This is the first of two related posts.
Black Mirror Part II: A Garden City will be posted this Monday, August 10th, 2021.
Vitrified Sand
Silica (or quartz sand) becomes a supercooled liquid, actually an amorphous solid, when it is superheated to 3090°F (1700°C).
During the vitrification process, heated silica can be made super-clear, smoky, or even wildly colored with mineral or chemical additives. It can also be later treated to appear mirror-like or nearly black.
Glass can be slumped, cast, laminated, or shaped and cut into oblong or square sheets and then draped over the sort of skeletal steel and concrete frame towers that are found in Downtown Los Angeles, Irvine, and across the Inland Empire. Glinting, mute, and low-resolution, these reflective, pixelated icons are beautifully blank monuments— dumb and dumber obelisks, temples, and pyramids for a late-capitalist age. I like to think of them as distant and somewhat culturally impoverished suburban cousins to Mies van der Rohe’s iconic mid-century experiments with glass and steel in Chicago, Toronto, and New York City.
Across Southern California, there are several great examples of the taut, slick, glass-skinned corporate architecture that Cesar Pelli, Anthony J. Lumsden, Welton David Becket Sr. pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s. Late versions of their projects persisted well into the 1980s, seemingly oblivious to other influences- like high-tech, post-modernism, and deconstruction- that eventually found their way into corporate office buildings.
AC Martin designed two striking granite and reflective blues glass towers in Irvine that were built in 1987. The tallest building in the San Fernando Valley, 10 Universal City Plaza, was completed in 1984 by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Herb Nadel’s office produced quite a few variations on the reflective glass theme around LA. Remarkably, in San Diego and Tijuana, N. Charles Slert, a Lumsden collaborator, continued with the genre well into the 1990s.
As boring, dumb, or faceless as they might seem today, black or reflective glass buildings were admired widely enough in the 1970s and 1980s to be copy-pasted into suburban business parks everywhere.
But, more importantly for me, they formed a significant part of the extraordinarily ordinary landscape that formed me as a child and as a teenager.
Beautiful Loser
“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
One of my favorite pieces of architecture in Los Angeles, the La Cienega Building, is a beautiful, flippant loser.
It’s both an absolute architectural dud and a perfect example of how lazy, derivative, and debased things in LA end up being casually iconic.
The La Cienega Building is made of cheap, black semi-reflective glass and not much else. It is a 12-story monolithic office block located across from the onramp/offramp at the 405 and 105 freeways, near LAX. It doesn’t belong to any particular neighborhood, so it lives in a demilitarized zone under a freeway between Lennox and El Segundo.
It was built either in 1968 or 1971. I have not been able to determine who built it. Nobody I’ve talked to you seems to know much about it either. All I’ve established is that the rent is quite cheap and that the elevators don’t work very well.
The short ends of this squat box are made of grayish-black brick or badly painted brick. It has two nearly identical and not particularly well-detailed glass curtain walls that run north-south along La Cienega and the 405. If you stand on the east side of the building under the 405 offramp, you can catch a glimpse from below of trucks and larger vehicles flying by, reflected in the building’s wobbly, gridded east face.
The La Cienega Building is so anonymous that I'm still at a dead end after months of trying to figure out who designed it. Unfortunately, it seems like it's an orphaned building, and nobody wants to take credit for it.
From really far away, like a quarter mile or so, or at great speed, say 100 miles an hour, you might think the building was something Mies van der Rohe might have dropped on LA by accident.1 It is, perhaps, a very poorly executed and very distant, stubby relative of the iconic Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan. However, if it looks like a Miesian project, it must be one from another version of our reality. Conceivably it could be from an episode of the Twilight Zone (or Black Mirror), one in which Mies migrated to Southern California, without ever having passed through New York or Chicago, only to find himself working for low rent developers trying to squeeze a building out of a leftover parcel of land on the wrong end of town.
There is no other way to describe it— to be fair to Mies— than to call it what it is: a bad copy of a better knock-off of Mies’ work.
