CALIFORNIAN ARCHITECTURE CONT: STILL  #AMREADING REYNER BANHAM.

Los Angeles from the Griffith Park Observatory

Taking the Universal tour  and visiting Disneyland –a sequence of habitable fantasies, the set for a film that was never ever going to be made except in the mind of the visitor.

Westwood and UCLA campus. Because academics apparently drive much less than most Angelenos, there seems to be a solid and insatiable demand for certain middle-class accommodation that make the area pretty well stable socially.

The shopping mall: a crucial type of pedestrian precinct, like Oliveira Street. What began as a civic gesture is now little more than a tourist trap, but a very good and colourful tourist trap.

The flatland of Los Angeles from the Griffith Park Observatory – one of the world’s great urban vistas for its sheer size and sheer lack of quality.

Dingbat – a type of idiot? Yes, and also a type of two-story walkup apartment building from the 50s still common in L.A. The dingbat is the true symptom of Los Angeles’ urban Id trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living.

Dingbat apartment in L. A.