We are apparently going to get a new tallest building in the city, the future 73-story Wilshire Grand Hotel. Which visually brings to mind another mega-hotel from another part of the world. I hadn’t heard about this before today.
Check-in on the 70th floor is a pretty cool idea.
Wow. That’s pretty spectacularly ugly. It take it that it’s replacing the previous Wilshire Hotel.
Wow! That’s a spectacularly ugly building. My husband used to stay in the old own when he was in L.A. for business. The last time I was in L.A., we stayed there as well. It had charm. The new one looks like it will fit right in with the theme park atmosphere of downtown.
I was just downtown today. Generally speaking, I like downtown. Today took me to the Mosk Courthouse for work, the Ronald Reagan S.O.B.* for other work, California Plaza for cash, Angel’s Flight for avoiding the steep side of the hill, Grand Central Market for fresh leeks. Ridiculous parking. The GCM is indeed a bit sanitized from the last time I was there but I didn’t mind, since it was food I was buying. And Angel’s Flight has been refurbished appropriately too.
* That stands for “State Office Building,” of course.
I like downtown L.A., too. It’s nice and quiet. Compared to downtown Chicago or San Francisco, it’s almost like taking a walk in the country.
Downtown San Francisco is quiet after 6 on weeknights and on weekends.
Sometimes I need to come to work on Saturdays and I always find it eerie about how quiet it is around downtown. I also saw a movie on a Sunday afternoon during winter break of law school once and the movie got out about 4 PM. It freaked me out a bit about how quiet it was downtown.
New York is generally not quiet until you get to really uptown Manhattan (inwood) or the super-residential parts of the other boroughs.
I worked in downtown L.A. at the older Federal Courthouse for awhile. It’s not bad but, after Chicago, meh. The whole L.A. Life area seems pretty artificial, like a giant amusement park as opposed to a real center city.
Then again, I’ve always hated L.A. with a passion, even before I lived there for five years, so my views on the place are pretty biased.
The new Disney Hall is certainly that. But I’ve never felt like I’ve been in an amusement park in Los Angeles or any other downtown. I have often felt as though the immediate environment of a given complex was tightly controlled and sanitized to an eerie extreme, in L.A. and elsewhere, which creates a bit of surreality — all the urban grit has been polished away, leaving nothing but gleaming impersonal granite and bland corporate art. But again, I don’t think that’s unique or even particular to Los Angeles by any stretch of the imagination.
Looks like a vibrator with a zipper.
+1
Well, the present architecture seems thoroughly uninspiring to me.
It’s true that we’ve got a lot of plain-looking concrete-and-glass boxes and featureless monoliths. Lots of cities have those, but saying that doesn’t excuse their clunky ugliness here, it only spreads blame around elsewhere along with it.
The Sanwa Bank office tower across the street from the Wilshire Grand is a moderately interesting geometric abstraction; I’ve always liked how the atrium and the whittles at the upper floors shift the shape of the building from its square base to its octagonal crown as one’s gaze moves upward. I like the somewhat more rectilinear whittling on the Empire State Building in New York too, and for the same reason. It visually enhances the idea that the building is reaching for the skies, because it suggests strain and effort at the higher levels of the construct.
Seems like nobody cantilevers anymore, which I think is a shame. Is it passé? Too expensive or risky?
True enough on the other buildings; I come from a city of even less distinguished commercial building architecture, where nothing can be over about 12-13 stories.
I’m not sure who put the can’t in cantilever either, but they are either awesome or monstrosities. Biggest problem these days in architecture is everyone’s become too risk adverse in design.
everyone’s become too risk adverse in design.
Yes, we really do need more of this.