Annie Winton and Audrey Wu
Donnell/ Stogdill
City of Angels
October 15th, 2015
Round-up post for October 16th
Throughout the week, our class has been discussing what characteristics entice people to want to come to Los Angeles as well as novelists/writers opinions of this environment. I’ve always felt that this Surfurbia, Foothills, Plains, Autopia ecology has accumulated over the years to become almost a paradise (Feel free to disagree; you can mention in your comments!!). Obviously, depending on what area, the type of ecology can change or can be a combination of more than one. As our class defined an ecology as a way people interact in certain environment, it is understandable that ecologies are consistently evolving. Mountain cropping (mostly in foothill ecologies) has literally reshaped physical features of nature for the benefit of human architecture being able to thrive. Examples like this exhibit how our society being formed does include imperfections that have altered and will continue to alter the development of our vicinity.
Two quotes from the end of one of this week’s articles portrayed a negative perspective of LA life:
“The unique thing about LA is that people had a new reason to be unhappy.”
“That promise of a perfect life isn’t what people really want.”
To me, both of these statements seemed justified in examples of The Day of the Locust. I find it ironic that our urban lab routed us to one of the locations described in the book and we were supposed to promote that spot by producing a brochure aimed for 1920s midwesterners. This brochure is to promote the surrounding areas and to sell the architecture of the different houses. I believe that LA architecture is quite sporadic. Each neighborhood has its own uniqueness, its own character. While we were driving, I noticed how in Los Feliz there is a distinct change from big houses, to smaller houses, but all of the houses have their own style giving them individuality. This obviously shows the two different socioeconomic classes of people. Looking towards the more glamorous side of LA and relating it to our readings, I can recognize Hollywood as the centerpiece of what defined Tod Hackett and his acquaintances and how their paths unwounded. All of this connects to the much disputed concept of environment influencing who you become. Hollywood and all of its glories and flaws destroyed Tod Hackett’s sanity.
With the knowledge of the characters and their lifestyles (pertaining to the book), to what degree do you agree that there is superficiality in the neighborhoods of LA? Or, if you don’t, what traits exactly of LA make it so desirable? What affect does aesthetics/appearance of this city have in proving that a person has “a perfect life” and is happy? And does the fact that we live here force us to believe it’s an attractive domain? What affect does architecture play into who is living in a certain area or home? Does it affect it at all? Looking at different neighborhoods to what extent does demolishing or expanding houses, do to the neighborhood's identity/reputation as a whole? I know there are a lot of questions. Answer any one or two to the best of your ability and try to be specific with examples!
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ReplyDeleteIt is an interesting question, do people influence their habitat or does the habitat influence people? You could say a little of both. In the beginning, Los Angeles's habitat influenced the people. The weather, the hills, the water, all changed how we built our houses or the clothes we wore or the jobs we worked. Now, in modern society, in the age of false aesthetics in an age of short-lived beauty, it is the place that influences the people.
ReplyDeleteNot long ago I was talking to Mr. Donnell about happiness in the Poly community. I feel that over these past 4 years the overall well-being of the community has diminished. So much added stress and anguish with equivalent results to the past. So what is doing this to us? I started thinking about what specifically has changed about the school in the past 4 years. It took a while, but it came to me– the architecture.
Our legitimate habitat has changed with these new buildings. The buildings are cold and underground. Some classrooms don't have windows... what more could be a representation of stifling creativity. I honestly believe that when we changed the form of our school, its function changed as well. The effects of the coffin like cement underground learning environment has made me uninterested in learning, which is a tragedy since I believe curiosity is such an important value. Sheppy Weppy!!!
The aesthetics of the typical LA neighborhood isn't superficial or tacky. The LA neighborhood is where the people living there can bring a piece of home with them to a new place. California, in general, has a ton of un-native trees this is because when people came west they brought the types of trees they had in their backyard with them to their backyard in California. Walking through the neighborhood of Hollywood I felt as though I knew where the people living there came from. Immigrant Angelinos came for opportunity but love living here because of the weather. Plants love the weather (except for the lack of rain) too which is why when the people get home sick they can have a little piece of home with them because it is so hospitable here. The architecture of the LA neighborhood has no affect on the architecture surrounding, but the culture. LA culture is described as diverse and the architecture reflects that. Oddly there is this new movement of demolishing and creating a uniform, utilitarian, and "modern" homes. I think this movement is destroying the quirks of neighborhoods and the fun little nuances that are there and replacing it with the "1984" grey. The personality of LA is what makes this city awesome to be in.
