A month ago, I wrote about a small black glass tower near LAX that has fascinated me. Today I’m sharing a few unrealized attempts— from almost a decade and a half ago— to design two black glass towers and a reflective glass subdivision.
Looking back, these are awkward and incomplete projects, and their guilelessness chagrins me. But, I am also impressed by my utter naiveté.
The projects are described in three cheerful but increasingly desperate letters to a potential client. The letters are dumb, overly optimistic, and possibly fictional— the kind of nonsense I sent out regularly, without invitation, when I was mostly driven by blind ambition and not much sense.
I’m certain that my 2008 self thought I’d be building things like this today. I am not. That sort of dumb optimism is hard to maintain, especially when midlife usually demands settling for the most realistic path forward. However, I want to recover that other attitude (minus the callowness) because so very little good comes artistically from continuously making peace with one’s failures and lost dreams.
On another note, I'll be taking a break from The Horizontal Fault for a while. Later this week, I start teaching in New York at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture. The last time I taught was at Berkeley in the Spring of 2020, before the pandemic hit. My graduate design studio at Pratt is based on the Low Rise Los Angeles housing competition Christopher Hawthorne organized earlier this year. Eventually, I’ll be writing about the results as a follow-up to an earlier piece I wrote about small-scale redevelopment for Los Angeles.
I will be back here in a few weeks. In the meantime, I will keep thinking about mirrored buildings and why they interest me so much.1
One: A hybrid museum for the Wilshire Corridor
Dear ███,
I just realized I could attach the file here.
This was a concept for a cultural community and arts hub for Koreatown.
I developed it for ██████ ███who is now at the ███ Gallery in ██████.
██████ engaged us to develop this concept as a real-world analog to ███ online, press, and publicity activities at ████████████.
The file’s been compressed, so some of the line quality on the images mighty be fuzzy, but you'll get a general idea of it.
I wanted the building to be an accessible indoor/outdoor art experience and “social condenser,” conceptually a new type of a building for LA— something like what you have been working on: a hybrid or a synthesis of a museum, gallery, lounge, café, lab, and library.
The building is composed of four stacked geodes clad in reflective black glass. There are a few areas of clear glass indicated in the renderings, primarily in some of the viewing rooms.
All of the geodes have the same crystalline shape, like Russian dolls. In addition, each geode has its own unique outdoor terrace or garden. These spaces are meant to function as public gathering areas and zones for artists’ projects, interventions, and performances— like the rooftop space at the Metropolitan.
This was supposed to be a vertical non-collecting kunsthalle. Like the New Museum and the original Whitney in New York or the recent addition to the Tate in London, the plan was that exhibitions could be curated independently on each floor or could connect between floors.
Traditional towers carry their weight or loads to the ground via steel and concrete columns, hanging the cladding off a subsidiary exterior skeleton like a curtain.
This tower is a bit different. I'm not sure if it's a traditional tower at all. But, looking back at it now, I realize that it is quite indebted to Marcel Breuer’s Whitney (now the MetBreuer.)
I did not realize it at the time, but now I can see that I basically inverted Breuer’s stacking approach and swapped monolithic concrete for opaque glass. I guess that’s how influence works; even from a distance, a powerful project can guide the hand of a lesser architect.
We attempted something new here and treated the entire structure as independent but integrated steel cages.
Each cage is hung off a central spine or trunk that carries all the building’s infrastructure and circulation systems.
So the superstructure hangs off cantilevered truss arms that, in turn, rest on shelf-like connections attached to the main spine.
That means very basically that each of the floors is suspended from the floor above it. One way to think of it is how a treehouse works: with the house-part resting or suspended from the tree's branches.
It was supposed to be located at the corner of Irolo Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown. There’s a very funny little jog or bend going north-south there, across the street from the Line Hotel. Apparently, Irolo and Normandie are misaligned due to an error in the original plat map for the area.
The result is that Irolo is about 50 feet west of Normandie, and therefore there’s a curve in the road. We took advantage of this misalignment to locate the museum on the leftover wedge-shaped lot between the Wilshire Normandie Metro Redline station and Irolo Avenue, which a Carl’s Jr currently occupies.
Placing the art building directly over a dedicated underground Metro station would mean car-free access from all over LA.
I hope you enjoy it!
Peter
Two: A Museum for Aoyama
Dear ███,
Apologies, I forgot to send you the other project we were discussing.
This ██████ competition design was for a vertical museum.
The site for the competition was in Aoyama, in central Tokyo, near the Prada store by Herzog and De Meuron. You can see their building in the foreground on the right, above.
We designed it in the form of an octagonally shaped reflective black glass tower. The tower was meant to be colorful and night. I imagined it could emit a multi-hued glow from within, like a big giant bioluminescent jellyfish.
The central concept for this project was that █████████ it could stage exhibitions sequentially along a circulation path, sort of like an extended version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim as if the building was a big Slinky.
11 years later, I realize that the intricate circulation system now reminds me of Vessel in New York, although we intended to keep the circulation tubes enclosed and not open air. As a result, they would provide spectacular views of Tokyo.
This project extended my ideas for the last project I sent you, the ███ ██████ design for Koreatown here in LA.
Four parts of the museum tower were designed as solid interlocking geodes, a little like the Koreatown ███ ██████ project I sent you, to accommodate display areas requiring large, flexible floorplates.
The rest of the structure was more doughnut-like, made up of a series of structural tubes, fitted with escalators and stairs, connected by a vertical elevator spine at the rear of the building.
Some parts of the building are cantilevering out into space, and others are bridging each other and tieing back the suspended pieces.
Although it may look like it makes no sense structurally because it doesn’t “stack” like a traditional tower, in principle, our Engineer ██ ████ felt that the structural forces in the tower could resolve themselves elegantly if we significantly reinforced the spine of the building.
We didn’t win the ██████ competition (or even get a mention), but I got a kick out of digging up this old project.
It was inspired by some of the black and reflective glass towers I grew up around in Southern California and one of the projects I always like to see when I am in Hong Kong, Paul Rudolph’s octagonal Lippo Centre Towers.
Peter
Three: People in Glass Houses…
Dear ███,
Hello again!
My apologies; I’m so absent-minded!
I forgot to send you these last two competition entries; they also utilized black and reflective glass like the previous projects.
We submitted the first one to an ██████ ideas competition that asked entrants to reimagine suburbia.
We got a notable mention for our ██████ suburban subdivision, emphasis on the division part.
The second was a competition entry for a ██████ museum ██████ ████ ██████on the ████ River.
Please get back to me when you have had a chance to review these projects; I hope we can find a way to work together.
Peter
Truncated Glass Pyramids
Notes
Foucault: On 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. So 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.
Michel Foucault, Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité
“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec