2613 say yeah!: #1. On the LA river - dear mr. owen moss, i have to disagree with you

there is a big, concrete structure running through Los Angeles. it is, somewhat archaically, called the LA river. it is not a river. only once every few years, thanks to torrential rains, the river swells from its backwater-sized width that one can easily jump across to a stream of a more modest size. yet it can never be a real river again, like it was long ago, before the gold-rush, before the missionaries.

Eric Owen Moss, the director of sci-arc and principal of the aptly-named LA-based architecture firm Eric Owen Moss architects, recently won the History Channel's competition "the city of the future: a design and engineering challenge".

anyway, hooray hooray for mr Owen Moss. lots of interesting and less interesting articles and interviews on the competition have appeared in the last few weeks, and more and more i feel like Owen Moss' LA of the future is not the LA of the future we will live to see, even though the design premise actually sounds interesting and promising.

Taking the ubiquitous (i still think this is a word that should be made easier. come on, when we are talking about sex, who uses the expression copulation?), say omnipresent (still different, but a little bit less than the other one...) la river, as Owen Moss calls it, and treating it as just another piece of infrastructure, angelenos would re-inhabit the banks of this dying piece of nature, bringing east LA closer to downtown, thus bringing wealth and prosperity to new classes of people.

Moss starts off promising, but come on, the LA river is not omni-present. it is a gutter and it is treated like one. the bridges that cross it are not constructed to be tall to let great steamships through, just to let trains with cargo through.

on the statement that east LA is a different city, i can only agree with Owen Moss. but it is not just east LA. it is the whole of the built structure that fills the basin and the surrounding valleys. unlike most other contemporary cities, Los Angeles is not greater than the sum of its parts. why? those goddamned cars, and the infrastructure that serves them. if you want to bring LA together, a move that would completely disregard the current state of the city, why would you use the one structure that divides everything? why don't we transform all highways into bus-lanes only, forcing people out of the car.

Owen Moss' view of the future of LA is an honourable one, i have to admit. it is optimistic and tries to make the best of it. It is not, however, a realistic one.

can you imagine this stretch of land ever to be the instigator of overcoming racial, social and economic divide in Los Angeles?

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