In Westwood, a Mecca of Consumption Turns Into a Park of Innovation

There are generally two ways we spend our time—by consuming or by investing. Consuming is immediate, as when we go shopping or eat at a restaurant.  Investing is more about the future—we invest our time to get rewards down the road, as researchers and scientists do at universities.

Consuming is sexy. It’s about hot brands that seduce us into buying in the moment. Investing is slow and plodding. It’s the daily grind of thousands of little steps that may or may not pay out.

Rarely do these two worlds come together as they have at the former Westside Pavilion shopping mall in Westwood, which closed its doors a few years ago in the wake of the Covid-driven retail downturn.

Earlier this year, without making much of a fuss, UCLA acquired the huge property, two miles from its Westwood campus, which was made possible in part by a $200 million appropriation from the state of California.

The former shopping mecca is now home to the UCLA Research Park, which houses the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy. At 360,000 square feet, the institute will be the primary occupant in the 700,000-square-foot Research Park. The recipient of the $120 million gift from the Michelsons, which was announced this week, is the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, which will use the funding to support research at the institute.

So where we once saw giant signs for Nordstroms or Macys, we now see signs for…a research park. The enormous structure is solid, efficient and nondescript. It’s no longer designed to seduce customers; now it’s designed to support researchers. Instead of having cheerful service workers catering to eager shoppers, we now have hundreds of sober researchers looking for medical cures.

These are the two poles of capitalism—consuming and investing. The Westside Pavilion was all about consuming; the Research Park is all about investing. Our economy lives or dies on consumption, on having people buy more and more stuff. But it also can’t grow or sustain itself without crucial investments in the future.

In other words, we need lots of people with the impulse to consume, just as we need lots of people with the patience to spend years working on a cure for a disease. Of course they’re often the same person.

It’s not unlike life, when we aim to find the balance between both traits. If we only worry about the future, we miss out on the joys of the present. But if we’re all about instant gratification, what kind of a future are we creating?

These days, I see both the past and the future when I drive down Pico Boulevard where the Westside Pavilion once stood. I confess that I feel a tinge of nostalgia for the heyday of that shopping emporium, especially the Landmark Theater that featured great indie films. In many ways, the Westside Pavilion was the communal gathering place for Los Angelenos living on the westside.

But if the place has lost its commercial and communal luster, it is gaining in other ways. It is a reminder that behind the flash of consumption lies the tedious but wondrous work of discovery and innovation.

Dr Michelson’s vision for the institute, according to a press release, is that it become a “field of dreams” for the study of the immune system. Eventually, and with a lot of hard work, the dream is to “develop advanced immunotherapies to prevent, treat and cure all of the diseases that afflict people today and to end these diseases in our lifetime.”

That ought to keep a lot of shoppers healthy.