The thing about being in a city that's very exciting in this respect is that you have the opportunity to sort of invent a project. You can kind of see a need, a kind of opportunity to change the city or fix a problem in the city, figure out how you would approach that project and that problem, and then craft a project around it. Welcome to our next session's one-to-one. I'm Amelia Taylor-Hockberg and this week February 22nd, 2016.
I speak with Alan Loomis, the Deputy Director for Urban Design and Mobility for beautiful Glendale, California. Loomis also teaches Urban Design at Woodbury University and serves as one of the mayor's appointees on the City of Pasadena's Design Commission, and way back when he was also an architect editor. We talk about Southern California urbanism and the difference between being an urban designer in the public and private realms. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
So Alan, are you from LA originally? I'm not. I grew up in Michigan. My early education is in Michigan, but I did come out to LA.
I want to say the summer of 1996 to go to grad school, which was SIRC. Graduated in 2000, so I've been in LA for the summer of between years. So... Wow.
So did you decide to go to SIRC because of Los Angeles? Are you particularly interested in SIRC for its own architectural reasons? It was partially largely because of Los Angeles. I was always been interested in architecture in the city, and Los Angeles was interesting in the sense that it was an aggressively polycentric city.
So architecture and the city context in LA cannot be thought of in terms of... There's one centralized downtown around which everything revolves. It's a secondary orbit in Los Angeles. That model doesn't hold up despite the sort of strength that downtown has always had.
I was thinking about my career here in 20 years. I have never actually worked in the city of Los Angeles. I've worked in Santa Monica for the past 10 years in Guendale. I've worked in Pasadena.
I've worked in Claremont. And Azusa and Ventura and Long Beach and cities in Orange County. I've worked in all sorts of cities that surround LA, but I don't think I've ever done a project in Los Angeles. But that's almost really a semantic distinction.
Of course, it's also a legal one. But to say you have this constellation of different entities and municipalities that all kind of inform the idea of LA. So that's kind of what interested you as well as this multifaceted... Right.
Yeah, my first kind of four-year architecture education was in Detroit in the early 90s. And there was this kind of idea in the architecture school that all we had to do was build more beautiful buildings in downtown Detroit and somehow the city would come back. And Detroit, especially then, really resisted that kind of... Someone now you've notion about how the city should work.
There's sort of social-economic problems. There were immense... There was no industry. There was just Detroit could not sustain that model, but that was kind of the model that architecture school put up.
So one of the reasons I left Detroit in that architecture school was because I wanted to explore something that was more nuanced. And Los Angeles and Houston were two very interesting cities to me, but I got into SIRC and not into Rice. So I end up in LA, which I think actually in the end was a better place to land. LA is far more interesting than I think Houston is.
And you do get to address the same issues. Hopefully a way that can be applicable, no matter which city you're in. Yeah. What I tell a lot of people on this, I think it's true, is that Los Angeles is facing the consequences of a sort of auto-centric sprawling urban model that was propagated in the 50s, 60s.
It is facing those issues far sooner than other cities. And so how we deal with trying to increase density or add transit into a freeway-oriented city in Los Angeles, how we solve those problems are going to be the models for places like Houston, like Dallas, like Phoenix. When they face those issues in another generation or 10 years from now, they're going to be looking at LA and saying, how did LA solve this problem? So that package of issues I think makes LA one of the most exciting places to be thinking about urban design planning issues in the United States.
I would say it's even more interesting than New York, although everybody thinks New York is super exciting. But LA is really doing a lot of pioneering work in terms of thinking about grafting an entirely new urban structure on top of an existing one. In many ways, there could be conceived as incompatible. Whereas in some ways, New York, I think, is the LA view of New York.
It's the blip in New York. And New York to me seems like it's just building more and more taller buildings. You know the model in New York, it's skyscrapers in subways. And LA, we don't know what the model is.
It's not going to be skyscrapers in subways, although we are building those, but in selected locations. So when you came to SIR, it was still on the West Side in the 2000s, it's not in the Arts District in downtown where it is now. Correct. I was in the last, when I graduated, we were the last class to graduate out of the Playa Del Rey Building.
So you came to LA for LA and you came to be at SIR, but did you presume you would be able to be doing urban design and urban planning work at SIR? Or did you come to do strictly architecture? What was kind of a context of what was possible in urban planning at SIR at that time? Well, it was very interesting because when I arrived at SIR, the first year I was there, I would say graduate thesis.
