Their bricks and mortarboard

Just a couple of decades ago, the study of art and architectural history was confined to work by dead people. Among the institutions most committed to exploring dusty old archives was the Institute of Fine Arts, a graduate program at New York University housed in Doris Duke’s former mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 78th Street. It was a place where the students’ fur coats lined the back halls, and tea was served gratis every Friday afternoon. There, even in the late 1970s, when this writer attended, “new” often meant the early 1920s, and “modern” could justifiably be used as a reference to the mid-19th century.

Revisionism has hit even this hallowed hall, where courses titled “From Boys to Men: Masculinities in Visual Representation” and “Deformities” are now offered along with classes on Caravaggio and “Hellenistic and Roman Republican Art, Third to First Centuries B.C.” Perhaps the most up-to-the-moment offering this semester, however, is a course on “Los Angeles: Urban Landscape and Architectural Creativity,” taught by French architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen.

Because this advanced seminar meets a continent away from its subject, students mostly look at pictures, read books and make slide presentations based on their library research. But last week, nine aspiring historians and four young French architects -- the latter students of Cohen’s from Paris -- took the institute’s first field trip to Los Angeles, in an attempt to fully comprehend the region. They didn’t even glance at Disneyland or Universal Studios. No one studied the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. On a trip to Santa Monica, they spent more time at Hennessey + Ingalls art and architecture bookstore on the Third Street Promenade than they did on the pier. Their focus was as much the mingling of styles as landmarks. In contrast to the East Coast, Los Angeles has been a place where architects -- from Greene and Greene to Frank Gehry -- have sought ways to acknowledge the region’s varied topography and climate and pioneered new solutions rather than designing on European models.

The revelations come in fancy and inconspicuous packages. In the early 1920s, Rudolph Schindler integrated indoors and out by creating glass walls that could open onto garden courtyards, as can still be seen in the Schindler House, now the MAK Center, built in 1921. Apartments centered around pools and fountains abound in L.A., but who knew that Rome’s Villa d’Este was the inspiration for the 1928 Villa d’Este garden apartments in West Hollywood, a two-story complex with a tiled courtyard that becomes a communal living room? These are among Cohen’s favorite L.A. landmarks.

To get the architectural scholar’s view, the class stuck mostly to driving on streets and made a point of following the coastline north and south. They climbed around construction zones and traipsed through aging landmarks; they toured significant homes, old and new. How a structure like Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral downtown fits into the neighborhood was as much a point of discussion as the sight lines from a balcony inside Gehry’s unfinished Walt Disney Concert Hall. In the course of a week they covered hundreds of miles and decades of history. Along the way they got a fast-paced montage of L.A. structured by Cohen’s generous and inclusive love for this place he calls “an original city.”

Opening doors

Cohen is one of a pack of historians studying L.A. from the standpoint of architecture and urbanism -- he estimates 100 books have been written about the city in the last 10 years. He is currently co-curating an exhibition titled “Los Angeles in the Age of Moving Images: 1914-1965,” planned to open in 2005 at the National Building Museum in Washington before moving to Paris, Montreal and L.A. (the last stop at a site yet to be determined). The goal of the field trip was to reveal the texture as well as the details of Los Angeles, and Cohen, with the help of student Emily Bills, who is working on a doctoral thesis on communication systems in L.A., set the group on track immediately after its plane landed on a Sunday afternoon.

They began at UCLA, viewing buildings by everyone from George Kelham (Royce Hall) to Richard Neutra (University Elementary School), Frank Gehry (Career Center) to Franklin D. Israel (Southern Regional Library). The pace didn’t stop until the next Sunday morning, when on the way out of town they studied LAX’s Air Traffic Control Center (Siegel Diamond) and Theme Building (Pereira, Williams and Becket). In between students visited Palos Verdes, San Pedro, Hollywood Hills, Culver City, Pasadena and Santa Monica. They even took a side trip to La Jolla and Newport Beach.

Two minivans filled with the students followed Cohen’s sporty rental car, but his desire to lecture was unbounded by red lights or traffic. He could often be seen gesturing wildly out of his rolled-down window at unusual roadside structures, and at one busy intersection somewhere between L.A. and San Pedro, he took the opportunity to step out of his car and give a brief talk to his wards across the howl of traffic.

