By Frank Gruber

April 26, 2010 -- I'm still thinking about the topic of last week's column, the City of Santa Monica's decision to accept the recommendation of City staff and outside jurors to hire James Corner Field Operations to design the new Palisades Garden Walk in the Civic Center.

One reason I'm still thinking about it is that the column engendered more responses than usual, and the emails and phone calls weren't only about errors I made. People are interested in politics, but they're even more interested in the politics of culture. Where the politics of culture intersect with the "politics of politics" is more interesting still.

In the column I wrote that people should not be surprised that selecting a designer for a civic project is a political act. A lot of people, however, don't believe that politicians should make decisions about "art". They point out that history is full of examples where politicians seeking to win favor among the voters, or, at the other end of politics, tyrants interested in their own glory, made bad decisions about art. Censorship and cheesy monuments come to mind. (Wouldn't you know it, but history is also full of examples where politicians and tyrants made good decisions about art.)

But architecture and public design have always been and always will be political. Design is to some extent art, but even the design of private buildings is public art. That in itself is enough to make architecture inherently political, but when it come to civic projects, which represent large investments made by governments, design is especially so.

In fact, it's demeaning to architects and designers to say that what they do is not political. All architects worth their drafting tables (or C.A.D. software) believe that what they do has social import, and that means politics. Think of the Modernists of last century; they believed they were saving the world. (Yet it only shows the complexity of the question to note that the unthinking state or various forms of corporatism ultimately co-opted the forms that they championed to make a more just world.)

I discussed the issue of politics and architecture last week with Santa Monica resident Dana Cuff, a professor at the UCLA Department of Architecture who has written extensively about the practice of architecture. While Prof. Cuff agreed that architecture was intrinsically political, she made the reasonable distinction that that fact didn't mean that decisions about architecture should be "political footballs."

This rang a bell with me. As I see it, the problem lately with politics (and not only the politics of design -- take a look over at Washington, D.C.) is that politics has become focused on decisions -- the "footballs" -- rather than the impact of decisions, or their meaning, so much so that it's become even harder to make decisions because of the obsession with them. And decisions have to be made; "politics is the art of getting thing done."

The issue is joined where, as I said above, the politics of culture meets the politics of politics. This is where process comes in. Both architects and politicians have to give ground. Architects and designers cannot have it both ways -- they can't say that what they do is political, i.e., has impact on society, and ignore the political process, i.e., democracy. Yet politicians cannot expect to obtain good results for the investments they make if they subject every decision to public process.

Let's put it this way. There is no reason to believe (in fact there are reasons not to believe) that if, as Council Member Bobby Shriver had suggested, the City Council had been able to make the decision about whom to hire to design the park after hearing presentations ("dog and pony shows") from the final six applicants, the City Council would have made a better decision than the decision that was the result of the staff and outside juror process.

But there's also no reason to believe that the decision would have been worse if the council, when it established the process, had, for instance, included a Recreation and Parks Commissioner, and/or a member of the Architectural Review Board, on the committee that interviewed and evaluated the applicants.

Nor was there anything to stop the City from using a public process to establish, before hiring a designer, the most significant aspects of the program for the park. For example, in the '90s I participated in one of these processes, when, as a Planning Commissioner I was a member of the Design Working Group that, through public hearings, developed the program for re-doing downtown streets before the designers were hired. No one would suggest that what goes into a public park is not political.

At the heart of the issues are the two roles of client and architect. Cities or other public entities should not be architects. They will benefit if they let the designers do what they were trained to do. But they should be active clients. As clients they need to be clear about what they want, and then they need to make sure their architects deliver the program that they laid out.

Ultimately, the City Council sets the rules for these decisions. If they want to change the rules they can do so -- with a public process.

* * *

Naturally, some of the responses I received to last week's column were about errors I made in it. At one point in the column I attributed the hiring process for the Palisades Garden Walk job to the Planning Department; it was pointed out to me (not by someone in the Planning Department) that the five staff members who made the recommendation with the three outside evaluators were from various departments, and that the overall process was under the direction of the Department of Community and Cultural Services.

I was also informed that I had inflated Frank Gehry's role in designing a "great park in Chicago". I was referring, of course, to Millennium Park there, but I had conflated Mr. Gehry's designing of two of the most prominent features of the park, the Pritzker Pavilion and the BP Pedestrian Bridge, with the design of the park as a whole, which was the work of several designers.

Frank J. Gruber is the author of Urban Worrier: Making Politics Personal, available at Hennessey + Ingalls and Angel City books in Santa Monica, at City Image Press, and on amazon.com.