essay by Sylvia Lavin - bücher.de · from left to right: le corbusier, the modulor 009 (1948) /...

essay by Sylvia Lavin

PRESTEL

MUNICH · BERLIN · LONDON · NEW YORK

HS#9

CENTRAL LOS ANGELES AREA

HIGH SCHOOL #9 FOR THE

VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS

100223_HS9-BUCH_Design_Text_RL.indd 001 04.05.2010 18:16:13 Uhr

REVOLUTION 9 essay by Sylvia Lavin

BACKGROUND

URBAN CONTEXT

POWER FOR ART

CHESS CONCEPT

PROJECT DRAWINGS

THE LOBBY

THEATER BUILDING

THE TOWER

LIBRARY BUILDING

CAFETERIA

ACADEMIES / ART BUILDING

ANNEX

005

019

026

034

038

046

058

076

092

108

130

142

176

CONTENTS

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3


“Revolution 9” is a song recorded by the Beatles and released on The

White Album in 1968, that heady year when students were demonstrating across

Europe, the Vietnam War was at a fever pitch, and Coop Himmelb(l)au was founded

in Vienna. The song has been described as the best-known work of avant-garde

music and the most disliked moment of any Beatles album. Key to the work’s Jekyll

and Hyde reputation is that unlike most Beatles songs, with their sweetly straight-

forward lyrics and comparatively unencumbered sound, “Revolution 9” is frustrat-

ingly diffi cult to understand. For some, this suggests a connection to musique con-

crète and opens the Beatles up to more than just a pop music legacy. For others,

however, the song’s sampling of bits of music by Sibelius and Beethoven opens

the Beatles up to accusations that they abandoned their audience and the band’s

obligation to make listeners feel good. The result has been a mash-up of inter-

pretations and misinterpretations, the most famous being the one celebrated by

conspiracy theorists who listen to the song backwards and claim that when John

Lennon repeats the words “number nine, number nine,” he is confi rming—in secret

code intelligible only à la Leonardo da Vinci, in reverse—that Paul McCartney had

died and had been replaced by a doppelgänger in 1966.

It is uncanny how much of this description applies to Coop Himmelb(l)au’s High

School #9. And I don’t just mean the uncanny coincidence of the number nine

itself, but of the trauma of interpretation and value that the two number nines have

produced. Like the song, the building has been both celebrated for its radical form

and chastised for its apparent abandonment of its obligation to its audience who

essay by Sylvia Lavin

REVOLUTION 9

00

5


FROM LE FT TO R IG HT: TH E B EATLES, TH E WH ITE ALBU M

(1968) / PAB LO P ICASSO, TH E ARCH ITECT’S TABLE (1912)

/ MARCE L DUCHAM P, FONTAI N E (1917) / 9 WEST 57TH

STR E ET, NYC, SOLOW B U I LD I NG, B U I LD I NG BY G OR DON

B U NSHAFT OF SOM (1971), AN D R E D 9 SCU LPTU R E BY

IVAN CH E R MAYE FF

are used to and therefore may still want conventional school buildings. Indeed, of

all of the relatively recent public commissions in Los Angeles, from Frank Gehry’s

Disney Concert Hall to the Caltrans Headquarters by Morphosis and Renzo Piano’s

Broad Pavilion at LACMA, the high school is the most classically avant-garde. The

school’s design is rooted in the idea that the function of art is to contest prevailing

ideologies and social mores (visible in the simplest sense through the “I am the

one that is not like all the others” stance of the building both with respect to other

new schools in Los Angeles and other buildings on Grand Avenue). The building is

rough, diffi cult, assertive, and non-conformist—a challenge to the idea of educa-

tion as a means of normalization—all features characteristic of the historical avant-

garde. And while some of these descriptors apply to other recent buildings in Los

Angeles, High School #9 is the only one that deserves them all. Add to this distinct

shapeliness the fact that the building was designed by an internationally renowned

architect, and it is easy to see why High School #9 happily confi rms for many that

Los Angeles fi nally belongs to the cultural big leagues rather than only the enter-

tainment industry, just as “Revolution 9” linked John Lennon to John Cage rather

than merely to Top of the Pops.

At the same time, however, High School #9 has been received in ways that recall

the public’s fi rst reactions to avant-garde artists from Picasso to Duchamp: with

dislike, distrust, and disbelief. While everyone now likes to like the modern archi-

tecture of Los Angeles, the high school, it must be admitted, has not been wel-

comed with such open arms, and is indeed a source of anxiety for those who have

forgotten how much all the other now beloved architects, from Schindler to Gehry,

were at fi rst disliked. Disliking Coop Himmelb(l)au, in fact, now makes it possible to

forget how much Los Angeles disliked the fi gures it now professes to love. (How a

city with several major museums but not one with a robust program in architecture

can think of itself as supportive of architecture is a question worth asking.) Through

the negative response to High School #9 it is possible to witness the history of

the avant-garde repeating itself with comments ranging from “I can’t fi nd the front

door” and “How do I know it’s a school?” to the simple, “it’s ugly.”

If love and hate tie the school to the odd notion of the Beatles as radicals (that

side of the coin was generally reserved for the Rolling Stones), what really makes

00

6


the high school a contemporary parallel to “Revolution 9” is that no one knows

what the number nine in either name signifi es. This isn’t really surprising given that

meaning is socially produced, making it impossible for a building to accrue value if

the culture around it cannot even agree on a name or thinks the entire enterprise—

a school for the arts at a time when most schools can’t afford pencils—isn’t even

worthy of public support in the fi rst place. And left nameless, in fact and in spirit, the

building has become like a Rorschach test, with every Tom, Dick, and critic trying to

fi ll it up with meaning that can be nothing more than their own personal and often

paranoid projections leading to a crazy chain of misunderstanding. For example,

and against all odds, in the midst of Prix’s pile of aggressively abstract concrete,

some want to read the tower as a sort of billboard in the shape of the number nine,

but a nine turned upside down. Wouldn’t that make it a six? Which belongs to the

sign of the devil. And the conspiracy theorists who play things backwards or, in this

case, upside down, focus not on the empty meaning of the number nine but on the

fact that the tower was left physically empty, which proves to them that which they

already thought, namely (or namelessly), that the school is an excessive waste of

money and the tower is the sign of a devil-wearing-Prada architect.

Given all the Sturm und Drang, it is worth considering for a moment if the number

nine, that might be a six, or an empty vessel, is a more strategic consequence of

the design rather than the accidental result of a funny shape that can get fl ipped

around and turned into anything. I don’t mean that Coop Himmelb(l)au devilishly

designed a billboard for the school that no one can read, but I am asking if the

larger problem of architectural legibility in a diverse culture is what is at stake in the

diffi culties people have had in reading not only the tower but the complex as a

whole. Even critics—supposed experts—have not had much to say about its par-

ticularities, tossing off vague comments about how the high school recalls Le Cor-

busier, for example, without giving any sense of in what way or to what end. Fur-

thermore, if you actually made some effort—looked on the Internet or went to the

library—to learn how to read Coop Himmelb(l)au you would fi nd many news reports

but surprisingly little analysis of any use in this regard. Even though the fi rm is well

known, often cited, and well published, there are no histories of the fi rm’s work, no

accounts of its contribution, and no written record of its development. (A major

00

7


retrospective exhibition curated by Jeffrey Kipnis is a recent and the only excep-

tion.) In this sense, Coop Himmelb(l)au couldn’t be less like Le Corbusier, about

whom a zillion books have been written—and were written even when he was alive

and controversial—and who himself wrote almost as many. While Le Corbusier is

at the center of a swirling tornado of words, it’s as though the whole fi eld of archi-

tecture threw up its hands in the face of Coop Himmelb(l)au and remained silent.

And, the few times critics have bothered to try to actually say something about the

work, they have tended to say Wolf Prix likes clouds and builds things that look like

clouds and they can prove it because his fi rm is named blue sky. Now, there is

nothing more conducive to idle description than a cloud. Leonardo himself, when

he wasn’t writing his notebooks in secret code, liked to pass the time reading the

shape of things into clouds. As fun as such creative misreading might be, most will

agree that it tells you much about the reader and virtually nothing about the clouds.