There was maybe one project that had an urban focus. Three or four years later, when I graduated, there were many projects that had an urban focus. So that sort of emerged as a major focus, at least on thesis projects and the timeframe I was there. And you graduated in 2000?
2000. Partially why I came to SIR was it because of, it wasn't that clearly they didn't have an urban design or urban agenda at that point. But it was appealing because there was this very experimental education profile. The fact that SIR didn't have tenure was appealing because where it come from before, all the faculty were founding faculty.
So the school I felt had sort of ossified intellectually by not having a high turnover of faculty. And so SIR was appealing from those two standpoints. But I don't think I came to LA with the thinking that I was going to be an urban planner. I sort of thought I was going to be an architect doing architecture in a context of a polycentric, vibrant, very complex city.
So how did that transition work? What point did you decide to focus professionally more on the role of an urban designer as opposed to the role of an architect? It was about midpoint through the SIR experience that I kind of stopped being interested in doing design oriented crafty sort of studio projects that, you know, typified what SIR was about when I arrived and became much more interested in kind of broader issues of the city and the kind of policy structure and which projects happen. I remember having conversations with friends that I wanted to be professionally in a place where I wasn't responsible for designing work, but I could create opportunities for people who were good at designing things to do their best work, you know, whatever it is 20 years later.
I think that's kind of what I get to do. Yeah. Kind of wild. Well, that position as well, like the educational perspective of urban design and urban planning comes from a planning and a policy kind of school of thought as opposed to a creative professional arts practice, like some people and particularly SIR might categorize architecture.
And you now teach and you now teach a word, worry, why you also have this role for the city of Glendale, kind of doing what you're talking about, getting to curate the really quality urban designers to do in the overall plan, what you would like to implement. So I want to ask about specifically education and education for urban planning and urban design. Do you feel it's kind of fair to split those two hairs as like the urban design is for the suppose of the designers, the architects and the creative disciplines and urban planning is more for the policy walks and because this is often how it breaks down in terms of education, right? You have UCLA, so you have the less than school of public policy is where you get your planning degree, but you go to the architecture school to get your design degree in urban design.
Yeah. And you've seen that split and a number of schools where they're completely different departments, you know, UCLA planning and architecture were once upon a time, one school and they split apart. And there are planning students at UCLA that really want to think about and be engaged in physical design, but they can't cross over very well. And of course, you'll see has a really impressive school of public policy, which is where planning lives.
And then there's the architecture school that seems to have very little interest in urban questions and it's kind of shocking in some ways that you would think these different schools, especially in Los Angeles would begin to merge because that distinction exists certainly in the schools and it exists to large extent in the professional. Though I think many of the planners that I work with and know are very interested in physical design care about it, a great deal. What hampers them is that because they don't have an architecture or kind of design background, they don't have an ability to explain why something they see an application that's submitted for a building on sale that comes across the counter, maybe very bad. They don't have the terminology or the training and the vocabulary to be able to explain why they think it's bad and therefore why it could be better.
Architects obviously have the background and it's kind of second nature to us. It's architects have to sort of redesign things and kind of put pieces back together, but planners don't have the training, but they're very interested in physical design. And I think there is a kind of trend in planning schools to sort of begin to incorporate physical design back into the curriculum. And one of the reasons I would say that or why I think it's very interesting and why there is an urban design unit and city of Clondélón is becoming popular in other cities, is because when you think about a place like Los Angeles where cities are so compact, every planning issue is also a design issue.
In many ways, the planning solution is not going to be necessarily different policies or different zoning codes. It's that might be part of it, but as often there is a design solution as well. And how would you say you approach this kind of issues and that kind of development of teaching future planners and future urban designers in your own position at Woodbury? Well, the classes that I teach at Woodbury, there's a kind of base urban design theory class, which is actually required for the students to get their undergraduate degree.
And so for that class, I really try and teach ways of seeing. It's really a class in diagramming the city. So we'll look at a variety of different historical points of view or theoretical models for thinking about the city. And each of them tends to come with some sort of diagrammatic way of mapping the city.
And so what I try and communicate to the students is these are a whole series of tools that they can use to analyze the city very rapidly. And each of those tools reveals different design opportunities that they can choose to act upon or not. So for example, Clarence Perry's 1929 neighborhood unit diagram talks about the ideal neighborhood fitting within a quarter mile radius circle with a variety of kind of elements, park space and community facilities within that radius. That's a model that one can then apply a map to a particular location.
