Exhibit of the week: Never Built: Los Angeles

Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles

Through Oct. 13

What a sad coincidence that “the most architecturally innovative part of the United States” is also “a thoroughgoing urban mess,” said Martin Filler in The New York Review of Books. Los Angeles, the home of various showpiece works by Frank Gehry, Richard Neutra, and John Lautner, exists today as “a highway-strangled expanse of artificially lush desert with no discernible organizing principle.” It didn’t have to be this way, as the Architecture and Design Museum’s “stunning array” of unexecuted projects proves. Who knew, for example, how close the city came to building an elevated train system shortly after World War II? Or that the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted helped produce a 1930 plan to lace the city with parkland? Viewing the sketches and models in this “enlightening” survey makes one wonder what might have been if faith in automotive and market freedom didn’t always trump the common good.

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Yet Los Angeles should also be thankful that it’s dodged “some serious bullets,” said Sarah Amelar in Architectural Record. Had the Santa Monica Causeway plan come to fruition in the 1960s, a man-made archipelago with a freeway running through it would now loom just off the shoreline from Santa Monica to Malibu. Of course, beyond the potential disasters lie plenty of “imagination-sparking” but mildly flawed ideas that also never came to be. In 1952 the firm of Pereira and Luckman produced plans for a unified terminal in the Los Angeles International Airport that might have created “a memorable, Jetsons-like gateway to La-La Land” had its giant central dome proved better suited for air conditioning. So goes the construction business, despite the curators’ apparent belief that L.A. has quashed an inordinate amount of inspired projects. I’d disagree: “Show me a major city, and I’ll show you a morgue full of never-builts.”

Angelenos never would have embraced Bigfoot schemes anyway, said Larry Wilson in the Los Angeles Daily News. The type of central planning that shaped Chicago and New York never took hold here for the simple reason that “those who came West wanted very much not to be in those places.” Well, some of them didn’t, said Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times. In truth, we’ve never really decided what kind of city we want L.A. to be: “horizontal or vertical, respectable or happily idiosyncratic, extending the traditions of East Coast and European capitals or eager to break from them.” But today’s burgeoning downtown and the public’s growing support for mass transit suggest that the tide may be turning, making the debate about what gets built in Los Angeles more pressing than ever. Perhaps this “revelatory” new exhibition will point to where we should go next.