L.A. Live

Los Angeles, city of enclaves, is methodically, unapologetically building itself one more.
The massive $2.5-billion, 4-million-square-foot L.A. Live project on the southern edge of downtown won't be complete for another year and a half or so. But its extensive second phase, much of which will open to the public this weekend, seems to rule out for good the prospect that L.A. Live might bring a fresh, forward-looking model of mega-development to downtown.
Even by the rather forgiving standards of a city whose leaders -- and whose public, for that matter -- demand little from developers when it comes to civic-minded design, the project is relentlessly focused on creating its own wholly separate commercial universe: a brighter, more strategically frenzied place than the world outside its doors.
The second phase is where L.A. Live, developed by the Denver company AEG, meets the city. A pair of new buildings along Figueroa Street -- one holding an ESPN Zone restaurant and broadcast facilities for the cable-sports giant, the other one containing the Grammy Museum and Club Nokia along with restaurants, a bowling alley and office space -- forms an important urban linchpin between the development's condo and hotel tower near the freeway, which will open in early 2010, and the adjacent South Park neighborhood.

The trouble is that the new buildings -- designed by RTKL, a Baltimore-based firm that also created the master plan for L.A. Live -- have almost nothing to say to or about downtown Los Angeles. Clad in glass and panels of metal and limestone, they are adamant in their sleek placelessness. Their primary concern is matching, in palette and spirit, the Staples Center next door (which, not coincidentally, is also an AEG property).

When you get right down to it, their architecture is fundamentally not really architecture at all but an extensive series of armatures on which the developer and its tenants can hang logos, video screens and a sophisticated range of lighting effects.

Most discouraging, it is precisely the project's outdoor spaces, with their illusion of public interaction and free-flowing movement, that use those screens and that lighting to most aggressive effect. AEG has talked in encouraging terms about pursuing connections between L.A. Live and South Park. Those connections would have been an important boost to the area, because South Park, like downtown as a whole, is in the midst of a fragile transition from no-man's-land to residential center. People are beginning to fill its streets, sidewalks and cafes, but they need additional encouragement from architects, developers and planners alike.