Does it fit that model? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't, your next step or question as a designer is to say, would you try and make this place mold into that model? That's offered to students ultimately decide whether they think that's a good model or not, but at least it's available to them in their toolbox of things they can look at.
So my own base or design class is really built around that kind of idea. And it's sort of built successfully because they always investigate the same place with these different diagrammatic techniques that they could have this really dense layered kind of understanding of the place. And but then I also teach started teaching these policy courses that are kind of researched into very particular kinds of policy or planning structures or zoning codes. So we've looked at like small subdivisions in Los Angeles.
We've looked at the city of gardens, multifamily zoning in Pasadena, where certain kinds of zoning regulations have very particular architectural outcomes and they were designed to deliver very specific architectural consequences. And in some cases, it's a matter of a planner simply manipulating a set of numbers on a table of regulations of setbacks and high requirements and minimum open size. So planner is simply playing around with some numbers, but it has these really specific architectural outcomes. So those classes are geared towards helping students understand one how to interpret very complex zoning codes, just a very important part of being an architect, I think, in a complex city.
But it also sort of reveals to them, like they may have a voice in this that they shouldn't just lead it to policy planners to change the numbers of setbacks and open space standards that you can, in effect, come up with an ideal design or kind of typological prototype for a new multifamily building form and then kind of reverse engineer code to deliver that. Which is absolutely necessary today and see like Los Angeles in the terms of how you adapt to think that shows an adjective as Byzantine planning code. So I see referred to most usually because when you have a city that clearly was built to these kind of architectural models of single family homes and smaller, however you want to categorize it, you really do have to do that reverse engineering to get things done. Because you know, you can't wait for the planning code to be comprehensively changed to adapt to whatever new urban utopia you've imagined.
You have to work incrementally to get there. Right. And so what you see is a place like Los Angeles with code is widely out of date. I think it was last updated in 1948 or something like that is projects that are really innovative have to go through a number of kind of exceptions to the code and variance processes, which at time and uncertainty, and then invites neighbors to sort of say, why can't you build to the code because there's this perception, I think, in a lot of neighborhood groups that somehow the code is the sacrosanct Bible that can never be violated and then asking for something that deviates from the code is somehow sacrilegious.
So the code must be handed down, like those 10 books of Moses or something like that. You know, it's not. It was written by people who were doing the best that they can with the information they had and kind of best practices and it could change it all the time. You know, dynamic cities and then their codes probably once or twice a year.
So switching into more to like the concrete work that you do, can you talk about some of the projects that you're working on both kind of immediately and maybe long term with Glendale at the moment? Sure. Well, probably the project that we've got the most amount of kind of press and the variety for is Project Recolting Space 134, which is a proposal to put a park over the 134 freeway as it cuts through the center of the city. Glendale, the entire city and the downtown are cut in half by this freeway and it's running below the surface streets.
So there are about four bridges that cross over the freeway. They don't go up or down. It's just completely flat for us. You're driving on the surface streets.
So the freeway is in this trench and it's in a trench for about a mile on corridor. And so it's relatively easy to imagine that you simply put a roof on top of that trench and then you build a park or something else on top of that roof. And that would potentially be somewhere between 20 and 30 acres of new land and ideally would be some form of parks or recreation centers part of the city that's very densely populated historically and becoming more so with new development. Downtown.
So it's a neighborhood and doesn't really have any park space. It's a neighborhood that means it. So that's the kind of big idea. And when we started it about five years ago, we used to talk about it as a real pie in the sky project.
So it's sort of akin to, you know, trying to figure out what color unicorn ought to be. We've now arrived in a place where it might be more philosophical, where we're trying to zero in on kind of what really is possible. And our next move on, which we're going to start the summer is going to be more of a kind of technical feasibility study where we will actually investigate. Okay, if we wanted to build this, where would we have to put foundation walls?
Does that have an impact on the freeway? It's, you know, would we have to rely on off ramps and stuff like that? You are getting the color palette out for the unicorn. There's, there is a color palette.
Yeah, we've decided it is a unicorn and it's, you know, it shades of blue. And now it's like, okay, what shades of blue and sort of where we're at. So it's still very theoretical kind of philosophical sort of project, but there's a lot of momentum in the city to try and figure out how to pursue this and make it happen. But it's also not something that, I mean, it is specific to the city of Glendale, this proposal, but it's also not something that I feel is unfamiliar for other areas in LA that when you think about kind of opportunities for creating more public space, one of the common things that people look for is freeway infrastructure, like, or freeway structures that could be used to, yeah, freeway cat parks or there was a Christopher Hawthort article where he proposed the end of the two freeways.