ReplyDeleteReply by Sloan Askins (She could not comment herself)
ReplyDeleteI think the reason Los Angeles hills are decorated with so many different styles of architecture comes from the fact that this city is for those who want to reinvent themselves. Those coming from the mid west or east coast think of Los Angeles as a place of innovation and possibilities. A place like any new place where you can be whoever you want, but Los Angeles pulls those searching for something new in their lives. Someone who wishes to buy a house on a hill that looks like a spanish castle or a modern house with a private beach in their backyard are the kind of people LA attracts.
I don't know that by living here it makes me think this is the best place to live, but venturing out and visiting other "attractive"cities in America makes me think Los Angeles is the best place to live. Sure it's busy and there's a lot of traffic, but we also have great weather and an infinite amount of things to do thats only a short drive or metro ride away.
My question to the class is whether or not people have a different perception of LA after reading these texts. Although we've seen the superficial side of LA for manny years, but reading these characteristics of our hometown makes anyone love LA any less/ Has anything we've read in the past 2 weeks changed the way anyone sees LA?
I've always thought that L.A. was a glamorous paradise from any outsider's perspective. This is in the media, in songs, in the reactions of people I've met in New York or even Hawaii, a paradise of its own. We claim Hollywood, celebrities, and palm trees. However, for locals, this is obviously not what we think of; Banham's Ecologies proved that. Instead, our reality exists of whatever is in our daily lives, whether it be foothills or freeways. The beauty of our city is the fact that we can't put a name on any certain dominating style. I think this stems from the fact that people come to L.A. to make their future, for the ideals of limitless opportunity and hope. So, when they arrive, they spend their time and money building their own dreams. On Tuesday's urban lab, we saw that purely within the different architectural styles of each house. Many had Mercedes or Porches parked outside, suggesting that the owners could afford to build whatever they envisioned. Thus, the character of the city is built up of all the different dreams of each Angeleno.
ReplyDeleteTo be drawn to an advertisement like the ones we made in class today, I think that you have to have a sense of unhappiness and disappointment with where you are. You need to be the kind of person who will be excited to live in a place that is as tacky as they come, but that has some faint allure of an ancient class. A place that is as new as possible, but that is designed to be an obvious fake of something old. Going to the Hollywood Hills, I was surprised by what I saw. I have never seen residential Hollywood, and it made sense. Sad people, I think, need to be comforted by whimsical fantasies, and the architecture and general madness that we saw really fits in to the description of one of those fantasies. That is what Tod Haskett means when he says that so many of these people have come to Los Angeles to die. It's as if it was the last place where they had a chance to be happy, but that chance was so slim that they may as well have come to die. A pause in the monotony, and a universal appeal of success and hope, Los Angeles attracts people of all types. Categorizing them by the architectural choices that they make probably says a lot more about their stories than we would expect.
ReplyDeleteAs Joni Mitchell says in Big Yellow Taxi, "you don't know what you got til it's gone", I think most Angelenos don't fully appreciate Los Angeles' beauty until they have experienced the architecture, history, and culture of another city. When I was younger, I hadn't grasped how fortunate I was to live in a city with such diversity, but when I visited my cousins in Temecula and on road trips to Northern California, I saw a completely different way of living. The architecture of each building fit such a vanilla template. The washed out, tan, dirt houses lacked any representation of culture unlike Hollywood where a Greek Villa style house stood across from a Tudor mansion with a draw bridge. Our location does not determine our opinion of our own city; however, I think that by living in Los Angeles most of us do not recognize the heterogeneity of not just the architecture of the houses but of the people and neighborhoods as well. In summary, I do not believe that by living in Los Angeles we are forced to admire the beauty and aesthetic of our domain.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think about LA, I actually do not know what to think about. This might seem backwards to some because I have grown up and lived in LA my whole life, but LA has so many aspects to it that it is almost impossible for me to categorize it. Let's take Downtown LA for an example. With Downtown, you have the busy streets, people in suits and professional clothing, expensive cars, an entertainment spot (like Staples Center or the Nokia Center) or movie sets, and many more places and things that represent the glamour of Los Angeles. But lets not forget that in Downtown, you have the countless homeless people, the dirty streets trashed with litter, the graffitied buildings, the cars that barely look drivable, and many aspects that bring out the not so pretty side of downtown.
