Pershing Square In Los Angeles: Analysis Of Architecture

As a settlement, Pershing Square precedes the existence of Downtown Los Angeles, which was formally established in 1917. In the late 1860’s, the park served as an arena for the representation and rallying of the politically driven leftist members of Los Angeles’ working class and ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Speeches were frequently held in the square for and by people who felt excluded from conventional political structures for systematic discriminatory reasons. The park was activated by its community and provided a symbolically democratic space for rallying in a post-war society. However, the City Council’s efforts to enforce laws and regulations to regulate the public voice of the people consequently stifled them and ended the park’s political significance. Since its designation as a public space, Pershing Square had undergone 5 redesigns by various architects leading to its current state as envisioned by Mexican Modernist Architect Ricardo Legorreta. Throughout its history, it fell under the names Los Angeles Park, 6th Street Park, and Central Park, in that order. The increasing ambiguity in the name of the park throughout time is somewhat representative of its gradual and incremental devolvement from its formerly integrated and socially activated state.

In his book “Los Angeles, the Architecture of Four Ecologies,” Reyner Banham writes that “It would be nice if Pershing Square was still full of old Men playing chess (Or whatever it was)” This statement originally published in 1971 still resoundingly reflects the state of the park today and its degradation from what it once was, as well as indicates the consistent ambiguity of its purpose through time. Formally a lush, flowering oasis, outdoor destination and lively pavilion, the current Pershing square fails not only in what it strived to achieve as a Public Space through the trials of time but fails doubly as a monument. As the shiny veneer of its novelty– cultivated by its installation-like appearance and its scale—inevitably fades, what is left is remnants of an optimistic ideal. The colorful, toy-block forms of Pershing square can feel as if they jest the city that encloses it- standing as a caricature of an imagined, infallible, and non-existent Downtown Los Angeles. The sensationalist nature of its historic references rooted in California’s humble orange grove origins and geographic fault lines read as disconnected from the square’s immediate urban context, and therefore brings it further away from the cultural integration it so greatly desires.

The density of the adjacent towers and 4-lane streets that close in on and surround Pershing Square creates a panopticon of visibility that fails to generate the sense of liberty and the comfort of freedom desired by the general public from a Public Space. There is something unavoidably imposing about the enclosure of the plaza in multi-story buildings and a moat of asphalt, and the expansive concrete block fails to liberate itself from the imposing urban landscape, with only patches of greenery in an ecologically deprived metropolis. Developing culturally significant and integrated public spaces in urban Downtown Los Angeles have proved consistently erroneous for multitudinous reasons. Predominantly, Pershing Square and downtown projects like it fail to address and synthesize their context and history effectively, and productively. Formerly a politically activated area, little to none of its history leaves any residue on the current iteration of the site, yet it had been anticipated to operate the same way. Now dwarfed by the cooperate metropolis that surrounds it, with none of the former passionate communities in any proximity after the development of the business district gentrified the area, Pershing square is engrained in a hierarchy that degrades it and completely disintegrates its former operability. Its stark displacement from the sociopolitical utility it once served is representative of Mike Davis’ retrospective analysis of Los Angeles as “contested ground.” Secondly, a consistent element in these struggling attempts to create a successful public space is the presence of techniques of control, security and exclusion that are regulated and mandated by City Council code. The bell tower’s inaccessibility to the public is one of many elements that generates this sensation of constraint and control that also causes it to approach the line of being an art object and moves the space further from successfully being a public urban space. The plaza is populated abundantly with these almost-art objects and graphic elements- that of which the novelty furthers the disillusionment of its visitors.

Pershing Square’s integral inclusion in Rockstar games’ GTA V serves as a possible example and indication of the contemporary space’s cultural significance, or lack thereof. (Fig.2) Los Santos, a fictional city modelled after Los Angeles, is home to a diverse cast of characters from a variety of financial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds in a simulated world that does not shy away from its depictions of poverty, gun violence and sex. In many ways, Los Santos creates Colin Rowe’s “Collage City,” by the exclusion of many homogeneities and redundancies in “iconic” elements of Los Angeles to construct a gratifying environment for the imagination of the user. The Square’s inclusion would imply that it is of high cultural or pop-cultural importance, yet even in this fabricated and dense world, Pershing Square remains a colorful yet insubstantial backdrop for the events of that world and acts indistinguishably from the rest of the vast and unassuming open-world stage. The model is not an exact replica- geometries are rescaled, displaced and recolored, yet the vast concrete surface dwarfs the meek volume of visitors populating it. Despite Los Santos teasing Colin Rowe’s “Collage City,” Pershing Square, (or Legion Square as it is called in the game), virtual sim characters pass through mindlessly; and with the removal of the park’s functionality as a parking lot or public transportation hub, Pershing Square’s shortcomings as culturally integrated public space is further brought to light.

“The Street” in terms of is often considered a fundamental and extremely integral part of the public realm and a representation of public urban life. Downtown Los Angeles currently harbors one of the most severe cases of homelessness in the developed world. The expansive suburban sprawl of Los Angeles County driving residents and residential “zones” outwards from the perceived nucleus leaves downtown streets as quiet, desolate sidecars to oncoming rush-hour traffic, populated with the occasional grocery shopper, public transport user or homeless citizen. The infrastructure of Los Angeles plays a major role in the struggle of the successful development of public spaces. The unfocused ubiquity of the built environment calls for the creation of monumental freeways, highways and 6-lane streets inevitably results in driving cars to be every Angelenos daily ritual. The incredible volume of commuters to corporate downtown buildings denies leisurely visitors to accessible and convenient parking in the dense city blocks, driving pedestrian traffic outwards. Therefore, there is hardly space for something such as a traditional, humble public plaza scaled to the concrete Pershing Square.

Public Spaces in Downtown Los Angeles consistently face shortcomings in the broader cultural development arena in ways that transcend the park or plaza typologies. The Bradbury Building, built in 1893, assumes the title of Public Space and is highly regarded as iconic and significant in Los Angeles’ architectural catalogue; and further serves as a looming example of the “public space” typology’s conventional nonexistence in Downtown. As an enclosed commercial building admired for its ornate ironwork interior, it exists as an artefact of time- and as a landmark, it unites communities in discussion and discourse. In this sense it succeeds in generating cultural significance in discourse, yet as an artefact, it falls short of what is traditionally considered a public space. “Public” Areas that thrive in greater Los Angeles include areas such as the Universal City Walk, Disneyland, 3rd Street Promenade, Rodeo Drive and the 3rd Street Promenade. These areas operate as “public” spaces, yet are highly concentrated with restaurants, bars, shops and touristic attractions- fully engaged in consumerism, and most notably, privately owned. These locations are also often near shopping malls- “public” areas that are also privately owned and operated.

Kevin Lynch often highlights the displacement of importance from Downtown Los Angeles. Banham also acknowledges that Los Angeles thrives outside the city center, and dispassionately describes Downtown as “Neither very attractive nor historically rewarding.” On the contrary, Banham refers to the beach as public space as “a symbolic rejection of the values of consumer society,” and states that “there is a sense in which the beach is the only place in Los Angeles where all men are equal and on common ground.” Contrary to the elements of restriction and legislation in the public areas of Downtown Los Angeles, privatized beaches are private “not because antisocial upper-class elements covered it with restrictive legislation, but because the pattern of development makes it physically inaccessible.” The air of social and political hierarchies is little to non-existent in the coastal domain- and private inaccessible properties scattered throughout the publicly accessible and vivacious areas are paid no mind due to their aesthetic and architectural awareness and integration with their context and surroundings. The life of “the street” is restless and unwavering, and it is this release from and independence from the imposing nature of consumerism that makes the coast a successful, culturally significant and adaptive public space.

Despite Pershing Square representing the shortcomings of the development of public spaces in Downtown Los Angeles, it stipulates important questions about the future of the urbanized world- whether true “publicness” has been or is still something that is attainable. Los Angeles’ vast suburban sprawl and decentralization not only disallows the development of new successful public spaces in a stale downtown Los Angeles but exposes the corporate and privatized nature of the pedestrian spaces that create the illusion of freedom through consumerism and are therefore informally deemed and experienced as “public.” The digital age of modern society constantly pressures and produces new ideas of collective spaces, and Los Angeles as a model of postmodern and contemporary urbanism, and as a city that exists with extremely diverse ecology and topography will undoubtedly be a source for new possibilities of what will be “public” space. The life and culture of Los Angeles thrive in the periphery- embedded under its shroud of homogeneity is an intricate web of history, culture, and diversity that will inevitably yield profound new urban development as it continues to unfurl.