Like a stormy day, Coop Himmelb(l)au provokes a lot of response, but it leaves

experts and non-experts equally speechless.

That it is not clear what High School #9 stands for as a name, that the school

indeed lacks a proper name, is subject to contradictory interpretations and has

a giant tower that acts like a Rorschach test—or a cloud—attracting all kinds of

unstable meanings that come from the viewer rather than the building, is not an

accident nor the result of the accidental circumstances of this particular project.

The idea that works of art and buildings too should engender rather than impose

meaning was a widespread principle in the 1960s, one that Coop Himmelb(l)au

indeed explored. But the high school helps make it clear that Coop Himmelb(l)au

is an extreme case even in this context of what was called “open work”—work

that was formally open in order to simulate open interpretations. From the begin-

ning of its history, Coop Himmelb(l)au not only posed a challenge to the very idea

of architectural legibility but produced an active resistance to reading. Moreover,

this apparently internal architectural issue has been rendered all the more acute

by becoming manifest in a troubled public school, where children are supposed

to learn how to read at a minimum, but where increasingly in the United States

they do not learn how to read at all and are often confronted by mass confusion

about which language to learn to read and write. In other words, the premise of the

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8


FROM LE FT TO R IG HT: LE COR B USI E R, TH E MODU LOR

(1948) / COOP H I M M E LB(L)AU, TH E WH ITE SU IT (1969) /

R U DOLF M. SCH I N DLE R, TH E SCH I N DLE R HOUSE, LOS

ANG E LES, USA (1922)

questions about architectural meaning that were posed by the avant-garde—that

there was a dominant culture with shared knowledge and assumptions that it was

the outsiders’ job to resist and critique—has been fundamentally challenged by the

collapse of cultural dominance, and not only of systems of shared knowledge but

even of what constitutes knowledge worth sharing.

There is a big difference between raising questions of legibility and being impos-

sible to read. High School #9 is not illegible, but it does take schooling to read it. In

fact, the design of the school offers a kind of schooling as it is a primer on the work

of Le Corbusier, an architect who was interested in creating a new set of ABC’s

for modern architecture (he called them points and believed you could make entire

cities with only fi ve of them), and whose work has itself become the basic starting

point for much of the vocabulary of postwar architecture. High School #9 com-

bines elements from various works by Le Corbusier in such a way as to constitute

a reading of what Prix considers to be the elemental building blocks and common

denominators of Le Corbusier’s oeuvre as a whole. The design acts on Le Corbus-

ier the way a music theory class acts on a Beethoven symphony, by showing the

incredible range of complexity that begins with just a three-note motif.

Motif #1 The Roof Terrace

One of Le Corbusier’s most infl uential ideas was the notion of a roof

terrace (now commonplace, but unheard of in the 1920s), an occupiable plane on

the top of buildings, whether large and urban or private and suburban. The most

mundane reason for getting people up off the ground and outside was to provide

access to light and air, to collective open space that was not simply the often pol-

luted street itself, and to provide views that helped connect people in a building to

the larger terrain. A more idealizing reason for a roof terrace was to produce a new,

unencumbered plane for social interaction without history and therefore without

prejudice. Stepping up off the ground was, for Le Corbusier, to step away from

inherited assumptions about class and privilege and therefore to step toward a

potential social utopia.

00

9


FROM LE FT TO R IG HT: LE COR B USI E R, SAI NT-MAR I E DE

LA TOU R ETTE, ÉVE UX-SU R-AR B R ESLE, FRANCE (1957–60)

/ ROOF TE R RACE OF U N ITÉ D’HAB ITATION, MAR SE I LLES,

FRANCE (1947–52) / V I LLE SAVOYE, POISSY-SU R-SE I N E,

FRANCE (1928–31) / FRONT VI EW OF U N ITÉ D’HAB ITATION,

B E R LI N, G E R MANY (1956–59) / CLAU DE-N ICOLAS LE DOUX,

PLAN OF TH E SALI N E ROYALE, D’ARC-ET-SE NANS,

FRANCE (1774)

