Visions for a Shattered City

By Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles

The visionary Swiss architect Le Corbusier once drew up a plan to modernize Paris that called for razing most of the central city and replacing the old structures with eighteen 60-story towers. His idea, says historian Robert Fishman of Rutgers University, was that "cities were completely out of touch with the modern world and modern technology and what they needed was shock therapy, or what he called 'urban surgery,' in order to make a complete break with the past." Fortunately, Paris survived Le Corbusier. But the idea might not be all that bad for other cities. Asks Fishman: Could it be that by tearing down so much the Northridge earthquake has dealt Los Angeles the shock therapy it needs? That somehow the blow will compel the city to develop in ways that take account of the seismic dangers lurking beneath it?

As aftershocks -- and the rumble of speeding trucks -- sent Angelenos scurrying for protective portals, engineers and architects turned the city into a giant laboratory, figuring out what withstood the tremors, what didn't and why. Even last week there was still much new evidence of damage to sift through. The University of Southern California's children's hospital had to be evacuated because of structural defects, and it was suggested that the L.A. Coliseum, site of two Olympic Games and home of the Raiders, would have to be torn down. As it turned out, the stadium may well be salvageable -- with $35 million in repairs.

In surveying the catastrophe, the experts have begun to imagine a postquake L.A. that would have room for skyscrapers and swimming pools, that would have people off freeways, on mass transit and telecommuting on the information superhighway. Some believed that L.A. residents may finally be primed to accept changes that should have come long ago. Elwood Smietana, Southern California manager of EQE, a San Francisco earthquake-design firm, put it bluntly: "It really takes a disaster to get people off their butts."

Here are a few things that may change:

STRUCTURAL DESIGN. Structural engineers emphasized two simple guidelines: for houses, flexible wood is better than static brick; and for large buildings, steel is far superior to concrete, which, no matter how much it is reinforced, can crumble like stale cake. "It's quite simple: if you want to be safe in an earthquake, the best thing you can do is build in steel," said engineer Peter Yanev, president of EQE. He pointed to a relatively new concrete parking structure that collapsed at the California State University campus in Northridge and to two adjacent multistory garages in Sherman Oaks at the lower lip of the San Fernando Valley -- one of concrete and in ruins, the other of steel and standing.

Earthquakes tend to exert greater force horizontally than vertically, usually twice as much or more. What seems to have been unusual in the Northridge quake -- which seismologists now said may have struck with two successive pulses -- was a superior vertical force. This caused some buildings that would have survived back-and-forth swaying to be subverted at their foundations. Accordingly, experts are looking at futuristic designs that will allow buildings to adapt to such tremulous variations. Japan, for example, has equipped buildings with computer-controlled systems that dynamically compensate for quake-induced motion; if an earthquake tips a building forward, these systems can activate massive weights and "thrusters" that force it in the opposite direction. Less expensive are suspension systems like the rubber- and-steel sandwich -- with a dense lead core to absorb energy -- that enabled the University of Southern California Hospital to ride out the quake like a jeep on a bumpy road.

URBAN DEVELOPMENT. The earthquake not only failed to shake but even reinforced Los Angeles' long-standing "golden towers" vision: that of an urban core of commercial skyscrapers surrounded by a redeveloped user-friendly downtown district. The so-called Downtown Strategic Plan has been under way for a dozen years at a cost so far of $7.5 billion. Its new buildings, dominated by the 73-story First Interstate Bank Tower, have been constructed with strong earthquakes in mind. Fire officials last week privately informed civilian volunteers that if the Big One hit near downtown, the new buildings ought to remain standing on their flexible spring-and-roller suspension systems even if the streets below were littered with 12-ft. drifts of fallen glass from their windows.

THE WORKPLACE. A surprising consequence of the traffic jams brought on by eight collapsed segments of the freeway system was a headlong rush toward the information superhighway. Mayor Richard Riordan announced a grandiose plan to relieve traffic congestion by extensive "telecommuting" -- working from home with computers and faxes. He also spoke of creating "satellite office centers" outside the downtown districts. The Southern California Telecommuting Partnership was organized in the earthquake's aftermath. Its members, a coalition of businessmen and government officials, hope to make telecommuting a viable option for the city, bringing permanent change to the way its work force is organized. "This will become the country's most advanced telecommuting system ever," said Riordan, a lawyer and former venture capitalist long practiced in cajoling the private and public sectors into cooperating with each other. "We're in this for the long run," says Roger Greaves, chairman of Health Net, a large California HMO and one of the 10 major companies in the scheme. "In an area as large as L.A. it just makes so much sense to telecommute. People are happier because they don't have to fight the traffic, and they get more work done." When an 800-number line was set up for companies interested in establishing satellite offices, more than 600 firms called in just the first week.

MASS TRANSIT. Immediately after the earthquake, exasperated commuters resorted to what would have been unthinkable in their car-worship culture -- they flocked onto commuter trains. Metrolink, the city's embryonic light-rail system, reported a tripling of morning passengers, from 10,000 to 30,000, on its four lines, and last week managed to retain 70% of the new ridership even after freeway detours began to reopen. The most popular by far was the 40-mile ride north to Santa Clarita, a new bedroom community cut off by the fractured Golden State Freeway; its daily ridership jumped from 900 to 17,000.

Ironically, the phenomenon is a return to the city's past. Before the unbridled freeway and suburban development of the 1950s and '60s, Los Angeles traveled on trolleys -- over an extended grid of 12 lines covering 1,500 miles. Metrolink and a complementary subway system under downtown to be completed in 1997 will eventually connect 70 stations across 400 miles of track -- a case of going back to the future.

Change, however, requires more than small change. In the aftermath, money questions abound. Hundreds of government disaster-relief checks -- some as high as $3,450 -- have gone out to undamaged homes in the Northridge area even as Californians who have lost their homes complain about aid being doled out to illegal aliens. And while President Clinton quickly asked Congress for $6.6 billion in disaster relief, state leaders moved with less alacrity. It took more than a week for state assembly Speaker Willie Brown to propose a one-year half-cent sales-tax increase to raise $1.5 billion for earthquake relief.

Perhaps the state has been through too much to be able to tax its way out of its latest catastrophe. "This time," says political scientist Sherry Bebitch Jeffe of the Claremont Graduate School, "we are facing the fifth year of a budget deficit. We are still in the grip of the most serious recession in California since the Great Depression. And on top of everything else, this is an election year in California."

With reporting by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago, Dan Cray and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles