in the sort of almost middle of hollywood is the magic castle.
it is, as the name sort of suggests, a little castle.  where they perform magic.
‘they’ being, in this case, magicians.
i, in this case, am good at stating the obvious.
not to schill for the magic castle, but it’s great.
and aesthetically?
architecturally?
it looks like a magic castle.
which sort of makes sense, as it’s a magic castle.
it makes less sense as it’s baking in the sun beneath the blue sky and palm trees across
the street from a park where spiderman smokes crack and in the shadow of what is, i believe, the worlds
largest japanese restaurant.
a scary ominous victorian sort of castle sucking up light and radiating darkness in the middle of the afternoon
on a cloudless day.
which, fantastically, makes no sense at all.
i like buildings that don’t make a lot of sense.
or that purport to make sense but then end up being absurd when you look a little closer.
like a fantastic spooky magic castle in the shadow of palm trees.

-moby

today i’m including just one picture of one house.
a very pretty center hall colonial with stately pine trees and a nice little yard.
or lawn.
lawn yard.
‘why?’ you might ask, ‘include a picture of a pretty and conventional center hall colonial in an architecture blog?’
well,
the following reasons (i like lists, by the way)

a-it’s pretty.
b-semiotically and rosebuddy it reminds me of the houses my friends lived in when i was growing up.
c-it sits perfectly parallel to the street.
d-and, most importantly, it’s completely incongruous with any contemporary and conventionally agreed upon sense of what urban architecture could or should be.

i mean, center hall colonial houses with stately trees and green lawns:
in california
in a city of 15,000,000 people
in the desert
75 feet away from crack smoking spiderman
 ?
and that just makes me like it more. it’s not modern, it doesn’t represent an innovative use of materials, it wasn’t designed by morphosis or bernard tschumi (nothing against either one, but they generally are published more than pretty center hall colonials).
it’s a pretty house in the middle of a desert city and everything about it is nice and disconcerting and probably baffling and annoying to most architecture critics.
oh, and ok, i’ll include a second photo, another pretty picture of the sun hitting the hills after todays crazy rainstorming.
i’m sorry if my utterly uncohesive approach to documenting the weirdness and random beauty of l.a is, well, uncohesive and off-putting.
but it all makes sense to me.
which probably means i need more therapy.
i hope you had/have a good weekend.

moby

it would be odd to have a fully functioning public pool in the middle of a big city.
it would be nice, but it would be odd.
and then i guess it would be even odder to have a fully un-functioning pool in the middle of a big city.
just a big hole in the ground, unceremoniously surrounded by a cheap chain link fence.
but there, right in the middle of hollywood, is a giant moribund pool surrounded by a cheap chain link fence.
which is odd.
‘how is it architecture?’
well, someone built it and it looks amazing, especially in the middle of the city.
and the twisty turny blue fiberglass slide in the corner is a pretty remarkable structure in it’s own right.
i guess the giant empty pool in the middle of the city begs some questions.
like: ‘what happened?’
i mean, it would seem as if a functioning gigantic pool in the middle of the city might be pretty popular.
so let’s look at hypotheses as to why it’s empty and in pool prison:

  1. they ran out of water and/or pool toys.
  2. aliens landed here and this is now a black ops government site like area 51.
  3. it’s actually a piece of installation art, possibly by ai weiwei. maybe the pool is actually filled with invisible sesame seeds.
  4. it’s a pool for mimes.

in any case, it’s a big amazing photogenic hole in the ground in the middle of a huge city.

-moby

spread throughout l.a are countless little craftsmen (or arts & crafts) houses.
the operative word being: little.
most of the craftsmen houses i’ve seen are cute little 2 bedroom houses, sort of like adorable little hybrids between houses and bungalows.
and then there’s the granddaddy (or grandmommy) of the craftsmen houses in l.a, the gamble house.
it’s so renowned it even has it’s own website.
here: http://www.gamblehouse.org

i discovered the gamble house due to it’s being right next to (and/or a part of) a unitarian church in pasadena. i was at the unitarian church to see a screening of miss representation but i arrived early and wandered aimlessly for 15 minutes.
and in those 15 minutes i stumbled upon:

  • a zen meditation group
  • a tibetan buddhist meditation group
  • a choir singing plainsong
  • this gigantic craftsmen house
  • pine trees

it was this remarkably and perfectly idyllic evening, the sun setting behind the pine trees while well intentioned meditators did their well intended meditating
and the choir singing plainsong (which sounds really nice in the pine trees) and this house sat there like a gigantic wooden arts & crafts spaceship.
it’s a REALLY big house, by the way. and it sits kind of majestically and imposingly on a big green lawn, like a gigantic wooden arts & crafts spaceship(i’m plagiarizing myself cos it’s late).
oh, and miss representation is a very important movie, too, and i highly urge you to see it.
and pasadena is really nice and it stoked fantasies i’ve had of becoming an academic and having friends who work at the jet propulsion laboratory.
or, as my imaginary friends who work there call it, ‘the jpl’.
‘what did you do today?’
‘oh, not much, just figured out how to send humans to mars.’
‘oh, nice. would you like a brownie?’
that’s how the conversations go in pasadena, i’m guessing.
i’m rambling, too.
so, goodnight.

-moby

one of the absolute best things about hollywood is the ubiquity of run-down old motels and hotels.
well, from my perspective, that is.
maybe some people think that the old run down motels and hotels are eyesores, and are representative or indicative of the seediness and faded glamor of l.a.
but i love them (largely because i see the seediness and faded glamor of l.a as being good, if sad, things).
why?
for about 18,000 reasons, but the top few reasons are:

-aesthetically the old motels are amazing. more often than not they represent some sort of mid-century attempt at space-age ornamentation, even if 99.9% of the time the space age ornamentation is faded and aged and has succumbed to the entropic onslaught of sun and smog and neglect. but the onslaught of entropy actually makes the ornamentation look cooler and more interesting. like wabi-sabi. which is a concept i hope more of us gaijin learn about.

-they’re still there. manhattan lost it’s flea-bag motels a long time ago, as the price of real estate has made it untenable for people to maintain crummy old motels on a lot that could otherwise house a miu-miu store. l.a is, in many places, kind of a dump, and as a result it still has the cheap real-estate needed for 50 year old run down motels. which i love.

-they’re cheap, and anyone can stay there. as a result they house some of the oddest of the oddballs who keep l.a interesting. the ukranian screen writer, the crack addicted spiderman, the ingenue from south dakota, the faded hair metal bassist, the brits on a 5 days bender, etc etc. anyone can stay in these dumpy motels. i’d write ‘dystopian egalitarianism’ but then i’d seem even more pretentious than i already do. but i wrote it. so i’ll write it again. dystopian egalitarianism. cos that’s what it is. the rung at the bottom, within anyone’s reach. the beginning of a climb up or the last step on a slide down. or just a place to give up.

over time i want to take more and more pictures of these amazing run down hollywood motels. i love them. someday they might disappear.
i hope not, but nothing lasts in l.a, and it’s amazing that they’ve been around for as long as they have.
i love them.

-moby

as an issue-laden and self-involved new yorker now living in l.a i of course go to therapy.
the other day while en route to therapy i passed this remarkable church in studio city (which is, technically, the valley, although my friends who live in studio city are loathe to admit it).  i had 10 minutes free before therapy so i swung into the parking lot and stopped to take some pictures of this remarkable little modern church.  and there, hidden in the midst of it’s remarkable-ness, were some equally remarkable and odd mosaics depicting things like, for example, ‘the first murder’.

so, here are some pictures of this remarkable modern church and ‘the first murder’ mosaic.
and oh, i tried to find out some information about the church, specifically who might’ve designed it, but all i learned on the google was that there’s a 3 year waiting list to get married in the church.  at least according to the google.

so, in conclusion: nice architecture, nice and odd mosaics, and a 3 year waiting list to get married.
all in all it was an educational 10 minutes in the parking lot pre-therapy.