Dressed in khakis, light sweaters and thongs, with nary a tattoo or piercing in sight, the students -- a mix of first-year and more advanced scholars -- took it all in with the humor and skepticism of the emerging intellectual. In the vans, they fought over radio stations and joked about the trip. But they gathered dutifully at each new site, many of them first-time visitors to the city they’d elected to research. Tuesday, for example, took them from the Charles and Ray Eames House in Pacific Palisades to the Santa Monica Place shopping mall, designed by Gehry in the late 1970s. Though it has been much altered over the intervening years, Cohen remembers the mall in its architectural heyday, and he suggested, “If you Photoshop the postmodern details mentally, you will see the grids Gehry designed.”

The students were unimpressed. “It’s a mall,” one remarked.

“Sometimes it’s a little sad,” said Alexandra Lange, an architecture and design journalist and doctoral candidate. “We haven’t seen anything that’s surprised me. The Getty was exactly as I expected. Maybe I’d just seen way too many photographs.”

By contrast, Taiwan native Yulin Lee described the Getty as a “religious experience.”

Cohen’s personal connections allowed for special access to privately owned structures, such as a John Lautner house and Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete-block Freeman House in Hollywood, owned by USC and long closed for renovation. A frequent writer on Gehry’s work, he got the group a tour of the architect’s new Westside studio.

Unanticipated invitations also came along. At a sidewalk viewing of early California Modernist Irving Gill’s Horatio West Court, a simple, well-kept, blocky white structure built as a seaside four-plex in 1919, William Creber, a production designer and owner of one of the apartments, invited the group into the locked courtyard. And next door to the Eames house, the group was invited in by Stuart Bailey to tour his spacious poolside home, known as Case Study House No. 20 and designed for Bailey in 1947-48 by Richard Neutra. Several students remarked on the vintage beige shag carpet, a style now back in vogue.

A city that works

Los Angeles is a city of contrasts, and its geography does not allow for a chronological study. Thursday’s tour in Pasadena of Charles and Henry Greene’s 1908 craftsman Gamble House preceded by only moments a visit to Art Center College of Design, housed in a Craig Ellwood structure from 1976, where models of a proposed addition to the school by Gehry and Alvaro Siza brought the students up to the minute.

The easy look was not enough. Cohen insisted on pursuing unconventional views, and he scaled walls, walked across bridges and took the long route to point out specific details. “They are not accustomed to looking at buildings,” he said of the young historians. “You have to feel the sense of climbing a stair, and that a ramp is a ramp,” he told them.

Standing in the center of the downtown parking lot of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Cohen pointed to the surrounding warehouse district. “This is L.A.’s Chelsea,” he said. “The Getty should have been here. It would have been an agora, and not an Acropolis.”

As they drove past a nearby factory where the stink of rancid fish permeated the air, Cohen remained unsympathetic to the students’ squeamishness. “The smell is part of the city,” he said, en route to the boat-shaped Coca-Cola bottling plant at South Central Avenue and 14th Street.

Cohen has written extensively on contemporary and Modernist architecture around the world. He teaches one semester per year at NYU, and the rest of the time is the head of the new Cite de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, soon to be housed in a $60-million, 230,000-square-foot museum and center for architectural studies designed by Jean-Francois Bodin. He says he would live in Los Feliz, with a view of downtown, if he ever were to move to Los Angeles, although his wife, Monique Eleb, a psychologist and sociologist, with whom he recently published a book on the city of Casablanca, prefers Santa Monica.

Cohen calls himself a “collector of cities,” and his enthusiasm for L.A. is infectious. “It is a city born together with the automobile, but also the telephone,” he said during a break from the students. “This expansive city could not have become what it is without the communications systems of the telephone and the media. Things are too spread out.”

Yet he acknowledges that L.A. is an amalgam of neighborhoods that function almost like independent villages. “The city is much closer to London, in its set of smaller communities, than it is to other American cities,” but, he said, there is a connection between the “extension” or sprawl of L.A. and its “fabulous climate.” “L.A. has everything,” Cohen said. “Everything is mixed, and you’re forced to face everything. The guts of the city are out in the open. But it’s also a city that has changed very much in the last 20 years. Between the museums, the universities and the Getty, it is a place where scholars can do serious work.”