High School #9 is organized around a roof terrace. Most of the other schemes

submitted to the competition were campus plans, the traditional American way

of organizing schools that require more than one building. The roof terrace motif

is intrinsically less pastoral in its implications than a campus and more rooted in

urban conditions; a roof terrace may look upon a landscape but it is by defi nition

not in a landscape as traditionally understood. The urbanity of the roof terrace motif

renders the school’s organization surprisingly contextual rather than contestatory

in downtown Los Angeles, where there has long since been an emphasis on being

elevated, through not only natural rises and falls in the topography but freeways,

platforms, skyways, and overpasses. Downtown Los Angeles, and Grand Avenue

in particular, in fact, tell the tale of the utopian rise and realpolitik fall of the roof

terrace ideal.

It is precisely in the degree to which the roof terrace of High School #9 is not like

that of La Tourette or Villa Savoye that Prix’s choice of the motif gets most interest-

ing: unlike Le Corbusian terraces—which are systematically fl at, above the ground,

and accessible only from with the buildings, which thus act like holy water cleans-

ing and preparing the visitor for his ascension to utopia—the high school’s upper

surface is not uniform and singular, but is rather compromised by and responsive to

the urbanscape of the neighborhood. The terrace therefore does not appear to be

fl oating above the ground (although it is an artifi cially elevated surface and there-

fore a terrace), but rather is a series of planes that step up but never quite achieve

liftoff. The changes in level allow various program elements to be connected, but

they more signifi cantly reduce the idealizing aspect of the original terrace model.

As any Angelino can tell you, the terraces, platforms, and elevated walkways of

downtown that were intended to be social lubricants have more often been divi-

sive, creating barriers between neighborhoods, classes, and color. One might think

of the plazas at High School #9 as a roof terrace that is ironically and intentional-

ly brought down to the ground in such a way as to make a necessary and some-

times painful bridge between an actual social order and a diagram of a potential

social reordering.

010


Motif #2 The Megastructure

If High School #9 is less than a campus and more than a single building,

it could be considered a small megastructure. One of the most signifi cant of Le

Corbusier’s urban rooftop buildings is the Unité d’Habitation, the fi rst of which was

built in Marseilles in the late 1940s. This housing scheme has been noted for sev-

eral innovations, but one of them is having suggested the notion of a relatively large

building that combines within one physical structure not only multiple program ele-

ments, such as housing and school, but also elements that generally belong to

non-architectural categories such as streets and infrastructure. In the high school

the roof is not just an upper limit of a building, but a deep plinth that sandwiches

parking, classrooms, and public buildings within its thickness. The plinth itself is not

quite a building—it doesn’t have a façade or a proper front, back, or side—but it

is a system that integrates building components and combines them with circula-

tion and event space at a scale that suggests the infrastructural. Indeed, one of the

most notable aspects of the high school is the degree to which the easterly class-

rooms abut the adjacent freeway. Many an architect would have thought the noise

and speed of the cars a distraction to students, but Prix did virtually everything

possible to make it seem as though the freeway was coursing through the building

itself. Whether or not this was meant to indicate to students that school was a way

forward, it certainly embedded the building in the tradition of the megastructure, a

typology invested in large-scale plans and big ambitions.

Another characteristic of megastructures, particularly as developed in the 1960s,

was that they were exploited as systems into which not just typologically diverse

but fl exible and changeable units could be accommodated. At their most extreme,

megastructures were giant empty cages in which often prefabricated and identical

living pods, working pods, or schooling pods could be inserted and moved around

as needed. The high school treats the classrooms, which from a design point of

view were found objects, belonging to an earlier phase of the design and done by

another architectural fi rm, as though they were provisional pods, susceptible to

being, at least conceptually, moved, upgraded, and transformed in the future. In

addition, the school is riddled with extra space—space on the roof terrace, space

