MAILANDER’S LA-"Nothing fades into the past so quickly as our vision of the future," deeply critical art critic Robert Hughes was fond of saying a handful of decades ago. And there is good reason for that.
Los Angeles has caught another round of future-longing … which it does every so often. The bug is epidemic--and in some cases the visions are antipodal. The Goldhirsch Foundation launched LA2050 a scant two years ago as "an initiative to create a shared vision for the future of Los Angeles, and to drive and track progress toward that vision." LA2050 was formed at almost the same time that City Council President Herb Wesson and Mayor Villaraigosa assembled the LA2020 Commission, which has already found that "Los Angeles is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward" even before bringing us its final report.
Worst of all, LA's leading industry, Hollywood, whelped a breezily cool white bubble of a movie called "Her" last year, set in an almost unrecognizable Los Angeles of the near future. The LA seen in "Her" is a clean, Anglo, antiseptic, transit-efficient, penthouse-dwelling LA where there are no taco stands, graffiti, Zacatecans, Jews, or potholes.
The protagonist of "Her" falls in love with his computer's operating system. But it's the attendant Playboy-moderne set decor that makes the movie. And this more than anything else caught the eye of the film's top fans.
Whether or not this muted Anglo vision of the future means that 2050 will belong to Mormons or Scientologists remains an open question. But one thing is certain: LA's own present-day members of its Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are so self-loathing in 2014 that they voted this extremely sanitized vision of Los Angeles's future as "Best Original Screenplay."
Playing Nostradamus in present-day LA involves much denial regarding the way the City exists to-day. In today's LA, which has always been an architectural laboratory for future visions, we have a few buildings coming online that present themselves as much as crystal balls as a film set in the future does.
For instance, the new Skid Row Housing Trust development downtown, called Star Apartments--maybe taking more than a nominal cue from the more celebrated Caltrans "Deathstar" at 100 Main--is one of those awful downtown buildings that looks like it belongs to a vision for a future that one immediately senses will with luck never arrive.
Even as Star comes online with its 102 new future-leaning prefab homeless housing units, at a cost of over $200,000 a unit and complete with exercise track, the whole formula for dealing with LA's most pernicious problem going forward is increasingly challenged. Noting the recent opening of another downtown homeless development, Gateway Apartments, a long Politico Magazine news analysis piece on LA's Skid Row concluded that "LA would need 130 new Gateway apartment complexes, at a cost of $28 million apiece, to meet the goal of ending chronic homelessness by 2016. No investment of that scale—or anywhere close to it—is in the works."
And it's not hard to see why. By my count, between Star, Gateway, and Sunland-Tujunga's Day Street Apartments, all professing to be state-of-the-art, we have 250 homeless housing units coming online in LA between Nov. '13 and Apr. '14, at an aggregate cost of $62 million.
If there are 50,000 homeless in LA, at this rate, we'll be obliged to spend $12 billion, to house all our homeless by ... 2114. But only providing there are no new homeless by then.
To me, LA's boomtown-like interest in prognosticating a vivid future is a way to ignore rather than fix the problems of the present. It mostly reflects intellectual lissomness, and even an innate hostility towards operating a calculator.
And while those in City Hall are quick to look at a future without applying any trending described by present-day math, it's also worth noting that they are even quicker to eviscerate the past. Beachwood Canyon's Fran Reichenbach noted to a handful of rabble rousers this week that the City Attorney had recommended the City destroy 149 boxes of its Ethics division files, including everything from campaign filing documents to speaker cards--nearly all documents that were over three years old, in fact.
It does seem...possible...that cutting-edge buildings, pan-global trends and awe inspiring lifestyles might happen in LA sometime soon. Tech is revving up--a little. The will to be lean and green and make money off of being so is everywhere. The flood of hipsters have culture's back at both the museum and street level. The Mayor is, at minimum, young and polyglot, even if he does belong to many of the ethnic groups ignored by "Her." The melting pot to which the Mayor belongs and enthusiastically panders already draws from the whole periodic table of tribes. In the past decade, the city has shut down freeways to let bikes pedal, built out subways halfway to the sea, all while adding pricey rental units that have saturated every fun zone.
But there is also this feeling that LA is not fully built out even yet, and using the promise of the future to bring it more boondoggles.
When looking at various redevelopment schemes for the City, I am reminded of the once future-looking Gateway Arch of St. Louis.
An architectural historian contended in a book last year on the Gateway Arch that most of St. Louis's profound urban problems could be traced back to the moment it decided to green light the big, future-looking monument and the plan to market itself as the gateway to a place that was not St. Louis.
I recall when I was a kid and the Gateway Arch was completed, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America. Now, fifty years on, it's 57th.
We used to look at the future as a place where we might talk to each other on a telephone and see our faces. Where we might talk to gadgets and the gadgets respond. That has all happened. But we were also working forty hour weeks back then, and that is no longer true for nearly anyone. In fact, the future into which we have presently arrived makes it feel like we are shopping all the time, working all the time, hustling all the time.
The idea of modernism itself is not a modern one anymore. The Bauhaus turns 100 in five years. Adolf Loos's seminal lecture "Ornament and Crime" is already 104.
Imagining the future as a cool and pristine place is code for saying things aren't right right now. Some may like to try to fix these things by inviting dreamers to dream greater dreams. But we had better apply some math to these dreams too.
(Joseph Mailander is a writer, an LA observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He is also the author of Days Change at Night: LA's Decade of Decline, 2003-2013. Mailander blogs here.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 22
Pub: Mar 14, 2014