Las Urbanistas

“This is perfect,” says Hays, a Pacific Palisades entrepreneur turned developer. “It’s halfway between two world-class cities in San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s beside a major highway, it has power lines, and the land” is cheap.

Even in a state built on big development dreams, Hays’ proposed Quay Valley Ranch project boggles the mind. It would be built from scratch on 12,000 acres stretching about five miles along the interstate, just north of the Kern County line.

About 50,000 houses and condominiums would be constructed in a village-like matrix with parks, offices and retail centers, and anchored by four “town centers.” Houses would be equipped with “smart technology” and new energy-efficient building materials.

No one would pay electric bills because solar power — including three 100-acre solar arrays — would produce 600 megawatts of power, enough to supply the city and export power to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for use elsewhere in California.

People could commute to jobs via water taxi, plying a 300-foot-wide stream meandering about eight miles through groves and neighborhoods. The community would include a theme park, a convention center, a racetrack, an auto mall, industrial land, farms, houses, schools and a medical center.

Hays’ Kings County Ventures LLC submitted a development application in October and plans to deliver a more detailed proposal next month. The project would be built in phases over 25 years, financed largely by commercial and residential developers working as partners and paying as they go.

Costs could reach $25 billion. Hays said building could begin as early as next year, though officials say that seems ambitious for such a large-scale project that is likely to face strong opposition from environmentalists and others concerned about increased traffic and pollution in the smoggy valley.

Carol Whiteside, president of the Great Valley Center, a think tank in Modesto, said such massive “leapfrog” development would only create more sprawl in the San Joaquin Valley, expected to grow from 4 million residents today to more than 5.4 million in 2025. She said new development should be concentrated in or near metropolitan areas, such as Fresno and Bakersfield.

“The issue for the valley is, what’s the strategy for growth? Are we going to build in existing cities or make new cities?” Whiteside said. “We try to do everything at once, we get stalled and the result is we get lots of suburban cities and not much sustaining economic center.”

But Hays is undeterred. He says that what he wants to create is different, a self-sufficient and environmentally sensitive city, one that manages its own water, provides its own electricity and generates its own jobs.

“I want to see if we can reinvent the way development is done,” Hays says. “If we can, we will blaze a path for everyone who comes after us. A town like this has to happen in California.”

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Challenges loom

Much of California and the West is built on grandiose dreams of outsized development. Hays is just the latest visionary.

In Southern California, Los Angeles-area growth is increasingly spreading north into canyon lands, over the Tehachapi Mountains and into the San Joaquin Valley. Each of those projects has drawn intense opposition from environmentalists.

Newhall Land and Farming Co.’s plan to build a 20,000-home development north of Santa Clarita was stalled by a lawsuit over water rights and other issues. The company has modified its plan, won some court battles and plans to begin building the first phase in 2009.

Farther north, on Tejon Ranch, 23,000 new homes are proposed for a new town called Centennial, near the junction of I-5 and California 138. An additional 3,450 estate homes and a resort and golf course called Tejon Mountain Village are planned near Lebec. Environmentalists argue that the two projects imperil wilderness and the California condor, an endangered species.

John M. Quigley, director of the Housing and Urban Policy program at UC Berkeley, said the task of building a new city is daunting. He said such projects are rare and tend to work when sustained by abundant natural resources or when built next to existing urban centers.

“There was a time about 25 years ago when a lot of attention was paid to building new cities in the United States, but most of them did not succeed,” Quigley said. “It’s difficult to pull off because the logistical and coordination aspects are enormous and the capital costs are huge. If I were an investor, I’d look at this very carefully.”

One of the biggest challenges facing Quay Valley Ranch is providing enough water to sustain a new city.

Mike Nordstrom, a Corcoran-based attorney hired to examine water supply issues for the ranch project, said it would require about 22,000 to 25,000 acre-feet of water annually. (An acre-foot is 325,821 gallons, roughly enough water to supply two families for a year.) He said water rights for at least that amount are available from the adjoining Liberty Ranch farm, which Kings County Ventures has secured the option to purchase.

He said streams and reservoirs created in the community would allow flexibility to meet water demands. The developers say conservation measures, including the use of large solar panels to shield ponds and reduce evaporation, would result in 66% less water consumption than in a typical similar-sized community.

To accomplish his vision, Hays has hired an impressive team of managers and consultants, including Jonathan Kieswetter, a partner in Kings County Ventures and president of Orange County real estate finance company Grace Capital Group; master planner Ken Brindley, who was on the team that built the Orange County planned community of Rancho Santa Margarita; and Vince Barabba, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau and head of corporate strategy for General Motors.

