The LA Style
and the Heteropolis
By Charles Jencks

Los Angeles, like all cities, is unique, but in one way it may typify the world city of the future; there are only minorities. No single ethnic group, nor way of life, nor industrial sector dominates the scene. Pluralism has gone further here than in any other city in the world and for this reason it may well characterize the global megalopolis of the future. Mass migration threatens many cities in Europe such as Berlin, but in Los Angeles, with an influx of nearly a million foreigners in the last decade, it is a fact. The strains are obvious; homelessness, a variety of languages (more than eighty are spoken in public schools), multi-ethnic tens-ions including riots, and a high rate of homicide.

Such depressing facts are well known to the outside world, but much less familiar is the urban and architectural response, both of which have been creative and positive. The city is the foremost heteropolis in the world, and the architects have forged a new style to deal with this heterogeneity, a strange style that can be called "heteroarchitecture" (because of its extraordinary juxtapositions) or "en-formality" (because of its new type of informality).

Spread out in a series of villages, high-rise centers and edge cities, the overall pattern of the city resembles a map of Europe on a small scale. Over 130 communities, the previous ranchos and townships, cut it up into a crazy quilt of opposed moods and styles. lt is as if each distinct area were a tiny country about the size of Luxembourg, each with its separate language, set of customs and style. Yet there are no border crossings and in some of these tiny nations many different nationalities mix together. As a whole it could be called "The LA Nation", and it has a more dispersed ethnic mixture than many entire European countries (over 150 nationalities). The results can be bizarre, shocking, liberating, overwhelming. They call for an ability to experience sudden change, violent contrasts. Some identity areas such as Beverly Hills are highly defined and others, such as Culver City, are fluid districts where variety is the rule. Difference and heterogeneity exist at many levels and this pluralism is itself a major reason why people continue to be drawn to Los Angeles.

Architecturally there have been three basic ways to deal with variety: the first, classical method of "unity in variety" assumes one can fit heterogeneity into pre-existing harmonious forms. The second, the Modern method of collage, assumes that variety can be presented through a juxtaposition of fragments. Hetero-architecture, the third method, exaggerates the second system and makes use of the first and blurs the two together. lmagine a food-mixer blending a variety of ingredients, but not to the point they become totally chewed up and you have the third model. The parts are somewhat recognizable, always distorted and blurred into each other. At a populist level, for instance, Disneyland in Los Angeles represents variety as a sequence of opposed classical types but messes them around, shrinks them by one-third and turns them into mongrels. The commercially successful architect Jon Jerde has applied the same method to many shopping centers and his extraordinary melange, the Universal City Walk: this is Representational-Hetero architecture and one can find it everywhere in LA. In a sense it is a very democratic, pluralist style because -- like the political practice of "the Rainbow Coalition" from which it stems -- it acknowledges the identity of groups, customs, and pre-existing values.

Also quite representational is the work inspired by the vernacular ofcommercial building. In the late 1920s Los Angeles had the greatest amount of Pop architecture of any city in the world, a roadside show to match Hollywood made up of buildings in the shape of bowler hats, grapefruits, donuts, hot-dogs and almost anything you might want to put in your mouth. Nearly all of this is gone, driven out by middle class good taste and corporate bad taste (such as Macdonalds or Jack-in-the-Box). But the tradition has been partly taken up by some members of the LA School. Obviously Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenburg's Big Binoculars (for an advertising company which has to watch changes in the market). There are also the amusing pop images of Jeff Daniels, Brian Murphy, Eric Moss and Hodgetts and Fung -- all of which amplifies or distorts recognizable icons.

However, there is another way of dealing with heterogeneity, the more common method adopted by the LA School of architects and those whose work is shown in the very colourful methods and models of this exhibition: en-formality. These architects portray variety through analogy. What l have termed Analogous-Hetero in the diagram reproduced here consists in the use of various informal materials in strong opposition and by the invention of new forms (or distorting old ones so they do not carry past associations). Frank Gehry was the first to crystallize this style from the junk and funk aesthetics which are so prevalent in LA. Artists showed the way, as he would be quick to acknowledge, but he turned this informal method of composition into a technique for producing architecture: the quick sketch buliding, the use of unusual materials out of context, the composition of relaxed juxtaposition (more like a still life by Morandi than a Dadaist collage). Eric Moss, Hodgetts and Fung, Thom Mayne, Michael Rotondi, Josh Schweitzer, Jeff Daniels, Brian Murphy, Grinstein/Narduli, Fred Fisher - nearly every architect in this exhibit, except Richard Meier, owes their method of informal collage and the use of demode materials to Gehry. Often the LA School is called simply the Gehry-Schule to indicate this obvious influence. No doubt all these architects would acknowledge the debt, but what is not so widely known is that the LA Style has been generalized way beyond Gehry and Los Angeles to become a large movement around the world.

The L.A. Style of en-formality

lt shares certain formal characteristics with other approaches, such as post-modern eclecticism and deconstruction, but it is less representational than the former and much more relaxed, colourful and humorous than the latter. Yet en-formality is more than a style and approach to design, it is a basic attitude towards the world, of living with uncertainty, celebrating flux and capturing the possibilities latent within the banal. Those who enjoy informal living are not necessarily most attuned to its virtues, which require a kind of wry detachment and passion for the unexpected. These allow a designer to notice qualities hidden within an ordinary situation, or everyday material.

