WA/SA
Working 9-5, at...
[waldrip architects/ s.a.] [architecture- los angeles]
Alberti, Sandro Ultra-’Shopping’; 1 February, 2002 [text12]
‘WA/SA’, ‘Aloha8’, and ‘Working 9 to 5, at...’
There is a new mall in Hollywood, catalogued as part of LAs recent ‘long-list of revitalization projects’: TrizecHahn’s ‘Hollywood & Highland’. Most certainly ‘it’ is about the near live-size (7/8 scale) recreation of a local movie set that has faded into obscurity (the ‘Babylon’ set of the movie ‘Intolerance’, 1916). And
that, ‘tis true, might be more appropriate than a Las Vegas style recreation of something completely foreign to the local context. Sometimes copies attempt to pass themselves off as faithful recreations of the original, instead of rejoicing in the distortions that make them unique. At ‘Hollywood & Highland’, however, the local movie-set tradition of copy-making is celebrated. First, in 1916, the image of Babylon was distorted was purposefully distorted (‘a make-believe mirage of Mesopotamia’, as described in the book ‘Hollywood Babylon, 1983, consisting of historically-dubious elements, such as towering elephant statues). Then, in the ‘Hollywood & Highland’, this early-century stage-set has been once again distorted, to serve the needs of a multiple-story commercial space at the early millennium. Now only selected pieces of the stage set reappear, facing strategic points of view, and the enormous 60’ first level of dreamy Mesopotamia has been subdivided into 5 or 6 commercial floors. The 1916 set’s lack of depth is now fully exposed and it now stands there, ‘flattened’, hand-in-hand with that other icon of dimensional illusion: the billboard. The entire mall would present a clever play of ‘solid’ horizontal fields [continuous, structural, commercial floor plans] (upon which human activity may be staged), and ‘porous’ walls [fragmented stage sets and thin publicity facades] (upon which human vision may be projected). Very modernist-contemporary.
are fictions of fen-om: [www.fen-om.com]
Vista 1; from the bus stop at back.
The stage set at Hollywood & Highland.
But all this fails to take into account the scale of the selected architectural elements, in relation to that of the human shoppers. More and more, the enormity of visual elements such as billboards and stage sets points to an interest in the sublime (the generation of aesthetic interest through awe-inspiring shifts of scale). This works very well in the movie theaters, where viewers can maneuver through the enormous aesthetic experience with minimal effort, and on the open road, where the enormous scale of the images loses itself at a distance (and is easily bypassed at high speed). What happens, however, when one attempts to physically inhabit these enormous structures. On one hand, they lose importance once the human eye penetrates their infrastructure
Vista 2: the main entry and exterior plaza.
Vista 3: very tight, from an adjacent sidewalk.