Indeed, if you could cut out about 12 floors from the Seagram Building—think of taking several slices out of a loaf of bread and repackaging them as a new, smaller, loaf— and then proceeded to remove the Seagram Building’s clever extruded bronze mullions and spandrels, then filled in the ends with cheap brick, and then, and finally you decided to bury Mies’ elegant granite public plaza in a recessed parking garage you’d get something like the La Cienega Building. Or, more likely, you’d get a more handsome version of the La Cienega Building. It is that bad.
But, it is so bad (and not from lack of trying to be better) that it verges on being transcendently good, a beautiful loser of a building if there ever was one.
And, since I am like a deranged B-Movie fan when it comes to pulpy architecture, I am utterly fascinated by this shoddy, second-rate building for all the wrong reasons.
It is awkwardly situated when it is meant to sit on a podium; it is next to a freeway and not on a proper street; it is terribly detailed when it is meant to be refined at every material connection and transition; it places a higher value on parking capacity than pedestrian access.
And yet, for all its wrong-headedness, there’s something about the building that puzzles me.
Instead of being an example of strong architecture, it ends up cowering next to a freeway offramp, being the less heroic and the more domesticated of the two structures.
Instead of declaring itself a masterwork, it is humble and, in a way, decent.
If there were ever an example of weak architecture in Los Angeles, this would be it because the La Cienega Building is a pathetic local version of a far-away building in New York, on a mythic avenue, that encapsulated the aspirations of an era. It is about as far away as you can get from Mies’ will to translate an epoch into space. It’s more like a mutt of a tower, the runt of the modernist litter; an afterthought built either a year before or two years after Mies sailed off into infinite space.
Architettura Povera
I realize that LA will never be more than a collection of sub-par buildings that don’t fit together well enough to make a real city for some elitists. This is the usual sour grapes about Los Angeles: that it is illegible, that the buildings are shoddy, that styles come and go here too frequently etc.
However, I also have noticed that for some architects here in Los Angeles, if something is not “experimental” enough, it can't be real LA architecture. This is because we have become too accustomed to the dumb position that “cutting-edge” ideas from the local schools of architectural thinking can’t be expressed by basic, ordinary, or humble things. In LA, at least for some of my peers, it always seems like if it doesn’t involve some degree of special effects wizardry, then it ain’t architecture.
I tend to disagree with both positions.
I believe that our hyper-regional, perhaps pathetic attempts at architecture, these discarded things that we call buildings, which we have misplaced along the tangle of streets that we call Los Angeles, are more than just ugly accidents. Instead, they always remind me that even in a state of total abjection, there are tenacious forms of ugliness, insolent grotesqueries, that in their insistent, raw authenticity approach true beauty.
So, I love the La Cienega Building, warts and all.
Sure, I admire its bargain-basement reflective glass façades. But, even more so, I am captivated by the current building owner’s recent DIY renovations, like using cheap, warped garden trellises (sprayed painted matte black to match the façades), as ventilation panels, below. Instead of something more appropriate like metal mesh, these trellis panels are inspired, even genius, acts of architectural domestication, reducing Mies’ overtired aphorism (God is in the details) to an unintentionally funny, almost cosmic joke. Only the God of Home Depot would ever vouch for such this sort of architectural butchery. Fortunately, they are so awful that they make the rest of the building absolutely sing.
I am also amazed by this little slab of a building because of the precarious relationship it has with the freeway offramp that swoops and flies adjacent, literally feet away from its southeast corner. How it got approved is a mystery to me. These days no plan check engineer would ever sign off on a building insurance liability suit in waiting like the La Cienega Building.
Even last week, when I passed it, headed southbound on the 405, it freaked me out.
I had a terrible vision of veering off that freeway overpass and then flying through space for a few seconds before crashing into the last corner office on the uppermost floor, maiming myself and all that business suite’s occupants, all of us becoming terribly ill-fated characters in real life, mashed-up version of JG Ballard’s Concrete Island, Crash and Highrise.
Notes
Mies van der Rohe never completed a project west of the Rockies. However, according to historian Alan Hess, LACMA super donors Norton Simon and Richard Brown wanted Mies to design the new LACMA campus. In contrast, Howard Ahmanson and others wanted Edward Durell Stone hired. It was eventually executed by William Pereira, whose firm designed LA’s first stand-alone art museum as an “art acropolis,” now fully demolished to make way for Zumthor’s new museum building.