The most celebrated example is Gehry's re-use of chain-link fencing, that dumb, horrible, utilitarian way of keeping people off your property, or unwanted animals out of your garbage (and LA has more different animal species wandering its streets at night than any other global city, a heterogeneity equivalent to its ethnic diversity). Gehry took chain-link out of its lowly status and transformed it as expressive sculpture, as flying sails, as veiling scrim, sometimes doubling it as overlapping layers to produce dazzling moire patterns and waves. lt will never seem the same again. Eric Moss has performed a similar transformative act with sewer pipes and all members of the LA School have one such victory over the banal to their credit. Look at the carefully crafted models of Morphosis, of Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi: they turn the aesthetic of junk into a melancholic art expressing the death of technology, its dirt, rust and imperfection. Yet this "Dead Tech" is not a lament, but a sensuous celebration of decay. lt reminds me of the impasto surfaces in a crumbling Italian Hill Town; stucco, dirt, smudges of earth colour washed over flat, abstract surfaces. Eric Moss constructs walls of actual buildings this way, something suitable to the hot, dry climate of LA.

The bricoleur, or a handyman, always stays very close to the materials and whatever is at hand, improvising with his limited tool-box and res-tricted set of methods. lngenuity is at a premium, the clever transformation of one set of solutions into another -especially cheap ones as Hodgetts and Fung have shown in their work. Having very little money and no time to put up a permanent building becomes a spur to creativity in their UCLA Library, a temporary building which makes a radical use of industrial technology. Such basic creativity is valued, even idealized by the Los Angeles School as a method, and it results in ad hoc concatenations that clearly accentuate their parts - the celebration of variety once again. The ideal is to stay close to nature, or the products of industriai society seen as a kind of second nature. The L.A. Style of en-formality is complicatedly informal, rough, tough and ascetic. These qualities predominate, along with the heavy metal contraptions which sometimes look like instruments of torture. Sadism, violence, decay? Behind these forms is another intention altogether. Despite everything, the architecture is friendly at heart, outgoing, open and accepting. lndeed this is the central focus of hetero-architecture; the ability to absorb other voices into a discourse without worrying too much about consistency or overall unity. The pluralism of inclusion, the desire to let every minority have some recognition, even those against you.

To fully appreciate hetero-architecture one must understand its opposite: the integrated, monolithic, monologic of Modern Architecture. One of the greatest examples of this is Richard Meier's extraordinary Ninth Wonder of the World nearing completion in Brentwood, Los Angeles, the billion dollar Getty Center. The actual cost of the center and the land may be hard to estimate since the project has lasted well over ten years, but by any conceivable measure it is one of the greatest, prestige commissions to be put in the hands of one architect. A heteropolitan approach would have divided this citadel on the hill between seven architects -- one for each large building and one for the masterplan -- and would have adopted various materials, styies, moods and metaphors. Dialogic consists in oppositions, it engages difference, whereas monologic enjoins a single statement, integration, even conformity.

Richard Meier's Late Modern aesthetic, which he has perfected over thirty years, is partly extended at the Getty Center by the prevalent use of stone, but it is stone which fits into the white, grey and black abstract monologic he has already well polished. Yet there is an acknowledgement of heterogeneity even within this logic. Buildings are skewed at odd angles (those generated by the hills and freeway); some are eroded, others collide together in juxtaposition; pure forms (circle, square and piano shape) are collaged. The village planning is, like Hadrian's Villa, a juxtaposition of set-pieces. So, even when Modern Architecture comes to LA (in LaLa Land as it is lampooned by aesthetes from New York), it remains looser, more eclectic, more friendly and plural. Architects of Los Angeles might bemoan the "miles and miles of Meier" but, if the world's most prestigious commission is to go to one architect, at least he has produced a monologic which is picturesque and variable to the landscape.

The supreme test of hetero-architecture and a building which, despite being attacked for five years may still be built, is Gehry's Disney Concert Hall. Winner of a competition in 1988, redesigned three times by 1992, it has been chastised as 'deconstructionist trash', 'a fortune cookie gone berserk,', a pile of broken crockery', an 'emptied wastebasket' and many other metaphors which damn its unusual curved forms. Defenders see these bent boxes as 'billowing sails', or a 'burgeoning flower thrusting its petals high above the LA smog' . Like any provocative, creative building in a pluralist society, it becomes the focus for love and hate. What should one think? It seems to me a perfect example of hetero-architecture. If built people will come around to it, I believe, because it is carefully suggestive of growing, pulsating life and it doesn't recall any particular ethnic architecture. It blurs metaphors together. It blends the box, the classical masonry culture center, and the expressionist curve into a new set of self-similar forms. lt is informal in composition, yet these self-similar forms have the logic of waves coming in on the beach -- each one is like every other one and slightly different too. In time, perhaps, all 150 ethnic groups can project their own meanings onto these richly suggestive shapes and in that sense the building can become a public focus for a diverse community.

That such an approach should reach consciousness with Frank Gehry, and then selfconsciousness with subsequent members of the L.A. School, shows a maturity rare at a time of quick change. The information world usually dissolves these movements of shared sensibility as soon as they are formed, in a blitz of media attention; but here a common attitude has managed to develop, perhaps because of the background culture of Los Angeles. It too mixes a sunshine gregariousness, an openness to new experience, with a tough streetwise realism. Hetero-architecture and heteropolitan urbanism may not reach the deep political issues of race, crime and inequality, but they do cast a new light on the multicultural debate, which now dominates discussions in the United States and is beginning to occupy Europe. Hetero-architecture opens a third position in the discourse; to adopt current categories, it is situated on the edge of the battle between the fundamentalists and deconstructivists. It suggests a way of otherness, hybridization and informality as creative responses to what is now an impasse; the conflict of dominant cultures with their subordinate minorities. Obviously it does not hold answers to the larger political questions, but it does suggest methods for confronting oppositions by creative displacement and creative eclecticism. It shows a way beyond entrenched positions. The love of difference -- heterophilia -- can lead to strange but beautiful inventions which diffuse strife by eliciting an enjoyment of and wonder at the other.