We voted out in Santa Monica today at the 1938 Art Deco City Hall, built during Roosevelt’s New Deal era. Our wait was just under an hour.

Santa Monica City Hall, Election Day 2008.

Please vote today, no matter the wait! I won’t make an endorsement here, but one candidate has a very specific set of ideas for historic preservation which may be of interest to any undecided readers.

Some of the buildings you see every day may be more important than you realize. Turns out that the Big Boy restaurant directly across the street from my Los Angeles architectural firm was designed by an important mid-century architect. Done in the Googie modern style (previously discussed on this blog), Bob’s Big Boy was a good neighbor with palatable comfort food for late nights at work. The restaurant, and a mid-century Cadillac dealership nearby, are being demolished for a massive BMW sales complex. Local residents were not pleased with the conduct of the demolition; don’t miss this post on the subject (the protest banner was gone by mid-day Monday). Here’s the view from my window:

Bob’s Big Boy, August 2008

Los Angeles’ local preservation non-profit, the 7000-member Los Angeles Conservancy, tried to generate interest in the buildings’ fate. Unfortunately, because planning and permitting had already advanced to completion, there was little to be done. A short segment on the demolition was featured on Warren Olney’s “Which Way L.A.” radio show on local public radio station KCRW; a rare acknowledgment of preservation efforts in LA.

Summer is upon us. Here’s my recent photo of the new Pacific Wheel ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier. Last month it replaced the previous version, which had been in operation since the mid-1980s. The wheel is a landmark of the west Los Angeles beach strip, visible from Redondo in the south to Malibu in the northwest.

Pacific Wheel, Santa Monica Pier, 2008

Removing a landmark and replacing it in situ with a near-duplicate is a touchy corner of preservation theory. It is famously practiced at the Ise Shrine, which is rebuilt every 20 years in a ceremony called shikinen sengu. The eminent preservationist James Marston Fitch discusses this form of preservation in his academic companion to the field.

My own encounter with this strange phenomenom was in New York City, and actually had a profound effect on my thinking. The original Hayden Planetarium, built during the Great Depression, was a city-designated landmark. When the American Museum of Natural History (to which the building is appended) proposed its replacement a dozen years ago, opposition was fierce. The preservationists lost, and the building fell.

But the replacement, designed by James Polshek and presided over by Neil deGrasse Tyson, is a luminous wonder that has reinvigorated the Museum and nearby park. Critical to this success was the fact that the building is a marvel of architectural design, and engages beautifully with the surrounding historic landscape of New York’s upper west side. Although the original building is gone, its replacement has brought thousands of new visitors to the museum. Nearby businesses have reaped the benefit of crowded sidewalks. A preservation fundamentalist might still mourn the original building; an urban preservationist sees the success of the new and celebrates the urban vitality created therefrom. There are always trade-offs.

I will freely acknowledge that it is quite rare to pull off this sort of thing. In Detroit, most of our fallen landmarks have been replaced by weedy lots or half-completed parking garages (ahem, Hudsons). When design-minded replacements are built, pressure to be “contextual” too often results in a stunted historical pastiche that only degrades and mocks the surrounding context. For the Detroit of the future, remember that the goal is preservation of a living city; not individual grand buildings in a dessicated and empty landscape. And if a new building is to be built–even in a historic district!–let it be stridently new and confidently modern; designed by architects who design in a present day language, use contemporary materials, and don’t clumsily mimic the past. Generations from now, our heirs will want to preserve buildings that represent 2008, not the 2008 version of 1908!

Stepping down from my soapbox, I can’t resist bringing this post full-circle, back to the ferris wheel. For although Bob-Lo Island Amusement Park is only a memory, we still have a very prominent landmark of the amusement park variety. The Uniroyal tire on I-94 has a much richer history than you might think. Originally proportioned as a bias-ply tire, with sharp lines and attractive lettering, it stood for years as an unmolested monument to the optimism of the 1964 World’s Fair, only to be “renovated” by the fine folks at Michelin (Uniroyal’s corporate parent) in 1994. It was transformed into a fat radial tire with a hubcap suitable, perhaps, for a 1995 Dodge Intrepid. The nadir of its recent history was surely the several years it spent with an unsightly “nail” protruding from its top.

