC was the largest city in the world with just over 12 million people. After that were London with 8 million people, followed Tokyo with 7, and Paris with 6.
Now there are 15 cities with over 12 million people. And according to current projections, by 2015 Tokyo, Dhaka, Mumbai and Sao Paolo will be the largest cities, all with over 20 million people.
Not to get swept up in a discussion about urbanization, but for better or worse, LA sets the precedent for the sprawling, ahistorical, decentralized, auto-centric mega city.
Despite how easy it is to trash LA, you have to give it credit for having a certain progressive edge and willingess to experiment. The houses in Venice (below) I don't think could ever be built in San Francisco proper (or most other US cities), where a rampant strain of architectural/urban NIMBYism turns into a sort of creeping conservatism. Too bad the sort of freedom and experimentation that produced these houses came with the price tag of chronic automobile dependency.
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| an early frank gehry (above) |