Hays and his team have received a favorable reception in Kings County. If the project is completed, it will double the current population of about 143,000.

County planning director Bill Zumwalt said his office has hired four new contractors to help review the massive project. The proposal is so new that it’s too early to answer questions about potential environmental effects, Zumwalt said.

“We’re talking about going from nothing to a new city,” he said. “It’s very challenging.”

Certainly, Quay Valley Ranch would offer amenities that Kings County officials desire.

Other than farming, the county has three state prisons and Chemical Waste Management Inc.’s hazardous-waste site near Kettleman Hills. The unemployment rate hovers at 8.3%, nearly twice the statewide average.

Kettleman Hills — population 1,400 — is the nearest town, about two miles west of where Quay Valley Ranch would be built. It’s a pit stop on I-5, and a few of the people walking in and out of the town post office recently said they were excited about Hays’ project.

Maurice D’Souza, 58, a gas station manager who lives near Kettleman Hills, gestured to the vast emptiness of the valley and said: “Look at this. There’s no life, it’s the end of civilization. I think [Quay Valley Ranch] is great. It will be good for business.”

Hays said Kings County Ventures has reached an agreement with Arizona-based RED Development Inc. to build a 1.8-million-square-foot open-air mall at Quay Valley Ranch. The developers are also talking with Cal State Fresno about building a satellite campus or research center.

Once the project gets the green light, Hays said, it will be easier to attract businesses and industries.

But Whiteside, of the Great Valley Center, is unconvinced. Sustaining a vision and long-term financing for such an ambitious project will be extremely difficult, she said.

What kind of community is left if the money runs out? Or if developers tire of the project and move on?

“If the vision fades away, we get subdivisions without jobs and incomplete neighborhoods,” Whiteside said. “It happens all the time.”

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Promoting his dream

Gazing out at the flatland, Hays, 50, outfitted in leather jacket, alligator skin cowboy boots and jeans braced by an oversize belt buckle, is enthralled by his dream for the new city — even though he’s not a developer and has never built anything.

Promotions and marketing are his business. And he’s good at it.

He came to Los Angeles from Florida in the early 1980s and worked in the marketing department for the Pantages and Greek concert theaters before moving over to KROQ-FM (106.7) as marketing director.

Hays eventually launched a successful book publishing company, Santa Monica-based General Publishing Group, in 1992.

“I always liked ink on paper,” he said. “I saw it as a way to change the world.”

Hays saw a niche in the competitive field and rapidly grew his company into one of the most successful book publishers in the nation during the 1990s. He did it by making slick, coffee-table books featuring Hollywood and pop culture titles, including: “Frank Sinatra, An American Legend” and “The Playboy Book: Forty Years.”

After his book publishing business folded in 1999 due to competition from discount retailers, Hays joined RKO Pictures and formed Idiom Films and Entertainment, where he worked for a time to secure financing for films.

“I’ve been in many businesses,” he said. “The common thread is business development. I am always looking for a way to see if we can do something better.”

His latest venture into real estate development is no different.

“We’ve been building homes the same way for a 100 years,” Hays said. “I feel that housing development can be improved, taking everything we know about development and making it better.”

The first few spadefuls of dirt have already been turned at the Quay Valley Ranch site. The two large redwood trees were recently planted next to an excavated pit where a pond is planned beside a new visitors center.

“Nothing like this has been done before,” Hays said. “It’s not often you get to build a town from the ground up. We intend to do it right.”

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gary.polakovic@latimes.com

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(INFOBOX BELOW)

Big plans

Developers want to build Quay Valley Ranch, a new town beside Interstate 5 about 50 miles north of Bakersfield.

The vision

150,000 to 200,000 residents

50,000 new homes

12,000 acres

100% solar power

A 42,000-seat stock-car arena

An auto museum

500 acres of ponds & waterways

$10 billion to $25 billion to complete

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Sources: Kings County Ventures; Kings County Planning Department

Innovative art and architecture revamp city’s grunge reputation

Christine Temin, Special to The Chronicle; Sunday, March 25, 2007

That’s what made this city’s new 8 1/2-acre Olympic Sculpture Park possible. The site, on the banks of Puget Sound, was developed in 1910 as a fuel storage facility. In the 1990s a clean-up operation began hauling away 120,000 tons of petroleum-contaminated soil. The goal was to return the last available shoreline site in the city to a pre-urban state where juvenile Chinook salmon — and sculpture too — could find a home in a reborn green area.

Seattle, a boom town a decade ago, is following the classic pattern for the second generation of wealth: The city’s leading families would like it to be known for something besides espresso drinks, software and grunge rock, and they’re increasingly focusing their attention on art and architecture by superstars and newcomers alike.

