There is one Meme Our ‘Woke’ is revolving around having a light fun in the New World. It depicts a man wearing a spandex in the field of 1980s laser glory, hands up in a gesture of jazz presentation. The caption reads, “You can always pronounce an Italian,” and there’s a sentence between his palms: “It’s never racist.” In terms of vocal performance, I would like to agree, but in our city, there is a disgusting presence of architectural gestures that are an insult not only to taste but also to the ability to live, sight, aesthetic conscience, floor and innovative descent. Los Angeles architecture, the nation of Italy and many ideas of the Renaissance.
You already know what I’m talking about. Hidden Valley Renaissance is a field dressing of Italian Renaissance architecture – often pabulum, sorted by taste, accepted and consumed accordingly. Also green grains. Grove, and on the street his cousin, Palazzo. Americana in the brand luxury apartment. Park La Brema Villa. Suite of projects known as Orsini, Da Vinci, Medici, Lorenzo, Ferrante, Visconti, etc.
The Swiss-French architect famously decided that the carburetor was a “living machine” but the developers behind the Hidden Valley Renaissance properties only envisioned the house as a cake topper for the cheesecake factory. An idea for a stool. For a living, these stores are designed from the outside as a dim simulacro of Italian palazzos, with some Beaux-Arts Dudaderi track lighting and essential retail footprints. I refrain from using the word “development” in reference to such land-use efforts, because this type of real estate actually excludes any kind of development from itself. These small self-contained towns, these adult playgrounds have been strictly zoned for pre-determined cultural and commercial activities that are considered appropriate for the public by billionaires like the mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, who is behind America in the brand and the grove. They are the lifeblood of urban existence and are designed to accommodate any possibility for the kind of casual, ad hoc commercial and community events.
I know people living in apartments in the United States. They are fine. If you live in the upper unit of the Tory Birch Store, you can spit directly into the patio patrons of Amici Trattoria. The interiors are definitely all un-plazo-like straight lines, optic white walls, steel appliances, beechwood accessories. The exterior is an international-style porch – next to the main elevator, which is approximately the rusty iron side of the Eiffel Tower, there are facades from bright white window frames to town bricks with a courtyard of Corinthian columns to dark taps. Swampy mustard concrete with Art Deco trim. And yet eclecticism is less than the sum of its parts, like when you combine all the colors of the rainbow only the mud ends with gray. The fact that these places can be absolutely fun to live in is helpful for their main function which is an indicator of a good life that the members of the community are hiding, where the members of the community are hiding.
This is painfully obvious in LA Rented Not necessarily meaningful Captured. California Alliance for the Most Recent Community Empowerment Institute Vacancy report “Thousands of luxury units across the city are vacant, second home or owned as a net investment.” Caruso a. Website Says its Excelsior luxury condo units are “100% occupied”, although for most of my evenings in the US to spend at Sephora, the windows of most of these domiciles remain intriguing, not to mention the musical waterfall in the center of the mall. Dark On a busy Saturday night, I spied around a quarter of my friends squeezing around a bistro table in one of Excelsior’s small terraces. The view of the real human bodies gathered there only draws more attention to the uniform emptiness of the apartment’s facade – the banisters have no laundry space, no plants, no unique window treatments, little glare of television sets filtering curtains, nothing. Talk about rubbing salt in my wounds – d’oh! This is a life-changing experience with a huge downstairs bathroom next to the giant Nordstrom where I empty my divaCop after pointing to 30% off-titles at Barnes & Noble.
Emptyness is baked in the concept of luxury. This, by nature, is not for everyone. What does it mean to stack luxury apartments in chain restaurants and fast-fashion stores, like many of these events, and call it community? Are shops deceived by the idea of luxury or are they deceived by the community? Or both? Or is the purpose of luxury to see how many vectors of income generation can be jammed on the same property?