Exactly. Yeah, the freeway cat park is by no means a kind of innovative idea for Glendale. It's Hollywood downtown Los Angeles and want to cook into locally or all investigating this. They're looking at one in San Diego, they've been built in Seattle and back in the 70s by Lawrence Halperin.
The most current one that's been built that is a real kind of role model for Glendale. And I think a lot of other cities looking at this is in Dallas called Clyde Warren Park, very well managed, very well designed and has a really effective funding mechanism and a kind of critical piece of it. Not only how do you pay to build one of these things, but ultimately how do you operate it? So it's by no means an innovative idea, which is good because it means that we can pull upon a lot of resources around the country and the nation to figure out best practices.
Also benchmarks to figure out how much these things cost. The first phase, which is maybe five acres of land is some are benchmarking costs, maybe $150, $200 million. You know, sounds like a lot of money, but in the context of freeway infrastructure where billions of dollars are being spent is not that much. And so previous just kind of to give a little more context and maybe situate your comments about working with different city governments a bit more after you graduated from SIRI.
But before you started working in urban as an urban design proper for different cities, you did work as an urban designer for private architecture firms. So what and also in Pasadena, I believe? Well, when I left, when I graduated before I graduated from SIRI, I started working for Moolen Polyzoidius, which is based on Pasadena private architecture firms. Stefanos Polyzoidius was more to the co-founders of the Congress for New Urbanism.
So there was a pretty high intellectual content to the work that was going on. It was very ideological and it's kind of positioning in terms of how we were approaching urban design. So that was a real amazing experience. You know, I used to think of my time at Stefanos's office as being like postgraduate education.
There was a lot of us who were fresh out of school and there was a lot of incredible dialogue that was going on. And in that time frame that I was there, we started really to develop a strategy about how to do form based codes. So for many years, that was part of the planning team that was really doing a lot of form based codes, which are zoning codes that regulate setback, heights, etc. But also have these very specific architectural intentions to them.
And oftentimes includes their stylistic guidebooks. So certain clients that we work for certain cities would say, well, we only want buildings in this town or this neighborhood, this town center to be craftsmen, Spanish, revival and old Western. And so we'd have to write style books that would explain kind of how to do those kinds of projects. So I probably worked on a 20 different projects in Envane, a couple of campus master plans.
The ones I gravitated to the most were the ones where we were doing retrofits for existing cities, oftentimes, you know, 1950s and 60s suburbs that are having to face this kind of transition because they needed a common great density where their major shopping mall had failed. And what did we do with that piece of land or an extension of the metro rail system was about to pass through them. So they need to figure out some sort of transit or into development strategy to take advantage of that. So those were the most interesting projects to me.
But the problem I had after a number of years of doing this is that we would have these very intense engagements with different localities and cities for, you know, five, three, four, sometimes five years where we'd work on them. And as soon as we got our plans adopted, our contract ended and we moved on to the next ones. So we never really had to face the consequences of what we were doing or deal with see how these plans ever got implemented. We were never hired to kind of do that.
So that's when I started thinking I'd really like to work for a city where I could then be involved in the implementation of these plans and kind of work through how you actually put them together. You said curate the sort of urban landscape and that's a big part of what my job in the city of Gwendala is, is really about curating in a sense. So the urban designer position at Gwendal opened up and so I had to get through a competitive interview process to get the position. But I started 10 years ago, like 2006.
No, it was actually late 2005 started late 2005 and that position in my first assignment was to develop the urban design plan and code for downtown Glendale, which we adopted a year later. And then every project virtually every project in downtown Glendale, it's needed some form of design review or city oriented projects were kind of crafting a new strategy or kind of new public works projects or compartment development. I've had a hand in sort of playing with or kind of helping to craft. So there's the question has always been as a new project comes in.
How does this fulfill the intentions of a plan that we had laid out in 2006, tweet the building a little bit here and there, make sure, you know, it's too high in this corner and make it. So I make sure the front doors and the right spot. I spent a lot of time trying to do that, making sure the front door and the main entrance is in a spot that makes sense for what surrounds it. But then there's also been the responsibility of sort of as a new development comes in to tell this architect, hey, there's another architect who's doing a project right across the street from you and your buildings need to engage in a dialogue and have some sort of relationship to one another either they mimic or contrast or what, but let's be conscious about what we're doing.
