"Architecture in some way has the duty to suggest behaviour. In some way. Places are the portrait of communities, and if the place is impossible, the community becomes impossible."

[renzo piano in the g.]

r.p.b.w. is 194.185.232.3

In post-liberal Los Angeles, awareness of this desperate situation is such that the defense of the privileged and middle class neighborhoods has taken on a sudden urgency. The desire of the ordinary middle class to live in socially insulated communities has created a frenzy for security fencing around entire neighborhoods, emulating the luxury, fortressed "minimal" cities that developed in the 1950s and 1960s, like Hidden Hills, Bradbury, Palos Verdes Estates, Hidden Hills and Rancho Mirage. Older communities like Bradbury, with 900 residents and ten miles of private streets, are fully enclosed with guarded entry points and served by public and private security services and are impossible to enter without an invitation from a resident. The San Fernando Valley, completely open ten years ago, now has over one hundred newly gated communities. The demand for more security is nearly insatiable.

and to think that the above is from '93, what do you think it's like now???

but don't worry, there's a plan to get you back out in public, maybe even downtown. move that bus!


what's that you say? you haven't heard of such a thing, well my friends, it's true. and it seems that we be drownin'in geniuses!

But for the park — a civic space, owned and meant to be enjoyed by us all — the current process seems at best paternalistic and at worst self-defeating. It may be a sign of hard times that we've had to turn over to a private development group the financing of a civic park, but it makes no sense to completely outsource its design to them and then hope for the best.

so my question is:

how do we keep los angeles from continuing to be an impossible place to live, without sacrificing our civic space to architecture based on commericalism? and further, is that even the right question to ask?