Moby Los Angeles Architecture Blog

i’m including this house simply because it was big and...

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:09:09 -0700

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...

Mon, 14 May 2012 02:52:58 -0700

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...

Sat, 12 May 2012 03:46:00 -0700

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....

Tue, 08 May 2012 02:27:00 -0700

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

Thu, 03 May 2012 05:47:37 -0700

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...

Tue, 01 May 2012 02:56:03 -0700

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...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

so, sunday i was driving home and i happened to pass by a castle...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:07:17 -0700

so, sunday i was driving home and i happened to pass by a castle for sale.
what made this especially great:

it was a block away from the soul-sucking sunset strip.
it had a hand drawn ‘for sale by owner’ sign taped to the gate out front.
it’s a really nice quasi-castle.
it overlooks a frank lloyd wright house.

see, years ago i was a committed architectural modernist. i loathed ornamentation, and i thought that year-zero for architecture began with corbusier.
anything ornamented or traditional or non-rectilinear was kind of loathsome to me, as i was a true believer in modernism.
and now?
well, life is short and i’ve come to view extremism (on my part and anyone else’s) with suspicion and distaste.
the extremist (whether religious or musical or architectural or political etc etc) usually is saying a lot more about themselves and their unresolved issues than they are about the object of their allegiance.
which leads us to wacky for-sale castles a block away from the sunset strip.
it’s ornamented, it’s traditional, and it’s amazing.
a modern house that looks like an l.a interpretation of an 18th century fantasy castle from the rhone valley.
or 17th century.
or 16th.
i have no idea.
except that whoever ends up living there is probably going to be pretty happy to jump around in the pool in the shadow of
their quasi-castle.

ok, 2 pictures of a house and 1 not-so-good picture of a parking...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:34:00 -0700

ok, 2 pictures of a house and 1 not-so-good picture of a parking lot.
first, the house.
i assume that this house is quasi-abandoned, which would explain why it looks like a mini version of norma desmond’s house in ‘sunset blvd’.
if you’ve never seen ‘sunset blvd’ then you owe it to yourself to go out and rent or buy ‘sunset blvd’, as it’s one of the greatest movies ever made about l.a.
ok, let me re-state that, it actually is the greatest movie ever made about l.a.
and this little house on the hill in it’s state of entropic desolation kind of reminds me of norma desmond’s house, but at about 1/100th the scale/size, and minus the dead monkey in the bedroom and the rats in the swimming pool.
although it might have both, i didn’t really get close enough to check.
and then, the parking lot.
if for some reason you’ve seen my book ‘destroyed’ you might be aware of the fact that i have a strange and inexplicable love of/for empty parking lots.
and i especially like this empty parking lot, as:

it’s big
it’s in the middle of hollywood
it has, for some reason, a perfect palm tree growing up through the dilapidated concrete.

and lone palm trees remind me of the album ‘miami’ by the gun club, which is a great album.
in fact, lots of dilapidated hollywood reminds me of the gun club. in a good way.
ok, i’m rambling, it’s 2a.m sunday night and i have to go to bed.
here’s mini-normal desmond house and a perfect abandoned parking lot.
i hope you had a good weekend.
thanks
moby

ps-oh, the house and parking lot are about 100 feet away from each other.

so, every now and then i like to back away from the strangeness...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

so, every now and then i like to back away from the strangeness of l.a and take pictures of houses and things that are just simple and nice.
like this house.
i drive by it almost every day, and it always strikes me as a perfect little hill-perched mid-century house with awesome little dr seuss plants in it’s tiny driveway.
someday my hope is that i’ll actually get invited in to one of these houses so that i won’t just feel like some creepy house stalker.
most of the houses in the hollywood hills present fairly tough phalanx-like facades to the street, but they open up with walls of glass to the gigantic views.
but as i’m a creepy house stalker i usually only get to take pictures of the phalanx-like facades.
granted, they’re nice facades, but someday maybe someone will let me into their house to actually take pictures of the parts of the houses that don’t look like bunkers.
but as for this house: as i said, i drive by it almost every day and i think it’s a perfect little mid-century house.
more than that i can’t say (or, well, write).
like, per usual: i don’t know who designed it, nor do i know if it has an amazing, storied past.
although as this is the land of make-believe let’s pretend it was designed by pierre koenig and that jimi hendrix and aldous huxley used to live here together in a late 60’s acid fueled version of the odd couple.
oh, and have a good weekend.
if you go to coachella make sure to bring sun block or a big floppy hat (not for late 80’s rave fashion, for sun protection).
thanks

moby

in the sort of almost middle of hollywood is the magic castle.it...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 03:12:07 -0700

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...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 02:39:01 -0700

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...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:02:50 -0700

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:

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

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:32:00 -0700

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...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:47:51 -0700

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...

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 04:59:24 -0700

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...

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 04:22:28 -0700

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...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:56:00 -0700

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...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 03:14:00 -0700

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...

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 03:06:44 -0700

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