P H O T O G R A P H Y: c O u R T e s Y P c l c O n s T R u c T i O n l e A D e R s / WA R R e n A e R i A l P H O T O G R A P H Y ( 1 )
Coop Himmelb(l)au | HigH SCHool #9
composed of four “academies”: music, theater, dance, and visual arts. The idea was to exploit the educational opportunities of the site, bordering inner city and Grand Avenue’s cultural district, along with Gehry’s Disney Hall, Isozaki’s Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Instrumental to Disney Hall’s realization and the future Grand Avenue Development, Broad wanted an architectural luminary (and later contributed $5 million) for HS # 9. An international competition ensued, won by Coop Himmelb(l)au. The firm’s approach emphasized “the importance of making icons people could identify and take ‘mental ownership’ of,” says principal architect Wolf D. Prix, who faults architectural anonymity for the assault on buildings during Paris’s 1968 student uprisings and L.A.’s Rodney King riots. “We needed to create something exceptional and memorable in the anonymous fabric of the city.” Hence the school’s spiraling, Tatlinesque tower, forming an urban gateway with the cathedral campanile directly across the freeway. Beneath the tower, a 950-seat, state-of-the-art theater—an ambitious piece of the revised program— anchors a corner with a glassy public lobby. But budgetary guidelines kept certain straightforward AC Martin elements in place: a central rectangular plaza and the boxy massing of classroom buildings, tweaked by Coop Himmelb(l)au with big, round, playful (verging on silly) windows bubbling across the street facades. These blocky volumes, each housing a separate “academy,” have become successful foils to the quirkier structures, much as Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Secretariat plays rectilinearity against a roofscape of similar objects. Set on a hill, HS # 9’s campus rises from wide entry steps, originally envisioned as a community perch. But LAUSD mandates, introduced late in the game, resulted in security gates at the stair’s base (rather than its summit), awkwardly severing it from the public realm. The steps lead to the campus’s protected center, its outdoor meeting ground and crossroads, with access to the library cone, cafeteria (burrowed in the hill), classrooms, and theater—a strikingly surreal landscape of silvery objects amid downtown skylines. Amphitheater steps ascend to the gym and soccer field–cum–open-air arts space. A secure precinct, locked during classes like any LAUSD school, the campus conveys a remarkable sense of freedom and spatial expanse. “My kids are so excited to study here,” reports one parent (echoed by students across the Internet). “It makes them feel special— they keep saying, ‘Wow, this is like college!’ ” Despite the gates, HS # 9 is not elitist, accepting 70 percent of its 1,700 students from its inner-city neighborhood. And, unlike highpowered arts high schools, it does not base admissions on auditions or portfolios. Yet the facilities and fittings—from cutting-edge theater technologies to music synthesizers—would be the envy of most college and professional arts venues. And that’s where the school’s dazzling cost and architectural expression reenter the discussion. True, the price owes much to unfortunate timing and unforeseen obstacles: an overheated economy, multiple LAUSD leadership changes, and a site complicated by archaeological findings and a defunct rail tunnel. But even so, in a school system plagued by impoverished
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1. The 9.8-acre campus, which includes a swimming pool, is near City Hall and many downtown cultural institutions. 2. The steel-shingled “pyramid” over the theater lobby houses a dramatic stair to upper tiers of seating. 3. Huge round windows illuminate the stairwell in an administration/ classroom building. Galvanized aluminum wraps the balustrade.
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01.10 Architectural Record
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