Another Postcard from the Southland

We went down to LA last weekend to see our friend Jessica’s play reading at the Open Fist Theatre in Hollywood. One of the great things about LA is the 99-seat house. Equity actors are allowed to perform in non-union theaters if they are less than 100 seats. There must be hundreds of these theaters in LA. You can see great plays and great actors in an intimate setting at very little cost. Jessica’s play is about a place very familiar to Paul and me. Thankfully, only one of the characters is really close to reality, and she is no longer living. One of the actors was O-lan Jones, who would be familiar to Magic Theatre audiences. She was a real standout. We were relieved not to see ourselves in any of the characters!

The playwright outside the theater

We stayed downtown at Checkers, which was once a posh hotel. I think it was like a sister to Campton Place in SF. It has been kept on life support by big chains and is now a Hilton. But the beds are good, and I love sitting in the rooftop hot tub and looking at the highrise towers above me. 

View from the jacuzzi

One of the weird LA mashups was driving out to Monterey Park and going to a Chinese restaurant in a mall where all the businesses are Chinese. There are few English signs, and they are usually misspelled. The best part was that the architecture was High Taco Bell. Really the most hideous fake Mission Revival (which is kind of fake even when it’s good) highlighted by neon. This topped off (or bottomed off?) by a surface parking lot and two-level subterranean parking garage that brought to mind that splendid kids’ puzzle Rush Hour. Once we got upstairs, there was a band on the other side of the screen playing for a wedding. A wedding attended by maybe a dozen people. That said, the duck was quite good.

We got to chat with Charlie Schroeder, whose new book, Man of War, sounds hilarious.

The screenwriter blows out his candles

We were in China celebrating our buddy Ian’s birthday. While we are name-dropping, we have to mention that Ian’s movie The Oranges, starring Hugh Laurie, comes out October 5. Welcome to New Jersey.

Our good buddy Johnny took us to the farmers market on Ivar in Hollywood on Sunday. It’s huge! A real town square. One of our favorite bookstores of all time, Hennessey & Ingalls, has a branch in a little retail center that was repurposed from some kind of warehouse. And of course we got to see the rear end of Crossroads of the World, another great LA mashup! Funky fantastic.

The Ivar Theater along the farmers market

The market

The rear end of crossroads of the world

Back downtown, we wandered around a bit and were pleased to see so many people living in converted office buildings. There is still a paucity of good restaurants and food emporiums, but there is no lack of dog walkers—always a sure sign of gentrification. Certain pockets are still just empty, and other pockets are still scary. Pershing Square is really bad. Legorreta’s bold colors don’t do much for the homeless.

Pershing Square

Union Station

We took the subway to Union Station, which was packed. It is the first time I ever saw it full of people, just as it is supposed to be. The ticket area was closed off, and Paul and I thought it would make a great setting for “The Ghost Train.” The old Harvey House restaurant is still empty, just like it was when my buddy Kristina first showed it to me in the late 1970s. Apparently, it is leased out for special events and photo shoots. The tile floor is divine. Here is a blog post about the space. http://laplaces.blogspot.com/2010/02/union-station-harvey-house.html

CA Union Station - the old Harvey House Restaurant

Across the street from Union Station is Olvera Street, the perfect alley of cheap crap. Despite the hideous trinkets, I love the scale. This time, we wandered into the Avila Adobe, which gives a sense of how LA’s earliest Spanish settlers lived. I especially enjoyed the scale of the courtyard.

Avila Adobe

Although Frank Gehry has been overexposed, his Disney Concert Hall is still beautiful, at least on two sides. The Chandler and the Mark Taper Forum brought people back downtown in the 1960s, and the Disney Concert Hall extended that possibility into the new century. Just down the street, Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art never quite achieved the same level of significance. After the expensive, postmodern, mostly subterranean showpiece was completed, most folk said they preferred the Temporary Contemporary, a former police car warehouse reshaped by Frank Gehry. That was where most of the fun took place.

