Moby Los Angeles Architecture Blog

one of the reasons i moved to los angeles is because i wanted to...

Tue, 14 May 2013 04:46:00 -0700

one of the reasons i moved to los angeles is because i wanted to spend more time looking around the gigantic west. because, to state the obvious, the west coast of the u.s is very different from the east coast.

i grew up on the east coast, and the east coast is great, but it’s generally fairly small and cute and subtle. then you go out west and everything is gigantic and un-subtle. the east coast has cute colonial towns. the west coast has bizarre sprawling megalopolises. the east coast has hills. the west coast has giant mountains. and when i moved to l.a i vowed to explore the weird and beautiful and baffling areas around l.a. and top of my list (well, near the top of my list), was mt baldy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Baldy,_California

like many people i first heard about mt baldy when leonard cohen moved there, to live at a zen monastery near the top of mt baldy. i assumed that mt baldy was some remote and mythical place, far, far away from los angeles. but, as is often the case, i was wrong. mt baldy is an hour away from l.a.

so today i drove up to mt baldy with some friends. we drank coffee at the mt baldy lodge. we had sandwiches in one of the 18,000 state park hiking/camping areas. and i took pictures of this little stone house.

i took pictures of this house because it’s perfect. it might not be architecturally significant, but it fits into it’s landscape about as perfectly as a house can ever fit into a landscape. and even though its an hour away from los angeles in 2013 it feels as if it’s fallen through a time portal (as does, fantastically, most of mt baldy) from 1935.

it doesn’t employ new or cutting edge building materials or building techniques. it wasn’t inspired by marcel breuer. but it’s amazing and perfect in it’s own way.

so, here’s a little stone house surrounded by trees in the middle of mt baldy.

thanks

moby

here’s random. or, rather, a random day in dysfunctional...

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:08:00 -0700

here’s random. or, rather, a random day in dysfunctional l.a.

3 different houses/things.

1-pickfair. i guess that pickfair deserves it’s own update, as it’s a pretty remarkable, monstrous, huge, strangely beautiful, ostentatious, emblematic, storied, oddball house. but, i’ll be honest, i felt kind of creepy and exposed taking pictures of this house as beverly hills residents drove by giving me baleful and withering looks. so i took a couple of pictures and tucked my figurative tail between my figurative legs and escaped the intimidating stares of the scornful beverly hills residents who were scorning me. or so i thought.

maybe they were just looking. scornfully. in any case: i felt like a creepy interloper. which, in fact, i might be. then i took a picture of a:

2- modern house across the street that looked kind of cool. i received fewer nasty looks while doing this. then i found myself in highland park where i took pictures of:

3-these amazing metal dragonflies that make no sense to me but are huge and strange and great.

and i maintain that they’d look really good mounted on the top of pickfair, using their disco ball eyes to stare at the beverly hills residents who were staring at me.

and, an aside, doesn’t ‘pickfair’ kind of sound like the name of a suburban supermarket?

in any case: gigantic pickfair, cute little mid century house across the street from pickfair, and some gigantic metal dragonflies in highland park.

thanks.

moby

i’m not sure where my love of abandoned buildings comes...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 08:17:55 -0700

i’m not sure where my love of abandoned buildings comes from. or, syntactically, i’m not sure from where my love of abandoned buildings comes. in any case: i love abandoned buildings.

when i was growing up i used to spend hours and days:
finding abandoned buildings.
breaking into abandoned buildings.
wandering around abandoned buildings.
and etc.

the abandoned buildings i played in as a child were all relatively old and victorian (which made them even creepier and fantastic). whereas l.a tends to have abandoned mid-century buildings, like this amazing, abandoned hotel. at least i think it’s a hotel. or was a hotel.

now it’s just a big, abandoned, beautiful modern building either waiting to be rescued from entropy or quietly observed by weirdos like me as entropy ravages it further. all the while writing run-on sentences, which i also love.

this particular abandoned building piques and keeps my interest because it clearly as at one point was a brand new building filled with mid century hipsters and swingers doing mid century hipster and swinger things (involving cocktails and lava lamps and prescription medication, one assumes). and now it sits moribund, with great lines and great bones, but moribund.

some buildings (old victorians, etc) seem like they were old when they were new. other buildings (mid century, etc) seem like they were designed to be forever new and futuristic, which makes their inevitable slide into entropic dissolution even more jarring, and strangely beautiful.

like abandoned space stations, almost. which, possibly, this is.

ok, have a nice weekend.