So in that sense, it's been curating. It's been a position in that role that is designing very vicariously because I never actually draw anything for other architects is always talking to them about what their buildings that look like other architects that I've worked with or ultimately responsible for their design. But fun because I had opportunity to collaborate with a pretty wide range of architects around the region that are doing work in the city. So that's been kind of that trajectory.
Now the other part of it has been that then we would do public projects or public initiatives. So, you know, we're kind of working on a long term plan to sort of revamp. We're going to reorganize the Central Park in downtown Glendale. That includes their central library.
So that's been one. What's the overall master plan going to look like then? How do you break it into pieces that are digestible for big city government, figure out how you pay for those little pieces, then put out RFPs, higher landscape architects architects to sort of do this piece or that piece and work with them as they evolve their designs. And so we've had a hand on being able to sort of guide that sort of process.
And so you mentioned before kind of briefly how the different advantages of working for private firms is working for a city, how those kind of break down and saying maybe you have more of an ideological rigor that you have more design freedom with and enjoy and get dirty with and private for working for private firm. And then of course you're pitching these designs and you're working the designs, but you don't get that full level of implementation and like longevity that you would get in more of the public position. I was wondering if you could articulate a little bit more specifically what you feel are like the kind of distinction of advantages between the different fields. Yeah, I think urban design practice in general is not something for people who need instant gratification and urban design practice in a city is definitely not for somebody needs instant gratification.
It is a long haul game and it's amazing that in Glendale we laid out a plan for downtown 10 years ago and huge components of that plan and that vision 10 years later have been implemented or starting to have ribbon cuttings and opening receptions and that sort of stuff. That's a really fast pace of change. And in fact in Glendale that there's a whole political community opposition that's emerged about was too bad too fast and too much changed too quickly. You know and planning directors will often tell you their goal is to help manage change and people's reaction to change.
But urban design practice in a city that's definitely you have to be very patient. And so there are pieces of what I've done that are plans that we imagined 10 years ago. And in some respects I think that those kinds of plans that we imagine I've often thought one and partially just sort of resurrecting old plans, testing off old documents and planning studies or something good in this and let's resurrect that idea. And then sometimes it's put that idea out there, mention it to a few different people, come back ask them again about it, see if it's taken root.
It's sort of like tending a garden in a municipal bureaucracy. And then every once in a while a city council member or somebody in the community or developer sort of has a very similar idea and then suddenly find a champion for something and you can kind of push that project forward and it can kind of come to fruition. Other ideas just sort of continue to sit there on the shelf as it were. So the thing about being in a city that's very exciting in this respect is that you have the opportunity to sort of invent a project.
You can kind of see a need, a kind of opportunity to change the city or fix a problem in the city, figure out how you would approach that project and that problem and then craft a project around it. Meaning that in many cases, we are writing the RFPs for developers or architects or planners are responding to. We get to write the context. Here's the parameters of the project.
That's what we get to do is to write those parameters and then select the right architecture design teams to sort of solve those problems. I think the contrast and being in the private sector is you're oftentimes waiting for those RFPs to show up and then you're reacting to them and competing for RFPs is really tough business. I mean, we get very well thought out proposals. We could get five to 10 of them for any different project.
It's very difficult to rank them. It's very competitive. So I have a lot of respect for people who chase this kind of work. So you mentioned to being able to kind of work with when you see an opportunity, Council people are so when they want to champion a certain cause and that gives you an opportunity to kind of work with them and get projects that you see needing to be completed, get the funding that they need and the attention that they need to get actually built.
I'm wondering specifically, there's so much talk about like the education of an architect is being like this necessarily generalist profession where inevitably you're going to be interfacing with politicians, with policymakers, with citizens with like just a number of constituents for a project because every project is so multifested that you have to be able to wear those different hats and be able to communicate your ideas to all these different people and kind of convince them of its necessity. But as a planner who's trained as an architect, do you feel like you got that training to be able to kind of rally all those different troops and interface with all those different people and get the path forage to getting the project done through all those different hoops? Well, I think architecture education was helpful in the sense that one of the things you learn is an architect is how to tell a story. You have to craft a narrative around your project and how it is going to address certain kinds of problems through design and kind of why this is a positive design to sort of imagine.