The Euro-mix style, of course, bleeds into all sorts of real estate holdings, the most aesthetically pleasing of which should be Jeffrey Palmer’s collection of house-of-Gucci-esque buildings crawling downtown. My personal favorite is Ferrante, which is named after a pseudonymous Italian novelist but I think it’s probably inspired by a dish in Sbarro. This contagious olive factory / cheesecake garden style may have a lot to do with real estate scans searching for a new Renaissance, but the buildings themselves are less inspired by Renaissance theories than obscure razors in the world. Some of the architectural features of Palmer’s real estate holdings include an Egyptian obelisk in the middle of a Roman fountain, an eco-friendly papyrus font design, and a medieval crest that looks like David Cronenberg’s attempt to rebrand the Rebate Academy. Like diseases, aesthetics can get out of hand. The vision of exemplary history by Palmer’s buildings is firmly out of the history of the neighbors they occupy. For humans and birds – the barbed wire that refuses to live and the upper bridges that allow tenants to cross the road without going out on the sidewalk mark the residence as a fort.
City blocks have been leveled to make room for these cosmic late compounds, although most buildings built in this style are alternately obscure. (Cosmic Latte is actually the name of the average color of the universe. It is essentially beige.) It is said that Los Angeles is a city of surfaces, and it is safe to consider many of our architecture kitsch, because when a building puts all its cards on the table, the relationship between its environment and its inhabitants is free to form and transform. .
I don’t like arrogance I love shopping, and I love unique buildings. So, why does the idea of Sprinkles Cupcake sitting in the direct eye of an ATM make me feel uncomfortable? Because of the delightful gardens and fun-time machinery involved, some of the hidden valley renaissance gives a disturbing sense of efficacy, a subtle illusion of hidden control among all the advertising copies about culture and community. And because it’s stuck between trails and striped parchments and exterior ornate waterfalls, it’s far more damaging than the bald-faced modernist experiments depicting the most destructive but bar-hanging residential architecture of medieval Los Angeles. To this day the dingbats that make up the city are quickly built into a uniform box with slap-on exteriors and plucky paint works. Many have fallen into disrepair, but as many have been revived and rebuilt from within to adapt to the ups and downs of their inhabitants. Each uniform box paradoxically symbolizes its special neighbor. The stylistic experiments of architects such as Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, John Lautner, and Frank Lloyd Wright did not become the imaginary reality of pure design, but with Googie diners and stucco bungalows, they helped shape the architect. The language of Los Angeles that makes the best of its blunted visions. They Say something About the city.
In cream and black these fake-Italian monuments seem to say nothing. What these self-contained spaces are designed to do is eliminate the possibility. They do not have any ambiguous phenomena that are not pre-approved in the blueprint phase. Architectural configurations are more efficient than any modernist box. These buildings pretend to be imaginary, so you don’t have to. They have the glow of history to save you the trouble of finding it for yourself.
In his 1969 book, The Economy of Cities,“ Jane Jacobs writes: “People who think we are better off without cities, especially big, untidy, untidy cities, never tire of explaining that very large cities, in any case, are incompetent and impractical.” Jacobs was an economist who thoroughly examined the “valuable incompetence” of cities. “I don’t mean that cities are economically valuable despite their inefficiency and impracticality,” she continues. Because They are incompetent and impractical. ” [emphasis mine]. She explains that the freedom of small entrepreneurs, businessmen, construction businessmen and the general public is the freedom to use and allow the city to develop. A self-contained mega-complex of planned residential, commercial and cultural activities is not really “development”. This is stability. Attempts to build them according to a fully calibrated mix of aspirations and degrading tastes cover their deepest ambitions to become whole factories to survive, eliminating impracticality and inefficiency. And, to a certain extent, the living themselves.
The growth of a city is a reliable link between its citizens and the civic bodies they choose to represent – a conscious population always finds a line between support and control, constantly encouraging the government to be on its side (supportive side, if you are thinking). . Mega-developers avoid this significant civil conflict by building adult playgrounds and using them as caricatures of fancy European cities to hide the fact that they are designed to control and monitor the lifestyle of their inhabitants. These buildings are designed for kids because of how the building looks at you. And they pile up on the arbitrary indicators of luxury until they get the silent frenzy of grandeur, the deaf silence of imagination.
Christina Catherine Martinez is the daughter of a writer, actress, comedian and Los Angeles. He is the recipient of the Creative Capital / Andy Warhole Foundation Arts Writers Grant and has been named a comedian by both Timeout LA and New York Magazine. Her book of essays, “Beauty Relationships” is available from Hesse Press. She was born in Southern California.