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# City alienates its architectural assets
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/city-alienates-its-architectural-assets/
- Published: 2005-04-15T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T23:53:42.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Downtown, #archive-import

*By TED WINTERER*

Can anyone name me one public edifice that’s been built in Santa Monica in recent years that qualifies as truly great architecture?

The sheds crafted by Daly, Genik at Los Amigos Park are going to look pretty darn smart. But they’re just sheds. And perhaps the new Public Safety Building has some aesthetic value. To my eye it evokes the early ironclad battleship Monitor that fought to a standstill with the Merrimack in the 1860s, so perhaps it will help educate students across the street at Samohi about the Civil War.

But otherwise our new public buildings are at best cautious and tame, at a time when nearby Los Angeles has benefited from bold and innovative works by Thom Mayne, Frank Gehry and Rafael Moneo. These new structures in downtown LA enliven the urban landscape with their provocative design. They also draw throngs of tourists who stimulate the local economy and thus increase municipal revenues. Perhaps that’ll get the attention of city officials: good architecture = good business.

Likewise, new private architecture in our town is often equally insipid because the layers of well-intended constraints in our zoning ordinance and public review process are so onerous that the architects in the greatest demand can afford to choose commissions in cities that aren’t so creatively stifling. Those that continue to work their trade here despite the obstacles must battle to keep their visions intact.

In fact, City Hall’s knack for repressing individual architectural expression is such that Messrs. Gehry and Mayne, both Santa Monica residents and both widely acknowledged as being at the peak of their profession, won’t design projects within our borders. And can you blame them? Imagine whisking Rembrandt through time to paint a portrait for you. But there’s a catch: He can only use three colors and cardboard as his canvas and must first get his sketches approved by a panel of lesser-known artists. I think his response would be an unprintable Dutch obscenity.

Concerned about the future of architecture in our burg, I placed a call to the Santa Monica offices of Thom Mayne, recently the winner of the Pritzker Prize, often described as the Nobel Prize of architecture. Fortunately I had better fortune than the last time I rang up Nelson Mandela, as Mayne immediately took my call.

Mayne moved to Ocean Park years ago because of his attraction to Santa Monica’s diverse community and liberal values, yet has been dismayed to find a completely different perspective towards architecture, one that is not at all progressive. Mayne believes the “provincial attitudes” of city officials assure they “get the worst out of good architects” and told me he’d had “nothing but...extremely negative experiences with the city.” When he and his firm Morphosis designed an innovative, green building to replace the fire station at Hollister and Second, City Hall “treated us incredibly horribly” and eventually replaced his scheme with the prosaic building that exists there today. And when he designed a new home for himself in Ocean Park, he was told the plans would never get approved by our Architectural Review Board.

Mayne further attests that his history with City Hall is not an anomaly. He believes “there are a lot of really interesting architects,” a younger generation in their 30s and 40s, living and working in Santa Monica, but “everyone would tell you that it’s a horror story to work here.”

So what’s Mayne going to do? He’s looking to move out of Santa Monica, to a place where he can build his own home without his vision being adulterated or rejected. Word has it Frank Gehry has plans for a new home in Venice and also will be leaving our town.

So two of our greatest living architects are leaving Santa Monica because they rightly fear they wouldn’t be allowed to fully express themselves in the creation of their own homes? To me, the exodus of these intellectual and artistic resources is a crisis far greater than the loss of restaurants at the Promenade or camping in freeway underpasses, yet city officials seem completely oblivious to the issue.

Instead, when Mayne’s Pritzker Prize was brought up at a recent City Council meeting, one of our elected officials went so far as to praise our city for cultivating world-class architects. I suggest our Council members would serve our town well if they also rang up Mayne and other architects and asked if city policies really foster their best work. (In my next column, which runs two weeks from today, I’ll offer some immodest proposals for ways to promote great architecture in Santa Monica. Ted Winterer is married to an architect and thus knows they need to be nurtured, respected and loved. He)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 15, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/041505.pdf?ref=smdp.com)