So a big part of my job in the city is oftentimes storytelling, frankly, it's, you know, if I'm going to do a presentation to a community group or to a commission or a city council about a certain kind of project or policy, you know, I'm really telling a story and I have to explain what's the context of the site or this issue, why what we are proposing as a plan is a positive solution to whatever problem we've set up and what's the pathway for how that the city is going to get there. And, you know, we do a lot of that internally with other city staff and other departments that we have to interface with that sort of telling the story. And I think that's architecture education, the whole process of being up in front of crits, the critique process and presenting your projects over and over to a panel of critics helps you to sort of tell that story. So does Glendale have a story that you are kind of obliged to be working towards, or at least to say the person who's never been to Glendale and they come in to Los Angeles and they say, I'm going to go check out Glendale and what you are hoping to build as the image that they get from that experience.
Is there some kind of overall city, I don't want to call it say branding or anything, it's like kind of city icon that you're kind of working on. Well, it's not branded architecturally in the sense that like Santa Barbara is all Spanish revival and they made that decision some, you know, in the 20s or 30s after an earthquake. So this is the image of the city Glendale is way too culturally diverse and historically diverse to have that kind of uniform brand and it both helps the city and hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it in the sense that the city's always kind of struggling to figure out its identity. That it's going to present out to the world, but it's helpful in a sense that it doesn't get stuck into one sort of mode.
And so it does allow for a pretty wide degree of diversity of kind of expression and the city just by way background is the third or fourth largest city in LA County after Los Angeles and Long Beach. I think Santa Clarita's 30 square miles population, well under 200,000 has pretty much every kind of urban condition you could want, except for an airport and waterfront, but it's got mountain ranges and hillside development. It's got industrial districts and railroad tracks and a kind of very significant downtown. If it was not in Los Angeles County, it was off by itself.
It would be a fairly significant mid-sized American city and it reflects all the different kinds of planning and development trends that any mid-sized American city has had. So it's a really kind of useful incubator case study of different kinds of ideas, but it doesn't really have this kind of strong image. What it is doing from a planning standpoint, the narrative that you would put out there is we have for 10 or 15 years been trying to focus new development and growth into the downtown and other selected areas as a way of preserving the single family neighborhoods that surround the downtown and especially the hillsides. So the city is for many years had pretty aggressive and sustained program of buying up hillside properties and then kind of putting them into an open space reserve.
But that means where did that development go? So it's got to be channeled somewhere. So it's been channeled into the downtown and other locations. And that again is not a unique strategy to go into El Pasadena's done that.
That is in theory the essence of the Los Angeles centers plan that goes back to the 1970s and the foundation of the LA general plan framework in 1980s. I think that's kind of been the general strategy overall in Southern California is keep the growth within your downtowns that are connected by transit. The red clip people don't have to drive to get around and the single family neighborhoods that surround those downtowns are therefore preserved from any kind of development pressure. And of course, LA has perceived as the fantasy utopian of single family homes.
Well, because Glendale has a transist in this link up with the MTA of Los Angeles, correct? It doesn't have its own standalone public transit system. Actually, we do have our we operate around bus system. Okay.
We have about 30 something buses that we do run independent within the city, but Metro runs the number of buses through the city on their two kind of the rapid bus lines that run to the city that provide regional connection. And then at the very south end of the city, there is a Metro link slash Amtrak station. So there's regional rail. It's not the subway or the light rail.
It's the regional long haul rail that you could use to commute up to Ventura County. Let's say that stops in Glendale. It's the last stop before you get to downtown LA and that location is the hub of our bus system as well. Yeah.
I'll find it interesting to see that how not just lend out other cities that you like these other large cities that could be kind of standalone entities if they were not kind of mugged on to the LA kind of monster field as LA vest more and more in rail and not just to the Metro link system of like the larger rail, but actually having more subways and extending the goal line out to Azusa and all this stuff, how these other cities can be more excessively integrated, rather more accessible to the greater downtown or within their greater downtown. Yeah. Well, part of the space 134 project, we're also interfacing with Metro who is, which is doing a kind of feasibility study for a bus rapid transit route that will link Glendale, Pasadena, Burbank and connect the two rail lines that are in North Hollywood and Pasadena. And so that's kind of an ongoing study.