ReplyDeleteI know I'm only talking about Downtown, but there are many other areas in Los Angeles that have the rich and poor polars. When we were driving to Vine St., we saw both the compact apartments and more middle class urban looking area and the big housed, green, upper class area of Los Feliz.
I think that that is what attracts people to Los Angeles. There are so many different personalities of LA that there has to be something for everyone.
When foreigners think of America they think of three things: New York, L.A., and everything else. While New York and the States of Id make up the vast majority of the country, L.A. is almost the perfect representation of America. America is defined as a melting pot, a very new country that is flashy, shallow, fun, and heavily borrows on the culture of everything that came before it. L.A. and Hollywood are cities that rose up around all these things. America is the a country where you can see classical french buildings in New Orleans and drive anywhere else in the south and see Greek inspired plantation houses. You go to northern Michigan and houses are built from logs, or New Mexico, which borrows from the classical spanish and Mexican styles. Just like we can walk down Vine street and see a house complete with a moat and crenelations right next to a Russian orthodox church right next to a Caribbean bungalow. L.A. is like America extract, condensed and hyper-stylized. We are the land of flashy people who want to get rich quick, a sentiment that could aptly describe our city. We have beaches, mountains, deserts, a highway system, and lots of boring stuff in-between just like America.
ReplyDeleteJoni also backs up LA's prowess more directly in California. With this song she puts our home state above Paris, France. Here that everybody? We beat the best city in the world. She claims the reasons for this bold comparison lie in the weather and the history. Paris is a city grounded in tradition, but Joni sees this as a negative, claiming it's too set in its ways. That is something LA is not. LA is a city grounded in evolution and change. It is not always planned change. We shift drastically along with the unpredictable fault lines and immigration trends. It is a city that bends at the will of its people. When new people arrive, they bring their clothes, their food, and as Oran brought up, even their backyards. You can call us vain and superficial, but what I see, is a population made up of people unwilling to let their voice go unheard. A population of people yearning to learn from, relate with, and sometimes change their neighbors. A population of individuals. But one thing that is absolutely inescapable in Los Angeles is the convergence of opposite ideas, present in court rooms, coffee shops, and especially freeways.
ReplyDeleteSheppy Weppy to all, and to all a good night.
In response to Audrey's question about the extent to which the change of one house affects the character as a whole, I would say that it is the motive behind that change, what that building represents, that is the largest influence on the neighborhood as a whole. One thing I noticed on our hike through the foothills was that the most striking difference from house to house was not the statement they made but whether or not they made a statement at all. The invasion of the dingbats, as Banham termed them, is most certainly underway, and there are many new apartment complexes that lack any character whatsoever.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, it was the blocks where each house formed a unique identity that fit together the best. The characters of the house were effectively synthesized into an aesthetically pleasing jumble. It was the blocks where certain buildings possessed no individuality, the dull new dingbats spring to mind, in which the personalized houses stood out. Imagine you have a room full of individuals, all expressing themselves, all protesting against uniformity. Then, you take away two thirds of the people and replace them with conformists. All of a sudden, the individuals stick out like sore thumbs, for they are now the critical minority, an easily ignorable group. Such is the unfortunate state of the few houses of character remaining in a sea of conformist buildings, be they dingbats or just boring houses. The unique architecture of each building once added to the aesthetic of the block as a whole, but that only worked when individualism was the rule. Now, conformity is the status quo, and I fear that soon there will be no Samoan huts to be found.
