The bus was new and clean and very roomy, seeing as how there were only 4 passengers. Megabus is a British company looking to break into the US market so as a promotional, they are offering ridiculously low fares between major cities. If you are in a Megabus city, I highly recommend that you jump on a bus to somewhere just for the heck of it. What better way to spend $5 and a Saturday?
Once we got to LA we walked out of Union Station and had our sack lunch in a little Mexican square. Well, Katy made a salad so it wasn't really in a sack. Afterwards we walked through Littly Tokyo (which should more aptly be named Little Empty Warehouse District) to get to SCIArch. Katy was tickled to be there but I was a bit less than thrilled. This is Katy upon arrival:
...and this is me:
Like I said, less than thrilled. I was happy to be there for her, but I already was unimpressed with LA and the location of the school. It was a good tour. The building is a quarter of a mile long and was the the first concrete and steel building built in Los Angeles in 1907. It used to be a freight warehouse. The program itself was highly unimpressive, given the amount of publication done on, about, and from this school. I didn't see a signle piece of architecture in the whole tour... lots of designs, lots of sculptures, and a handful of pretty models. Turns out the SCIArch mostly makes pretty things on computers. Reading some of their thesis abstracts, it seems they can't really write, either. Glad I didn't go there... it was on my list. Katy was, thankfully, wholly unimpressed. Now I don't have to worry about being dragged to LA.
Notes on LA: I can't adequately express the pure and utter misery that Los Angeles seems to have brought on the human condition. We didn't see a single happy person there... not a smile on the streets. And when Katy smiled at people (being Canadian, she does that) it seemed to freak them out. It was hot and humid with hardly a tree in sight. Not 10 minutes after we got off our bus we both started coughing from all the smog in the air... it's so thick it settles on the buildings! The average road is 7 lanes in one direction... and this is downtown. The level of poverty evident just around the financial district is staggering. There is no real interaction between the buildings and the street. Most city blocks consist of a large mid-to-high rise building plugged into the ground with possibly a couple of cafes for the workers to get their coffee at. Lots and lots and lots of brick walls flanking streets. So it goes.
After SCIArch we walked to our hotel, the Biltmore Millennium. This joint was awesome! It is an old movie star hotel from the 1920's. The common areas were all hand-painted plaster done by a single man. The rooms were nice, too, but the rest of the hotel was so much fun to walk through. We spent alot of time exploring it... which was nice because I don't know if I mentioned it or not, but LA sucks. I'll just let the hotel pictures speak for themselves:
The pool was a roman style bath in the basement.
Katy saw this guy right after reading his poster. He's a life coach and was there speaking to a business managers graduating class. Evidently he's famous. I don't know... ask Katy.
While we were walking around Saturday we came across this random sculpture on the side of the AT&T building. See? There's potential for my kind of work.
Friday night we got all dolled up and went into downtown to a nice little Spanish/Cuban restaurant. On the way there we stopped in and had a drink in a rotating bar on the 35th floor of some building. Considering how much we both hated Los Angeles, we had a blast. It was a nice night of diner and conversation over a decent Chilean wine and a fantastic stuffed sirloin. I love that we can split meals... she eats like a bird, I eat like a bear. It works.
This is the building with the rotating restaurant... see the two light bands at the top?
And this is the Cuban joint.
Saturday we roamed downtown Los Angeles only to find out just how little there is to do there. We saw the Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry.
Now, I've always had pretty strong feelings against Frank Gehry's more recent work but touring this building... well, it just absolutely cemented my opinion of his over-publicized and under-designed hunks of grotesque, self-aggrandizing titanium.
All of the effort in the building is put into the thousands of sheets of titanium plated together to form a shell outside the actual building. The whole exterior is held together with machine screws.
It only looks good from a distance... and even that is debatable. The interior is thoughtless, bland, lacks detail and human scale. The fixtures, doors, hardware, etc. are the same ones on your local high school, church or Wal Mart.
The titanium might have looked good once, but now it just collects smog particles and looks like a dirty car.
The joints are ill-fitted.
The seams often have trails of dirt and corrosion streaming down them.
I could go on for pages. Needless to say, I was not surprised, but thoroughly disappointed that this is considered a "masterpiece" of architecture.
It confirms to me that it is not true architects writing the publications. At least there was a cool fountain, though. As I'm looking through pictures I realize that we never took a picture of the whole fountain. Shame. It was a giant lotus flower made of shattered pieces of blue china tile. I forget what kind it is... but Katy thinks it's a traditional Portugese tile. Someone reading this may know.
The shiny metal makes for some great funhouse mirror moments, too.
This is me waiting for the bus home. We were in really crappy moods and had been ready to leave for hours but had to wait for our bus to get there. It's funny now.
And more insight... this time with actual words:
All in all, though, we had a good time together. We're both surprised we managed to get through that without killing one another but I guess we're just good (or lucky) like that. So it goes. Lesson learned: Los Angeles makes you angry and steals your soul... and will give you a good case of black lung given a week or two. I feel sorry for all the people trapped there. I'm just glad Katy crossed it off her list... since she wouldn't listen when I told her months ago that LA is a hot, angry, concrete prison. Chalk it up to experience... and now she trusts me more. Gotta give her a break, though, she's Canadian, she thinks everything's nice. No wonder they need us so bad. Ok, I've been at this post for hours now. I actually fell asleep last night while writing and now it's morning. I'm going to go get breakfast.
