`It’s a departure,” Daniel Olivas, a project manager for the Federal Aviation Administration in Los Angeles, was saying the other day. He was not talking about one of the 1,100-or-so airplanes taking off daily from Los Angeles International Airport, but about the city’s arresting, controversial $19 million air-traffic control tower, dedicated last month.
The tower, designed by four women–two architects, an artist and a landscape architect–is “the most visible major building designed by women in recent years,” said Deborah K. Dietsch, editor in chief of Architecture magazine. And like choppy air over the San Bernardino Mountains, it also has had a turbulent history.
The 257-foot tower cuts a striking profile on the landscape, aided by soaring tubular struts and a curved roof meant to evoke biplanes, airplane wings and other images of flight. Perhaps the most riveting sight is a protruding egg-shape sculpture made by artist Sheila Klein of 250 colored runway lights mounted on the tower. She said it was inspired by the eggs of the El Segundo blue butterfly, an endangered species living in the sand dunes to the west of the airport.
Referring to the tower’s stalk-like configuration, Kate Diamond, the design architect, explained: “Los Angeles is a landscape of palm trees. On some level, this is the ultimate high-stress tree house.”
The FAA is trying hard to modernize air-traffic control centers all over the country. The increasing age of some of its centers became obvious one dark and stormy night last November at Hartford’s Bradley International Airport, when a window blew out and rain poured in over the electronic components. The FAA had to order the controllers out. The FAA is also building a new tower at Washington National Airport.
But endangered butterfly eggs and palm trees are not standard-issue imagery (neither are artists such as Klein, who calls herself “a crusader against the boring, beige banal of built” and talks about “femming the tower” with her light display. “A tower is a very male kind of thing,” Klein said).
The Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission, which oversees the design of buildings on public land, rejected numerous generic schemes of the inverted-flashlight variety. The new tower “was going to be a signpost,” sadi the architect Elyse Grinstein, former president of the commission. “We wanted a tower that would say: `Here’s a city that’s interested in good design.’ “
The tower, which has been likened to a “Star Wars” battleship and Darth Vader, is three times larger and 100 feet taller than the old tower, which does not offer a full view of the runways and will be used as a backup. The new design is at the center of the airport and includes a five-story administrative building and a three-story atrium. In addition to improving visibility and ease of movement for controllers, the tower will have numerous technological improvements, said Monte Belger, the FAA’s associate administrator for air-traffic services. It sits adjacent to the 1961 Theme Building, the parabolic-arched landmark that looks like a modernist water bug.
Critics of the tower, which cost $2 million more than a generic one, Olivas said, included lawyer Johnnie Cochran, a former member of the Board of Airport Commissioners, the committee appointed by the mayor to oversee airport-related policy. At a meeting with the architects, Cochran went after the design “with a buzz saw,” Diamond said. (Cochran did not return phone calls for comment.)
In response to criticisms from the board, Diamond, a partner in Siegel Diamond Architects, and her colleague Adriana Lovinescu, the principal architect for Holmes & Narver, changed the roof color from Chinese red, deemed too flashy, to FAA gunmetal gray. “There is a history of picking on buildings that have become beloved over the years,” Diamond said philosophically. “They picked on the Eiffel Tower, violently.”
In demanding an only-in-Los Angeles showpiece, the Cultural Affairs Commission was in step with trends in airport design, which is becoming more indigenous. Recent examples include the tensile-roofed tenting at the new Denver International Airport, meant to echo the Rocky Mountains, and the new terminal in Chattanooga, Tenn., designed to evoke the city’s railway history with a copper dome 140 feet in diameter.
More distinctive regional designs “are also an attempt to provide diversion in the hurry-up-and-wait syndrome of life,” said Ron Steinert, a vice president of Gensler & Associates in Los Angeles, which designed the Chattanooga terminal.
Part of the effusiveness of the Los Angeles airport design stems from Klein’s egg, which has sequenced lights that will alternate between radar and butterfly imagery. Her artwork, mandated by the city, which requires such public art, includes a cascade of 12 flood-lighted cables, which cross at the center of the 28-story tower and are meant to suggest wings.
“We call those bungee cords,” said Richard Frutschy, an air-traffic controller. “We told some pilots that’s how we’re going to pay for the tower, by offering bungee jumping.”
Among those who will be using the tower daily, the building is getting to generally favorable reviews. It seems to be doing for the airport what the “Hollywood” sign does for the Hollywood Hills: marking it as an icon.
Jacques Belanger, a tourist from Montreal, said it reminded him of a lifeguard tower. Some claim to see the letters “LAX” (the airport’s code letters) in the design. “It’s the sort of thing everyone has an opinion about,” said Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, whose district includes the airport. “When I first saw it I wasn’t crazy about it. Now, I love it.”
Melvin S. Davis, an air-traffic controller and union representative, said the upgrades and add-ons, as he calls the details, were “difficult to accept at first. They’re definitely unusual. We’ve taken some huge hits from the pilots. But it’s grown on some of us.”
“It’s on the edge,” said Dan Kaljian, a TWA pilot. “And L.A. is certainly that. If I saw this tower in Pittsburgh, I would think it was pushing the envelope a bit.”