Disney Concert Hall

Temporary Contemporary

My favorite show in the Temporary (now known as the Geffen Contemporary, although most members still call it the Temporary) was the one in 1989 about the Case Study Houses called “Blueprints for Modern Living,” curated by Elizabeth Smith. As I have written before, I think this show was the catalyst for reexamining midcentury modernism. It sure brought Julius Shulman out of his Soriano lair in the Hollywood Hills. The staff used the space beautifully, rebuilding two Case Study Houses and the living room of the Eames House (not quite the re-creation we saw recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but cool nonetheless). At MOCA up the hill, I count a wonderful Ad Reinhardt show and a Robert Irwin retrospective in the 1990s as two of my favorites. MOCA started life as the museum that artists supported. Back then, LACMA was kind of fuddy duddy.

Blueprints for Modern Living:
History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses
by Elizabeth A. T. Smith

So it’s sad to see MOCA in such trouble. There was an enormous show called “The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol,” and while I really liked the Mark Bradford and Tauba Auerbach canvases, I really can’t be bothered with the Andy Warhols. He is one artist who really suffers from overexposure. Rather like Salvador Dali. Director Jeffrey Deitch appears to be favoring a kind of safe avant garde. And some folks feel that he has made a Faustian bargain with tract house mogul Eli Broad. The prediction is that Broad will eventually take over MOCA and fold it into his own Broad Museum (with a new building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro under construction now).

The Broad

Over at the County Museum, director Michael Govan was willing to disagree with the mighty mogul, and after his namesake building was finished, Broad picked up his marbles and moved downtown. Strangely enough, this seems to have served the County Museum well. They are much freer to pursue all kinds of different avenues and have now become the preferred museum for artists. Although it was the Temporary that put on the Michael Heizer show in its early days, it is the County Museum that got the rock.

Levitated mass by Michael Heizer

In the last year, the County Museum exhibit “Living in a Modern Way” bookended the Case Study House show from 20 plus years ago. And their reconstruction of Ed Kienholz’s “Five Car Stud” was one of the most disturbing and wonderful pieces to be seen in recent LA history.

Although I didn’t care for the “Abstraction after Warhol” show, I was relieved to see the Rothkos from the Panza collection front and center in their show of masterworks from the collection. I remember when these were shown at the Temporary and how they were barely lit. They just hummed. Count Giuseppe Panza’s gift must have been one of hope. Hope that this new museum would forge a brave new way in art. Maybe it will again one day.

Finding Platner at Princeton

Warren Platner endures as a bright (if occasionally shiny) light from the 1960s and 70s. As an architect, he is best remembered for interiors and furniture design. Interiors tend to disappear, but furniture endures. Since his chairs for Knoll cost so much to make, the tables are the ones that most designers can readily identify. But it’s time to look at him again for his architecture too.

courtesty dwr.com

KnollStudio®
Platner Lounge Collection

KnollStudio®
Platner Dining and Low Tables

Like his former employers, Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche, he was trying to break out of the ubiquity of corporate modernism—American style. Sometimes he could go overboard, but the excesses of postmodernism make his explorations look disciplined, if not exactly restrained.

His own house in Connecticut runneth over with multiple level changes, window seats, nooks, and luxurious materials. Makes me think of Christopher Alexander gone modern baroque. Like an excited kid sketching, he didn’t know when to stop. The living spaces suggest that he might have gotten too generous a discount at the furrier.

Alexandra Lange, one of my favorite design journalists, has written about Platner in Design Observer. A few years ago, her long piece used Platner’s bold use of brass as a jumping off point (see http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=12047

and

http://observersroom.designobserver.com/alexandralange/post/in-dwell-platners-opulent-modernism/21868/)

Platner was on my mind in early May when we were invited to venture out to Princeton for a Mother’s Day brunch. Oddly enough, we could not locate a map when we got off the train. Since we were early, we decided to wander around until we found our destination, the faculty club, guessing that it would be in the center of campus.

Thanks to an abundant landscape, Princeton University is still a beautiful campus. Just walking around, I got the impression that the school seems very conflicted about its architectural identity. This is a school that loves its history—in any era. A lot of revolutionary war events took place in the modest structures near the town/gown edge. Over time, commissioned architects borrowed heavily from the neo-Gothic and neo-Tudor. Sort of a U.S. university straight from central casting impersonating a (stone) British university.

Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Whitman Hall
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Occasionally that conflict gets resolved beautifully, like when Gwathmey Siegel, in its moment of modernist glory, repaired the Greek Revival Whig Hall after a fire by inserting a sculptural intervention (1972). For years, the school’s favorite architect seemed to be Venturi Scott Brown, who navigated the tension between old and new with a heavy tilt towards old. Brick with stone graphics.

More recently, the university seems to be looking forward with new buildings like Rafael Viñoly’s Icahn Laboratory (2002), Fred Fisher’s Sherrerd Hall (2008), and another engineering building on the boards by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, But then at the same time, it just looked way backward with a neo-Hogwarts dorm and dining commons (2007). The monstrosity was built largely with funds from eBay zillionaire (and failed Californian gubernatorial candidate) Meg Whitman and of course is named for her.

Icahn Laboratory by Vinoly
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Robinson Hall by Yamasaki
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Earlier buildings such as Feinberg Hall by Williams-Tsien (1986) and Marx Hall by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood (1993) negotiate this tension of building modern in a neo-everything-goes context with grace, finding a thoughtful middle way. One of my favorite buildings was I.M. Pei’s unapologetically modern dorm, Spelman Halls. The interesting geometric plan offers the pedestrian a kind of dense walking experience drawn from the spatial experience, but not the literal forms of European universities.

Of course there are the usual starchitect suspects sprinkled throughout the campus: the requisite Gehry silver lump, in this case the recent Lewis Library (2008); the squat and ungainly Pelli (a pool from 1990); some bizarre Yamasaki affairs (1965, 1966); and a much-needed lightening of the dour 1960s architecture school by Architectural Research Office (2008). I am eager to return to see all that I missed.

Lewis Library by Frank Gehry
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Lewis Library by Frank Gehry
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Our destination turned out to be the highlight of our tour. We came around the backside of Prospect House and saw the glass and concrete dining room in all its bold modern glory. I remembered it from Platner’s book Ten by Warren Platner. At the point in the late 1960s and early 70s when modernism held sway, Platner was commissioned (in some kind of collaboration with Pietro Belluschi) to renovate the school’s faculty club, which is housed in Prospect House (c. 1850), the university president’s house from 1979 to 1968. Platner didn’t make much of an effort to relate to the “context” or reflect the existing architecture in his addition. Instead, he just attached a concrete trellis to the back of the Victorian mansion to create a kind of grand screened porch for dining. He also refurbished many of the antique public areas with his own trademark furniture. Judging by our casual observation, that groovy early 1970s decor has been banished and returned to a vague historic blandness, but the dining pavilion remains largely intact. What a simple elegant joy it is.

Princeton Faculty Club, Location: Princeton NJ
Architect: Warren Platner
© Ezra Stoller/Esto

Princeton Faculty Club, Location: Princeton NJ
Architect: Warren Platner
© Ezra Stoller/Esto

Princeton Faculty Club, Location: Princeton NJ
Architect: Warren Platner
© Ezra Stoller/Esto

Princeton Faculty Club, Location: Princeton NJ
Architect: Warren Platner
© Ezra Stoller/Esto

The waffle slab ceiling has punched openings along the outermost trellis and along the one wall that attaches to the house. The balanced light, which can be modulated by the sliding wood shutters, provides a wonderful daytime dining experience. We were seated in the center of the room at a large table but could easily hear all of our dining companions. Looking out over the beautiful Prospect Gardens, the room nearly disappears. The building seems to be a mini-me of Platner’s Kent Memorial Library in Suffield, Connecticut (1973), which apparently has been saved.

If you’ve got a friend on the Princeton faculty, go have a meal there. (The corner glass detail alone is worth a visit!) Have your generous host take you on a walking tour of the campus afterward. Then you can go back and look again at Platner’s bold humility and be inspired.

p.s.

The Mother’s Day buffet was really good!