The flying saucer LAX design is just the OPPOSITE of today's airports, whatever "best" might mean here (How beautiful the design looks from outer space, perhaps?). There is rarely anything "central" in the terminals, pickup and dropoff is organized by airline. Long branches reach out from the terminals to gates at the ends of twigs. Mandelbrot designs come closer to describing the layout of modern airports than architects' plans.
I agree, but 'big plans' do not compute with the fragmentation of private ownership of land parcels. You can probably only have the fragmentation that we have now, or grand visions where the private ownership of land parcels delays projects and after a while kills them off. I am not advocating one thing or another, it's just different.
The airport design looks interesting - we'll probably find it somewhere in China soon. There it's spelled out, the airlines wanted their own terminals. With today's technologies there shouldn't be an air conditioning problem, especially not in a colder climate.
As many readers have said, the Lloyd Wright designs do have a touch of the Speers about them. But the Pereira and Luckman design for LAX was brilliant and it appears to have been the templet for today's best airports.
East LA. If you know where the Avenue 43 exit from the Pasadena Freeway is, come off the freeway from downtown, turn right at Griffin Avenue. Los Avenidos territory.
I have a genuine question about LA, if you (or anyone else) has time to answer...
Despite a lifetime of seeing LA depicted in movies and on TV, it doesn't seem to have a centre or a heart, the way European cities do (or east coast cities such as New York* or Australian cities). A town square, a communal space outside a city hall, an esplanade next to a river. Is that the case? Where is the 'centre' of LA (and I don't mean in a geographical sense)?
* Disclaimer, I've never been to the US so I'm just guessing, but places like New York do appear to have that focal point, like Times Square on NYE for instance.
- my parents and other relatives were married in his world famous all glass church in Rancho Palos Verdes. Wayfarers Chapel has a
two year waiting list and couples come from as far as Australia to have their weddings there- it's gorgeous.
- I remember walking home from my grade school in San Pedro 90732 literally crying like I had been tear gassed the air was so bad late '60s. My parents said it was even worse before incinerators were banned.
A lot has changed since then. I was born and raised in LA and I can remember in the 80's days where a thick layer of brown was a constant on the horizon. Since California has implemented tougher air quality regulation pollution has been reduced greatly. The difference really is night and day, but there is always room for improvement.
Just curious, but what neighborhood did you grow up in?
Good design is possibly the best and ultimately the cheapest way to deliver the greatest bang for bucks. Unfortunately it is now mainly cookie cutter designs that are par for the course.
Lloyd Wright was the son of, not the same person as, Frank Lloyd Wright. Obviously absorbed a lot from his famous father though, the civic center he designed would have been an excellent base for future growth (in the 1920's). Large scale projects like these are prohibitively expensive given land prices in SoCal
...and the brown envelope mafia crony capitalists found they could make just as much money out of property speculation by doing less and made just as big a mess as some ego driven careerist architects dreamed of making.
It's like an mix between the Bruce Report, Dubai having more money than sense, Germania and Corbusier on speed. Now we know where it all came from, Would it have been built using the Bison LPS. Scary.
Wright's reminds me of the sprawling Tyrell Corporation in Bladerunner
Well Wright's Ennis-Brown house was, famously, used not just as a location to shoot the entrance/car park of Deckard's block in the film but also as a pattern for the set design for his apartment.
The model does look totalitarian, but isn't LA's carcentric sprawl a different kind of totalitarianism? Some elements of the model might have helped in providing greater urban density to that city, as long as they were broken up by the inevitable anarchy that comes with real life.
What carcentric development has done in one of the most beautiful regions of North America is a crime against nature and humanity.
Most urban designers these days do not get the vast amounts of opportunity to spend long hours thinking up fantastic neighbourhood concepts and sci-fi resplendant new landscapes and buildings of the likes seen in the above essay (from the early 20th century).
Its like much of everthing these days, its no time & less money, and less staff in the office and the bosses (read property developers) are soley interested in making just fat profits from property deals (eg Trump) to give a damn about aesthetics and other lovely things. I would have thought with the substantial amount of money to be made in property development, the reverse would be true but it is not. Good design is being given less and less of priority which is why we end up with poor functioning cities and suburbs
Just means that parts of dubai will become unlivable in around 30 years time due to some flaw in forward thinking urban design (sea level rising is an obvious one)
Well lets face it, orange is Trumps favourate colour. i watched some doco about him and his developments which was made 15 years ago, where he boasted constantly that the best apartments were all covered in mirrors, gold & brass. Theres a reason he changed the oval office curtain/draped to gold. I'm still wating for him to install a strippers pole.
