L.A. Unified Brings Style to School Building Boom

When completed in three years, the $90-million school near downtown will have six buildings clad in glass or curved metal sidings of vibrant green, reds and blues, clustered around stepped courtyards. A music classroom will open onto a patio for performances and a culinary arts room onto a vegetable garden. A bridge will span 3rd Street, linking athletic fields to the gymnasium.

As L.A. Unified prepares to build as many as 120 schools in 10 years -- the largest such building program in district history and one of the biggest in the nation -- it is trying to do more than ease its overcrowding. L.A. Unified is hiring 80 architectural firms to give different looks to different neighborhoods, recasting parts of the city's landscape along with the public's idea of the American school.

"Schools are no longer coming out of cookie cutters," said Robert Timme, the dean of USC's architecture school who is chairman of a council that advises L.A. Unified on school designs.

The district, which anticipates spending $3.6 billion on the building program's first five years, is taking advantage of a recent boom in funds. With the passage of two state and local bonds on Nov. 5 -- and two earlier school construction propositions -- L.A. Unified may reap $7 billion in all. And the district is already preparing an additional $2-billion local bond initiative in 2004 to leverage a planned $12-billion statewide bond that year.

Mindful of accusations that the district mismanaged construction dollars in the past, officials say they are aiming for efficiency as much as appealing to the public imagination.

"You're not getting the low end, but you're not getting anything luxurious either," said Kathi Littmann, the district's deputy chief for school planning. The schools will be efficient and built to last, "but they're not monuments with things like granite facades and terrazzo floors."

Containing costs became all the more important in recent weeks, as the district discovered an earthquake fault running directly beneath two of the six unfinished buildings at the seemingly star-crossed Belmont Learning Center, which already is the most expensive high school project in America. The site may have to be scrapped -- and district officials have vowed to carefully screen other potential sites for similar problems, which may increase costs.

Benefits of the massive building project will extend beyond schools, supporters say. Many new campuses will include exhibition spaces, playing fields and auditoriums accessible to the public in the evenings and on weekends. And planners are looking to locate schools close to parks and libraries.

"If we do this well, we will have the extraordinary possibility of pulling the city together -- people of color and Anglo, rich and poor," said school board member Genethia Hudley Hayes. "These schools are going to anchor communities and get people to start asking questions: What other amenities can be clustered around them?"

The diversity in school designs is driven, in large part, by big-city congestion.

Many of the new urban school sites are too tight and oddly configured for standard campuses. The denser urban grid has forced the district to plan multistory schools on top of underground parking garages on two-acre campuses and to share land with other users. For example, a proposal to build an 800-student school at Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue would combine retail, housing and a subway station on seven acres.

The designs also tend to be more child-friendly, more filled with color and light, than schools of building campaigns in the 1920s and '50s. They emphasize energy efficiency and environmentally friendly designs. And all will be wired for multimedia and high-speed Internet access.

Reactions to the plans have been mixed.

"Some of these designs are extraordinary," said Michael Lehrer, a Los Angeles architect and member of a committee overseeing use of the Proposition BB district construction and repair bond measure passed in 1997. "Some are very important architecturally, some are trendy, some ... are silly-jazzy, and some are clunky and poorly proportioned."

Some people are worried that the district, which hasn't finished a comprehensive high school since Richard Nixon was president, is moving too fast on too many projects at once. Five schools have been completed in the last two years, 75 more are in various stages of planning or early construction and 40 others are expected to follow. That means breaking ground on a school every month or so for the next few years.