I think to some extent we have been limiting our conversation about the superficiality some people observe in both Los Angeles and it’s people, by ignoring a large population of people that live here. I believe that a lot of the time, superficial aspects of Los Angeles are only present in neighborhoods above a certain household income. Naturally, to outsiders of Los Angeles, even if in reality it may not make up the majority of Angelino’s lifestyles, this “glamourous” and “celebrity packed” place will be the first correlation they make with Los Angeles. You lose one of the most unique qualities of Los Angeles (its diversity- of people, places and food), when you focus in on only one type of person that lives here. I find it disappointing that we live in a culture so obsessed with superficial image, celebrities and perfection and hope these are not the only connections people make it their minds when they think of LA.
ReplyDeleteThere is undoubtedly a great culture in LA that promotes the augmentation of one's personality. This is obviously implemented through media and the people who we deem to be our 'idols', but there is an inescapable facade that each person, one way or another, must uphold. Though bold, this statement holds true and applies to architecture and general lifestyle glamour. There is a common strive to be something that one is not. This is not a necessarily negative culture tendency. The strive to be something more than oneself inevitably leads to improvement in certain aspects. However, this leads to an in-genuine culture revolved not around who people are, but who they want to be.
ReplyDeleteI do think LA is an attractive domain, but that's not merely due to the fact that I live here. Like people mentioned above, the city is synonymous with reinvention, youth, and culture. There's something a little unreal about Los Angeles, and that is a huge pull factor. When I tell people I'm from LA, they almost always look at me with wonder. There's so much about the city that seems like a perfect dream, and that's why people continually flock to it - because they are curious. They want to see for themselves if something this great could actually exist.
ReplyDeleteNow to answer Sloan's question, I don't love LA any less after the readings. If anything, I love the city more. I think it's crazy how Ellenberger stated in her article that Los Angeles used to be such a homogenized city. I just can't imagine there not being a melting pot of cultures or individualized activities. I guess I could see how people could find that isolating, but I view it more as a tribute to independence and an opportunity for being unapologetic about our identities. This is the reason why Angelenos are so proud of their city, not the glitz and glamour.
I believe that L.A. is a very exciting and life changing place. I view L.A. as being extremely superficial back in the day and during the time period of the Day of the Locust, due to all the movie star drama it held, all the publicity it consumed, and how the movie making industry affected people from all around the U.S.. L.A. is still the same city it once was, and it still has all of its publicity and drama, if not more than it did before, but now people handle it differently. There is still much superficiality that is blatantly present in the guise of celebrities, peoples' attitudes, and the overall environment of the city, but the way we go about it nowadays is simply different.
ReplyDeleteAlthough L.A. has dealt with, and still deals with, its reoccurring superficiality, I do believe it continues to contain some of the most desirable aspects that one can wish for in a city that they live in. The city of Los Angeles, and all of its surrounding areas, contain amazing weather, exciting entertainment, and great job opportunity as well as some of the best institutions for education that you can find in the U.S.. It truly is the city of dreams, but simply one that carries a lot of baggage with it.
The appearance/aesthetic within L.A. however takes many forms. It does not, however, determine if we have a "perfect" life. Some may think that in order to have the perfect life you have to have the biggest house with the most land and the most money but this is not the case. A person can be so much happier with so much less, in a worse part of our city, but it's all about perspective and how you look at things. That is how you determine how good your own life may be.
I think the most attracting this about LA is the diverse span of opportunity it holds. As we discussed last week, a good portion of our ancestors moved here for the opportunity for work. Today LA has expanded(shown in the NYU video) and continues to sprout new opportunities everywhere. Specifically pointing out the fact that there are so many different styles of architecture only emphasizes my point about the uniqueness of the city. Is there any other city in the world where its citizens have the opportunity to live in the foothills, the valley, the beach, or the desert and still be within the boundaries of that city. LA is attractive because it is home to more than we can comprehend, from the architecture to the unique people themselves, LA is without a doubt the craziest, most creative, and most filled to the brim city on the planet and that is why it is so attractive.
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