LOS ANGELES: THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FIFTH ECOLOGY
This text serves as an introduction to the forgotten chapter of Reyner Banham’s Four Five Ecologies of Los Angeles. During the 2022-2023 term, Andrew Zago lead eight Masters of Architecture students at the University of Illinois at Chicago in an extensive research studio on Los Angeles River Basin. The students engaged the LA River Master Plan put forth by Gehry Partners with the help of landscape architect OLIN, and will propose an alternate cultural center at the Rio Hundo junction near the convergence of Imperial Highway and ‘The 710’ between Lynwood and Paramount. Spring 2023.
Reyner Banham, in 1971, described four fabricated social habitats as ecologies (see Banham, Reyner, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971). Borrowing from Merriam Webster: an ecol- ogy is a concentrated habitat of organisms and the relationship to the surrounding surroundings. Meaning for Banham, ‘ecology’ was less biological and more cultural—mobilizing the identified ecologies as the parts that make up the whole of Los Angeles (to be referred from here on out as simply LA). The fourth and final ecology intended to bring some semblance of fusion to the fragmented ecologies of LA; bound together and connected by the mesmerizing matrix of the highways: see Autopia. Always referred to as ‘The’: ‘The 101’, ‘The 405’… ‘The’ is the attitude of the auto-induced LA. But this town is big enough for two The’s. 52 years on from the original Four Ecologies its time to establish the forgotten fifth ecology— The LA River as the unidentified uniting fifth ecology—the first true biological “ecology”.
Passing through 17 cities along its 51 mile journey, The LA River takes nine graduate students in one Ford Cargo van about 18 hours to travel the entire waterway (with coffee stops and cigarette breaks). Beginning in the foothills of Simi Hills, winding around the Griffith Park before beelining south towards the glorious Pacific Ocean in Long Beach; the river covers more than a dozen jurisdictions, flowing past almost every conceivable kind of neighborhood—through slow residential, to productive industrial zones, past a sleepy downtown and side-by-side with the habitually domineering LA highway. It skirts the Warner Bros. and CBS studios, where dreams are made on its northern end, and divides some of the poorest towns on its southern end. Broad enough to land jumbo jets, it resembles an airport runway for long stretches, with a narrow groove carved down the middle to handle the routinely meager trickle of water. The river is ordinarily a dribble, and sometimes it gushes. For the most part it’s dry and rarely it’s raging. The Los Angeles River is an unusual urban waterway used sometimes as a flood basin, but mostly as a movie set.
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Long Beach (710) Freeway, looking southeast, 1961. Image courtesy of the Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Library.
Ready for Floods, 1958. Image courtesy of the Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Library.
Andrew Inside the Barren River Basin, 33.927186, -118.175788, 2023. Near the Hollydale Regional Park in South Gate, CA, Professor Andrew Zago is dwarfed in stature by the expansive emptiness of the LA River Basin.
David Beneath West Imperial Hwy. 33.930341, -118.175429, 2023. Studio member, David Ramis, stands under the West Imperial Hwy. overpass. Ramis stands approximately 6ft. 2in. tall, and It was estimated the height of the overpass was roughly 30ft.
The Studio at the Site, 33.930253, -118.175701, 2023. The studio took a photograph and explored each transect of the LA River and it’s perpendicular motorway, every 3 miles, for the entire 51 miles. At Transect 12 the studio found themselves at underpass of West Imperial Hwy, in South Gate, California, otherwise known as, the site.