This is the second of two related posts.
Black Mirror Part I: The La Cienega Building was posted on Saturday, August 10th, 2021.
Mirrors and Gardens1
I’m sure that I passed by the La Cienega Building in the mid-1970s on the interminably long drives I made with my parents, up and down the 405, to see my grandmother Lucilla and my grandfather Joaquin in La Jolla. But I don’t really remember it or seeing LAX either, for that matter. Maybe I was asleep or looking the other way.
We drove down the coast about three to four times a year in my Dad’s dark blue 1968 Mercedes Benz 280, the one that he used daily on his commute from Sherman Oaks to LACMA, where he was a senior exhibition designer for a spell before he quarreled so much with his colleagues and supervisors that he was forced out. Unfortunately, he tended to do that frequently enough that he was bounced from employer to employer, about once every two to three years despite his charm and talents. I’m pretty sure I inherited the habit.
But, truthfully, if I don’t remember the La Cienega Building at all, I can crisply recall the mysterious spectacle of reflective blue metallic glass cladding Welton Becket’s octagonal Irvine headquarters buildings designed for the multinational oil drilling conglomerate Fluor in the late 1970s.
I can still see the mushroom cap-like HVAC housings, now partly obscured, vividly sitting atop the Fluor complex on those drives back and forth, like three weird, shiny landing pods waiting to unleash some alien horror. The entire development seemed planned to have more cinematic, less than architectural, qualities.
Even today, so many buildings in Irvine look like they should have backdrops for Logan's Run, Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, or A Scanner Darkly.2 They have a dystopian and antiseptic quality— forerunners of a gleaming and immaculately fake green corporate utopia still promoted by the Irvine Company today.
A Garden City?
Irvine is a bizarre place; it never seems quite real to me.
It's supposed to be one of ‘America's most desirable regions,’ but something creepily synthetic and funereal about the place usually sets me off whenever I visit. It must be those verdant green lawns so tightly manicured to within an inch of their lives that they seem less like actual landscapes than prisons for impenitent plants.
Another thing that weirds me out about Irvine is how supernatural and yet clandestine it is: how the overwatered, uninhabited, and inaccessible gardens are laid out around the base of every corporate center, like pretty moats or cute demilitarized zones made of grass and travertine.
But I think it's the happy insanity of it that finally gets to me after a while.
There’s so much anxiety and schizophrenia always cheerfully hanging around in Irvine, right there in bright daylight. I imagine the entire place gets sprayed down from the air with Lithium right before the morning commute starts, every day and also on weekends and, especially, during the holidays.
It is as if the whole Irvine thing, the “Luxury Coastal California Living” pitch that the Developer is always hawking, was dreamt up one late night over drinks by Walt Disney, Joan Didion, and Michel Foucault—an urban caricature of all their obsessions about happiness, mental illness, and prisons come to life.
More Glass
There are many other variations on the theme of black, metallic, colored or reflective glass corporate architecture spread out across Southern California.
For example, the tallest building in the San Fernando Valley, 10 Universal City Plaza, was completed in 1984 by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Nearby Charles Luckman’s office (with interior design firm Milton I. Swimmer Planning and Design) designed a six-story office building for Warner Brothers, wrapped with curvy glass walls meant to reflect up to 80% of the summer heat gain. Post-OPEC crisis, this became a priority and a raison d'être for excessive and sometimes totally unwarranted glass façadism (or façadomy!!) in local office building design.
AC Martin designed two striking granite and reflective glass towers near the Newport Coast. They were built in 1987 and set in a weirdly sylvan landscape. Johnson Fain’s AIG Sun-America Center in Century City was completed in 1989. Herb Nadel’s office produced quite a few variations on the reflective glass theme around LA. Further afield in the Inland Empire, San Diego, and Ventura Counties, numerous suburban office parks were executed in reflective glass by lesser-known but not less interesting architects.
For example, Danish architect Ebbe Videriksen, one of Richard Neutra’s midcentury collaborators, designed the tallest tower in Ventura County, part of the Topa Financial Center, in 1987. Before the area filled in with malls and podium housing, it has a stark and weird presence, rising out of Oxnard’s agricultural fields a few miles east of the Pacific. Remarkably, in San Diego and Tijuana, N. Charles Slert, a Lumsden collaborator, continued with the genre well into the late 1990s.
Icebergs and other Reveries
These late modernist glass buildings interest me for two reasons.
Firstly, in general, I find it strange that I have such fond memories of so many anodyne things, like the stucco commercial buildings I wrote about here earlier.
Secondly, I never made any connection between all the little wood-framed houses that litter the Southland, like so much confetti spread across a lawn, and the big, blank glass office buildings that pop up around freeway off-ramps and business centers— pushing aside all the nearby smaller buildings, just like big icebergs plowing through an arctic suburban field.
So, as much as I have an appreciation for little houses and medium-sized commercial buildings made of stucco, I also have a real fondness for cast-off big glass, monolithic, iceberg-like things. My devotion to these commercial glass buildings is located somewhere between my fascination with their blank demeanor, ultra-cool qualities, and how ordinary and ubiquitous they are. But, on the other hand, their totemic or even iconic qualities never seemed to align for me with how quotidian and commonplace they actually are, and that tension— between coolness and just trying too hard— keeps me fascinated.
Inevitably, there is, of course, more than a touch of treacly nostalgia and mid-life crisis-driven sentimentality here, too, which is a bit odd since my habitual longing for dated, anonymous buildings and generic places is a bit eldritch. Sure, those glass towers and commercial complexes recall long-gone childhood places like the Galleria in Sherman Oaks and University Town Center near La Jolla, but they also remind me of Hollywood’s dalliances with a darker, more menacingly technologized vision of modernity: the strange obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Death Star in the original Star Wars trilogy, the USS Cygnus, the beautiful spaceship in Disney’s 1979 sci-fi dud The Black Hole, and a favorite: the magnificent large scale architectural model of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters built for Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner.
Glass Screens
It seems that earliest recollections of Southern California were made driving around the San Fernando Valley, Irvine, suburban San Diego, or else watching The Rockford Files, Simon and Simon and Three’s Company.
What I didn't see in person I saw on TV.
Now, in my head, all those memories are mixed up and interchangeable.
Some are mine, and some were shot on video: distant images of vast, somewhat mechanical pieces of freeway infrastructure, lots of little domestic things, big two and three hundred unit apartment buildings on Sherman Way and Magnolia and out by UCSD, or the occasional dumbly impersonal but luminously reflective office building near the waterfront or next to a freeway.
Perhaps those media references also say something about how I saw or experienced the Southern Californian landscape as a child and a teenager— mostly through the windshield screen, reflected on a facade, or sometimes only on television, in other words, through a piece of glass.
Notes
Foucault had some interesting things to say about gardens and mirrors:
Mirrors:
“The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.
From the standpoint of the mirror, I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Then, starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.
The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal since to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.”
Gardens:
“The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm.
As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space).
The garden is the smallest parcel of the world, and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).”
Michel Foucault, Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité
Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité October, 1984; (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967 Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec)
Pereira’s nearby UC Irvine campus was used as a backdrop for the third feature in the Planet of the Apes series, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 1972/3. The escape scenes in Logan’s Run (1976) were shot at the Hyperion Treatment Plant in El Segundo, designed by Anthony Lumsden. Soylent Green (1973) was filmed, in part, at the LA Coliseum, the Chevron Refinery Power Generating Station also in El Segundo, and the Marina City Club Apartments, also designed by Lumsden. In addition, Richard Linklater shot many exteriors for his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel, A Scanner Darkly, nearby, in Anaheim, California in the later 1990s.