Getty Museum: LA Overdrive exhibit

Two weeks ago I visited the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, to see the Overdrive exhibit. The Overdrive exhibit shows what city planners and civil engineers, from the 1940s to the 1990s, thought the future of LA would look like. The exhibit is filled with blue prints and miniature models of buildings and landmarks of how buildings would change and adapt a higher population and changes in modes of transportation. For instance, one of the drawings depicted how LAX airport would change to accommodate more people and how the style of the buildings would change. 

As you can see the design of the LAX theme building was adopted. However, next to the picture was a model of what the entire airport would look like and it was clear that the only part that still exists was the theme building. Though the design of the theme building was futuristic, the architects neglected to predict how much of a necessity parking lots would be in the future. Within the airport the model only had a paved surface to accommodate parking, as opposed to the plethora of parking lots that exist currently. I found this to be very interesting, because it should how impossible it is to predict what the future will look like. 

Another part of the exhibit that I found fascinating, and which I later asked my city planning professor to explain to me, was a picture drawn by a civil engineer depicting elevated sidewalks. 

I was intrigued by the picture, because the caption stating the advantages of the elevated sidewalk seemed logical. Still, I had never heard nor seen any city which implemented the design. Upon asking my professor he told me that in fact a few cities had implemented the design, but none had lasted because the elevated sidewalks did not make anything more efficient and actually made the use of the car more appealing. Therefore not only did elevated sidewalks cost an incredible amount of money, but they also reinforced the opposite of what they were meant to do, which was promote more walking.

Overall, I thought the exhibit was incredibly interesting and it showed just how impossible it is to accurately assess what the future will look like. While the parts of the exhibit that do exist today were interesting to see, I found that the most interesting parts of the exhibit were the things that do not exist. It was like a behind the scenes look at all the failed ways of innovation, which in theory were very interesting and creative, but had not place in reality. The elevated sidewalks for instance, in theory were the solution to stopping the increase in car use, but in reality did the exact opposite. Finally, the exhibit showed me that similarly to the way people in the 1940s thought the design of the city would be different, so we think that the cities in the future will be different in all kinds of ways, but for the most part the way in which we perceive cities to change are incorrect and it is things that we do not expect that make the real changes.