moby

hi.i just got back from weekend 2 at coachella.and it was...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:20:49 -0700

hi.
i just got back from weekend 2 at coachella.
and it was great.
i could indulge in hyperbole, but really, it was great.
i could also make more of an effort to expand my lexicon of adjectives.
but until then i’ll make do with: great.
on saturday morning i woke up early (one of the accidental benefits of not being hungover) and took a drive out to the salton sea.
now, the salton sea is one of the most remarkable, wrong, beautiful, apocalyptic, baffling, compelling places in california, the united states, the northern hemisphere, and possibly (see aforementioned hyperbole), the world.
it’s just so odd and wrong and amazing.
the beaches are made up of crusty animal and fish and crustacean bones.
the water is brown-ish and filled with dead things.
and a majority of the land surrounding the salton sea is abandoned and empty and apocalyptic (baking in 100 degree heat for most of the year certainly makes everything seem even emptier and more apocalyptic).

here’s some information on the salton sea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea

while there i took a bunch of pictures, but i’m including these, of an abandoned gas station and video store (maybe, i say as a southern californian eco hippie, gas stations will someday seem as antiquated and out of date as video stores? yes, you can roll your eyes. but it’s still a nice idea. says the hippie. with no hair). i especially love the stark and boxy utilitarianism of the gas station. throw in some sheets of glass and you could have an empty and apocalyptic glass house or farnsworth house.
sort of.

if you were at either coachella weekend: i hope you had a great time, and thanks for letting me dj.

moby

ok, i’m including this in my oddball architecture blog for...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:20:00 -0700

ok, i’m including this in my oddball architecture blog for a few reasons…

i think it’s a really beautiful video (as made by my friend colin rich).
with clearly no objectivity i like the song a lot (as made by mark lanegan and i).
it’s all based in and around los angeles (salton sea, joshua tree, and the angeles national forest).
it’s kind of an entropic love letter to los angeles and the desert around los angeles.
there are lots of buildings in the video (even if some are very far away…)

here are two links, vimeo and youtube.

oh, and i highly highly highly recommend watching it full screen, as it’s really beautiful.

thanks,

moby

just got back from coachella (which, i feel the need to state...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 15:12:05 -0700

just got back from coachella (which, i feel the need to state the obvious, was amazing: the weather, the line-up, the audience, the location, etc, etc).

and i posit that these are architectural photos… (or, rather, photos of architecture). in that: they’re photos of a space expressly designed and constructed for a specific purpose. it’s temporary architecture (well, from a broader perspective of impermanence i guess all architecture is temporary), in that it’s erected, filled with technology and people, and then disassembled.

it’s also quite unique, as far as the history of structures is concerned, in that there aren’t too many open-air but enclosed structures designed to hold 25,000 people (the whole festival is around 100,000 people each day, i believe. this is the sahara dance tent, designed to hold around 25% of the festival attendees). it’s also a fascinating structure in that it’s aesthetics are utilitarian but powerful and impactful.

oh, and i just realized that i failed to take a picture of the outside of this gigantic people-hangar… hm. oops.

maybe i’ll try to do that next weekend.

in the meantime: the inside of the sahara tent at coachella.

thanks,

moby

some things. first off: pacific standard time presents modern...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 02:27:54 -0700

some things.

first off: pacific standard time presents modern architecture in l.a is up and running and certainly worth seeing, either in person or on the internetsmachine. here’s the link: pacificstandardtimepresents.org

secondly: i’m only including one picture in this update.
see, i was sitting outside and i was looking across the canyon and i noticed these three houses on the opposite ridge.
i see them everyday, but for some reason i was particularly struck by them today.
as you can see, there’s: a 1970’s castle, a spaceship, and an odd boxy modern house painted pink.
which is, all things considered, l.a architecture at it’s finest. or most random. or, subjectively, finest.
oh, and did i mention that there’s a mountain in the background?
and on the mountain you can find mountain lions and hikers and people riding horse’s in the middle of the city?
and people still think l.a is a terrible place?
a bizarre desert mountain beach suburban latino city filled with fantastically dysfunctional artists and musicians and writers?
a weird sprawling city where people sit in their backyards with their dogs and go on hiking dates when they’re not at the farmers market?
that sounds terrible? to whom, scrooge? dick cheney? pol pot?

oh, and people sometimes dismiss l.a for it’s sprawl, but as far as urban verbs are concerned isn’t ‘sprawl’ better than ‘sit’?

l.a might be a byzantine petri dish, but at least the things in petri dishes move around and do weird and interesting things.

