Less Is More

   Surely no entity in America has ignored architect Mies van der Rohe’s dictum, “Less is more,” more assiduously than Santa Monica City Hall. 
   City Hall almost inevitably goes too far, does too much, puts a lot where only a little is needed. 
   It has ordered art on the beach, bumps and medians in the streets, extensions on the curbs. It has turned parklands into frenzied gatherings of high-tech equipment, and simple laws into Byzantine tangles. 
   The elegant old Santa Monica Pier survived years of neglect, threats of demolition and storms, only to be sunk by a blizzard of so-called City Hall-mandated “enhancements.” 
   The modest Third Street mall was turned into a bigtime commotion.
   A once-quiet region of light industry and artists’ studios was transformed into the Slick Precinct.
   And now City Hall has set its sights on the Civic Center — that area which is rimmed by Colorado Avenue, Pico Boulevard, Fourth Street and Ocean Avenue. 
   In the 1950s, the City sold some 11 acres across Main Street from City Hall to the RAND Corporation for $250,000. It was, as they say, a steal. A half-century later, the City bought approximately the same acreage back from RAND for $53 million. And now the Civic Center Working Group is developing a plan for the area. 
   We have been down this road before. In 1989, RAND informed the City that it planned to build what amounted to the largest commercial development in the history of the city on its land, but the property, augmented in the 1970s when RAND bought up parcels of land on Ocean Avenue, lacked the appropriate zoning. Rather than simply rejecting RAND’s plans, the City decided to collaborate with it on a new Civic Center Specific Plan which would incorporate RAND’s proposed development, the existing public buildings — City Hall, the County Courthouse, the Civic Auditorium — and such “enhancements” as a town square. 
   After four years and much wrangling, the Civic Center Specific Plan was unveiled. And it was a masterpiece of MORE — extraordinarily overwrought, a textbook example of bad urban design, and profoundly insulting to the eye, the mind and the soul. 
   When RAND failed to find a commercial partner, it revised its plans, opting to sell 11+ acres to the City and build a new complex for itself on the remaining acreage. 
   And so, once again, the Civic Center is on the table and we have a chance to finally do it right, but early signs are not encouraging. For one thing, City officials refer all too frequently to the old plan. For another, it has brought back the Roma Group, the consultants on the bad, old plan. For a third, the list of things people want in the Civic Center is seemingly endless. MORE is already in the saddle, but, here, as in so many other places, LESS is what we need. 
   Stand on the southeast corner of Pico and Fourth and look across the Civic Center. It is an altogether striking prospect. What is there is sufficient, and quite pleasing — a few white buildings — the Civic, the Courthouse, and City Hall, all easy and appropriate in the setting, a lot of open space — lawns and parking lots, and, beyond it, the city itself, Palisades Park, the ocean. To improve on it is a daunting, perhaps impossible task.
   The City is committed to building low-cost housing on the RAND acreage and while we agree that there is a need for such housing, we do not think it belongs here. City Hall gave away its own ocean vista when it created the Hotel District on Ocean Avenue. Do we really want to construct another row of large buildings there, which will further diminish the Civic Center’s ocean connection? 
   There’s a lot of support for a “town square” in front of City Hall, which will presumably be the center of the Center. This is over-planning at its most thoughtless. We don’t need a town square, we need a place in the heart of the city which is open to everything — especially spontaneity and serendipity — pastoral, and simple. 
   The only element the Working Group has discussed which makes sense is an underground parking structure — which would remove cars from the townscape and permit the conversion of existing surface lots into passive open space and playing fields. 
   And so, even as City Hall labors to reduce this fine prospect into one more overwrought, over-planned, rigidly ordered place — studded with the usual DO NOT signs, we dream of a Civic Center in which City Hall, the Courthouse, the new Police/Fire Building, and the Civic Auditorium rise out of a vast field of green grass, trees and flowers in which people wander, muse, picnic, bike, skate, stroll freely, making it up as they go along. Because, in this as in virtually everything, only by doing less, will we truly make the Civic Center more than it is now. 
   Ed. note: For a complementary take, see Bay City Beat