Barton Phelps, AIA, Corridor: The Highspeed Roadway as Generator of New Urban Form, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 54
[p. 54] "J.B. Jackson "A landscape without visible signs of political history is a landscape without memory or forethought. We are inclined in America to think that the value of monuments is simply to remind us of origins. They are much more valuable as reminders of long-range, collective purpose, of goals and objectives and principles. As such, even the least sightly of monuments gives a landscape beauty and dignity and keeps the collective memory alive."
In his elegant essay Concluding with Landscapes, cultural geographer J.B, Jackson draws an abstract distinction between the messy, ad hoc use of the medieval European landscape (Landscape I) and the clear physical and social ordering of public and private space that developed during the Renaissance and led to the urban formalisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Landscape 2). It is the latter, Jackson suggests, that Americans, and American architects in particular, have persistently admired despite its foreignness to an American landscape that he has shown to be distinguished mostly by the signs of temporary and historical conscienceless use. In the remarkable conclusion to his essay, Jackson finds that Renaissance concepts of ordering had only a brief impact on the United States and that the American landscape we encounter today derives from topography of late medieval England with which the earliest settlers were familiar. What he calls our Landscape 3, Jackson believes, has more in common with Landscape 1 than with Landscape 2.
If Jackson's observations seem to seriously question the overall relevance of design, they can also be seen, perhaps, more positively from the architect's perspective, to underscore the value of recognizing the significance of periodic urban transformations and the usefulness of analyzing the often unconventional arrangements that they produce.
In California, twentieth century changes in transportation-in particular the supremacy of private cars and trucks and the accommodation by means of elaborate highway engineering of their potential for random and high-speed movement-played a key role in shaping a uniquely complete version of Landscape 3, undiluted by previous urban forms. With this approach, Los Angeles can be seen as a superbly equipped environmental laboratory-the largest (and the most repetitive) collection of these commonplace, undesigned, urban landscape events that have come to characterize the twentieth century development of American cities, most of which are now more like Los Angeles than their citizens may choose to admit.
[p. 54] "One indication of the radical transformation caused by the construction of the Los Angeles freeway system some thirty years ago is the difficulty we now encounter in imagining the landscape of Los Angeles without it. Freeway construction photos from the early sixties [p. 55] remind us of the enormity of its physical impact as well as the seemingly arbitrary disruption brought about by its superimposition over a fully-developed urban/suburban grid. Harder to grasp now is how the advent of the [p. 56] freeway fundamentally changed the way in which we understand the city.
[p. 56] "Before the colossal pattern of elegantly engineered roadways was imprinted over the small scale neighborhoods through which it passes, residents depended on trolley lines and what we now call "surface" streets to structure their reckoning of the city. Because most buildings were kept low, the system of roads and streets was more diagrammatic than monumental and it was still useful (and easy) to know the names of neighborhoods through which one needed to pass on a trip, for they were posted on street signs across town. This old-fashioned intimacy with places in Los Angeles was obliterated by the freeway system, reducing the names of neighborhoods and the boundaries between them to local lore and obscuring their relations to each other. Now freeway exit signs define important locations and they do so in terms of major cross streets. Newcomers receive seemingly arbitrary instructions to turn "right" or "left" as a first direction upon returning to the pre-freeway streetscape. Movement through the city has become abstract and separate from experience in the life of the street.
Dense parkway planting, intended to soften the juxtaposition of two different scales of building, results in a remarkable duality between the experience of the roadway and that of the bordering streets. The striking clarity of engineering thought that created the hyperproximity of suburban backyards and fourteen lane roadways can now be perceived only from the air. Thus, the monumental formal implications of the roadway, for the most part, go unnoticed.
Functionally, an exponential increase in the volume of traffic has lessened the promise of dependably efficient automobile travel and rendered the residual condition at street level even less tenable. There, a noisy, fractured landscape of cul-de-sac streets that still seem only recently severed, ugly and ineffective noise barriers, daunting (even dangerous) pedestrian bridges and tunnels, and overgrown plantings stretch hundreds of miles throughout the city. Citizen concern focusses on protecting neighborhoods along the corridor and even reconnecting them across the roadway. Stripped of novelty, the high speed roadway has become a common, powerfully definitive feature of the landscape of the "horizontal," car-oriented city. But a revisionist examination of those all-too-familiar urban conditions- "unresolved" by urban design standards-that result from the superimposition of the freeway suggests the possibility that new building types and collective forms could be used to reclaim neighborhood identity [p. 57] and even reconnect freeway drivers with the places they roll by.
