threshold

6/4/2010

Adam Arvidson is now blogging at threshold.  This recently revamped design blog focuses on the built environment of the upper Midwest.  Adam is one of three editors and one of eight regular contributors.

 

You can still follow the Treeline Travelogue here, by clicking on destinations to the right.

 

Downtown L.A. Tour (Part Two)

11/1/2008

Heading south from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (see part one) on Grand Avenue, I passed the three buildings of the Music Center, designed by Welton Becket (one of the namesakes of international firm Ellerbe Becket and proponent of "total design") and completed in 1964 and 1967.  My guidebook calls it "bland," but it actually looked kind of interesting, though the object of my immediate desire was just across 1st Street to the south.

Yup, the Disney Concert Hall. 

 

I was keen on seeing this 2003 Frank Gehry building not because I love the man's designs, but because I'm actually not sure about him yet.  The Disney is tourist-friendly, with open doors and free audio tours (narrated by John Lithgow).  Though the tours won't let you in the main auditoruim, you're free to wander the rest of the building and the 3rd floor garden. 

 

3rd floor garden?  I was surprised, too.  But it was actually my favorite thing about the entire building.

 

Firstly, though, the pros and cons of the concert hall.  Cons: damn, the entry plaza is scorching hot from that warm California sun and all that steel.  The interiors are staid and unremarkable -- the wooden structural trees are almost interesting but look more mall than concert hall.  And I can't get used to the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't game Gehry plays with the structural elements -- all covered up and shiny from the outside and then exposed overhead in the warm wood auxiliary performance space (the audio tour all but admits it's like looking up the building's skirt).

 

Pros: The aerial skywalk on the 5th floor is fantastic: great views, cool spaces, unabashedly technological.  The seemingly impenetrable steel shell stragetically hides a large number of windows, making the interior well-lit and open while preserving the sculptural look of the exterior -- Bravo!  And that little-known garden is simple, intimate, and classy.  It also lends a certain softness to the building that it desperately needs.

Designed by Melinda Taylor (landscape designer) and Lawrence Reed Moline (landscape architect) the garden is home to lush planting beds, large trees (which were craned into place from three stories below), a Delft china-covered sculpture by Gehry, and a 300-seat outdoor amphitheater.  Its a great place to sit and relax.  While I was there, several Angelenos were taking lunch in the cool shade.

There are also some excellent moments where building skin is glimpsed through vegetation.

It actually made me wish the street level plazas felt a little more like this.

 

Just another block south is the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), part of the massive, multi-level "California Plaza" development.  MOCA actually has three venues across town, but this is the main building, designed in 1986 by Arata Isozaki.

The exterior is a jumble of materials (red stone, white metal, steel gridwork, glass block, and green metal with red diamond-pattern inlays) and the interior is a confusing maze of half-levels.  The pyramid roofs in the larger galleries, though, do make those spaces appropriately lofty.  I was interested in seeing the Louise Bourgois exhibition on at the time, otherwise, I might have skipped this one.

 

California Plaza, by the way, is perhaps worth a closer look.  It is perched at the top of Bunker Hill and includes two office towers and an elaborate (perhaps over-wrought) water plaza and performance stage.  I got almost totally lost amongst the many levels, but the design itself seemed interesting.

Very urban.  I hear it clears out by 5, though.  (I couldn't discover who the landscape architect is.)

 

The last stop before hitting the Red Line back towards my hotel: the Bunker Hill Steps, designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin.  Supposedly inspired by the Spanish Steps in Rome, Halprin's work includes a series of curvilinear rises bisected by a rocky water feature. 

There's also an escalator to one side, which drops theme-park-esque through a series of Old World archways.  Though this certainly isn't Halprin's best work, riding an outdoor escalator downward about 6 stories is an interesting experience.  You can see some video of my descent here.

 

As I mentioned earlier, I traipsed around just a small part of downtown LA.  But I happened upon a nice little on-line guide called Angels Walk, which you might find interesting if you had more time (and energy) than I did.  After these sights and the long ride back to West Hollywood, I was pooped.  And so was my little design-tour sidekick.

 

 

Downtown L.A. Tour (Part One)

10/30/2008

Yes, there is a downtown Los Angeles, and it is surprisingly accessible.  Most of the subway lines converge there, and it's walkable though unexpectedly hilly.  It's also big, and I was only able to see a small section of it in a day.  There is a lot of interesting design downtown, including the well-known Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels and the Disney Concert Hall.  If you're coming downtown from elsewhere in the LA metro area, take the subway all the way to Union Station.

This 1930s era Mission-style building still serves Amtrak and some regional rail lines.  It's a well-preserved gem with lush tropical landscaping in front.  From there, it is a short walk to the historic center of town, the "Pueblo de Los Angeles State Hstoric Park."

 

LA was originally settled by the Spanish, and was for a time ruled by Mexico.   The portion of the city centered around Olvera Street  and "the Plaza" -- a circular open space with high gazebo, which happened to be decked out for Day of the Dead celebrations while I was there -- was settled as early as the 1780s. 

