The architect Frank Gehry unveiled plans on Monday to build a 50-storey, glass-encased tower in the heart of central Los Angeles as the centrepiece of an ambitious $1,8-billion redevelopment plan.
The plan aims to restore a vibrant and thriving downtown to a city many say lacks a civic centre. ”We’ve worked hard to make this a true LA building and to make it a great place to be,” Gehry said. ”We want to create a unique pedestrian experience, we want to activate the streets and energise Grand Avenue.”
His designs, the first part of a three-phase plan envisaged by civic and private developers, would see the tower echoed by a smaller 25-storey structure. The two buildings, at opposite corners of a city block, will be linked by shops, offices, hotels and restaurants.
The project aims to play off what has become arguably the most recognisable building in Los Angeles, Gehry’s Walt Disney concert hall. But where that building is trademark Gehry in the style of his Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, all billowing lines and burnished stainless steel, the new project offers a deliberate contrast.
The taller of the two towers, which will contain a hotel on its lower floors, luxury apartments on its upper floors and three swimming pools on its roof, will be made of slabs of limestone at the base with glass encasing the body of the tower. The glass may take the form of a pleated drape or it may resemble a more solid curtain; the architect has still to work out the details.
The smaller tower will present a harder, more angular facade to the buildings around it. With shops, bars and an art gallery at its base, it will provide 150 flats and 100 affordable housing units, a gesture to one of the problems facing the area: the lack of diversity and community.
The towers would be Gehry’s first skyscrapers; to date he has not completed a building of more than 12 storeys. Developers hope to start work at the end of this year.
The downtown Los Angeles area around Grand Avenue, from which the development takes its name, boasts a daunting collection of civic buildings, but it can be a hostile, impersonal place.
Gehry’s own Disney Hall is not a welcoming sight. Its neighbour, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which for years hosted the Oscar ceremony, is an ugly, brutish building. Alongside them runs the six-lane Grand Avenue, which developers want to turn into the Champs Elysées of the west.
While the area is dominated by office blocks and civic buildings, there has been a resurgence of residential living in recent years, with estimates suggesting that the residential population of the area could double to 48 000 within the next decade. The new development does boast one feature currently lacking: a supermarket.
Downtown Los Angeles around Grand Avenue was not always so bereft of community or civic life. As Bunker Hill it hosted 19th-century homes for the middle classes. But from the 1920s it drew a less desirable category of resident and became an embarrassment to the leaders of the fast-emerging city. In the early 1960s the area was razed. – Guardian Unlimited Â