Item 18 - Appeal Application Nos. 2023-02 and 2023-03 for Cabrillo Town Center project

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HISTORIC RESOURCES ASSESSMENT JULY 2022 TORN CENTER PLAZA L C A $ANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA J /`�` usually racial minorities. Money too fled the cities with the middle classes, leaving many neighborhoods with a crumbling housing stock and decaying services. Conditions seemed so dire President Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949, giving government authority to compel land acquisition in city centers. Government then sold or leased the land to redevelopment agencies who constructed state - subsidized housing for the poor. "Urban renewal," as it was euphemistically known, represented the continuing legacy of Roosevelt's New Deal efforts to solve problems by means of extensive federal intervention. As in prewar Federal Housing projects, the architects and planners chose not to reconstruct traditional rows of houses on streets; they chose to construct Le Corbusier's housing towers in urban parks. In America, wrecking balls and bulldozers cleared the way, funded by federal tax dollars. Adding to the destruction was President Eisenhower's Interstate Highway Act of 1956, linking together most of America's largest cities and towns. The Interstate shot into commercial centers of cities, irreparably splitting old neighborhoods in two and providing an even easier route for those fleeing to suburbs. In America, Le Corbusier's idyllic landscape quickly deteriorated into asphalt parking lots and uncultivated dirt. Vandalism and crime were rampant in federal housing projects. Whether it was due to social factors or the physical design, it gave Modernism a black eye. Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), student of Peter Behrens, was the other great Modernist architect of this time. Mies headed the Bauhaus for 3 years until Nazis closed the school in 1933. He went to the United States in 1938, where he became director of the Armour Institute (later known as the Illinois Institute of Technology), in Chicago. Far less interested in the social aspect of architecture than Le Corbusier, Mies saw buildings as technical and visual problems to be solved. His motto was "less is more." He wanted architecture to reveal fundamental essence ("form follows function"). His technique was to build a simple and rational structural cage onto which he hung an external cladding system completely subservient to the structure's inherent geometrical grid. Because the cladding system was now reduced to a thin and lightweight veneer of glass, it came to be known as a curtain wall, acknowledging that it simply hung like a curtain from the frame to protect the insides of the building from the weather. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) had earlier experimented with a number of these ideas, but Mies clarified and perfected them. Mies offered low-rise and high-rise versions of his style. The campus for Illinois Institute of Technology was the low-rise idea. He placed several freestanding pavilions on a rational planning grid, each one comprised of simple boxes with flat roofs. Each building was itself strictly planned on a rational cartesian grid, which established the location of the structure, the walls and openings. The high-rise idea is exemplified by the Seagram Building in New York City, 1954-58 (Phillip Johnson as associate architect). The Seagram Building is a simple box strictly Pdiy °found (07/21/22) 18 - 785 10/3/2023 14