THRESHOLDS 44 UNFIT: Los ANgeLes ANd The empTy gLAss Box WORKSPACE 43 UNFIT: LOS UNFIT: 05-03-2015 3:19:40 05-03-2015 EMPTY GLASS BOX ANGELES AND THE ANGELES DANA CUFF AARON CAYER AND CAYER AARON Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00114 by guest on 25 September 2021 02-CUFF-CAyeR-UNFIT-FINAL .gdoC VERSION 3 LAST MODIFIED ON JANUARY 14, 2016 9:09 AM 44 UNFIT: Los ANgeLes ANd The empTy gLAss Box WORKSPACE THRESHOLDS 44 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00114 by guest on 25 September 2021 45 “Many U.S. cities have had their downtown areas fall into this kind of desuetude [as in Los Angeles], and have made equally irrelevant THRESHOLDS44 attempts to revitalize them, but in none of the others does one have quite such a strong feeling that this is where the action cannot possibly be.”1 —Reyner Banham When Arthur Erickson’s second California Plaza building opened with fanfare in 1992, its fifty-two floors were seventy percent vacant, and the rest of central Los Angeles’s commercial real estate was one quarter empty as well. It was patently clear that the modernist office tower was no longer fit for work in Los Angeles.2 As a product of managerial capitalism and a tool for organizing Los UNFIT: work-time and work-space, the monofunctional office tower stood as an icon of downtown knowledge work and as a distinct A N ge signifier of the “organization man,” whose work life was separate L es es 3 from his leisure time and domestic life at home in the suburbs. AN d T The glass boxes that rose between the 1960s and 1990s sought he e to upgrade Los Angeles’s image as a modern city modeled on its mp T y more respected sisters: New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. gLA In the post-war period, “virtually every high-rise office building Box ss in Los Angeles was designed in some version of modernism,” and the towers built were more imitative than distinguished, less numerous than the capacity of the center-city land cleared for development, and yet more voluminous than the demand for dd .IN 4 R office space. ye CA - h 16, 2016 9:46 PM The clichés about Los Angeles, its downtown, and its suburbs need no further rehearsal. CUFF ARC Instead, the evolution of the city, which is usually described in terms of demographics ds- WORKSPACE L 1Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University California Press, 1971), 190. esho R 2At the time, Manhattan’s vacancy rate was 16.9 percent. See: Richard W. Stevenson, “Office Glut Spreads in California,” The New York Times, 45 h November 11, 1991, accessed January 14, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/11/business/office-glut-spreads-in-california.html T - 3Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 121. IT 4Wim de Wit, “The Style of the Future’ The Vicissitudes of Modernism in Los Angeles,” in Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future 1940-1990, ed. Wim VERSION M ON MODIFIED LAST 03-m de Wit and Christopher James Alexander (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), 72. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00114 by guest on 25 September 2021 LAST MODIFIED ON JANUARY 14, 2016 9:09 AM 9:09 2016 14, JANUARY ON MODIFIED LAST 3 VERSION 02-CUFF-CA 46 and political economy, can be illuminated presented the opportunity to invent new by overlaying the history of its material work practices that fit the spatial patterns THRESHOLDS44 form. This is particularly important for of the city that, in turn, would influence ye R-UNFIT-FINAL . R-UNFIT-FINAL understanding the sprawling megalopolis the evolving architecture of work. These of Los Angeles, where conventional urban pressures sparked an animated battle narratives do not apply, since “downtown” between centrality and escape, concentric gdo comprises less than one percent of the work and sprawling leisure, and speculative C city’s 500 square miles and is the place of planning and architectural restructuring work for only seven percent of all workers that rendered downtown a playground for in the city.5 Between 1940 and 1970, the overindulgence. A once-glorious, rundown population of the wider Los Angeles con- neighborhood called Bunker Hill focused urbation tripled to 10 million, fragmenting the development regime’s fantasies, and the region into a full 140 incorporated with herculean effort, the hill and every- cities each with its own downtown of sorts.6 thing on it was flattened to make way for However, the standard urban narrative Erickson’s towers along with others in the UNFIT: Los UNFIT: of a middle-class, white exodus does not 1970s and 1980s. Yet the “build it and they describe the spatial demographics of Los will come” aspirations of the public-private Angeles because the population booms real estate machine missed its target; the A emanated primarily at the periphery, economic strength of the region was built N ge forcing predominantly Anglo boosters to upon workplaces already diffuse and varied L es es invent a narrative about downtown that enough to sidestep conventional central- 8 AN might be powerful