L.A. Architecture/Design

As visitors to my Facebook page already know, I had a really good time on our long weekend in L.A. a week or so ago.  I won't recap the boring details but I thought I'd share a few of the photos I took.  I've always been really interested in architecture and design (until my senior year in high school, I thought I was going to be an architect) and these photos show some of the iconic places that we visited.

Our first day there, we went to Hollywood Blvd:

- The First National Bank Building on the northeast corner of Hollywood and Highland was built in 1927 and until 1932 was the tallest building in Hollywood. It was designed by the architectural firm Meyer and Holler, who also designed Grauman's Chinese Theatre and the Egyptian Theatre.

- Built in 1926, the El Capitan hosted Citizen Kane's world premeire.

- The Roosevelt Hotel hosted the first Oscars in 1929 and many famous people, including Mariln Monroe and Frank Sinatra, have lived there.

Grauman's Chinese Theater

Our 2nd day at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

- Eames' designed furniture

- Frank Lloyd Wright designed lamp 

- the building housing the Japanese and Koren art exhibits
- looking up at the Variety building from the balcony outside of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum
- two pictures of the Page Museum (La Brea Tar Pits), which is right next to LACMA

From the last couple of days in California:

- Underneath the Manhattan Beach Pier - numerous film scenes made near this pier (Falling Down, Point Break, Tequila Sunrise)

- picked up Michelle's mom from the Union Station train depot in downtown L.A.  Blade Runner, Speed, Italian Job, Drag Me to Hell all used this station as a backdrop.  The interior of the station is fantastic with Art Deco lighting and decorations.

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Speaking of modernist architecture and design, I attended a screening of Visual Acoustics, a documentary of Julius Shulman, at the Phoenix Art Museum today.  Shulman is the preeminent architectural photographer and has documented all of the most famous modernist architects including Wright, Richard Neutra, Frank Gehry, etc.  This was a great film.  You would think it would have only attracted a few nerdy architecture students, but the film room was packed (probably 500 people).  His life and photographs do a great job of documenting 20th century architecture, especially in SoCal.

Art

I'm reading Art in our Times, by Peter Selz, right now. I'm pretty much an art moron, but I try. I own quite a few art books and every once in awhile will bury myself in one and try to learn a little bit. I've read quite a few on more historical art and architecture but hadn't really concentrated on one that focuses on the 20th century like this one does.

A couple of the entries amused me either because of their topical relevance or because the art presented there seemed to speak to me. The first of these was a passage talking about the architecture of the Pentagon:

"During the early 1940's, the world's largest office building, the Pentagon, was erected across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in an area commonly known as "Hell's Bottom." According to esoteric lore, when a pentagon or pentagram is drawn on the ground with its chief point toward the south, it can be used for black magic and destructive purposes, and, indeed, the War Department's structure faces south."

Ahh ... it all makes sense now. I guess that Dick Cheney was probably too young to have had any part in that?

The other entries I like for a couple of reasons -- they're dark and skewer the Church a bit. They're paintings by Francis Bacon (the British painter) based on Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650). That's Velazquez's original on the left below:


Velazquez, considering the time in which he lived, and that the Pope viewed his portrait favorably, was not trying to cast a negative light upon the Church at all.

With Bacon, it's more ambiguous. His alteration to the original seems to express agony and pain. It's as though the Pope is screaming. Bacon didn't say that he had any problem with the Church or the Popes, but he did over 40 variations of the Pope and definitely seemed to have some kind of feeling. And it wasn't pleasant.

One of the other variants shows the Pope between sides of beef. I couldn't even begin to guess what that means, but I like the fact that Bacon doesn't consider the subject matter to be above parody or criticism -- a sacred "cow", as it were.


Bacon reminds me of another 20th Century artist I like, Marshall Arisman, and even of David Fincher, the director of Se7en, in his choice of colors and subject matter.