Sylvia Lavin, UCLA, School of the Arts and Architecture, Los Angeles
Eric Owen Moss, FAIA, SCI-Arc, Los Angeles

      Is Los Angeles a city that ought to rely on external models in planning its future or is Los Angeles an urban law unto itself?

      How useful are the caricatures of Los Angeles that represent the city as movie town “Hollywood,” or avant-guard “Venice,” or the city of endless freeways? Is Los Angeles perpetually a “collection of suburbs,” or is the city “without a center” about to become centered? We’ll discuss these questions and examine the role of cultural traditions, experimental design and planning precedents, and the evolving purposes of infrastructure-freeways, train routes, power grids, and the concrete Los Angeles River in the re-imagining of the next Los Angeles.

Learning objectives:

• Define how a young city develops a conception of itself and its urban future, which is not derivative or dependent on external city planning precedents but relies on its own abilities to define itself
• Describe how the infrastructure, particularly the freeways and the concrete river which define and circumscribe large sections of Los Angeles, could be amended, reconfigured, removed, or replaced to reunite rather than subdivide
• Identify whether contemporary Los Angeles is simply an urban law unto itself and, if so, whether the city is a planning precedent for the organization of new cities and the amending of existing cities around the world.