Sometimes it is the scope of a vision that leaves you in awe. William Mulholland's colossal effort to bring water to an arid San Fernando Valley. Robert Moses' vision of a massive freeway system that would ease the congested metropolis of Manhattan. These are men who worked in broad strokes. At times, the quality of their work seems almost secondary.
Ed Feiner is such a crusader. Since 1990, as the chief architect of the federal government's General Services Administration, Feiner has been the guiding force behind a $10-billion, decade-long plan to build or upgrade 155 federal courthouses across the country. In the process, Feiner has sought to bring back to federal courthouses the grandeur that was lost during the 1960s, when standards for public buildings sank to an all-time low.
It is a vision that has sudden significance for Los Angeles. Initial discussions on a new federal courthouse at an unspecified downtown site began several years ago. (The existing Spring Street courthouse will become the federal Bankruptcy Court.) Last month, the GSA unveiled its short list of eight architectural firms that will compete to design the $250-million-plus project: Kohn Pedersen Fox, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, Perkins & Will, Cannon Dworsky, Steven Ehrlich Architects, Rafael Vinoly Architects and Richard Meier & Partners.
The list includes a number of competent architectural firms--something that would have beenimprobable in a GSA project only a decade ago. Kohn Pedersen Fox and Skidmore Owings & Merrill are well-established corporate architects. Both are capable of tasteful, inoffensive design. Two others--Richard Meier and Rafael Vinoly--have demonstrated the skill to produce works of real architectural substance.
But while the GSA's list reflects a significant shift in who the government is choosing to design its buildings, and may even signal that the most dismal period of federal architecture is finally behind us, we still might ask ourselves: Is that enough?
In its potential impact on the downtown landscape, the courthouse project ranks alongside Frank O. Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall and Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. But as a whole, the list of architects--which was culled from a meager pool of 20 applicants--lacks creative range. Nor does the list maintain the kind of minimal standards that would guarantee a design that rises above the mediocre. What we end up with, in fact, is still a coin toss.
To some, Feiner's past may make him an unlikely hero. He began his architectural career at New York's Cooper Union in the mid-'60s, when the school was considered a center of architectural experimentation. Instead of entering the professional mainstream, Feiner joined the U.S. Navy master planning program. He left the military for a brief stint as a designer at Gruen Associates--a respected Modernist firm best known for its mall designs--before returning to the Navy and finally joining the GSA in 1981.
At the time, government buildings were shaped by the same kind of bottom-line mentality as the worst commercial developments. Most were bland, sterile boxes whose main function was to deaden the human spirit. Feiner and his staff set out to change that. In 1990, as a way of demonstrating the government's renewed interest in architecture, they established the GSA's annual Design Awards, which recognize the best designs for government buildings. At the same time, the judicial system was trying to cope with a severe overcrowding problem due to an increase in court cases. As a result, Congress approved a major increase in allocations for courthouse construction.
The courthouses were the perfect launch pad for Feiner's ideas. He immediately set out to convince judges--the de facto client in all courthouse buildings--of architecture's symbolic role in upholding the stature of the federal court system.
Among his earliest victories was hiring Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners to design a courthouse in Boston. The firm was not a particularly risky choice. Having established its reputation designing the most luxurious kind of corporate Modernism, it is not out to challenge conventional design norms. But at its best, such as in the design of the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, the firm's mastery of the fundamental tools of architecture--structure, proportion, scale--give the work a suave refinement lacking in conventional building.
Soon Feiner began to attack more systematic problems. In 1993, he streamlined the application process for government projects. Excessive experience requirements were relaxed. And a new peer-review system was established.