011


FROM LE FT TO R IG HT: FROM LE COR B USI E R, “TH E

LESSON OF ROM E,” TOWAR DS A N EW ARCH ITECTU R E /

LE COR B USI E R, SAI NT-P I E R R E DE F I R M I NY, FRANCE

(1970–2006) / COOP H I M M E LB(L)AU, HOUSE R E HAK,

LOS ANG E LES, USA (1990) / ÉTI E N N E-LOU IS B OU LLÉE,

CÉNOTAPH E / CYLI N DR ICAL SKYLIG HT OF SAI NT-P I E R R E

DE F I R M I NY / COOP H I M M E LB(L)AU WITH K I K I SM ITH,

PARADISE CAG E, MOCA LOS ANG E LES, USA (1996)

in the plinth, etc.—that cannot be defi ned by normal and predetermined use but

that rather anticipates future performance and extramural happenings put on spon-

taneously by students. Like the adaptability of pods moving in and out as needed,

at High School #9 performance itself serves as a building block provisionally given

a home by the megastructure.

Motif #3 Geometric Primitives

Le Corbusier considered all good architecture, from ancient buildings in

Rome to the newest in Paris, to derive from a few good platonic solids—a round

temple was a slice of a cylinder, a dome a section of a sphere, and a house a couple

of cubes stitched together with the golden section. These elemental shapes appear

in all of Le Corbusier’s built work both as the regulators of the buildings’ overall

massing and sometimes as quasi-independent elements that erupt on rooftops or

out of the ground. These geometric primitives reappear in the Prix design as the

round shape of windows, the truncated cone of the library, the pyramidal theater,

and the cubic protrusions of light wells and the tower. These giant solids emerge

from the plinth, as though they were partially buried within it rather than sitting on

top, and establish a skyline above ground for the school as a whole. The presence

of these solids is not only interesting for the way they link the school to Le Cor-

busier’s notion of elemental fi gures of architectural form in the guise of geometric

primitives, but because Le Corbusier’s notion in turn linked him to a history of mod-

ern architecture that goes back to the eighteenth century. And if that connection

weren’t enough, the single most important book written on this history of geometry

connecting the era of Enlightenment to the twentieth century was by an Austrian,

Emil Kaufman, who wrote From Ledoux to Le Corbusier in 1933. High School

#9 seems to be whispering, “From Ledoux to Le Corbusier … to Le Wolf Man.”

Much has been written about this historiography, but suffi ce it to say that Enlight-

enment architecture is full of sunken pyramids and spherical performance spaces.

And much has been written about the continued interest in modernism beyond

the eighteenth century of stripping architecture down to geometry’s version of the

ABC’s, exemplifi ed by the work of Le Corbusier from the Church at Firminy to

012


Chandigarh. What I’d like to add to and emphasize in this story is that these geo-

metric primitives were produced on the eve not of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,”

but of what might be called Revolution #1, the French Revolution, during which

years many architects spent their time in prison (being punished for working for

the monarchy), literally stripping their buildings of royal symbols, redrawing them as

geometry, geometry pure and abstract enough that it could be permanently discon-

nected from its original royalist meaning and left free to bear new meaning. Erasing

the marks of distinction and inherited position to produce universal form ultimately

became synonymous with and symbolic of revolutionary goals themselves.

After the Revolution, and once the idea that all men were born (more or less) equal

became offi cial policy with Napoleon, actually turning all men into political and

social equals became a practical matter rather than theoretical ideal. One instru-

ment in this transformation was public education. Before the Revolution, educa-

tion had been both the privilege and the proof of high birth. Educating the public,

educating people to become a public, defi ning the public as those individuals who

shared a knowledge base and set of standards and morals was one of the most

important legacies of Revolution #1. According to this new civil code, public edu-

cation became both a right and an obligation: to this day, to become a French

citizen you must be schooled in French, you must learn the established form of

literacy, and are legally required to say “ordinateur” rather than “computer” as does

the rest of the world. During the nineteenth century, literacy came to be required

not just in the language arts but in the visual arts as well. This meant every school

child learned to draw simple geometric forms, and the curriculum was not con-

sidered a dispensable luxury but rather deemed an essential tool of the Republic.

These are the forms that Le Corbusier used as the basis of his architectural vocab-

ulary and that Prix used as the starting point—if not the end point—of his effort to

spell the shape of a new public school for the arts.

