It’s not often that architecture becomes a major talking point in a mayoral race. But former candidate Spencer Pratt keeps talking about it, and is firing back string on social media about the appeal of the Art Deco buildings.
“One of the hallmarks of communism is the glorification of ugliness,” Pratt began in a post that included a photo of the 1930 Eastern Columbia Building on Broadway, perhaps the most famous deco landmark in Los Angeles, along with a massive concrete tower designed by Eric Owen Moss Architects, better known as the Rapper (W), which was completed three years earlier on Jefferson Boulevard.
“Contrast the magnificent architecture of Depression-era Los Angeles with the brutalist communist decadence vomited upon us today,” Pratt declared. “I will support any candidate who pledges to throw this architect in prison for crimes against beauty.”
Even as some architecture critics join Pratt in criticizing the rapper (W) – Oliver Wainwright, in The Guardian, Named Building ‘a dangerous thing’ It seems unlikely that Pratt’s former rivals, Mayor Karen Bass or City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, would support throwing Moss into the mix.
However, the topic revived a question that had been circulating in Los Angeles architectural and political circles for weeks: Why does Spencer Pratt love Art Deco so much?
This obsession first surfaced in May, during interviews with David Friedberg of All-In, and Writer Megan Daum. “We’re going to make L.A. very beautiful,” Pratt said He said Friedberg. “No more of these high-density, SB 79, prison-like structures. We need to bring back Art Deco.”
SB 79 was a reference to a state housing bill, scheduled to take effect July 1, that allows denser apartments to be built in neighborhoods near transit lines. The project is not popular with many of Pratt’s neighbors in the Pacific Palisades area, who fear that homes lost in the January firestorm will be replaced by apartment complexes.
The mention of housing law in the same breath as Art Deco may have been jarring to listeners. In fact, it was consistent with the nostalgia of Pratt’s campaign as a whole, whose unspoken slogan from the beginning was essentially: “Make Los Angeles Great Again.”
Of course, there’s more to Los Angeles than art deco.
The great strength of Los Angeles architecture is its extreme eclecticism. Although some fans of the Spanish Colonial style may disagree, the city has never had a townhouse style.
Just in terms of publicly accessible landmarks, you can see early modernism at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, which was built with tilt-up, quick-set concrete walls.
Near the Pratt neighborhood in Pacific Palisades, a variety of mid-century modernism remains at the eucalyptus-shaded Eames House and Studio off Chautauqua Boulevard. (He – she He survived fire.)
Frank Lloyd Wright’s new Mayan experience, Hollyhock House, is owned by the city and is regularly open for tours.
Downtown Grand Avenue features a killer row of cultural and religious buildings by winners of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s leading honor, including Frank Gehry’s sparkling Walt Disney Concert Hall, the reserved Arata Isozaki Museum of Contemporary Art and Rafael Moneo’s majestic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.
So there is much more to Los Angeles than just a certain style.
But for Pratt, Art Deco also served a political purpose. In several of his campaign contributions, Pratt contrasted what he saw as the dystopian hellscape of present-day Los Angeles with a sepia-toned image of the city in which he grew up.
And Art Deco is not a bad choice as an aesthetic embodiment for a Los Angeles looking to recapture its past glory. Along with several variants, including Streamline Moderne, it is the historical style directly responsible for shaping the city’s civic character.
Many of our most iconic civic landmarks, including City Hall, Union Station and the Central Library, fall under Deco’s expansive umbrella.
The style is known among historians because, as its popularity rose a century ago, it occupied a middle ground between the nostalgia for Revival architecture, such as Spanish Colonialism, and the austerity of Modernist buildings, with their flat roofs and rejection of wholesale ornamentation. Along these lines, the idea may have appealed to Pratt as a symbol of unity, even compromise.
But there’s a darker feel beneath the star-studded embellishments and shiny surfaces of Art Deco too, and they seem to match the sombre tone of much of the campaign’s rhetoric.
Art Deco did not hit its stride in the Roaring Twenties, but as the Great Depression took hold. The first serious effort among architects to revive the style emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, another period of anxiety, uncertainty, and political violence.
There seems to be something about Art Deco that not only reflects periods of conflict and division, but feeds on them. Like the ill-fated Pratt campaign, it portrays itself as a ready-made savior, ready to save the city from sliding further into ugliness and despair.
Christopher Hawthorne, a former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times and chief design officer for the city of Los Angeles, teaches at the Yale School of Architecture and writes the weekly magazine Punch list Newsletter.