-moby

ok, i promised some updates featuring buildings with honest to goodness architectural significance, so: here’s a building with honest to goodness architectural significance.
it’s:
a rare oscar neimeyer designed round spaceship building in the middle of l.a (well, the middle of west hollywood, which would be on the outskirts of l.a if you lived in east l.a).
apparently oscar neimeyer designed this amazing building in 1974 for a plastic surgeon and then it was bought in the 80’s by mark mothersbaugh from devo (i’m going to name-drop; i learned these things from mark when i was over there the other day).
i’m posting black and white pictures but if possible i highly recommend seeing it for yourself(ves), as in person it’s bright, swimming-pool green.
although now that i think about it i don’t know of too many bright green swimming pools.
so i guess ‘swimming pool green’ kind of makes no sense.
how about…7-up green?
or shamrock green?
you get the point: it’s bright green.
in context it’s amazing and random, as it’s surrounded by some egregiously banal west hollywood architecture. but smack dab in the
epicenter of tawdry west hollywood there’s this amazing oscar neimeyer designed green mark mothersbaugh spaceship.

thanks

-moby

yesterday i was running like a crazyperson to meet a friend for dinner and i was on a random side street in hollywood and i passed this oddball ‘alexander: ruler of the world’ apartment house and i had to stop and take a couple of pictures. (by the way, a key to bad writing: use ‘and’ as often as possible in the same sentence, that way your writing will sound like a 7 year old’s ‘what i did last summer’ essay…and then jimmy and i went to the pool and it was fun and jimmy ate french fries and then he threw up and then i went home and i had green beans and then i watched tv and and and.  you get the point).

so: ‘alexander: ruler of the world’.
i don’t have much to say about the ‘alexander: ruler of the world’ apartment house except that:
a-it’s random.
b-it’s awesome.
c-it’s very colorful.
d-someone clearly went to a lot of effort to spruce up their otherwise banal apartment building.
e-there are greeks in l.a.

if my goal in this blog was to ‘document significant and important architecture’ then clearly i’d be falling short.
but my goal is to ‘document the random and at times beautiful weirdness of los angeles’.
and ‘alexander: ruler of the world’ apartment house is random and weird and beautiful if you’re willing to have very broad criteria for establishing something as beautiful.
coming next: i’m going to try and find something a bit more conventionally architecturally significant than autobody shops and pink apartment houses.

thanks

-moby

ok, i was in costa rica for the weekend playing the imperial festival with bjork and tv on the radio and thievery corp and flaming lips and lots of others.
to be clear: i’m not sure if i’m name dropping or if i’m just drawing attention to the fact that it was a really great festival.
or both.
but i’m mentioning the imperial festival, as it kept me away from l.a for a couple of days, and thus kept me from my true purpose in life: taking pictures of parking lots and old houses and putting them on the internet.
today’s oddball architecture blog is less about architecture and more about the strange and disconcerting and unique randomness of l.a.
today i’ve included 2 pictures, taken 40 minutes apart.
one picture is of a very glamorous auto body shop in the middle of hollywood.
and the other picture is of gigantic mountains.
i happily admit that there’s nothing too terribly remarkable about either picture.
but what makes them remarkable when taken together is that they’re 30 minutes away from each other in the same city.
there’s an old cliche that in l.a you can go skiing in the morning and surfing in the afternoon.
it’s a nice old cliche, because it’s true. and it’s a picturesque cliche, used to lure people to l.a for decades.
but less of a cliche, although equally true, is that in l.a you could pawn your silverware after breakfast and get eaten by a mountain lion or bear before lunch.
in fact you could pawn your silverware at 10 a.m and be running away from mountain lions by 11a.m.
(to be clear: i’ve never heard of anyone in l.a being eaten by a mountain lion or bear. i guess i was just trying to sound tough, as writing, ‘having a picnic by 11a.m’ doesn’t seem to carry the same gravitas).
so, auto body shop at 10 a.m, gigantic mountains at 10:45a.m.
thanks

moby

today’s house is a simple little jewel box of a mid century house.
not the most dramatic, not the most architecturally significant, but just a perfect little solid mid century house.
perfectly proportioned, perfectly maintained, just a perfect little house.
oh:
in other narcissistic news: i’m off to costa rica for a couple of days, so i might not have any l.a architecture pictures for the couple of days i’m in costa rica.
maybe i’ll send some costa rica pictures.  possibly of monkeys.  possibly of poo throwing monkeys.
hopefully minus the actual poo.
i’m not squeamish, but i feel that my life is complete without being pelted by monkey poo.
ok, have a nice weekend wherever you are.
-moby