Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the riots and the strange beauty of hetero-architecture

In this monograph, Charles Jencks provides a new classification for the global city of the future, for its social and architectural structure and style: the heteropolis. He views Los Angeles as the world's foremost heteropolis where all the contradictions come true. Multicultural, Third World, super rich, minoritorized, high-tech, sprawling with over 100 communities and now riot torn - it represents the future of the global city, and it has invented a new style of hetero-architecture which is both provocatively fresh and suitable to its pluralism. The hetero-architecture of Los Angeles suggests a way beyond the present impasse between the fundamentalists and the multiculturalists, a third position which diffuses confrontation with creative displacement and inclusive eclecticism. The strange beauty of hetero-architecture embraces variety, its informality allows marginalized groups to feel at home, and its unusual metaphors suggest our connection to the natural world. Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, Morphosis, Frank Israel and Charles Moore are its visible leaders, but there is also a vernacular and funk version of the genre as well as the populist versions of Jon Jerde and Disneyland. The philosophy of hetero-architecture accepts difference as a necessity and turns it into a virtue with an informal aesthetic at once polyglot, abstract and representational - that is radically eclectic and inclusive in an understated way. The LA Style, as it is known, has affinities with other aesthetics such as the Wabi and Sabi style of the Japanese. With many world cities now facing increasing pluralization, the heteropolis is bound to become a major urban form of the future. This richly illustrated book is aimed at architects, city planners and urbanists, sociologists, geographers, philosophers of Liberalism, and the general reader.