[p. 57] "Preliminary research conducted in 1988 with students at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, indicates that, for reasons of cost and political complexity, major freeway expansion in Los Angeles is generally unlikely. No-growth activity in established neighborhoods, an encouraging Cal-Trans air rights leasing program, the lack of clear planning policy, and the record of recent speculative building work together to suggest rather that the land comprising freeway corridors is likely to attract intense and incoherent development.
A 9.4 mile stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway between the San Diego and Harbor Freeways was selected for study because in addition to its status as the most heavily traveled roadway in the world, it displays an impressively varied design as it slices over and through a broad range of topographical and neighborhood conditions, it is possible to distinguish the layered phenomenal, formal, and political implications of this freeway landscape. Our 1991 exhibition Corridor: The Highspeed Roadway as Generator of New Urban Forms represents a first attempt to analyze and reconfigure prominent edges of the vast, often suburban, fabric that lies along the right-of-way of the freeway system. It accepts the freeway as a meaningful monumental form and takes its overlay on the city as a stimulus for the development of richer, more comprehensible urban landscape-one that responds to the scale of the roadway and its formalizing potential for the city around it.
Organized into four parts, the exhibition began by documenting the transformation of the pre-freeway city. Superimposition: Building the Roadway compared construction photos from the early 1960s with views of the same sites today. The second part, "Duality Unresolved: Conditions and Possibilities," was composed of a sequence of slides showing present conditions. These were grouped as experiential types: "The Ride," "Hyperproximity," "Disruption," "Vacant Rooms," and "Vestigial Armatures." The latter posed the formative potential of the freeway artifact by showing lively public spaces in Italy that were shaped by the foundations of long-gone Roman structures. In Part Three, "Ways of Looking at a Freeway," differing graphic representations of the corridor ware combined with provocative quotations from well-known observers of the landscape. "On and Off," "The Ride," Topography," "Local Conditions," "Zoning," and "Disruption" suggested alternative [p. 58] interpretations and reconsiderations of the freeway beyond the humdrum of the commute.
[p. 58] The last part, "Proposals for Lateral Incidents," was shaped largely by two concepts that emerged from the 1988 study. We referred to them as "The Middle Layer" and "Informing the Ride."
"The Middle Layer" postulates the insertion of a variety of building types into the undervalued and unprotected strips of property that border the freeway system and straddle two dramatically different scales of buildings. At street level, the Middle Layer raises specific questions of the appropriateness of programs and architectural form, as well as more general issues of neighborhood coherence, noise abatement, traffic reduction, and possibilities for new densities or proximity between living and working space. Current thinking suggests that these latter linkages and their resultant reduction of commuter travel promise one of the few attainable solutions to the rapidly worsening problem of car traffic in Los Angeles. Middle Layer studies need to look realistically at land value and development potential, but another main focus rests on design issues related to the context of the selected sites-their unusual topography and shape, the special construction techniques they will require, and their proximity to a noisy, dirty urban artifact of extraordinary formal power.
"Informing the Ride" explores the experiential duality that exists between the roadway and the surrounding city, and the possibility for citizens to understand both better. It assesses the effect of "marker' buildings and spaces in order to learn how they can fix and identify specific neighborhoods or places within the panoramic view of the city that the freeway driver comes to know and enjoy. Informing studies involve structuring the visual impact of the Middle Layer when it moves into [p. 59] the motorist's field of view. They suggest structures that respond to dramatic transitions in use and perception, both in their horizontal and in their vertical dimensions. Because the particular stretch of freeway under consideration is often elevated above the street plane, these studies need to operate at a larger scale than that of individual buildings on the street. They emphasize three-dimensional concerns of solid and void, sculptural forms, skyline, texture, rhythm, multiple lines of view, and kinesthesia.
[p. 59] Prompted in part, by Jackson's willingness to view change in the American landscape as a positive cultural expression, we have examined ways in which a structural interaction between the freeway and its adjoining neighborhoods can work to the benefit of both. In the interest of posing credible alternatives for a less exclusive planning policy, Corridor proposes a series of Lateral Incidences at selected sites along the roadway. These suggestions represent only a few of the specific sties with Middle Layer and Informing potential. They represent an architect's reading of the implications of certain undeveloped residual situations and are essentially practical. The scale of such projects can be extremely large and their design and implementation would require complex public-private cooperation and neighborhood participation to develop guideline requirements allowing for local specificity and multiple designs. In all cases they would require a fundamental balance between respect for the roadway as a single artifact and the thoughtful restructuring of the social landscape it is intended to serve.