In most sculpture parks, the landscape takes second place to the art. Not in Seattle, where the new park strikes a careful balance between nature and the work of human hands. That’s not surprising: Seattle is possibly the most environmentally aware city in America. One New York artist represented in the park, Mark Dion, said that when he came to scope out the site, his curator/hosts took him not to a lot of museums, but to see salmon ladders and visit foresters.

“The culture here is really different from New York,” Dion said at the park’s opening. “People here talk to you about kayaking. They know their trees. They know their birds.”

In the six-panel fold-out announcement of the park’s opening, there isn’t a single piece of sculpture pictured — just grass, sky, water, trees and mountains.

The lead designers, New York-based Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, faced additional challenges. Crisscrossing the site are train lines and a highway and, unlike the contaminated soil, they could not be removed. So Weiss and Manfredi created a new topography that rises above this infrastructure. It can’t block the noise of trains and cars, but it can block them out visually.

The architects created a Z-shaped path that descends 40 feet from a large, glass street-level pavilion that serves as a starting point, with a shop, information stands and a cafe, down to the waterfront. The park, a branch of the Seattle Art Museum, which is a 10-minute drive away, is “open, expansive and informal,” says SAM director Mimi Gates. (“Yes” is the answer to the obvious question. She’s the stepmother of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.)

The zigzag trail makes the site seem larger than it actually is and adds a sense of mystery and privacy. You don’t see the people on the other sections of the Z, and you don’t see what lies beyond the section you’re on.

Each of the 21 monumentally scaled sculptures has plenty of breathing room. Most are by what art fans call the “usual suspects”: Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly and other celebrated artists. And even the works that were not created for the site seem perfectly placed. Calder’s 1971 painted steel “Eagle” once graced a bank plaza in Texas. Silhouetted against the sky in its new home, where eagles actually do soar, its bright red wings look ready for takeoff. Serra’s five massive, S-shaped, acid-washed steel forms occupy a valley visible from the pavilion. They entice you to venture down and dance around these forms that are unusually playful and lyrical, coming from a sculptor known for sterner stuff — such as his huge installation in Spain’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which looks about to burst through architect Frank Gehry’s gallery. In Seattle, Serra’s work isn’t fighting with a building.

Among the site-specific pieces are those by Roy McMakin, Teresita Fernandez and Dion, all of which affect you intellectually as well as viscerally. McMakin’s “Love & Loss” is that title spelled out in large concrete letters that double as shoreline seating. The red neon ampersand at the top of a tall pole seems to speak to the red of the Calder, which is some distance away. It’s also the red of the dozens of portable chairs you’re invited to move around the park so your eyes can linger on the view while you sit in comfort.

Fernandez has created a magical diversion on a pedestrian bridge over railway tracks: She’s placed a glass wall on one side of the bridge and let the glass extend into a canopy that protects people from inclement weather. Embedded in the glass are digital images of shifting skies, the hues changing from violet to burning orange. The dramatic skies envelop you until the passing trains seem but a distant rumble.

Dion is known for his archaeological and nature-based projects that literally dig into the past. (He’s the artist-in-residence at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.) For Seattle, he’s created a greenhouse, its triangular form echoing that of the big pavilion at the top of the park’s slope. The greenhouse is home to a Western hemlock, Washington’s state tree, lying on its side. (It had already fallen when Dion found it.) The tree is now a “nurse log,” providing a rich environment in which ferns, mosses and seedlings can grow, keeping the cycle of nature alive.

“As long as it takes a tree to grow, it takes it to decay,” Dion says. “This one is about 150 years old.”

Complementing the sculpture are the park’s aural, olfactory and tactile elements: the sound of waves against rocks; the tangy smell of the waters of Puget Sound; the crunch of bark-covered paths underfoot, releasing a woodsy scent.

The park is very near the heart of the city, very accessible. And admission is free.

Architectural ambitions

Seattle is also gaining a reputation in architectural circles. A fine example of its ambition is the Seattle Central Library, opened in 2004 and designed by Rem Koolhaas, the Pritzker Prize-winning principal of the Netherlands-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and Seattle’s LMN Architects. People with no intention of checking out a book come here just for the building design. (In the first year of its operation, however, the number of books borrowed by youths shot up by 60 percent.)

The library sits on a precipitous hillside, and its angled support columns add to the steep effect. Sloping exterior walls are made of diamond-shaped panes of glass bordered in steel. The sides of the escalators inside are glowing chartreuse. The wall next to one escalator has a ragged hole blasted through it.

Through the hole, two of sculptor Tony Oursler’s signature outsized balloon-shaped eyeballs peer back at you as you stare at them, wishing the escalator would slow down. A floor piece by Ann Hamilton, who has carved out the first lines from books in 11 languages, with the letters backward, as they would be on a printing press. Both pieces are paradigms of art that is relevant to the setting and its purpose.

House of prayer

One of Seattle’s great and least publicized architectural treasures is architect Steven Holl’s decade-old Chapel of St. Ignatius, on the campus of Seattle University. As an artist-designed place of worship, it ranks in significance with the Matisse Chapel in the South of France and the Rothko Chapel in Houston.

Holl’s spaces are usually irregular, and this one follows suit. Outside are a reflecting pool and an unornamented bell tower that set the contemplative tone. The interior of the chapel is a series of spaces of different shapes and sizes, with colored or frosted glass windows letting in light of various hues.

The small Blessed Sacrament Chapel contains its most unusual element: a real madrone tree, its branches reaching upward into an angled wall. From the tree hangs an amber glass lamp that illuminates the onyx box that serves as the tabernacle. Embedded in the beeswax-coated walls are prayers.

Artful defenestration

Another piece of Seattle architecture that is slightly out-of-the-way but well worth the trip is Western Bridge. An erstwhile bridge-manufacturing plant in an industrial neighborhood, it now houses the private contemporary art collection of William and Ruth True, who are particularly interested in video. Among their more spectacular pieces is Christian Marclay’s “Video Quartet,” in which the artist uses four abutting screens to juxtapose film clips from different countries and eras, Hollywood to Bollywood.

The Olympic Sculpture Park isn’t the end of the Seattle Art Museum’s expansion. On May 5 it opens a new $86 million wing. Designed by Allied Works Architecture, it will adjoin SAM’s earlier building, which the museum has outgrown. The focal point of the new interior will be the Forum, a 5,000-square-foot free public gallery with a large interior window that visually unites the two spaces.

The Forum is meant for large-scale installations, and the opening one, Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Inopportune: Stage 1,” promises to be spectacular. Best known for outdoor works involving gunpowder or fireworks, the Chinese-born, New York-based artist is using nine white Ford Tauruses for the SAM piece. They’ll form a huge arc that rises from the floor, with one car zooming through that interior window. Boeing-built airplanes aren’t the only means of transportation that flies in Seattle.

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If you go

All addresses are in Seattle.

Getting there

From San Francisco, Alaska and United airlines fly nonstop to Seattle.

Where to stay

Inn at the Market, 86 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101. (800) 446-4484, www.innatthemarket.com. Elegant boutique hotel close to famous Pike Place Market. From $175.

Hotel 1000, 1000 First Ave., Seattle, WA 98104. (206) 957-1000, www.hotel1000seattle.com. Seattle’s newest luxury property. From $225 a night.

Where to eat

Taste, 2901 Western Ave. (206) 654-3190, www.tastesam.com. Official restaurant of Olympic Sculpture Park, in the park’s glass pavilion, with a politically correct tone: “Even in view of the magnificent Puget Sound, we are vividly reminded that the ocean is not as inexhaustible as it once seemed,” reads its brochure. Lunches, which are excellent upscale picnic fare, $5-$10.

Campagne, 86 Pine St. (206) 728-2800, www.campagnerestaurant.com. Sweetbreads, cassoulet and other traditional French favorites; French and local wines. Main courses $20-$30.

Le Pichet, 1933 First Ave. (206) 256-1499, www.lepichetseattle.com. Open all day. Hearty French country food encourages lingering over the magazines and newspapers provided for diners. Dinner entrees $15-$20.

What to do

Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave. (206) 654-3123, www.seattleartmuseum.org.

Seattle Art Museum, 100 University St. (206) 654-3100, www.seattleartmuseum.org. Reopens May 5 in stunning new space adjacent to its 1991 building.

Chapel of St. Ignatius, Seattle University, 901 12th Ave. (206) 296-6000, www.seattleu.edu/chapel.

Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave. (206) 386-4144, www.spl.org.

Western Bridge (William and Ruth True Collection), 3412 Fourth Ave. S. (206) 838-7444, www.westernbridge.org . Fabulous collection of contemporary art, with video at the forefront.

For more information

Citywide Concierge Center, Washington State Convention and Trade Center, Pike Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. Restaurant, lodging and attraction booking service, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays (closed 1 to 2 p.m .). Operated by Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, www.visitseattle.org.

Christine Temin last wrote for Travel about Bogotá, Columbia. To comment, send e-mail to travel@sfchronicle.com .