Well, there you have it. A garden of ever-changing delights. Or a fountain that runs in colors and changes shapes through noons, mid-afternoons and nights. A gift to all who will never travel. A loving reminder, to those who have, of what they left behind in Florence, in Rome, in Paris, and all across the world.
Can we collect these photographic bouquets and rearrange them and hand them back as celebrations on no particular day for no particular reason, save beauty itself?
Might as well ask if Monet can make the sun climb the cathedral facades at dawn, dazzle the battlements in the late day, and bronze them with a golden flesh as the sun vanishes.
Monet, borrowing from the history before Time cried: “Light!” And there was Light.
Why can’t we do the same?
YESTERMORROW PLACE
We have all strolled through colleges and noted that the library is here, the art gallery there, the museum next door, and the classrooms and theater just beyond. Often, we found libraries sharing quarters with certain colleges. But if two or three of the above-mentioned environments happen in one building, they are separated in confines that shut out people rather than invite them in.
Imagine, instead, what I call a Yestermorrow architecture, imaginative enough and large enough to enclose everything in a single structure.
And one, I might add, that lures, calls, leads, and pulls you from one area to the next.
Imagine…
The outer circle, the art galleries, would illustrate all of the metaphors to be found as you move inward.
The second circle would display all the artifacts of our various histories in a museum round.
The third enclosure would be the library.
Followed by the inner round of the classrooms.
And at last, the theater.
Why a theater at our architectural core?
Well, isn’t life one drama topping another? Isn’t everything theater?
Everything, that is, from courting rituals to marriage ceremonies, to office space, to town plaza, to rocket pad at Canaveral?
Try to imagine any human activity that does not finally shape itself into vivid metaphors spoken, acted, taught.
What we have here then is a series of incredible cups, round boxes, a five-shelled wagon train circled to shield us from the night.
Again, stepping through from circle to circle, what would we find?
The paintings, lithographs and watercolors that portray humanity in private encounters or en masse.
Natural life itself as delivered to us by archaeologists and anthropologists from tarpits or Troy ruins.
And then all the massed bricks of the wondrously mysterious library where one can monkey-climb the stacks to Kilimanjaro leopard, Everest snow, or Alpha Centauri immortality.
Giving the onionskin another peel—the university.
Small perhaps, under the circumstances, but containing a dozen rooms where a dozen subjects, relating to the surrounding totality, are delivered forth.
And then at the sounding heart, the voices of dramatic theater, or your special vibrant professor, or your teaching-tool cinema, repeating in yet other forms, the truth collided with on your way around or on your way in.
An architecture, in sum, it seems to me, as marvelous as those rounded self-encircling nautilus shells found along the shores of our seas.
Easy to build? In the mind, yes. With glass, brick, stone, and mortar? Difficult. And expensive.
But if finally blueprinted, built and sent down the ways to ride the mid-oceanic grass of a California university garden, what a place to travel, wander, and stay. What a pomegranate experience. What an incredible womb, finally, in which to grow ideas and rear young and old children.
Will it be built between now and the century’s end? And in the one hundred years beyond, can it be the most imaginative teaching hearth ever built to warm our minds?
I say it can be done.
I wish it to be so.
YES, WE’LL GATHER AT THE RIVER
We’ve all heard the words to the old and familiar spiritual “Yes, We’ll Gather at the River,” and, indeed, in a few years, if we do not gather at the actual rim, we will put ourselves together near the river. We speak, of course, of the L.A. river, which channels dry wind and warm dust through most of our Southern California year.
And, yes, we will gather, if we plan it well, at a riverbed of now-isolated communities in downtown Los Angeles—those areas being Little Tokyo, Olvera Street, Chinatown, and the intermingled Italian commercial isles.
Created separately by different customs in various years, these proofs of our immigrant past stand but a few hundred yards apart. Yet they might as well be separated by tens of miles for all the mixing or lack of mixing between these towns within a city.
Rarely do the inhabitants of the three or four communities stroll from one to the other. Rarely do tourists, abandoning their cars, ricochet happily from one immigrant duchy to the next.
All that must change.
What is missing at this moment in time? The almost forgotten pedestrian of yesteryear. Who removed his legs and turned off his lights?
We did, by neglect, surely not by plan.
To see what we have done wrong and what can be renovated right, the simplest stroll through London, Paris or Rome will reveal the paucity of our imagination, and the need to rejuvenate curiosity and the delight that is derived from walking mile after mile and relishing the mileage.
Consider: we fly nine-thousand miles for the privilege of walking our shoes off in those cities. Then we return to feast ourselves along two paltry city blocks in our cars.
How come?
The answer, of course, is that Paris is a continuous river of fascination, an assault of delight. The eye, the ear, and the culinary nose are bombarded on every hand by color, light, sound and the scent of breads and foods adrift from one thousand bakeries and twenty thousand restaurants. The same, on a smaller scale, holds true for London, Rome, Vienna and Madrid.
Can we borrow and learn from the humane and delightful customs of these cities, to insure that our downtown immigrant isles do not remain closeted but become part of a tributary-flow of Angelenos and emigres from Iowa? Can we break the dams that hold the people back from participating in the old adventure of walking?
Yes! Imagine with me:
Let us use the Music Center plaza on Bunker Hill as our possible starting place. Fill it with more chairs, tables and a clutch of outdoor wine, coffee and sandwich places. Then build a bridge across Hope Street so that pedestrians could stream down past that fine, roaring fountain, which most people have never seen, along the rarely-discovered mall. Said mall to be strung with miniature lights and filled, every few yards, with new curio shops, bookstalls and miniature sandwich places, so that the pedestrian is lured on to reach Broadway.
There our yellow brick road, for that is what it might start out as, would turn north. In turning it would become a Mexican/South American river of bright inlaid tiles, recalling the esplanade along the seafront in Rio. This stream of brilliant tiles would lead us through a refurbished section of Broadway to turn east on First to lead us a few blocks to Little Tokyo. Along the way, the tiles would gradually change shape and color until they become the symbols of the Land of the Rising Sun, the dragons of history, which will flow, still under a canopy of miniature lights, past yet other small shops, so that our curiosity is unending. We would hasten shopping through Little Tokyo and emerge into a long serpentine of walk, which would lead us to Union Station.