L.A. Unified Brings Style to School Building Boom

This isn’t your grandma’s schoolhouse.

Designs for Central High School No. 10 look more like a dot-com firm flaunting a worker-friendly image than an inner-city campus of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

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.

Some architects complained that austere finances, bureaucracy and frantic deadlines snuffed out some of the most adventurous design ideas, particularly on classroom interiors, where the district sought conformity as much as possible. Some designers wanted to experiment with rounded spaces instead of standard rectangular classrooms. In one case, safety concerns nixed plans for exposed ceilings: Students might try to hang from the rafters.

The most pointed criticism so far has been aimed at the district’s choice of building materials, which some architects consider insufficiently durable. Most of the schools will have wood frames instead of steel; vinyl tile floors, no marble.

“That doesn’t mean that with a good maintenance program they won’t be in use 50 years from now,” said district Facilities Director Jim McConnell.

Many of the schools may remind passersby, at first glance, of shopping malls, museums, office complexes or airport terminals. That may be disorienting to people expecting schools to resemble authoritarian monuments or be sprawling green campuses of one-story buildings. But they reflect a national trend, played out on a big scale in Los Angeles, to commission more daring public school architecture.

The library of Manual Arts New Elementary School No. 3, for example, is expected to lean into the corner of Jefferson and Catalina. A parallelogram with a window as wide as a movie screen, the structure showcases the students and allows them to view their neighborhood near Exposition Park.

“We were going to do a more neutral school and then have the residents do a mural,” said Christopher Coe of Arquitectonica International, the firm that designed the $20-million campus, where construction is scheduled to start next spring. “But the community told us that it was OK to be more colorful.”

Central High No. 10 -- numbered schools may get new names later -- at the corner of 3rd and Bixel streets just west of downtown, is among the most ambitious designs. (The campus, where construction is supposed to start next summer, will be on a hill above the district’s biggest embarrassment, the unfinished Belmont.)

Central High No. 10’s designers adopted a strategy similar to Universal CityWalk: cutting off undesirable urban elements like traffic and homeless encampments while trying to create a town center for the 2,000 students. Separate buildings for offices, library, cafeteria and auditorium will line the courtyards.

With the courtyards and other touches, “we’re kind of blurring the traditional lines between the classroom and the street -- we’re saying education happens in both places,” said its architect, Scott Johnson, of Johnson Fain Partners. “We’re also saying that something communal and social has to happen here.” Another unusual project, the $50-million Science Center Elementary School under construction amid museums at Exposition Park, will recycle the 1926 former Armory shed. A new, low-lying classroom building will be built beside it, camouflaged by berms and grassy rooftops.

“The school disappears into the landscape environment,” said its designer, Thom Mayne of the Morphosis firm. “It literally becomes an extension of the park.”

That project pooled money from L.A. Unified, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and a state park bond. But the 13 years of planning and discussions with neighboring USC and museums showed how difficult sharing property can be, Littmann said, adding that it is more likely for schools to be built close to recreational and cultural facilities, not on the same sites.

History shows that school construction, though essential, need not be dull. Past construction booms, such as those in the 1920s and ‘50s, produced some designs so distinctive that the district now has at least 49 schools considered worthy of historical preservation status.

“These schools were built at a time when institutions garnered more respect, and the buildings that expressed those institutions were seen as places that honored the institution and the city,” said architect Lehrer.

But as Proposition 13 hampered districts’ ability to pay for maintenance and new schools, many campuses fell into disrepair. Architects say that allowing these buildings to become run down offends communities and dehumanizes students.

Tara Logan, 8, agrees. She said her former campus, Sylvan Park Elementary in the San Fernando Valley, used to be vandalized by students. “People used to spray the walls,” she said. “They threw rocks at the windows.”

After she moved to the new Columbus Avenue Elementary School in Van Nuys this year, she noticed that the students showed more respect.

With slanted roofs and clean lines designed by the Leidenfrost/Horowitz architecture firm, Columbus Avenue’s two-story layout clusters several groups of six classrooms around a common teachers’ office and supply room. Individual tutoring can be held in those rooms while teachers watch their classes through windows.

The interiors are efficient, if not warm, with linoleum floors and particle-board shelves. The white board is also a projection screen, and shelves and a television are hidden behind it.

Barbara Thibodeau, Columbus Avenue’s principal, said she wishes the classrooms were somewhat larger. But she said she and teachers feel fortunate to be in the new school.

Most important, she said, she thinks the new architecture will help students focus on learning. “I want to say it will,” she said. “Time will tell.”