It’s been thirty-one years since John Lautner died. For those who didn’t know him, John was California’s and, perhaps, the United States’ best postwar architect after Frank Lloyd Wright. He was also my friend and over the years, because I was involved in local government, I attempted somewhat foolishly, to get him a government job. Oil and water don’t mix. Great architects and modern California government are incompatible. John was of the last generation who with his fistful of engineers, consultants, and an occasional lawyer, was able to wrangle a great house out of the congregation of counter monkeys at the building departments. As time went on, this became more and more expensive and time-consuming, and John could only get houses built for the very wealthy. Many a fine modest house remained on the building department cutting room floor. We did not realize it at the time, but California government’s war on the single-family home was in full bloom by 1980.
Since 1992, in Los Angeles County, there hasn’t been a single piece of great architecture built. Oh, there have been some big piles, some well detailed piles, and a lot of expensive piles, but nothing that makes the human spirit soar with delight. Actually, I’m wrong. After a more than decade long battle with the California Coastal Commission, architect Bart Prince built a gem of a house in Malibu. But the battle so scarred the couple who owned it they ended up divorcing by the time it was done, and it was sold as their only asset. The middle eastern gentleman who bought it tore it down and built a huge Mediterranean pile that didn’t conform to the setbacks, viewscape preservation, massing and color requirements, or coastal access requirements that Bart Prince was forced to comply with. It’s incomprehensible.
In most parts of the world, wealth or bribes would suffice, as an explanation, but not California, and most specifically, not Los Angeles County. Wallace Cunningham, a great California architect who is the best of my generation, and can somehow get great work done in the San Diego area, also had a project in Malibu. This was for a series of homes built by a group of friends who were world famous musicians. The project was to mimic the shape of the hillside, have earth sheltered roofs planted in California native plants and would be “Zero Net” in its energy use. These were literally what everyone says eco homes should be. They would also have been quite stunning and would have rivaled John Lautner’s Silvertop in Silver Lake for both breathtaking integration with the site and technological advancement. Unfortunately, the project never even got to be decimated by the code counter monkeys at the Los Angeles County Building department. It couldn’t get past the California Coastal Commission. Bribes, in the form of land donations to public private partnerships, cash for trail building, and a wad of cash for their architect to design various public accommodations were lavished upon the Coastal Commission and associated California departments and pet captive not -for -profit organizations. Everybody had their hand out and everybody got their palm greased. Despite this, the Coastal Commission never gave their approval. In the third world you actually get what your bribe buys. In the third world a bribe is tens of thousands of dollars. In Malibu it’s millions upon millions of dollars. In the third world, petty despots have a semblance of honor. California government is more corrupt than the third world.
It’s not just Malibu where California and local government will conspire to destroy good architecture. Remember I mentioned I tried to get John Lautner a government job? One of those was the design contract for the Lincoln Avenue Redevelopment in the city of Altadena. For two decades, the County tried to hand this project to a campaign donor. That effort failed and the process broke open. With a lot of community effort and a seemingly all-out war, we managed to get the design contract awarded to Eric Lloyd Wright (Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandson, a truly great architect and a wonderful human being). Eric partnered with a local African American developer, Harold James. The County of Los Angeles worked overtime to discourage the community from building this project. They had other plans, plans that had nothing to do with the community. The County plan was to replace the struggling Black business community with national chains and avoid building any housing. Their plan was to build a soul-crushing strip mall. We attempted the inverse of all that. Eventually Eric and Harold won the project, but Harold had a fast-acting cancer and died, and the county gave the community and Eric Wright ninety days to get a new developer, or they would re-award the project to people at the higher levels of the County’s redevelopment staff. Miraculously, we came up with a developer, but unknown to the community and to Eric Wright, as a condition of getting the job, the developer was sworn to get rid of everything by Eric Wright, except perhaps his name. He was sworn to the losing site plan that was favored by the director’s prior employer, and that nonfunctional site plan is what Altadena now has.
First came the demolition of the site plan that had local small businesses placed diagonally on a 45-degree axis from the main street ensuring added visibility, like the Leidesplein in the Netherlands. Then the grocery store was removed from the prominent corner and a gym placed there. Next, the common open seating area and water features were gotten rid of, followed thereafter by the children’s play area. Then the affordable housing was eliminated. Then the overhangs equipped with what was then cutting-edge LED lighting powered by solar cells and battery packs for the sidewalks. The roof overhangs were chopped off and the insulated glass panels on the west side of the project were also deleted. This turned those shops into solar ovens. A great design was eviscerated by a million cuts. Every graceful note of humanity, every gift to the Earth for the future was hacked off. It became so bad Eric took his name off the project. Trying to do him, and Altadena that favor, caused my friend endless grief and I have regretted it ever since.
The thing was that this project was a radically different way of doing community redevelopment. It was centered on the needs of the community and the Earth and attempted to dance and mediate those things into a workable whole. This was a threat to the development industry and the County structure as a whole. It had to be destroyed and it was. The idea of joyful habitation in some kind of balance with the Earth, is horror to city planners. They are all about soullessness and the lack of connection to one’s fellow human being and to the Earth. Despite their statements, we have their deeds and the deeds they twist others into doing.
We are at a crisis point now in California. Everything in this State is crumbling due to the tremendous heft of governmental corruption. It’s not just corruption in the general sense of bribe taking. It is a corruption of people who are supposed to be servants but who believe themselves God-kings and expect to be worshipped and have their every whim adored by the public. It is a corruption where the legislature decriminalizes the theft of $1,000 or less from retail stores and criminalizes employees stopping the theft because their campaign donations come from online retailers. Pay tribute or die. It’s a corruption where neighborhoods are turned either into open air homeless encampments or are filled with state subsidized hyper-dense no rehab/rehab facilities. The neighborhoods that don’t like it? They’ll be ignored. And even if the people pass an initiative against such things, overturning it becomes the first order of business when the legislature reconvenes. How dare the people speak what we do not wish to hear!
It’s a corruption where the elected blather endlessly about something called “democracy” and rule with the iron fist of tyrants. It is a corruption that makes organic architecture, the American architecture of the free spirit, impossible and illegal.
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