How to find meaning in a centerless world? For a half-century, that has been the question facing the strip of corporate towers, cultural landmarks and undeveloped lots known as Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Time and again the avenue has been the focus of grandiose proposals by civic leaders who dreamed of transforming it into a cultural Acropolis. Angelenos watched the progress from the comfort of their suburban enclaves, mostly with bland indifference.

That all began to change with Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, completed in 2003, which raised the level of architectural ambition for Grand Avenue. Next month the Los Angeles City Council and the county Board of Supervisors will review revised plans for a retail, residential hotel and entertainment complex that may reveal just how willing the city is to address the deep social rifts beneath the area’s newly polished surface.

Designed by Mr. Gehry for the New York-based Related Companies, the master plan for the site, a choice parcel directly across from Disney Hall, provides a case study for one of the most pressing issues in architecture today. Can the bottom-line world of mainstream development produce something of architectural value at enormous scale? Or is Mr. Gehry simply there to provide a veneer of cultural pretension?

The project also offers a lens on the conflicts that continue to define the identity of downtown Los Angeles today: the tension between the fortified cultural and business district at the top of the hill and the vibrant Latino district to the east; between traditional East Coast planning formulas and this city’s informal urban landscape; between its high-culture aspirations and its pop-culture ethos. How Mr. Gehry negotiates all this could determine whether downtown Los Angeles will ever matter to anyone but civic boosters and curiosity seekers.

The downtown area’s decline dates from the late 1920s, when the birth of the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard heralded the triumph of a new motorized culture. For decades since, promoters of downtown Los Angeles have struggled to stem the exodus of businesses to the palm-lined streets of Old Town Pasadena, Westwood and Beverly Hills. Meanwhile cultural critics like Reyner Banham skewered the very concept of a traditional downtown core in a city best grasped through the windshield of a car.

The redevelopment of Grand Avenue has been the most significant effort so far to reverse that trend. It also ranks among the most misguided.

First conceived in the 1950s by downtown power brokers like Buffy Chandler, the wife of Norman Chandler, who was then the publisher of The Los Angeles Times, the avenue was intended as a citadel of office towers and cultural monuments at the top of Bunker Hill. To create it, planners bulldozed a vast neighborhood of Victorian houses, replacing them with a network of freeway ramps, tunnels, underground roadways and elevated streets crowned by a sprawling Music Center at one end and a cluster of ominous-looking towers clad in dark glass and slickly polished masonry at the other.

In architectural terms the avenue said as much about the city’s cultural insecurities as its growing ambitions. The Music Center’s barren concrete plinth and fusion of classical and modern décor are an unoriginal takeoff on New York’s Lincoln Center; the generic corporate towers mirror those found in every American city, sleek corporate citadels devoid of imagination. Yet the architecture also masked an insidious social agenda: like other cities seeking to make themselves palatable to squeamish suburbanites and tourists, planners walled off the new cultural and business district from the rest of downtown.

Its elevated plazas, under the constant surveillance of security cameras and private guards, formed a virtual cliff that towered over the Latino underclass shopping in dilapidated Beaux-Arts buildings and theaters a few blocks to the east. The isolation became more glaring as the city’s growing density and booming Latino culture began to suggest a different reality.

That history began to turn with Disney Hall, which unlike its neighbors is woven into its immediate surroundings. Its sweeping steel facade, which unfurls like a ribbon along the avenue, echoes the curved facade of the Chandler Pavilion next door, its forms lifting up to allow the life inside the lobby to spill out onto the avenue. Grand stairs climb to a verdant public garden that wraps like a necklace around the rear of the building.

When Related hired Mr. Gehry in 2005 to design its entertainment and retail complex too, it seemed like a promising step. Few architects are as familiar with the avenue’s history or have played a bigger role in shaping the city’s architectural legacy. And although the project did not seem nearly as glamorous as Disney Hall, it was viewed as critical to the avenue’s success. Situated on the east slope of Bunker Hill alongside the Colburn School of Music and the Museum of Contemporary Art, it presents one of the last opportunities to repair the fractured link between the new cultural district and the old city center. 


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