moby

here’s what i know: there was a period in the early 20th...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 02:29:00 -0700

here’s what i know: there was a period in the early 20th century when a lot of people in hollywood thought it was a good idea to build fantasy houses, borrowing liberally from spanish or mexican or norman or british or arabic architectural styles.

i don’t know if this period has a name, nor do i know if legitimate architectural writers/bloggers look at this period with awe and love or disdain and more disdain.

i also know that as a non-legitimate architectural writer/blogger i look at this period with awe and love, especially when compared and contrasted with the beige generic cat-vomit period that typifies a lot of l.a architecture from 1970 to 2013.

this particular house is clearly modeled on arabic/north-african architecture (i say ‘clearly’ because i’ve clearly seen arabic and north african buildings that kind of look like this house. so, ‘clearly’ is a completely subjective and non-academic term. to be clear). and it’s beautiful.

‘beautiful’ is also a completely subjective and non-academic term. but as i’m a self-proclaimed non-legitimate architectural writer/blogger i reserve the right to use terms that would be anathema to any legitimate architectural writer. like, ‘beautiful’, or ‘pretty’ or ‘generic cat vomit’.

maybe if this were my day job i’d be a little more academic in my criticisms. but i’m just a guy with a laptop, so: this building is beautiful and i love it and i wish the owners would invite me over to drink tea in those little bitty silver tea cups that you think of when you see a souk.

ok, i hope you had a nice weekend.

thanks,

moby

ok, graffiti. i mean, technically it’s attached to a...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:57:11 -0700

ok, graffiti.

i mean, technically it’s attached to a building, so it’s tangentially architecture? right?

well, maybe i just have too broad an idea of what constitutes architecture, as i’ve included pictures of clouds and lizards on this site. but i’m a college drop-out, so what do you expect? an erudite and reasoned consideration of exceptional buildings? or pictures of lizards and graffiti? how about an erudite and reasoned consideration of lizards and graffiti? and buildings, too, on occasion.

i also have a really hard time spelling words with double consonants. like: ‘occasion’. is that right? it looks like it should have 2 ‘s’s’.

so: graffiti. you have to admit, this graffiti is pretty remarkable. and it defines and establishes the space, far more than the building upon which it’s been painted. the building itself is kind of egregiously unremarkable. it’s only the graffiti that distinguishes the building from the few million other generic buildings in l.a.

i especially like the scary blue baby doll playing bongos. and the scary clown.

moby

see, l.a is a random city. or, rather, a city of randomness....

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 05:58:00 -0700

see, l.a is a random city. or, rather, a city of randomness. and random things. and a twisted unicorn spaghetti approach to cohesion. and because l.a is random i believe it would be odd to make any attempt to either shoe-horn or force any notions of cohesion onto it. even if involving dangling participles. like the last sentence. sorry.

now, this building. house. bunker. it’s a random house in a random setting. it’s modern and kind of brutalist and boxy. it’s also grey, with dark windows. all well and good, but it presents a whole host of questions.

like, for instance, who wants to build a grey modernist box house on a desert hillside underneath blue skies and eucalyptus trees? i’m not saying it’s a bad choice, it’s just not necessarily the first choice many people would necessarily make when confronted with a building lot on a hillside surrounded by azure skies and eucalyptus trees.

i actually like this grey box house. it’s simple and austere and utilitarian and it makes very little sense in it’s site/context, but it makes perfect contextual sense in a sprawling urban environment that’s fantastically devoid of cohesion.

i mean, a house like this could’ve been anything. it could’ve been a beige hairball (as in: coughed up by a predator). or it could’ve been a norman castle or a spanish hacienda or a mies inspired rectilinear glass box or a lautner spaceship.

it could’ve been anything. and it’s a grey assemblage of boxes and dark windows. which is great, i guess. baffling when scrutinized, but great. cohesion is for sissies.

maybe that’s a new slogan for los angeles. along with: ‘los angeles, the first city of the apocalypse.’

ok, thanks.

moby

p.s-i’m also including a picture of a giant cross with downtown in the background. it has nothing to do with this house. except that they’re in the same neighborhood. ok, thanks again.

and now a random one. yesterday i went for a walk on my street...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:47:58 -0700

and now a random one.

yesterday i went for a walk on my street and took some random pictures of random houses. plus a picture of a landscapers hat on a tweety bird doll in the back of a pick up truck.

all of these houses are perfectly nice, but on their own i probably wouldn’t be inclined to devote a whole update to one of them.

