Description
Choose low not high resolution. Choose butted not mitered corner. Choose shimmed not
sculpted base. Choose dull not glossy finish. Choose rude not hewn stone. Normally, we associate
these crude features with poor craft in architecture. But when used systematically, these choices
assemble into what we might begin to recognize as syntax. This is not the modernist syntax of wellformed
signs, which can be analyzed to depict part to part and part to whole relationships, but a
syntax of non-signifying elements that result in muddled languages, muted forms, and blank fa?ades.
Meaning is defined, but it fails to fully communicate. This syntax remains abstract even when built at
full scale. L.A.?s buildings and their images have a long-standing relationship to this aesthetic.
Consider some buildings: a relentless fifty-foot chain-link fence abuts Colorado Avenue in Frank
Gehry?s Santa Monica Place; a paper cutout of a western front adorns his World Savings Bank in
North Hollywood. Or