The freelance lifestyle has it benefits. Mid-week beach days, matinees, and the opportunity to translate architect Charles Moore’s 1984 architectural guidebook of Southern California into an interactive map.
Charles Moore, along with fellow architects like Robert Venturi, Denis Scott Brown, and Michael Graves, was a leading figure in the “Post-Modern” school of contemporary architecture. He was responsible for a diverse array of projects, from the funky architectural stew of New Orleans’ Piazza d’Italia to the sublime neo-hippy community of Sea Ranch in Sonoma County. He was also Dean of Yale’s School of Architecture and a prolific essayist throughout his career.
In “Los Angeles The City Observed” he delved headlong into the architectural landscape of Southern California and produced a work both exuberant and critical, and traces, in a zigzag manner so fitting for a father of post-modernism, Southern California’s architectural vernacular from earnest 20th city building to showbiz fantasy land to modern metropolis. And while Moore’s book is less exhaustive than David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s “An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles”, I find Moore’s work to be more rewarding. Moore dotes over his subjects, devoting pages of writing to discussing the architectural particularities and individual charms of the buildings he selected, discussing them with sophistication, insight and humor, as well as providing the necessary topographical details so that the reader may seek these places out themselves.
But for all his intelligence and excitement, Moore didn’t always get the details right. Addresses and place markers in the book are occasionally incorrect. Published in the mid 1980’s long before Google Maps, once can imagine how difficult it must have been to fact check every detail in the book. But luckily we don’t face that problem, and with the availability of Streetview, satellite imagery and historical databases I was able to correct some of these errors.
The more exciting byproduct of all these fact checking was discovering what remains and what has been lost since the book’s publishing. Interestingly, the highest concentration of vanished sites exists not in the older and now freeway scarred neighborhoods of eastern Los Angeles but in the fantastical environ built up around that temple to fantasy, Disneyland. Moore lovingly describes quirky mom ‘n pop inns like the Space Age Lodge and the Inn of Tomorrow that popped up on the borders of Walt’s kingdom, creating a symbiosis of make believe in the belly of the Southland. These businesses have almost all been replaced by the bland corporate accommodations Americans are now so accustomed to. There are other examples scattered throughout the region, of historic and cherished places like Tail ‘O The Pup replaced by gas stations. But in true post-modern form, other sites are gas stations. Reading the book is an egalitarian thrill ride through one of the largest built environments on the planet; visiting the sites is even more fun. So I encourage you to bookmark this map, and the next time you’re caught at the wrong end of LA’s infamous rush hour, see what’s nearby. I guarantee it will be more rewarding than an hour spent on the 405.
Robert Girardin 