And of course, as Metro contemplates new tax measures and ballot measures that continue to sustain funding, you can imagine behind the scenes, there's all sorts of political jockeying to get your rail project onto the list of projects that ballot measures should be funding. Speaking of ballot measures, have you heard anything and do you have any opinions you'd like to share on the neighborhood integrity initiative? We spoke about a little bit on the most recent podcast. We recorded the Arknax Sessions podcast.
And so I just figured as an urban planner in LA, if you had any thoughts on it. Sure. I think, you know, by context, is my understanding of what's happening. Los Angeles has this incredibly outdated zoning code and a patchwork of journal plan policies.
It's very hard for most cities to find funding to fund long range planning and long comprehensive updates of zoning codes. And the little city of Azuz I worked on a journal plan and zoning code update and I went through three different city managers and probably two different city councils. It's the kinds of projects that burn politicians out so they don't like taking them on typically. So Los Angeles has this incredible patchwork of systems trying to make a 1948 planning policy framework work for the contemporary era with new Metro lines and new subways coming in.
So because they're so far behind on that project, they're having to project by project sort of invent almost project specific zoning to a variety of variances and exceptions and journal plan amendments, et cetera, to be able to do something that makes sense for where we really think a lot of people think LA's planning ideology ought to be going and how the city ought to be evolving. As I was saying earlier, a lot of people think zoning codes are handed down by Moses and should never be changed. So there are people think just the fact that you're asking for a change from the zoning code is it makes your project somehow bad. So you have folks who don't want to see any further changes or exceptions and Los Angeles is how most things are done.
So there's one for us that says no more exceptions and changes to zoning code. But as I understand this neighborhood initiative is even taking a step further and saying absolutely no projects that ever be approved without them being consistent with the plans that are on the books, which is I said really reflect the 1950s and 60s kind of ideology about what the Los Angeles landscape ought to look like. So it seems like it would really ossify the city and sort of really prevent the kind of change that the city needs to go through. And it's painful change too.
I mean building new buildings that are taking out parking lots and turning into six, seven or taller story buildings multifamily. That's really visible change that frightens people. It's not the Los Angeles that we grew up with. It's not the Los Angeles I moved to when it came here 20 years ago, but it's the Los Angeles that I think the city needs to grow into and selected areas and the big fights tend to be in the places where you see a lot of the change happening very rapidly.
Like Hollywood, for example, seems to be the epicenter of a lot of people's hire. So I would tend to take the point of view that I think this initiative really could have a damaging effect on the city's ability to sort of respond to change. And if it was to take a step further and say that we're not going to change the existing plans that really just sort of freezes the city at a particular moment in time. And any city that is really worth visiting is incredibly dynamic and constantly changes.
In fact, in some ways you could argue that a very dynamic city responds and changes faster than planners can keep up. And in some ways, you know, we're attracted to those kinds of cities. It means there's a high degree of intellectual capital, a lot of creativity and a lot of investments and happening. And those kinds of cities are going to change much faster than us poor planners writing our zoning codes could ever respond to.
And there will be new development typologies that we will have never thought of that somebody will put on the table and the codes can address it because we had never thought of that idea. But the marketplace and other people's creativity can get there. It's definitely for better or for worse initiatives like this and the publicity that's attached to them do bring to the forefront these discussions of the changes that LA is going through and how we should have probably gone through them before faster. But that something is happening and makes it at least exciting and exciting place to be a planner.
So I want to ask you as well for if you had any advice or just thoughts to share with people who are kind of considering planning or don't really know that planning exists but might be as a profession but might be interested in these kinds of questions of city building and creating or rather adapting cities from a model that might have worked over half a century ago but probably wasn't that sustainable from the get go into something that can be more strong in the future. Well, I think most of the designers that I know come into the business through their architecture planning or landscape architecture occasionally through public policy and other kind of pathways, but that's generally the kind of pathway for it. I think somebody who has an interest in engaging this kind of discussion is obviously an enormous amount of literature and you can read and conferences you can go to and visit cities all over the place. But I think somebody who's interested in figuring out how the sausages made needs to start seeing that process.
So you're planning commissions and your design rewards or design commissions are pretty good places to sort of see how the action, how somebody's coming together. And you know, it's going to be a little bit remote. It's not entirely the sausage or getting kind of a sanitized view of it, but you start to see that there is a process involved. And it's certainly one of the things I try and teach my students is that if they're working in a complex urban environment like any place in Los Angeles, they're going to have to go through multiple bodies of people, many of whom don't have an architecture background to have an opinion and ultimately get to approve or deny their projects.