The capacity to read cones and pyramids, like the capacity to read words in a par-

ticular language, was implicitly part of a social contract, an even exchange between

reader and writer, listener and speaker. If the public was going to be taught to

read, then it was assumed that one would address them in a legible form. The

“speaking architecture” of the eighteenth century makes sense only in the context

013


FROM LE FT TO R IG HT: PAU L CÉZAN N E, TH E BATH E R

(1885) / VLAD I M I R YEVG RAFOVICH TATLI N, TH E

MON U M E NT TO TH E TH I R D I NTE R NATIONAL (1917) / LOS

ANG E LES DOWNTOWN CONTEXT, B U N KE R H I LL, 1981 /

DOWNTOWN B ROADWAY / G RAN D AVE N U E CU LTU RAL

COR R I DOR, TH E LOS ANG E LES OPE RA I N FRONT OF TH E

TH E WALT D ISN EY HALL (1987–2003) BY FRAN K O. G E H RY

of this reciprocity. By the twentieth century, however, this contractual meaning was

increasingly seen as a technique that had not led to social equality but that had

instead produced social conformity and concentrated power in the hands of those

who controlled the technology of discourse. The avant-garde’s interest in illegibility

or at least producing new forms of legibility was a reaction against this consolida-

tion. But regardless of this reaction, everything from Cézanne to the teapots of the

Bauhaus still used the same platonic geometry beneath the jagged edges and the

Darjeeling brew that every young child, artist, and architect learned in grade school.

The alphabet of formal discourse that was produced through the education of a

public that was itself produced by Revolution #1’s social contract of legibility has

been so universally accepted as the true and natural language of the arts that the

geometry is no longer recognized as a political invention but accepted as a simple

visual lingua franca.

The diffi culty today for buildings like High School #9 is that this social contract has

not only been breached—there is no cultural lingua franca, only an ever proliferat-

ing number of pidgins—but it is no longer even recognized to have had its origins

in a contract. The spread of art education after WWII ingrained the idea that the

“truth of art,” its underlying formal principles, would be understandable if you (and

by you they meant a theoretical anyone) just looked long and hard enough. In fact,

one Picasso-derived mantra of art appreciation was, “Learn to look at art through

a child’s eyes,” as if to suggest not only that a viewer did not need education but

that education might even be harmful. “Meaning will emerge,” art teachers taught,

museum directors directed, and popular style magazines headlined, because you

will be able to see the cones for the forest. All these claims were predicated on

the faith that these geometries expressed universal rather than culturally specifi c

codes and values. While a cube may be a cube here and there, now and then,

assigning value to a cube is a lost art because it is no longer taught. Being able to

read shapes originated as a form of proof of education and this skill earned access

to participation in a public sphere. But today, we no longer recall (nor provide) the

education that was part of this social contract and have replaced it with a vague

notion of talent and innate ability. Indeed, we have gone further to argue that if you

are talented enough you don’t need education. Which in turn leads, with diabolical

logic, to the argument why bother to educate, which of course then leads to the

014


condition in which it is possible to consider a high school for the arts as so without

social value that it does not even need a name.

High School #9 is both a product and reaction to this reversal of historical fortune.

Its design is a working through of how education once mattered and might matter

still in a culture in which legibility and literacy do not belong to a system of mutually

agreeable exchange and mostly fail to produce widely agreed upon meaning. And

the result of the working through is mixed feelings of both loss and possibility. The

library is not the cone of shared knowledge but a shape in mourning for commonal-

ity that can now only be recalled from memory. The concrete work lacks softness or

social graces because it prefers to evoke instead the sadness of Boullée’s archi-

tecture of shadows and buried forms. On the other hand, the tower is not an icon

of nonsense but a promise that looks forward to the next Revolution, just the way

Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International spiraled up and out toward a not-yet-

present history. The fragility of this promise does, I suppose, make the tower sus-

ceptible to being tossed about without consequence, like a free-fl oating signifi er.

But, on the other hand, if I promised to pay you $9 for something and only gave you

$6 and claimed that it was all the same because 6 is 9 just fl ipped upside down,

I bet the missing $3 you would object. In this case, it seems clear that knowledge

is money. What the architecture of public education needs today is more of both.

That is what the school says. More money please. More knowledge please. You

can try conspiracy theories and read it backwards, but then, I’d like to pay you 6

bucks for your efforts.

015


PR EVIOUS S PR EAD: V I EW OF TH E 101 HOLLYWOOD

FR E EWAY, DOWNTOWN LOS ANG E LES. TH E TOWE R

(R IG HT) , SYM B OL OF TH E COM M ITM E NT TO ART, FOR MS

A GATEWAY WITH TH E TOWE R OF TH E CATH E DRAL OF

OU R LADY OF TH E ANG E LS (LE FT) .


The invitation to participate in the competition for LAUSD’s High School #9

for the Visual and Performing Arts in September 2002 appeared in the offi ce of

Coop Himmelb(l)au at a time when—after the completion of the fi rst built pub-

lic projects, the UFA Cinema Center in Dresden completed in 1998, and three

multi-residential buildings in Vienna in 1998, 2000, and 2001—the offi ce started

to become invited to competitions for prestigious, international large-scale public

and cultural buildings, of which, in addition to High School #9, the BMW Welt in

Munich, Germany; the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio; the Musée des Confl u-

ences in Lyon, France; the House of Music in Aalborg, Denmark; and the European

Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, were all won between 2001

and 2005.

At that time, a branch offi ce existed outside Vienna in Guadalajara, Mexico, found-

ed in 2000 with the commission of the JVC New Urban Entertainment Center for

Jorge Vergara Madrigal.

The Mexican offi ce had a pivotal importance in the history of Coop Himmelb(l)au,

as it was—after then thirty years of practice—the breeding ground for new inter-

nal organizational structures necessary to take on this next generation of large

commissions. It was also the physical location where the designs for these com-

missions were conceived, including the design for the High School for the Visual

and Performing Arts, and it temporarily continued the history of Coop Himmel-

b(l)au’s Los Angeles offi ce, which had been founded in 1988 and closed in 1995

(to be reopened in 2003 for High School #9). In 2000, many coworkers from Los

Angeles and Vienna moved temporarily to Mexico to make up the diverse team to

carry out these project designs.

BACKGROUND

019


COOP H I M M E LB(L)AU L.A. R E-OPE N S ON

2404 WI LS H I R E B LVD., LOS ANG E LE S 03/2003

SCH E MATIC D E S IG N R E-D E S IG N

04/2003–06/2003

D E S IG N D EVE LOPM E NT

07/2003–10/2003

I NVITATION, S E LECTION, AN D COM M I SS ION

OF COOP H I M M E LB(L)AU AS TH E

LEAD I NG D E S IG N ARCH ITECT

09/2002

MASTE R PLAN D E S IG N

10/2002

CON STR UCTION DOCU M E NTS

11/2003–04/2004

D SA PE R M IT PROCE SS

05/2004–04/2005

SCH E MATIC D E S IG N

11/2002–03/2003

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The High School for the Visual and Performing Arts therefore has its roots in many

layers of Coop Himmelb(l)au’s history, from the early Vienna years to the Los Ange-

les as well as Mexican infl uences. Mainly, however, the project is the product of a

twenty-year experience gained from the presence of members of the fi rm in Los

Angeles—as practitioners and as educators—out of which grew, from the point of

view of an outsider, an understanding for its place, people, politics, and culture into

which the project for the High School is embedded.

Los Angeles also has had critical infl uence for the development of the work at

Coop Himmelb(l)au as a whole, as in 1993 the 3D technology borrowed from the

local fi lm industry here was fi rst introduced into the architectural design process

next to physical models (Groninger Museum, Groningen, The Netherlands, 1993–

94). Later, the 3D technology and process were transferred to the main offi ce in

Vienna and all global branch offi ces. Both were also particularly instrumental in the

development and construction of High School #9.

The completed high school represents the fi rst building Coop Himmelb(l)au real-

ized in Los Angeles after twenty years of presence in the city, and the second pub-

lic building in the USA.