Well its quite noticable that the one exception to all the old "good ideas" is that of the trump tower. reminds me of that saying that you cant polish a turd, or that a poo covered in glitter is still a piece of sh%t.
I grew up in Los Angeles in the 50's and 60's. This architecture is all very nice and that, but even if built would have done nothing to mitigate the fact that (unless you had lots of money) it was an unmitigated hell. I remember days where the air pollution was so bad your eyes would burn and it hurt - actually was painful - to take a deep breath. Combine that with the heat and a shining grey sky that beat down on you, where the soup was so thick all you could see of the sun was a diffuse bright patch in the sky, where even the grass turned brown and the trees died from the pollution, and you have a hell on earth of the sort described by Tolkein when he wrote about the wastelands of Mordor.
And yes, there was then (and is now) a sharp divergence between the life styles of the rich and the poor, and very little middle ground. If you could afford to live in one of these towers it could be presumed that you would never have to consort with the slime - as the Great Unwashed were described by the police - that infested the streets, much like the free roaming vermin they were thought to be.
Unbuilt Los Angeles: the city that might have been – in pictures
Comments
Blade Runner for fiction, Man in the High Castle for predicting the fascist hegemony the USA is becoming ;-)
More like Blade Runner.
My very words. I was about to post that and I so that you beat me to it.
The flying saucer LAX design is just the OPPOSITE of today's airports, whatever "best" might mean here (How beautiful the design looks from outer space, perhaps?). There is rarely anything "central" in the terminals, pickup and dropoff is organized by airline. Long branches reach out from the terminals to gates at the ends of twigs. Mandelbrot designs come closer to describing the layout of modern airports than architects' plans.
I agree, but 'big plans' do not compute with the fragmentation of private ownership of land parcels. You can probably only have the fragmentation that we have now, or grand visions where the private ownership of land parcels delays projects and after a while kills them off. I am not advocating one thing or another, it's just different.
The airport design looks interesting - we'll probably find it somewhere in China soon. There it's spelled out, the airlines wanted their own terminals. With today's technologies there shouldn't be an air conditioning problem, especially not in a colder climate.
It's like something out of Blade Runner.
As many readers have said, the Lloyd Wright designs do have a touch of the Speers about them. But the Pereira and Luckman design for LAX was brilliant and it appears to have been the templet for today's best airports.
East LA. If you know where the Avenue 43 exit from the Pasadena Freeway is, come off the freeway from downtown, turn right at Griffin Avenue. Los Avenidos territory.
Well said, the first illustration looks remarkably like Hitler's vision for Berlin.
Lincoln Center.
Perhaps someone else has mentioned Goldin & Lubell's "Never Built New York"?
Megalomaniacs envision cities that can never be built. There is a coterie of panting architects who trail behind them.
Spot on. Quite possibly London and Los Angeles too.
You made the right connection. Tyrell HQ actually exists, they filmed Ennis House, designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright.
http://ennishouse.com/
We need to build green cities, not the kind of giant monuments that Hitler planned for his Berlin.
- here you are:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayfarers_Chapel
Ironically, as a boy I caught sandabs off the Redondo Beach Monstad Pier as well as learning to surf at Torrance Beach.
I have a genuine question about LA, if you (or anyone else) has time to answer...
Despite a lifetime of seeing LA depicted in movies and on TV, it doesn't seem to have a centre or a heart, the way European cities do (or east coast cities such as New York* or Australian cities). A town square, a communal space outside a city hall, an esplanade next to a river. Is that the case? Where is the 'centre' of LA (and I don't mean in a geographical sense)?
* Disclaimer, I've never been to the US so I'm just guessing, but places like New York do appear to have that focal point, like Times Square on NYE for instance.
- my parents and other relatives were married in his world famous all glass church in Rancho Palos Verdes. Wayfarers Chapel has a
two year waiting list and couples come from as far as Australia to have their weddings there- it's gorgeous.
- I remember walking home from my grade school in San Pedro 90732 literally crying like I had been tear gassed the air was so bad late '60s. My parents said it was even worse before incinerators were banned.
- and all but screams a phallus fixation.
I straightaway thought of the Tyrell HQ from the opening scene of Blade Runner.
That wouldn't have been so much the case a century ago.
Lloyd Wright's Civic Center is Albert Speer's monumental. Had the Nazis won the war Berlin would look like that.
A lot has changed since then. I was born and raised in LA and I can remember in the 80's days where a thick layer of brown was a constant on the horizon. Since California has implemented tougher air quality regulation pollution has been reduced greatly. The difference really is night and day, but there is always room for improvement.