and i’m ashamed at the syntax in that last sentence. eesh, what, was i raised in a barn? my grandmother would be ashamed.

in any case here are some random and odd mid-century or mid-century inspired or just plain odd and random houses on my street. oh, and one moderne house, like a tiny ocean liner. and aforementioned tweety bird in a hat.

there are lots of other nice houses on my street, i just randomly decided to take pictures of these. nice mid century-ish houses baking in the hot march sun.

moby

here’s a quick one. i was hiking around my neighborhood...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 03:27:30 -0700

here’s a quick one.

i was hiking around my neighborhood earlier today and i saw this little house (well, it looks little from a distance, maybe it’s not actually so little up close).

it’s nestled bucolically at the base of some hills and forest, and is possibly inhabited by some benign grimm’s fairy tale character (assuming there are benign grimm’s fairy tale characters). which, of course, is nice. but which, of course, in most circumstances, is rarely all that remarkable. except in this case the house in question is about 1/2 a mile from the center of densely weird hollywood and about 1/4 mile away from one of the busiest freeways in the united states. which, as someone who was born on 148th st in nyc, still seems odd and strange and kind of magically remarkable. that there’s almost no delineation between the urban and natural in l.a, just some odd and random demarcations that rarely, if ever, make much municipal sense.

for instance: you’ll be driving down a street in my neighborhood and looking at a big expanse of trees or scrub brush and wondering: is that a park? is it part of the reservoir? is it someone’s property? is it brigadoon? is it where elephants go to plot the demise of their human overlords? can i hike there? will i get shot? and these are all equally valid questions.

quotidian urban sprawl juxtaposed randomly with relatively untrammeled nature.

oh, and sorry for the big-ish pretentious grad-student-y words, i didn’t have a lot of friends growing up so i spent my summers reading my mom’s books rather than playing outdoors with the normal children.

thanks,

moby

oh, a p.s/codecil to the update about the bridge… chris...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:50:47 -0700

oh, a p.s/codecil to the update about the bridge…

chris nichols sent me this picture of the bridge when it was an actual bridge. apparently at one point it was a real, actual bridge, for real, actual trains. but given l.a’s less than amazing history as regards public transportation it’s now just a gathering of giant concrete pilings in the river.

poor l.a, always eating the best parts of itself.

moby

here’s architecture and a bird. first, the bird....

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 03:39:18 -0700

here’s architecture and a bird.

first, the bird. technically it’s called a ‘turkey goblin’. actually technically and taxonomically it’s probably not called a turkey goblin. but my friend misty, with whom i was hiking, decided that it’s a turkey goblin. so, henceforth, turkey goblin.

and the architecture. or engineering. or, a bridge. or a part of a bridge. or, to keep this going, a bridge and some giant concrete pilings that look like they were supposed to be a bridge at some point but ended up as not quite a bridge.

i’m sometimes impressed by things that required unimaginable time and resources and energy and money to be built but were then never quite finished. as i’m assuming is/was the case with these very big concrete pilings built in the middle of the los angeles river. or maybe they serve a purpose, other than just being brutalist and photogenic.

the bridge serves a purpose. it was designed with a specific utility in mind, i’m assuming, and it now satisfies that utility, letting cars and people go from one side of the river to the other. but the pilings? giant and immovable? they just sit there, waiting for a railway bridge (i’m guessing) that will never materialize. like giant concrete miss havershams. just sitting and slowly succumbing to entropy and birds.

in other news: it was a beautiful day and you might have figured out that los angeles has a river (named, imaginatively, the los angeles river) and very few people seem to hang out at the river but it’s beautiful and covered in strange birds, like the aformentioned turkey goblin.

ok, i hope you had a nice weekend.

moby

hi, i hope you had a nice weekend. i’m going to state a...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 03:32:00 -0800

hi, i hope you had a nice weekend.

i’m going to state a sad and self-evident truth. which is: there are a lot of crappy houses in l.a. some of them are endearingly crappy. some of them are just crappy. and i’m not judging what goes on inside these crappy houses, as i’m sure that lots of smart and well intentioned and creative people do interesting things inside these beige crap palaces. but there are a lot of them. and it can be depressing.

in between the beige crap-shacks, however, there are some gems. like this house, by richard neutra (i think it’s by neutra…don’t skewer me if this isn’t a neutra house. someone said, ‘i think that’s a neutra house’, so i’m just repeating what i’ve been told…i’m ignorant. happily so).

