Everything is fresh, clean and cheap. The facades, ugly, harsh and barren like the communities it surrounds. This place is a testament to Los Angeles and the future; that culture is dynamic, it changes and pulsates new life. It also hints at the future of America, and how we are becoming a compendium of international ideas - a global culture. Los Angeles' trend is being followed from Des Moines to St. Louis to Tucson. It is a wonderful and frightening transformation; a new world where choices abound, ideas mix, where citizens of each city may have little in common with their fellow citizens; but are somehow more a part of a greater global community. Lonely people in an efficient, cold world.
This place is an affront to composition, to ordinary respect which mankind should give himself. This is out of reach of the Angeleno, who knows not aestheticism from a tract-home. Aesthetics is at the heart of environmentalism, it is the parallel which is often put aside by the larger issues of resource scarcity and bioecological threats. Aesthetics is not rooted in tradition or culture, it is as dynamic a concept as the cultures, which promote or deny it. It is the subtle difference between class and trash, leather and rubber, wood and aluminum siding. It is everything that Los Angeles is not. This place is, in the words of Robert Kaplan, the "aesthetic abyss."
facebook
twitter