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Mark Schiler, an architecture professor at the University of Southern California, has studied visual and thermal glare in downtown Los Angeles. He found that heat reflected by the aluminum wings of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall was strong enough to melt traffic cones. Schiler suggested thinking about direct light as ideal for performing oral surgery and diffuse light as ideal for reading a book. Put it that way, and most Angelenos would be happy to live in the shade.1

At one time, they did. “Shade was integral, and incorporated into the urban design of southern California up until the 1930s,” Davis said. “If you go to most of the older agricultural towns … the downtown streets were arcaded. They had the equivalent of awnings over the sidewalk.” Rancho homes had sleeping porches and shade trees, and buildings were oriented to keep their occupants cool. The original settlement of Los Angeles conformed roughly to the Law of the Indies, a royal ordinance that required streets to be laid out at a 45-degree angle, ensuring access to sun in the winter and shade in the summer. Spanish adobes were built around a central courtyard cooled by awnings and plants.2 As the city grew, the California bungalow — a low, rectangular house, with wide eaves, inspired by British Indian hill stations — became popular with the middle class. “During the 1920s, they were actually prefabricated in factories,” Davis said. “There are tens of thousands of bungalows, particularly along the Alameda corridor … that were manufactured by Pacific Ready-Cut Homes, which advertised itself as the Henry Ford of home construction.”3

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It’s easy to see how this hostile design reflected the values of the peak automobile era, but there is more going on here. The destruction of urban refuge was part of a long-term strategy to discourage gay cruising, drug use, and other “shady” activities downtown. In 1964, business owners sponsored another redesign that was intended, in the hyperbolic words of the Los Angeles Times, to finally clear out the “deviates and criminals.” The city removed the perimeter benches and culled even more palms and shade trees, so that office workers and shoppers could move through the park without being “accosted by derelicts and ‘bums.’” Sunlight was weaponized. “Before long, pedestrians will be walking through, instead of avoiding, Pershing Square,” the Times declared. “And that is why parks are built.” 4

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• 1. Marc Schiler and Elizabeth Valmont, “Microclimatic Impact: Glare around the Walt Disney Concert Hall,” Proceedings of the Solar World Congress 2005 Joint American Solar Energy Society / International Solar Energy Conference, Orlando, August 6-12, 2005. [PDF]
• 2. In an interview, Rojas described “knowing how to control shade” as a fundamental Latino value. “All these Midwesterners moved to L.A. and saw the sunshine as a prize. They don’t want to see shade. It’s dark and gloomy and it’s all different things.” Latinos, on the other hand, see shade as part of their lives: “How do we live in darker places?” The courtyard, in particular, has a rich history in Los Angeles. Architects see it as a reaction to the city’s urban form, a “desert covering vast, undifferentiated, private expanses.” In this context, placemaking “is achieved by the exclusion of the surrounding context and by the definition of a protected interior.” See Stefanos Polyzoides, Roger Sherwood, and James Tice, Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles: A Typological Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1992), 4. On the orientation of the oldest streets, see Jeremy Rosenberg, “Laws That Shaped L.A.: Why Los Angeles Isn’t a Beach Town,” KCET, January 9, 2012.
• 3. A 1925 catalog shows ready-cut bungalows advertised with elaborate landscaping — acacias, grevilleas, eucalyptuses, pepper trees, and even date palms — planted against sun-facing exteriors. See this Flickr collection.
• 4. “Pershing Park Plan Adopted by Commission,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1964; “New Design Demanded for Pershing Square,” Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1964; “Revised Plan for Pershing Square,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1964; “Model Gives Preview of ‘New’ Pershing Square,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1964. For a fuller history of the park’s designs, see David Douglass-Jaimes, “AD Classics: Pershing Square / Ricardo Legorreta + Laurie Olin,” November 23, 2015.