Los Angeles is Exceptional

Excerpt: "LA may not always be impressive, is hardly ideal, and never flawless -- but it is endlessly fascinating. And though it can sometimes seem needlessly challenging and hopelessly obscure, it rewards those who take the time and make the effort to explore and understand it." 

Photo: Astronaut Chris Hadfield. Source


---

It’s common to hear visitors to Los Angeles remark that it’s not as impressive as they had expected. Some of this can be attributed the fact that Los Angeles is a frustrating, confusing place to visit; some of it can be attributed to unrealistic expectations based on media images of LA.

Primarily, though, it can be attributed to the fact that much of Los Angeles really isn’t that impressive.

Photo: Ted Soqui, LA Weekly

The above image was taken at the intersection of Beverly and La Brea. While not a very significant place in the social or economic functioning of the metropolis, for almost 40 years this mundane intersection has been a symbol of LA – and the popular disillusionment with it.

In 1975, New Yorker Stephen Shore stood on this corner and made an almost clinically deadpan photograph of the mildly dystopian scene. As LA Weekly described the work in their article accompanying the contemporary reenactment above: “Shore ends the dream of the West with the reality of the West.” 

Photo: "Beverly Blvd and La Brea Ave.," June 21, 1975, Stephen Shore
(For more on this intersection in photographs, read this).

Los Angeles’s urban qualities can be unsatisfying for those who approach it with notions of what the nation's second largest city should be. The relative lack of monuments to urban life, at least in comparison to older American cities with Beaux Arts foundations, limits LA’s triumphal “city-ness” (the freeways were somewhat of a proxy until they became ubiquitous nationwide). Additionally, the city’s polycentric form and unorchestrated built environment means that any sort of “critical mass” is rarely sustained for much longer than one would find in significantly smaller cities.

But for as long as Los Angeles has been an American city, there have been critics who have taken their criticism far beyond a simple disappointment with LA’s streets and buildings to a conclusion that Los Angeles is unremarkable. From Nathanael West to Woody Allen, much of what has been written about Los Angeles has been by those ready to write off Los Angeles as a void.  

“Nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.” – Aldous Huxley, Americana, 1925

This enduring and oft-repeated dismissal (originally written by Huxley, an eventual Angeleno, and later possibly echoed by Dorothy Parker) has not only promoted the popular misunderstanding of Los Angeles as strictly suburban, but also the idea that Los Angeles is lacking.

The conception of an insipid Los Angeles persisted for almost 80 years, until around the end of the last decade when a notable shift in LA's reputation began to take shape. In areas like art, fashion and food, a newfound appreciation for LA has emerged. To many of those who have recently taken interest in Los Angeles, it has become clear for the first time that Los Angeles is, in its own way, remarkably substantial.

LA may not always be impressive, is hardly ideal, and never flawless – but it is endlessly fascinating. And though it can sometimes seem needlessly challenging and hopelessly obscure, it rewards those who take the time and make the effort to explore and understand it.

LA’s current “moment” of interest appears to be fueled in part by renewed awareness of this quality. In 2007, BLDGBLOG author Geoff Manaugh posted a breathlessly exuberant post about the limitlessness that is Los Angeles. “Greater Los Angeles” captured the feeling of anticipation as the city began to emerge from the troubled 90's and LA's enthusiasts started to revisit the curious enthrallment that had motivated Reyner Banham three decades earlier.

In August, Telegraph published an essay by actor and musician Hugh Laurie that echoed Manaugh’s (and Banham's) excitement in LA’s boundless diversity and "anything goes" nature. While in the past there had been a tendency to ascribe Los Angeles's laissez-faire attitude to it's newness -- that it hadn't "figured itself out yet" -- as LA matures there's been a growing realization that, if anything, it's the fact that Los Angeles doesn't want to come to some conclusion of identity that makes it LA.  

More and more people are coming to appreciate that the 19 (or 72, or 88) suburbs have never been collectively in search of anything.

With its great diversity of people and ecologies, its benign climate, its permissive infrastructure, and its lack of any organizing cultural principle, Los Angeles is an expanse of potential – that largely overlooks context. This is most famously represented in residential architecture: In LA’s beach communities you will find California beach houses and cottages… and French chateaus, alpine lodges, urban lofts and Georgian colonials. 

A small sampling of places called home.

Los Angeles is a massive collision of attempts. Some have succeeded, many have failed spectacularly, but all have contributed to the ongoing and seemingly random layering of ideas, conceptions, and perspectives on the landscape. For the urban explorer, it is a place of constant revelation. Living in Los Angeles is all about the hidden and the unexpected.

As has been said before in various ways: if New York City is the mighty river, rushing forward and pulling you along in its strong current, Los Angeles is the vast ocean, open in all directions and largely uncharted.

Photo: "File:Los Angeles Basin.jpg," Anonymous. Source

It’s an ocean that puts forth an endless tide of new ideas – many that have forever changed the world. The net benefit can be argued, but I think few would disagree that the world needs places of experimentation.

Death for Los Angeles as we know it is the expected: when we all know what is around the corner, on each stretch of shopping street, on each artist’s, architect’s and musician’s mind.

LA’s lack of cohesiveness encourages misunderstanding, which has historically given it the freedom to hide behind stereotypes and stay eccentrically productive. Most recently, Los Angeles rose to the arguable position of the nation’s preeminent center for contemporary art production during a time when the city itself was broadly dismissed.

But as appreciation for LA grows, so does attention to detail – which can be stifling. There is danger that we will succumb to the pressure to perfect what we know, rather than to attempt what we imagine.

When every craftsman and Spanish colonial bungalow has been tastefully restored and every restaurant, coffee bar, and work of street art perfectly tuned in with global trends – and the image of Los Angeles can fit neatly on a home décor screen print – this place will cease to be exceptional.

The stance of this blog is conservationist, but not necessarily for things. Buildings and artifacts can be powerful reminders of the special character of this place, but the desire to preserve can sometimes be more motivated by a distaste for the current moment than an appreciation for the past.

This blog is about saving what it means to be Los Angeles.

To help retain and build pride in our city's local character, we will do our small part to bring attention to that which is unique, unexpected, exceptional – even when it isn’t successful.

Likewise, from time to time we will bring fair criticism to that which is expected and potentially homogenizing – particularly when it is considered impressive or “well-done.” 

Additionally, and importantly, we will avoid devotion to the past over progress.

One example of this type of failing is the idea that Los Angeles should remain auto-dominated – a faithless form of Los Angeles exceptionalism. Los Angeles is not about the foolish attempt to resist change and preserve the unsustainable, it is about the foolish attempt to try something new and constantly improve on what we know.

If we are to endure as Los Angeles, we must adopt a reverence for what truly makes Los Angeles unique – not the buildings, cars, or streets that already exist, but the local spirit of chaotic endeavor that constantly moves us.

Let other cities be perfect. We are Los Angeles.

Space Shuttle Endeavor -- born in LA, back on the streets.

Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images. Source