The letter of invitation from the LAUSD to participate in the international

interview competition for the High School for the Visual and Performing Arts was

received in September of 2002; an interview was held and the commission was

won in the same month. The international contestants were Bernard Tschumi/New

York and Foreign Offi ce Architects/London, as well as Los Angeles’ Michael Malt-

zan Architecture and Daly Genik Architects.

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B I D D I NG PROCE SS

05/2005–02/2006

CON STR UCTION

03/2006–12/2008

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The jury consisted of LAUSD offi cials, Mr. Eli Broad, and advisor Sylvia Lavin, at the

time chair of the UCLA architecture and urbanism department. With the competi-

tion, Coop Himmelb(l)au won the design architect lead position for the project with

the conditions to partner with a local offi ce as executive architect, to be selected

by Coop Himmelb(l)au from a LAUSD pre-selected group of four architects, and to

re-open a local project offi ce in Los Angeles.

The master plan and schematic design proposals were carried out in Mexico in

October and November 2002. After approval by LAUSD, the executive archi-

tect was selected by Coop Himmelb(l)au in November 2002 and the new Coop

Himmelb(l)au L.A. offi ce, Cloud Inc. L.A., re-opened in March 2003.

Several important factors came together, like the alignment of stars, form-

ing a constellation under which the unique public arts high school project was to

be born: the state-bond-funded 12.5-billion-dollar plan by the LAUSD to build

131 new schools by 2012–13, the former LAUSD headquarters site at downtown

Fort Moore Place chosen to be made available for new school construction after

the demolition of the existing buildings; and the revitalization of downtown Los

Angeles, in which the neighboring Grand Avenue cultural corridor, initiated by cul-

tural and educational philanthropist Eli Broad, is one main crystallization point. Eli

Broad’s concept for a cultural corridor on Grand Avenue and a performing arts high

school modeled on existing arts high schools in New York and Washington D.C.

interested several LAUSD leaders who decided to turn the new high school on the

Fort Moore site into their fl agship project as a combined high school for the visual

and performing arts and for general education. Important visionaries of the project

to be named here are Eli and Edythe Broad of the Broad Foundation, who also

initiated the formation of DTA, Discovering The Arts, Inc., a nonprofi t committee in

support of the arts high school chaired by Araceli R. Ruano; in addition to LAUSD

superintendent Roy Romer and LAUSD District 4 superintendent Richard Alonzo.

021


URBAN FABRIC IN THE LOS ANGELES BASIN.

HIGH SCHOOL #9 IS LOCATED AT THE EDGE OF

DOWNTOWN ALONG THE 101 HOLLYWOOD FREEWAY.

LOS ANGELES BASIN

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DOWNTOWN

HOLLYWOOD H I LLS

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UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE

COOP HIMMELB(L)AU

Coop Himmelb(l)auCentral Los Angeles Area High School # 9 for the Visual andPerforming Arts

Gebundenes Buch, Pappband, ca. 192 Seiten, 20,8x24250 farbige AbbildungenISBN: 978-3-7913-4433-1

Prestel

Erscheinungstermin: Juni 2010

Bauen für die Bildung: Identifikation durch visionäre Architektur COOP HIMMELB(L)AU, berühmt für visionäre Architektur, hat in der Innenstadt von Los Angeleseine High School für Bildende und Darstellende Kunst gebaut, die neue Maßstäbe setzt. DieArchitektur der insgesamt sieben Gebäude, die durch ihre strukturelle Klarheit faszinieren, bietetden Schülern einmalige räumliche Voraussetzungen für eine künstlerische Ausbildung. DieseMonografie stellt das gesamte Projekt ausführlich in Wort und Bild vor und erklärt es in seinemstädtebaulichen Kontext.

http://www.randomhouse.de/book/edition.jsp?edi=335016

essay by Sylvia Lavin - bücher.de · from left to right: le corbusier, the modulor 009 (1948) /...

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Transcript of essay by Sylvia Lavin - bücher.de · from left to right: le corbusier, the modulor 009 (1948) /...