Here’s another good article with several excellent photographs. I can dream that someone at Michelin was smart enough to hide the original tire sections away for safekeeping. In this case, we find that replacing a landmark with an “updated version” has cheapened our landscape. Instead of a vintage piece of Americana from the 1964 Worlds Fair, we are left with nothing but a big ol’ tire sitting at the side of the road. There’s a trade-off I’d like to get back.

Continuing our appreciation of modern “landmarks", here’s one of the pop culture variety: the Frank Gehry designed mall in Santa Monica is being (partially) demolished and rebuilt.

Demolition of Santa Monica Place, 2008

Gen X’ers of a certain age (and other fans of Amy Heckerling) will recall the mall as the mythical location for many of the scenes in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Follow this link to see a Google street view pre-demolition.

In fact, the mall’s exterior, shown in the movie’s opening sequence, was Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica Place…the interior was filmed at the Sherman Oaks Galleria in the San Fernando Valley, from whence the world was introduced to the Valley Girl. This site notes that the Sherman Oaks Galleria was subsequently damaged in the 1994 earthquake and completely rebuilt in an open-air style. Looks like the Orange Julius stand is long gone.

We won’t lament too much about Santa Monica Place, excepting the obvious waste inherent in demolition. Your blogger is currently on exile from Detroit and within walking distance of the building, which boasted only second-rate eating places and not a few empty stores, no doubt due to the stiff competition along the far more attractive commercial street next door.

The new complex will be open to the air, utilizing the Pacific Ocean breezes to cool the public areas and trying to recreate the experience of the adjacent Third Street Promenade. Unfortunately, where the Promenade is a 24-hour public street (limited now to pedestrians), the exterior areas of the new mall will remain private land and thus be closed to public access overnight. This will result in an ersatz public space, not open to the full range of activity found in true public squares. As such, while being more environmentally and aesthetically responsive to its context, the new mall will be the same as its predecessor in terms of public engagement. But it will surely be an improvement, even if we have to bid goodbye to a small fragment of movie history…

Harmony with nature may not immediately come to mind when thinking of cities. But think again. An article in Sunday’s New York Times reminds us that city dwellers, perhaps contrary to intuition, actually live greener lives than their suburban counterparts. Its all about density and distances, and the city always beats the suburbs in these primaries. (Yes, your blogger has been obsessing on politics lately.)

New Orleans Canal Street streetcar line, under construction, 2003.

Sustainable urbanism is the effort to codify and perpetuate an approach to urban development that prizes connections and adjacencies over large private lots and miserable commutes. One of the best ways to ‘measure’ the green bona fides of a new neighborhood development is through the certification process available through LEED. This acronym, now well-known among designer types, stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. LEED was a system pioneered by the U.S. Green Building Council (an umbrella group of developers, architects, and academics) about a decade ago. Originally, the intent of LEED was to stimulate the construction and operation of sustainable buildings. This original LEED system is now referred to as LEED-NC, where the NC stands for New Construction. Architects refer to LEED-NC requirements on an almost daily basis in a progressive practice, where university or governmental clients increasingly demand buildings that achieve LEED certification.

In recent years LEED has expanded its metrics to areas of immediate concern to preservationists. Many of us who gravitated to historic preservation were appalled not only by the loss of architectural character in American cities, but the sheer waste of embodied energy in the land-filled materials and demolished buildings themselves. For preservationists, it is an article of faith that programming needs should be addressed first with adaptive reuse, and then if necessary with new construction. For urbanists (a group often overlapping with preservationists), sensitive infrastructure development is of major concern to vibrant and renewed urban life. Read this recent Los Angeles Times piece for a good object lesson.

I-75 Northbound in Auburn Hills. The old paradigm.

For this reason (and because of the success of LEED-NC), the LEED-EB and LEED-ND systems are going to become increasingly relevant to preservation and planning work in American cities. Look for them to appear soon in model codes, zoning ordinances, and master plans adopted by municipalities across the country. EB stands for Existing Buildings, and includes points for reuse of existing building stock. ND refers to Neighborhood Development, and thus the LEED-ND system is directly related to sustainable urbanism. In many metropolitan areas sustainable urbanism can be mainly concerned with [sub]urbanism, but the acres of empty land pockmarking Detroit make LEED-ND an urgent and necessary reference tool for our future. I will explore the LEED systems in depth in future posts.

And, by the way, Thomas Sugrue–Detroit native, urban historian and author of a highly recommended book on Detroit–is quoted in the NYT article referenced above.