enough to supplant ized finance or corporate headquarters. d T its vibrant identity as the center of Latino At the present moment, when a 24/7 he commercial activity along the 19th century work-life is challenging the very possibility e mp gridiron streets.7 Architects, developers, of leisure and lifestyle, and as the arts and T y and planners of Los Angeles’s downtown entertainment are themselves considered gLA were required to push against conventional sites of work, we argue that the history of ss Box ss wisdom about the spatial interplay of work Los Angeles’s nebulous downtown reveals and leisure by interpreting downtown as an an evolving relationship of leisure to work, open latticework and the modernist office and the role of both in the city. The insular, towers as tools for overcoming post-war suburban corporate campuses that now representations of suburban leisure, constitute well over half of all office space which prioritized pastoral ideals of refuge in the United States are being pressured by over urbanism. In essence, Los Angeles both scholars and freelance-driven econo- mies to renew civic-minded engagements 5That’s below the average for other American cities: San Francis- co (26.1 percent), in comparison to Austin (28.8 percent), Charlotte with existing city centers, infrastructure, (19.5), New Orleans (23.3 percent). See: Joe Cortright, “City Report: Surging City Center Job Growth,” City Observatory, February 2015, housing, and diverse urban culture in order accessed September 1, 2015, http://cityobservatory.org/wp-content/up- loads/2015/02/Surging-City-Center-Jobs.pdf 6Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions WORKSPACE (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 131-2. 7“Downtown Los Angeles” in this essay refers to a historically shifting geography, which prior to WWII was located in the traditional plaza district and nearby 19th century gridiron. After the war, “downtown Los Angeles” 8It is worth noting that downtown’s office towers, typically occupied by still existed in this zone, but expanded to include the adjacent Bunker Hill finance, legal, and accounting firms, continue to hover around 20 percent tabula rasa with urban redevelopment efforts concentrated primarily along vacant today, as those tenants continue to shrink their footprints and Grand Avenue. compete for rehabbed industrial space with the booming tech sector. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00114 by guest on 25 September 2021 to achieve socio-economic sustainability.9 in 1884 to open an office with the hopes of 47 It is therefore no coincidence that an agile, developing surrounding land, including ambiguous, and perpetually “vacant” urban a 120-acre fig orchard in the suburbs that THRESHOLDS44 center, such as downtown Los Angeles, is would later be named “Hollywood.” The poised to redefine the intersection of work subsequent golden age of film and enter- and leisure in ways more consistent with tainment, coupled with the displacement of an individualistic, everyday life that is less rail transportation by automobiles, proved susceptible to a homogenization of mass capable of replacing the former heart of culture, and more enmeshed in the violent the city—downtown—with a new kind politics of the everyday. of sprawling, social urban substrate—a process that the urbanist Albert Pope DOWNTOWN LA: A SUBURB characterizes as the city of form being ONCE REMOVED overtaken by the city of space.10 Phantasmic As in many cities across the US, office work advertisements and accounts of a “Los was central to the formation of downtown Angeles lifestyle” leveraged recreation Los Angeles in the 19th century, when time and a leisure lifestyle, depicting the Los UNFIT: railroads promulgated downtown work city as a land of leisure, entertainment, and centers that would eventually connect to sprawling domestic life. By the 1940s, it distant suburban residences. As primary was clear that “work” in Los Angeles had A N social relationships based on location were been redefined, at least rhetorically, since ge L weakened by broad migrations to central the suburban metropolis was claimed as es industrial cities like Los Angeles, they “the land of stars: where they live, where AN d were replaced with relationships based on they work, and where they play.” (Fig. 1) T daytime associations and common eco- Los Angeles’s displacement of he e nomic interests. Downtown Los Angeles downtown in the name of “recreation,” mp T emerged as a bonafide urban center at “play,” and “freedom” paralleled Thorstein y gLA the turn of the century for shoppers in Veblen’s classic theory of “conspicuous the Seventh Avenue retail district or for leisure,” which described both physical and Box ss workers in the Spring Street financial intellectual pursuits of “non-productive core, yet downtown’s primacy was slowly consumption of time.”11 However, such outshined by an impulsive series of land definitions of leisure based on freedom and investments percolating on the edges of the refuge were qualities of social life governed city.