Jeanine Centuori, Director of the CCRD, and
Paulette Singley, Associate Professor

Program Overview

"A City seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep apart from a small downtown not yet two centuries old and a few other pockets of ancientry, Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape. Most of its buildings are the first and only structures on their particular parcels of land; they are couched in a dozen different styles, most of them imported, exploited, and ruined within living memory. Yet the city has an incomprehensible, even consistent, quality to its built form, unified enough to rank as a fit subject for an historical monograph."
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Penguin, 1971) 21.

"The Los Angeles region is increasingly held up as a prototype (for good or ill) of our collective urban future. Yet it is probably the least understood, most understudied major city in the United States."
"Preface" Rethinking Los Angeles Eds. Michael J. Dear, H Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996) ix.

From Reyner Banham and Theodor Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Ed Soja, Los Angeles has emerged as an intriguing and compelling paradigm for students of the city. While the detractors of Los Angeles are as numerous as the cliches—lack of a center, uncontrolled sprawl, no pedestrian activity, edge city, etc.—the city's urban morphology nonetheless offer a puzzle of questions regarding urbanity in which missing pieces remain hidden across such diverse histories and theories as, for example, postmodern geography, hyperrealism, new urbanism, or economic modeling. What remains consistently silent in the numerous and often-disparate interpretations of Los Angeles are the city itself—an enigmatic mirror reflecting the profile of ideology more than urbanism: pure mythology. In response to recent publications about the city (please see attached course proposals), as well as to the growing number of architecture schools throughout Europe and America that focus on Los Angeles as a topic for design studios, Woodbury University's Department of Architecture is laying the groundwork for a Collaborative on the Study of Los Angeles at The Center for Community Research & Design in Hollywood (CCRD). The CCRD will serve as a locus of activity in the analysis of Los Angeles, providing studios, lecture rooms, and exhibition space for a center where faculty and students from Woodbury and other regions can interact and share in developing a body of research concerning the city. The faculty, staff, and advisory board at Woodbury University constitute a rich knowledge base concerning the city and have developed affiliations with community groups and governmental agencies that provide important information regarding current projects throughout the city. Thus, the CCRD will offer a series of seminars about Los Angeles architecture and urbanism, assist other schools in developing relevant studio projects, and simultaneously foster collaborative efforts between guest institutions and Woodbury University.

The Facility

Center for Community Research and Design:

The CCRD has ground floor access with a storefront window onto Hollywood Boulevard. The ground floor has a Gallery where work from the studios and other departments in the University is displayed and open to the public. The ground floor also holds ample critique and classroom space. The mezzanine floor has a seminar room that can accommodate about 16 people and a faculty office.

The upper floor level contains open studio space for students. There is enough space for 3 studios of about 15 students in which to fit comfortably. Each student is provided with a 3' x 61/2' table. There is great light from several large skylights. Internet ports are on this level. (typically, students mount parallel rules on the tables, and also use individual computers with Internet access).

Additional Program Benefits:

• Use of the Hollywood facility (24 hr. access)
• An individual work station for each student
• Internet access
• Exhibition opportunity in the Ground Floor Gallery
• Faculty Guidance for Studio Topics in Los Angeles
• Woodbury University Library Access (Burbank campus)*
• Woodbury University Swimming Pool & Weight Room Access (Burbank campus)*
• Woodbury University Computer Lab Access (Burbank campus)*
• Woodbury University participation in student activities (Burbank campus)*

Program Fees

Institutions may choose from the following program options. Fees apply to groups of ten to twenty-four students.

Option 1: Seminar Enrollment
Students may enroll in (1) or (2) 3 unit seminars offered by Woodbury faculty (see the attached list of courses). Topics are focused on urban issues.

	(1) 3 Unit Seminar		$1911
	Program Fee		$200*
	University Services Fee		$75
	TOTAL		$2186

* Program Fee is waived with enrollment in 2 courses.

Option 2: L.A. Field Study Enrollment
Students enroll in the following 2 unit course offered by Woodbury faculty.

	L.A. Field Study (2 units)		$1274
	Program Fee		$400
	University Services Fee		$75
	TOTAL		$1749

Option 3: Facility Use Only
Students take all courses from their respective institution's faculty only.

	Program Fee		$800
	University Services Fee		$75
	TOTAL		$875

Option 4: Short-Term

	Up to 2 weeks		$1000
	Up to 4 weeks		$2000

 

SEMINAR COURSE OFFERINGS

Screening the City: Pelicular Los Angeles
3 Unit Seminar
Instructor: Paulette Singley
This Seminar focuses on the intersections between cinema, architecture, and urbanism. Film allows the students of the city to experience and study distant spaces and times as they have been mediated by the cinematographer's lens. Filmic montage allows the cultural historian to explore the powerful intersections of literature, popular culture, musicology, digital technologies, geomorphological politics, and the body in space. In this course the abstract frame produced by both architecture and film will investigate each other in a suspicious yet mutually conspiratorial attempt to derivé, drive, and derive the city of Los Angeles. Los Angeles offers a unique opportunity not only to consider the returned gazes between architecture and cinema but also the infinite possibilities of the film industry's narcissistic portrayal of itself as an imagined city that both reflects and constructs itself with the built domain.

A Cartographer's Compass: the Nature of Los Angeles
3 Unit Seminar
Instructor: M. Victoria Liptak
This course constructs Los Angeles through its geography and (infra)structure. We will investigate the lifespan of human efforts to inhabit L.A.'s "four ecologies" (Banham). We will spend much of our class time hiking the green spaces on USGS topo maps and Thomas guide pages. We will document attempts to control the natural forces at work in the Los Angeles basin and the surrounding mountains, to establish boundaries and communities, and evaluate whether and why these attempts failed or succeeded. We will read from J.B. Jackson, Joan Didion, Reyner Banham, Kevin Starr and Mike Davis, among others. Through research, we will meet Abbot Kinney, chair of the first Board of Forestry in California, William Mulholland, water baron, Thaddeus Lowe and David MacPherson, mountain railway visionaries, and others who have shaped the nature of Los Angeles. And through interviews and lectures, we will meet with those groups who seek to shape the future of the nature of Los Angeles, including the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, TreePeople, and the U.S. Forest Service.

