from p. 21
Urban Dwelling
June 15 - 28, 2012
Serving the Seven Cities of the Harbor Area
are raised in homes that nurture their innate nature. The only child of German immigrants, Bohn was
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born in Maywood, near Huntington Park. His family relocated to Bixby Knolls when he was a year old. His home was filled with sturdy mid-century Danish furniture, much of which is still intact because it was designed and built to last. Often monopolizing his parent’s den, Bohn spent long hours building large models made from Legos and Lincoln Logs, first following the directions to a tee, and then building structures drawn from his imagination. He fondly recalls incorporating the two dimensional Lego trees into his designs as a child. He wonders if that somehow spurred his love of landscape architecture. The Long Beach of Bohn’s youth was “Iowa
by the sea.” Peopled by white mid-westerners, Bohn describes an idyllic neighborhood in the post-World War II paradigm. Everyone knew everybody, stay-at-home mothers kept track of each other’s children and the neighborhood was safe. But like many neighborhoods across the nation, it also had a grotesque nature. In 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed restrictive housing covenants unenforceable in their ruling on Barrows v. Jackson 346 U.S. 249, but that didn’t stop some of Bohn’s bigoted neighbors a few decades later from harassing a mixed race couple who dared to buy a home in Bohn’s white middle-class neighborhood a few
decades later. The couple fled. The experience clearly left a bad taste in Bohn’s mouth. Class has become more defining than race in modern Long Beach, Bohn argues, with neighborhoods being occupied by people with similar education and income levels. This makes sense to a point, but if left unchecked, separation along class lines can lead to alienation. “If we separate along class lines,” says Bohn, “we loose a sense of a greater community.” Long Beach has matured into a better and fairer place, Bohn believes, and he wants that to continue far into the future. By the time he graduated St. Anthony High School, Bohn found Long Beach boring and provincial and he couldn’t leave for college fast enough. He studied architecture while attending Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo, and at the Ecole d’Art Americain in Fountainebleau, France. After graduating, he lived in Berlin with his elderly aunt, who lived to be 93. Bohn attributes her vitality in part to the healthier lifestyle enjoyed by Berliners, many of whom walk and take public transportation. After a few months in Berlin, Bohn travelled to India to work as part of a diverse survey group trying to preserve and study ancient structures located in the pilgrimage town of Hampi, not far from the city of Bangalore. Although he was only paid $5 a day, Bohn recalls with a smile, it was more than enough to live like a king. Like the Danish furniture in his parents home, parts of the aged structures in Hampi had survived because they were wisely conceived and constructed to last. Many years later, now a husband and father of two, Bohn is a partner (along with Winston Chang) at a locally-based design firm, Studio One Eleven, which was founded by Alan Pullman. The firm subscribes to the principals of the architectural movement of New Urbanism, which advocates for the creation of walkable cities with localized employment led by a sustainable ecological and economic strategy. The effects are subtle but visible, a tree here, a parklet there, and are part of an incremental strategy to make the city more livable for its inhabitants. The ideas of New Urbanism fly in the face of what has sadly become conventional wisdom. Post-World War II affluence bathed the country in a surplus of money, energy and building materials. This has led to a trend of mass construction that didn’t take the needs of humans and communities into consideration. Whether one is a conventionalist or a new urbanist, adherents to either philosophy must adhere to the concerns of the marketplace. But whereas many cookie cutter magnets from out of town seize at short-term windfalls, Bohn is one voice in a chorus of community members seek long-term investments that will intrinsically add value to the city in the long term. This battle of ideals will continue to be waged far into the future.