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.

CALIFORNIAN ARCHITECTURE. #AMREADING REYNER BANHAM.

I am in Los Angeles. What better place to read Reyner Banham’s classic Los Angeles.The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Some memorable phrases:

 

Brown Derby. martinturnbull.files. 

• In 1925 Santa Monica used more pianos than any other city of its size. Meaning? It was no longer a resort. It had become a home city.
• The Pacific Coast Highway is lined with oil pumps, their orange-painted heads nodding tirelessly and always out of synchronization with each other.
• Lee Shippey’s list of Californian tradition is to speak in superlatives, to live out-of-doors, to tell tall tales, to deal in real estate, to believe what isn’t true, to throw dignity out the window, to dress dramatically, and to tackle the impossible. Unlike the Arts and Crafts houses, Greene’s wooden houses are perfect in visible spaces, but in hidden spaces it’s the usual old US carpenter’s crudwork.
• Mountain cropping to provide flat space for a housing development proposes a new kind of ecological disturbance. Such large-scale trifling with an earthquake prone land is more than a lost ecological amenity.
• The hamburger – a pretty well-balanced meal ..that one can eat with one hand—has achieved a kind of symbolic apotheosis in Los Angeles. Like the hamburger, the architecture of the hamburger hut is something fantastic, a symbolic assemblage, its functions repackaged in a Hansel-and-Gretel image.
• The Tahitian Village Restaurant, especially, strikingly and lovingly ridiculous…sums up a general phenomenon of US life.

  

  Tahitian Village Restaurant. tikiroom.com