You know, we're sort of taught that we get to do whatever we want and architecture as a kind of vision, but that's not the case. You have to conform with other people's expectations and these other review bodies. So simply being aware of that process is very educational. And then oftentimes cities will be engaged in some sort of planning exercise.
They're always looking for people in the community to sort of be members of advisory teams or groups or something like that to kind of weigh in and kind of provide advice. And I think that's a pretty good venue for people to start seeing kind of a deeper look at the making of the sausage to be participants in those kinds of activities. So even if you're not interested in a kind of a design or planning career path, like you could participate and have a meaningful voice in the process in those ways. I would also love to have a bigger presence and more vocal presence at least of urban planners on our connects because we often get, you know, you're going to be a poster child at this point.
We're going to bring them in with the Loomis actor, but that often the conversations get into either incredibly heady or at least I should say the contentious news pieces that we post in the kind of comments that we get. Oftentimes the conversations revolve around issues of academic theory or contentious aesthetic choices or media appreciation of the architect and overall society and have less to do necessarily with really talking about like the urban situation or the urban context or the future of cities in a way that is rigorous and informed, but also like social and out of a community. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Alan, you were on arc and active beginning ages in the dark ages, which don't aren't as far as I know are accessible at all. And at this point, the very early stages of the site being long long lost to redesigns.
But I was wondering if you had any idea of like, was there an urban design or urban planning community on the site when you were participating in it? That you can kind of characterize or comment on? Yeah, they're kind of what there kind of was. There was a number of commentators or kind of early contributors.
And I think originally there was like 10 or 15 people who had rights to post comments or articles on the site. A number of them had an interest in not necessarily urban issues, but kind of large scale landscape issues. I think Jeff Mann on from Building Blog was an early contributor and he was posting the kind of stuff he continues to post on Building Blog. Sort of interested in large scale industrialized landscapes typically.
So there was a number of people that were kind of having a sort of dialogue by the way we were posting stuff or commenting about larger urban issues. It wasn't the exclusive focus of course, but yeah, there was a bit of that. Well, it's bringing it up to speed as well. So as kind of a closer off question, which you can totally decide to dismiss if you like.
We like to have people who come to the studio give us some recommendations for things they're reading or listening to or watching right now, but they just like to share. Oh dear. And if I told you at the beginning of the conversation, you might have had a better idea of what you could share. But if you don't want to share anything or you just can't think of it.
Well, the problem is right now I'm not really reading from doing much. I run around my life as death by meanings. I don't really read much. That's totally fair.
Although I will say I just got pretty exciting. Well, I will offer two suggestions. I just got was it the six canonical projects by RIMCOOL Hoss, which originally I thought was going to be more of a typological study. When I ordered the book and then opening it up, it seems to be a pretty in-depth theoretical investigation of a wide range of ideas that inform RIMCOOL Hoss' projects with, you know, six or eight of these projects being kind of the focal points by which this broader dialogue unfolds, which I think sounds really interesting.
And then the other thing I would say, I also picked up a book called Herroic Concrete, I think is the name, which is the investigation of Brutalist Architecture in Boston, which I think is really interesting that the Brutalist trend is being kind of revived and revisited and taken seriously. And partially it's because I work in a Brutalist office building that's floated up on four gigantic concrete pilotis. It's a very heroic building. So I have a certain kind of affection because that's my office home.
So that's I think that kind of investigation is very interesting. And then the other books that I've started collecting recently is a series of books from Time Life that were published probably in the 70s. They had a series of books called The Great Cities. And so there's one in Tokyo or Mexico City or Jerusalem or Prague.
And these are books that I was reading as a child, I think, checking out my local library that were sort of the inspirations growing up in Midwestern and suburb in Michigan. That was, this inspired me. So how cities are really exciting places. So you're finding the original editions from where they have they updated it?
No, I'm purchasing getting the original books. They're usually book remanders from libraries and I'm actually finding it kind of pretty inexpensive now. Because they're widely out of date, but they're sort of... That's a good trip.
They're a little bit in the style of directing. Totally. And for the 70s in a place like... Yeah.
Yeah, the book on Berlin is really fascinating. It's all about how Berlin is a divided city. That's fantastic. Thanks for sharing those.
And thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for taking the time out. Thank you for inviting me. Thanks for listening to our Connect Sessions One to One with Alan Loomis.
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