The Public Realm
3 Unit Seminar
Instructor: Jeanine Centuori
What exactly is public space? Who controls it? Who uses it? Public space is a slippery concept that is informed by several disciplines including architecture, politics, art, and economics to name a few. In principle, our American democratic values are/were represented in centrally located public spaces such as the New England Village Green. It was a place that belonged to all, and by agreement all had equal access. While the memory of these early political ideals still exist in some of our built fabric, public space has eroded, fractured, and multiplied. Perception of public space has been altered by the rise in corporate culture, changes in civil liberties, and attitudes about individualism and collective responsibilities. Spaces such as office building plazas that we offhandedly refer to as "public" are often controlled by corporate interests and are not truly accessible and open to all. Landmark court cases such as the "Tilted Arc" public art project by Richard Sera express some of the conflicting attitudes of ownership by artists versus occupants. Research by J.B. Jackson, Mike Davis, Michael Sorkin, and Margaret Crawford suggest that public space is being reformed by the public itself-- that the street for example is used by urban apartment dwellers as an outdoor gathering space. This course will examine the nature of the history and evolution of public space, as well as forces impacting it from the disciplines of architecture, politics, and art. Readings from these disciplines will be employed along with local field trips to public spaces.

Art & Public Policy
3 Unit Seminar
Instructor: Constance DeVereaux
Art IS politics. This well-known dictum has proven itself throughout the 80s and 90s and, in recent Congressional tug-of-wars, proves itself in the year 2000. Art as political speech has a long history, and encompasses all forms, from the satirical plays of Aristophanes, to the protest songs of the 60s, to graffiti art, performance art, costumes used by political protestors, and myriad other forms of art in the present day. Despite this connection between art and politics, art as a political right for both artist and audience, is far less contemplated. From architecture, to music, theater, visual art and dance, the arts have often felt the vagaries of censorship, lack of funding, and outright repression. Transforming a passion for the arts into broad public acceptance is best achieved through the public policy process. An appreciation for how art becomes policy is a useful tool for anyone involved in the arts ­ as professional artist, teacher, student or supporter of the arts. The focus of this course is to explore the broad influences that affect policy setting, policy formulation and implementation.

The Literature of the City
3 Unit Seminar
Instructor: Paulette Singley
This course will focus on three paradigmatic moments of urbanism as depicted in novels. The primary text will be Richard Lehan's The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History and the focus might be, for example, 1) Regency London 2) Haussmann's Paris 3) Chicago after the fire. The specific cities and novels will be determined but the content of the course will follow the structure that Carl E. Schorske develops in Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. That is, for each selected city I will examine a "trio" of influential figures including an artist, a writer, and a "thinker/philosopher." Thus, I might look at Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Henri Labrouste's Bibliotheque St. Genevieve, and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish as offering a unique triangle of ideas based upon language and revolution.

Philosophical Toys
3 Unit Seminar
Instructor: Paulette Singley
The popularity of the recent/current Getty Exhibition and publication, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a box to Images on a Screen, reminds me that I have collected a body of work regarding the pleasures involved with 19th century apparati and their cultural implications. Over the past several years I have asked students to produce optical devices, spatial books, drawing machines, cartographic instruments and more. Several of these "machines" are on display at the Getty Center, but only a few can be touched. This course will allow students to research this equipment and to write/build an essay about the impact of such devices that, indeed, can be touched. What this course has to offer for a general education requirement is both a literary/historical background on these pre-cinematic machines and their complicity in the framing if ideology. From literary "crypts" found in the games of a calligram to the visual ciphers of anamorphosis, this course will cover the mechanics of optical illusion in conveying scientific vision to the literature of cubism (vis a vis James Joyce or Robbe Grillet) and the crisis of the object (both words an symbols). Some of the readings might include: Devices of Wonder: From the World in a box to Images on a Screen, Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer (October Books), Martin Kemp's The Science of Art : Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, or readings from Plato. Field trips will include visits to Santa Monica's Camera Obscura as well as to the Mt. Wilson Observatory or the Griffith Park Observatory.

Urban Design Theory: The Elemental City
3 Unit Seminar
Instructor: Alan Loomis
This course will investigate the fundamental elements of urban design. Its point of departure will be the two most influential urban manifestos of the past century: the Athens Charter and the Charter of the New Urbanism. The former defines the city in functional terms, the latter in terms of physical scale. Together, these two Charters will structure our inquiry, although we will not accept them as dogma, but subject them to criticism and interrogation throughout the semester, continually asking "Are these accurate and useful descriptions of urbanism, and if not, how might the city be better described?" The primary mode of theoretical inquiry will a semester-long examination of specific locations in Los Angeles, selected by students from the Thomas Guide codex of maps. Each location will be examined according to the functional and physical terms of the two Charters (asking, "what is left out?"). Guided by their choice of site, students will also read and present texts in urban design theory, from both the historical canon and the history of Los Angeles. Additionally, in-class-writing exercises will require reflection upon the elements of urbanism.

Los Angeles Field Study
2 Unit Seminar
Instructor: staff
This course will investigate the rich architectural environment of Los Angeles. Through field trips, newspaper articles, and readings, the layered history and erasure of Los Angeles will be examined within the broader American, European and Hispanic influences presented here.

 
Back to the Hollywood Center for Community Research and Design