Spaces and Changes

            

Los Angeles, the largest and the most populated city in California is the subject of various socioeconomic studies. The city is consisting of various districts and neighborhoods and its actual border is hard to understand due to its expansion. The city meets the Pacific Ocean’s shore on the west and chaparral scrublands surround the city from other sides. Having the different biomes and topography in the city develops different local climates in each borderline of it which ultimately leads to variety in architecture and lifestyle. Los Angeles, like many cities in Southern California, is an ethnically and culturally diverse city. The city’s immigrant population dominantly consists of Hispanics. Asians, Indians and Persians are the other significant portion of the relatively newly immigrant population. Several neighborhoods in Los Angeles are colonized by the people with similar cultures, religions, and nationalities which make the city’s structure alter from one neighborhood to another. Hollywood is famous for being the world’s movie industry center, which is one of the reasons why each year millions of national and international tourists visit Los Angeles. There are many public buildings inside the Los Angeles area: science and education centers, theaters and concert halls, movie and entertainment related places, and museums. The diversity of Los Angeles however, does not always revolve around various cultures among people, there are large economic differences in the population’s social classes which are identifiable by studying the neighborhoods, and communities from different parts of Los Angeles. All the diversity in the city is influenced by economic factors. Stereotypes are made within the population due to dissimilarities in the income and opportunities. Although public places such as schools and museums are meant to give services and education to all types of people in the community, still some of the places doesn’t follow that pattern; they are more available for some certain people, in the other words, certain visitors from similar cultures or social class feel comfortable to visit those places. Availability of a place for a certain culture or class transparentize the diversity of the city.

            In Luis Alfaro’s essay “Minnie Riperton Saved My Life”, he describes how he ended up in a different high school than what he was expecting. He clearly mentions how stereotypical social forces in Los Angeles affected his life while he was told his brother and him were going to be bused to another High School in the Valley: “We were really scared about busing. We had never been around people who were not like us. You know, people like us. People who shopped at the open-air mall on Crenshaw near Stocker. People who bought small bags of popcorn from  Midtown Sears and later went roller-skating at the rink across the street” (14). In those few sentences Alfaro uses several places to describe who he is and how he lives. He uses the place he lives to describe himself and identify the differences between his family and the majority of the people in their society. The place Alfaro lived in made him to believe he is unlike the people who go to the Grant High School in Valley. This can be viewed from an alternative perspective; maybe the Grant High School is designed to be for middle or high class people of the valley. Or maybe a student like Alfaro is rejected by community inside the high school rather than Alfaro rejects the idea studying in a Valley high school. Either way it represents how different places accept or reject different classes and cultures and how various people think about merging in another cultures and societies. It is interesting that in most cases the accepting or rejecting a places has nothing to do with the function of the place.

            By comparing two similar public places –in terms of function—in Los Angeles, we can further understand how places affect the overall characteristics of the city diversity within the border of the building. The effect is not necessarily permanent, but it is different from the expectations the place’s functions, which it is built based on.

            The Getty Center, museum of fine arts in Los Angeles is one of the places, which is located on the top of the places-to-visit lists of the tourists. It took around a decade to build the Getty Center and a lot of expensive materials and technologies were applied to make it more attractive. One of the best teams of architectural design and construction were recruited to make sure they finish the fine work before meeting the deadline. The museum is located over a hill surrounded by the expensive neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Beside the parking fee, visiting it is free of charge. Getty center –like any other museum in Los Angeles –is the place of holding several cultural events per year and this along with rare and valuable artworks from all around the world they keep in their large halls make it a suitable place for tourists and local people to spend few hours in.

However, our expectation from Getty Center as a cultural place is fundamentally different from what we can observe at the building: A multicultural function for a place, in a multicultural city but people visiting Getty Center don’t look much different. They all have something in common, they are all nicely dressed. If Getty Center is a public place, so people from different cultural, economic, and educational backgrounds should come and visit them. There is no formal dress code for visitors, so there should be a selecting force hidden in the place to invite certain people or make everyone to follow similar pattern rather than their own lifestyle.

“16,000 tons of travertine” (Website) has imported from Italy to build Getty Center. Travertine is the theme of the building. Visitors can even buy a cube of travertine with the Getty Center’s logo on it at its gift shop. Getty Center has a dining room and a café, which serve a relatively expensive food. There is umbrella bins next to each door to help people in the rainy and sunny days. There are several balconies to give visitors the view of Los Angeles, without any disturbing scene visible. It is just like a noble life in a noble building. Using expensive material for construction, serving expensive food, and the unnecessary facilities could be the hidden selecting force.

Since there might be a misconception about the function of the place attracting certain people from the society, it would be helpful to compare Getty Center to another public building in the same city with the same function, LACMA.

LACMA is similar in function to Getty Center. They are both fine arts museums. LACMA is much older than Getty Center and it is famous for keeping modern artworks such as the large collection of Pablo Picasso’s artworks. The building is descent, not as shiny as Getty center and the food is not that expensive. Diversity in people visiting LACMA is not far different from people visiting a regular shopping mall. There are playing grounds and few grass fields on the back of the building which families come for a picnic, or bring their children to play and enjoy watching few tar pits near play grounds. The visit hours aren’t that long and the museum provides free admission fro the residents of Los Angeles County.

Getty and LACMA don’t look like buildings in a same city, as Grant and Belmont High Schools don’t. Getty Center dictates us unwritten rules to visit the museum and enjoy the view, architecture, and building even more than the art they keep inside it, while LACMA invites us to visit and enjoy the art in the middle of the Los Angeles in Wilshire boulevard where one can see the city closely, with its all pros and cons.

Getty Center also doesn’t welcome the “People who bought small bags of popcorn from Midtown Sears and later went roller-skating at the rink across the street”(Alfaro 14), not because the building stop them from visiting, because of the background stories settled in the minds of people to draw lines and borders around places.

Places have power to change and arrange. Places can label people, get them closer together or make them more apart. But members of societies are the ones who give the power to the spaces. They define the places. They design and construct buildings, and invite and reject people. The effect of any place is initiated by the concept the creator of it had in his mind.

Los Angeles is a space, like a building, but in a greater scale. Although it is a diverse city, living in it requires following certain patterns. The patterns in each neighborhood modify characteristics of the people living in them and make the city to be dynamic. The city changes and makes us change, and then we change the city again.

Work Cited

Alfaro, Luis. “Minnie Riperton Saved My Life” Another City: Writing From Los Angeles. Ed. David L Uline, .et. al. San Francisco: City Lights books, 2001. 13-18. Print.

“Architecture.” The J. Paul Getty Trust. n.d. Web. 1 Nov. 2013.