Just curious, but what neighborhood did you grow up in?
Thank you. That looks interesting.
Thanks Chris
Good design is possibly the best and ultimately the cheapest way to deliver the greatest bang for bucks. Unfortunately it is now mainly cookie cutter designs that are par for the course.
The Santa Monica Causeway Company should be suing Dubai for stealing their master plan.
Lloyd Wright was the son of, not the same person as, Frank Lloyd Wright. Obviously absorbed a lot from his famous father though, the civic center he designed would have been an excellent base for future growth (in the 1920's). Large scale projects like these are prohibitively expensive given land prices in SoCal
Wow, that first drawing looks like it comes from the concept art of The Man in The High Castle!
Couldn't agree more.
As shade more conventional:
https://archive.org/stream/TheNewColonialsAPlanBookOf51Two-storyHouses/TheNewColonials#page/n0/mode/2up
...and the brown envelope mafia crony capitalists found they could make just as much money out of property speculation by doing less and made just as big a mess as some ego driven careerist architects dreamed of making.
Tower of Civilisation. The Dark Tower.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/b5/57/40/b55740303f4143d2be5d5faed0818692.jpg
It's like an mix between the Bruce Report, Dubai having more money than sense, Germania and Corbusier on speed. Now we know where it all came from, Would it have been built using the Bison LPS. Scary.
Well Wright's Ennis-Brown house was, famously, used not just as a location to shoot the entrance/car park of Deckard's block in the film but also as a pattern for the set design for his apartment.
You might be interested in my in-depth essay on the architecture of Blade Runner - its making and meaning etc - which forms one of five articles on my website on aspects of the film.
The model does look totalitarian, but isn't LA's carcentric sprawl a different kind of totalitarianism? Some elements of the model might have helped in providing greater urban density to that city, as long as they were broken up by the inevitable anarchy that comes with real life.
What carcentric development has done in one of the most beautiful regions of North America is a crime against nature and humanity.
Yes, it's very like the Tyrelll Corporation building in style, isn't it?
Most urban designers these days do not get the vast amounts of opportunity to spend long hours thinking up fantastic neighbourhood concepts and sci-fi resplendant new landscapes and buildings of the likes seen in the above essay (from the early 20th century).
Its like much of everthing these days, its no time & less money, and less staff in the office and the bosses (read property developers) are soley interested in making just fat profits from property deals (eg Trump) to give a damn about aesthetics and other lovely things. I would have thought with the substantial amount of money to be made in property development, the reverse would be true but it is not. Good design is being given less and less of priority which is why we end up with poor functioning cities and suburbs
Yes, I noted the similarity right away, too.
Just means that parts of dubai will become unlivable in around 30 years time due to some flaw in forward thinking urban design (sea level rising is an obvious one)
The architect was Lloyd Wright, not Frank Lloyd Wright. Lloyd was Frank's son, and he had his office in Los Angeles.
That Trump tower is hideously ugly.
Well lets face it, orange is Trumps favourate colour. i watched some doco about him and his developments which was made 15 years ago, where he boasted constantly that the best apartments were all covered in mirrors, gold & brass. Theres a reason he changed the oval office curtain/draped to gold. I'm still wating for him to install a strippers pole.
Well its quite noticable that the one exception to all the old "good ideas" is that of the trump tower. reminds me of that saying that you cant polish a turd, or that a poo covered in glitter is still a piece of sh%t.
I grew up in Los Angeles in the 50's and 60's. This architecture is all very nice and that, but even if built would have done nothing to mitigate the fact that (unless you had lots of money) it was an unmitigated hell. I remember days where the air pollution was so bad your eyes would burn and it hurt - actually was painful - to take a deep breath. Combine that with the heat and a shining grey sky that beat down on you, where the soup was so thick all you could see of the sun was a diffuse bright patch in the sky, where even the grass turned brown and the trees died from the pollution, and you have a hell on earth of the sort described by Tolkein when he wrote about the wastelands of Mordor.
And yes, there was then (and is now) a sharp divergence between the life styles of the rich and the poor, and very little middle ground. If you could afford to live in one of these towers it could be presumed that you would never have to consort with the slime - as the Great Unwashed were described by the police - that infested the streets, much like the free roaming vermin they were thought to be.
I don't miss the place one damn bit.
That's exactly what I was thinking!
Albert Speer wasn't the architect by any chance, was he? Because it looks an awful lot like Germania.
So LA was supposed to look just like what Dubai actually looks like now.
"looking over one of the city’s poorest immigrant communities".
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