If you're into Spanish colonial architecture and Latin American culture, there is a lot to see here.  If you just enjoy the feel of a Central American market (complete with sidewalk food stands wedged impossibly between vendor stalls and permanent buildings), Olvera Street is pretty authentic (though bound to be packed with tourists -- school groups, potentially, as when I visited on a Monday morning).

 

The walk south then west from Olvera Street to the Catheral of Our Lady of the Angels is not scintillating, but not treacherous either (cross the 101 on Main Street, where there are wide sidewalks, then hang a right on Temple Street).  On the way, you'll pass the 1928 City Hall, which offers free tours (and happens to be the tallest "base isolated" structure in the world).    The Cathedral, by Spanish (appropriately) architect and Pritzker winner Jose Rafael Moneo, is a jaunty composition in buff concrete and alabaster.  There are some great exterior and interior pictures at arcspace.

Though contemporary, it is as powerful, awe-inspiring, and carefully crafted as the historic churches of Europe.  The interior (free to enter) is stunning, with light filtering through translucent stone and steel tri-part chandeliers descending from the ceiling.  Even the pipe organ is perfectly of the place, its angular arrangement unusual for a church organ but a perfect reference for this building.  The website of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles says the church is designed to last 500 years.  I left feeling that after those 500 years it will command the same respect we give to cathedrals now more than 500 years old (Reims, Notre Dame de Paris).  It is truly a landmark.

 

The plaza around the building is also a lot like those European churches of old: hard, hot, vast, and seemikngly meant to accentuate the bulk of the building.  Our Lady of Angels has a nice plaza around back, though, where water and trees cool pleasant seating areas.

 

The Cathedral is on the corner of Temple Street and Grand Avenue, which runs south past several key downtown LA sights.  More on those (the music center, Disney Hall, MOCA, the Bunker Hill Steps) in part two....

 

Streets of L.A.

10/28/2008

While in LA, I was staying in West Hollywood, close to some of the biggest names in streets (Sunset, Santa Monica, etc.).  Here are some shots of what they look like in person.

 

The Sunset Strip near Holloway Drive:

 

Santa Monica Boulevard near La Cienega:

 

The Miracle Mile (Wilshire Boulevard near Fairfax):

 

Grand Avenue, which runs through downtown over Bunker Hill and past the Cathedral, the Disney Concert Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Biltmore Hotel (this view is from the Disney's 5th floor aerial walk, looking south):

 

The thing I noticed as I rode buses across town (and the hardest thing to capture on film) is that quality along these famous bouelvards is nodal.  Between downtown and the ocean, there are some key intersections with high quality vegetation, pedestrian crossings, medians, and vital storefronts, as pictured above. In between are seemingly endless blocks of what I can only describe as marginal commercial frontage: one-story blocks with handscrawled signs and burglar bars.  The streetscapes are generally devoid of trees.  It's hot and quite bleak. 

 

In all, I have come away with an impression of vastness.  These streets seem to go on forever.  They're wide, and the tall palms are stately, not lush.  I know LA is big, but it feels big, too.

LACMA

10/26/2008

On my first full day in LA, I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

That's "Urban Light" by LA artist Chris Burden.  Those are 202 fully restored, fully operational vintage street lights and, according to a January, 2008, article in the LA Times, they are meant to create a "more fitting entryway to the sprawling [LACMA] Campus."  That campus comprises seven buildings, most quite unremarkable, that house more than 100,000 works of art.  The highlight architecturally is Bruce Goff's Pavilion for japanese Art.

Its a curvy composition in green concrete and stone, with translucent windows meant to be reminiscent of paper screens.  The interior is pretty Jetson-y, in a 1970's kind of way, but definitely intriguing.

The building blends into surrounding Hancock Park...

...home also (in a weird anagrammatical juxtaposition) to the La Brea Tar Pits (art, tar...).

 

A few years ago, LACMA made press for commissioning then scuttling a Rem Koolhaas plan to demolish most of the existing campus (built between 1965 and 1988) in favor of a new, cohesive start.  (There's a good synopsis and some images at arcspace.)  Instead, Renzo Piano is overseeing a 10-year "Transformation."  The first fruits of that commission are the 60,000 square foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the new BP Grand Entrance, a open-air, partly-covered space of which Burden's artwork is a part.

 

The Broad is a simple but effective building.  Entering it is an experience not unlike visiting the Pompidou in Paris: a bright red escalator ascends three stories on the outside of the building to the top floor.  Essentially, The Broad a limestone box with red accents, but I'm a sucker for that kind of rich minimalism...

...especially when plants reinforce it even further.

As its name suggests, the Broad is devoted to contemporary art, and LACMA has an excellent collection of that.  The highlight for me (and my four-month-old son) was the twisting Cor-Ten maze of Richard Serra's "Band," which occupies the entire first floor of the building.

Between the Broad and a construction site that will (hopefully by 2010) become the Resnick Pavilion (also by Piano) is a temporary landscape of interest.  Under the red legs of the stairways and escalators is a very pleasant promenade of potted palms and permeable pavers.