it’s a perfect internationalist modern gem of a house, with just the perfect amount of goldilocks style entropy. long and sleek and rectilinear, with perfect little clerestory windows and even a couple of cats in the windows (not sure if you can see them in the pictures). oh, and i’m not implying that perfect mid century jewel box gems of houses need to have cats in the windows, but clearly it helps, generally speaking. little mid century cats, ideally, wearing glasses and smoking pipes and talking about the wonders of fiberglass.

it warms my heart that in between the beige crap-shacks of l.a there are these amazing little modernist wonders. and maybe as i become more enlightened i’ll be able to see the beauty and wonder in the beige crap shacks. but for now i just think they’re crappy. unlike this gem. which is the opposite of crappy.

thanks

moby

first off: thanks to palm springs modernism week for organizing...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 02:51:58 -0800

first off: thanks to palm springs modernism week for organizing a whole bunch of great events last week, and also for asking me to come out and speak with frances anderton at the ace on saturday.

also on saturday i was able to visit the richard neutra ‘miller house’. palm springs is, of course, filled with remarkable mid century architecture, with this house standing as one of the best examples. simple and thoughtful and smart and interesting and practical and understated, it’s mid century desert architecture (as designed by a man born in the mountains of austria, of course) at it’s best.

palm springs fascinates and baffles me. it’s beautiful and it seems like a great place to live, even if it’s a desert furnace that without irrigation is probably incapable of supporting biological life for 2 or 3 months out of the year.

oh, and there are probably much better photographs of this iconic house, but, for better or worse, here are mine.

thanks,

moby

as tonight is the oscars i thought i’d put up a picture of...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

as tonight is the oscars i thought i’d put up a picture of the hollywood sign.
well, actually the back of the hollywood sign.
i love that the hollywood sign has become this iconic image, representing l.a universally, far and wide.
what makes it amazing is that originally the hollywood sign was erected as temporary advertising for a real estate development.
originally it said ‘hollywoodland’ (the name of the real estate development), but the ‘land’ part fell down.
paris has the eiffel tower, nyc has the empire state building, rome has the colliseum, and l.a has a big old sign advertising a real estate development from the 20’s.
which, if you dislike l.a, you probably see it as a symbol of the quick, vapid, and disposable nature of l.a culture.
or if you like l.a (as i do) you see it as something kind of odd, modern, accidental, impermanent, and endearing.
so here’s to the world’s most famous and recognizable real estate development advertisement.

ok, happy academy awards.

-moby

Explore L.A.

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 11:04:25 -0800

Explore L.A.:

“Uncovering L.A.’s secret attractions and hidden adventures through the eyes of Tumblr users.”

ok, so there’s an architectural style from the early/mid...

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 05:50:18 -0800

ok, so there’s an architectural style from the early/mid 20th century that is either called ‘moderne’ or ‘streamline moderne’ or ‘houses that look kind of like grounded ocean liners’.

and l.a has a lot of these ‘streamline moderne houses that look vaguely like ocean liners from 1930’. not enough, as they’re pretty great, but still: a lot, comparitively speaking.
and this one is arguably the prettiest of the bunch.
because it also sort of looks like a corbusier inspired french/parisian house from 1930, but with palm trees sitting in the background (and uninspiring beige houses on either side of it).

also, i’m advertising my ignorance here: i know nothing about this house. i don’t know who designed or built it. nor do i know when it was designed or built. but it’s beautiful. and it looks like like a grounded and amazing ocean liner. albeit a modest/small grounded and amazing ocean liner.

it does sometimes make me sad that when people/developers put up new buildings they rarely seem to aspire to put up beautiful and interesting buildings, but rather throw up (apt choice of words) a handful of generic beige vaguely missionary houses.

i apologize for editorializing, but the world doesn’t really need any more generic beige houses. but the world would benefit from having more houses that look like grounded, futuristic, art deco ocean liners. like this one.
there, i’ve editorialized.

dear developers: please make more houses like this. and fewer generic, beige houses. if possible.

thanks,

moby

oh, ps. here’s the wikipedia page on ‘streamlined moderne’. oh, and i’m not sure why they tacked the extra ‘e’ on the end of ‘modern’. but it makes it almost impossible to say out loud and not sound really pompous. try it, say ‘moderne’ out loud. see, it’s pretty awkward, huh. like you need a cigarette in a 10” long cigarette holder and noel coward playing in the background.

Moby, The Architecture Blogger on Dwell.com

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 07:06:53 -0800

Moby, The Architecture Blogger on Dwell.com