Quote:
Originally Posted by StethJeff
How many years until the stapled-on-bookshelves nonsense like 1400 Fig becomes outdated? It's already laughable but that isn't my question. How long until we see buildings like this the same way we look at hammer pants, barb wire tattoos, and Pontiac Fieros?
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Love this response LOL. I can tell you are on a similar wavelength. Think a little deeper than average.
In many ways I've always felt LA was the barb-wire-tattoo of cities. Very little of LA's architecture is enduring precisely because most of it is fashionable but vapid. It only looks cool to those types who are easily fooled. And "those types" in LA are the masses. Angelenos go for things like this, or the Grove, or Palmer's Tuscan shit-boxes. Believe it or not, MANY people in LA see this crap as attractive. They see the anachronistic, faux-gothic USC Village as "collegial". Our masses are like the hipster who bought Hershel backpacks two years late in an attempt at looking the part. Never the ones to actually originate the part.
The stereotype that appearances matter more than substance is somewhat true. Even our self-described liberals and environmentalists are only fashionable. They don't truly understand the issues behind their purported cause because if they did they'd demand more density, reduced parking minimums, bike infrastructure, and progressive zoning (see Seattle, Vancouver, or Toronto), and yet they fight all of the above when it threatens easy parking for their multiple Range Rovers.
The reason LA's culture is ANTI-progressive is because its residents as a whole lack sophistication. Otherwise they'd demand progress en-bloc and we'd see the fruits of it. Instead we see a politically confused city. It's superficially liberal. It wants mixed use, but it wants abundant free parking. It wants transit, but not through my hood. It wants walkability and bikes, but not where it matters because cars musn't be inconvenienced at any cost. It wants revamped zoning, but in "that other" neighborhood only. It wants walkability, but it wants to preserve the suburban "feel" of a nabe. Yes these issues exist in other cities. But not this widespread. The proportion of those who DON'T "get it" is MUCH greater. That's why little progress and LOTS of REgress happens here. The kinds of developers we end up awarding proves this. Basically Angelenos don't understand urbanism. Are ambivalent about it. They live in an inferior version of Toronto but their brains are still stuck in Simi Valley or Orange County. Dense without connectivity. Discordant and brutally scaled.
It's all connected: a city's aesthetic sensibilities and its collective moralities. You can read a city's intellectual rigor and depth in its everyday architecture and urban design, in the council-members that it elects, and in the policies that it tends to enact. My purpose: a single vote to counterbalance all the backwardness of the masses. Maybe if I can convert a few while I'm here we can make progress and we can build more intelligent (i.e. thoughtful) looking architecture.
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We will see more big proposels in 2016, believe in it. 
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