right before leaving for montreal i took a couple of simple ‘i’m looking south and now i’m looking north’ pictures from my fire escape.
‘fire escape’ is such a literal term.
what if spoons were called ‘food diggers’.
and windows were ‘house holes’.
‘fire escape’ was probably named by the person who named the orange and the fly.
ok, off to montreal, see you soon.
then el paso, also see you soon.

i’m in new york and montreal and el paso this week, so unfortunately this will be my last architectural update until next monday.
but in the meantime here are some pictures of what is arguably one of the most historic and iconic and remarkable houses in l.a, the schindler house.
it’s been photographed about a million times, and deservedly so, for it’s a beautiful and idiosyncratic and strangely bucolic (although a lot of that is, of course, the setting) house.
it also has a really idealistic and idiosyncratic history, here’s the wikipedia page if you’re interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler_House

and apparently when it was first built you could sit up in the sleeping baskets and see all the way to downtown (now that’s impossible due to the 4 billion buildings that have been built in the last 90 years in l.a between the schindler house and downtown).

also a nice l.a architecture fact: at one point schindler and neutra co-habitated in the house.

i’ll take some other pictures this week, and if they’re worth looking at i’ll put them up here.
and then next week i’ll get back to taking pictures of oddball buildings in l.a.

thanks

moby

Moby talks LA Architecture with 1883 Magazine here.

i’m including this house simply because it was big and impressive and intimidating.
and, given that it’s in a city in the desert in the american southwest, amazingly incongruous.
but back to big and intimidating: it’s this gigantic beautiful looming manor house, looking sort of like a country house bavarian’s would go to for their holidays.
i can imagine it covered in tons of snow at christmas, except for the fact that it’s in the desert in southern california.
or, alternately, it could be a good house for vampire bankers.
although i can’t imagine that vampire bankers would be very happy living in southern california.
but i could be wrong

moby

i was heading home from real food daily yesterday and out of the corner of my eye i saw this perfect little mid-century (or earlier) house.
so, of course, i stopped and took pictures:

and, of course, i went home and tried to find out some/any information about the house(is it a case study house? who designed it? when was it built? etc?).
which was, of course, impossible.
as either there’s no information to be found about this perfect little house, or i’m just egregiously bad at finding out information about perfect little houses.
in any case: it’s a perfect little mid century house with perfect little rectilinear proportions and perfect little clerestory windows and a perfect little yard and a perfect little entrance way and it looks as if some remarkable architect designed it, although i don’t know who(m).

oh, per usual i couldn’t take pictures of the sides or the back, as they’re hidden by trees, and as much as i like taking pictures of people’s houses i don’t really want to become a creepy house stalker and end up in jail for taking pictures of the sides of people’s houses.

i can imagine the prison conversation:
‘hey what are you guys in for?’
guy 1 - ‘i was smuggling ar-15’s from turkmenistan to newark’.
guy 2 - ‘i blew up a bank in arkansas.’
guy 3 - ‘i ran 10 crystal meth labs in dominica’.
me - ‘i was taking pictures of mid century architecture in l.a’.

so, i’ll stick to the street and not go to jail for being a creepy architecture stalker.
thanks

moby

ok, i might overuse the word ‘favorite’.
but i have a lot of favorites.
like, for example, this house/building/structure.
it’s, all things considered, my favorite place in l.a.
architecturally it’s pretty simple, like a humble little mission chapel.
but it’s history (and current use) is/are pretty amazing.
to wit:
it’s currently an l.a outpost of the international theosophical society:
http://www.theosophical.org/about-us

and in it’s past it was a silent film theater, a directors club where orson welles staged plays, a little lecture hall where carl jung and aldous huxley spoke, and a meeting place for the krotona society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krotona

now, as a theosophist building, it’s used for yoga and 12 step meetings and spiritual meetings and solstice events and neighborhood concerts etc etc.
it’s a humble little building and even though it’s architecturally very simple and basic it’s my favorite building in l.a.
last december 21st we were gathered in this little building for a solstice concert and it felt as if we were a million miles away from anything even tangentially urban.
but, of course, grimy hollywood is a 10 minute walk away.
so, from my perspective, this little building represents much of what makes l.a a really remarkable, special, hidden place.
and even though it won’t appear in any books on ‘great buildings of l.a’ it is, in my humble opinion, the greatest building in l.a.
thanks
moby

p.s-oh, i’m also including a couple of pictures of lizards because they’re everywhere and i love them.

it’s late, so i’m not going to write much.

but here.  are.  randomly:

4 pictures of

1-a perfect, beautiful moorish jungle house looming above a jungly hillside.  it’s just about my favorite house in my neighborhood.  i could say more, but it’s just a beautiful, perfect, looming, tall, moorish jungle house.  again, it’s late and my inner grad student has already gone to sleep.  mea culpa.

2-an empty street that looks like it’s 2 seconds away from being filled with zombies.

3-a box of a house that makes no sense to me, with it’s corinthian columns and chippendale door thingy and mustard walls and boxy windows and etc and etc.  i’m not maligning it, it’s just a box of a house that makes no sense to me.

ok, i hope you have a good weekend.

thanks

moby

Moby interviewed on Arch Daily

here’s conversation i had with guy horton for archdaily about l.a and buildings and things

there’s an odd area on the border of hollywood and silverlake, where beverly sort of turns into silverlake blvd, mainly populated by single story strip malls.  and then in the middle of this odd unnamed area is this amazing fortress behemoth, looming over the pupuserias.
it kind of breaks my heart that this huge monolith is being misused as a storage facility, but luckily it wasn’t torn down and turned into nail salons and a video rental store (not to malign nail salons and video rental stores, i just like weird early 20th century monoliths more).
i harbor a hope that tim burton will buy it and turn it into something, maybe a new place for edward scissorhands to live.
oh, as i was taking these pictures a man eating his dinner on the sidewalk said, ‘that’s a big beautiful building, huh.’

well said.

so, last week i was driving to our nbc tonight show rehearsal and i drove by what looked like the scene of a brutal alien attack on our planet-wide defense and communication systems.
i’m assuming that it was actually just a broadcast center being torn down to make room for a wal-mart, but the dystopian, entropic, futuristic destruction appealed to the stunted, adolescent sci-fan in me.
so i stopped and took pictures.
for some reason (maybe because they’re cool) i’ve always loved demolition sites.
and in this case i especially love what’s happened as it looks, as i mentioned, like the aftermath of an alien attack.
i could put on a highbrow hat and say that i love the aesthetics of specific utilitarian objects when they’re unintentionally repurposed (like, say, busted up old satellite dishes). or i could just say that a bunch of huge, old, busted up satellite dishes behind a barbed wire fence look dystopian and amazing, and that they are, accidentally, architecture, in that they define and contribute to the odd urban environment of l.a.
and that last sentence was, in fact, a long and unnecessary run-on sentence.
oh, i’m including lots of pictures of the busted up gigantic satellite dishes because they looked so amazing.

thanks

moby