The Ugliest Architecture in Southern California - Part 2: The Westside

by Tony Chavira

First, two Honorable Mentions. Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenberg’s Chiat-Day “Binoculars” Building in Venice is both horrid and uninspired. Yes, it is. It may be a sight you need to see for yourself, but it’s really nothing original for Oldenberg and nothing extraordinary (structurally or design-wise) for Frank Gehry. It’s a sideshow for tourists to point and giggle over as their “Sightseeing L.A.” bus passes through the neighborhood, as most of them haven’t see the scope of an Oldenberg sculpture in real life. Also, I have to admit, there are much uglier buildings overall.

   

The second honorable mention is the original design for Santa Monica Place, which (like a wicked stepsister) was ugly on the inside (which was planned in a haphazard manner) and the outside (which was jarring and inconsistent with anything around it). Oddly enough, it was also designed by Frank Gehry’s office, going to show that an architect can do equally amazing and atrocious work. After years of sitting around as a dated eyesore, Santa Monica Place is finally getting completely revamped. I just wanted to be sure to mention both of these structures to serve as a warning to “avant-garde” architects out there. Originality and style only sometimes overlap; sometimes they are mutually exclusive.

And now, on with the list!

1. Beverly Center

Don’t sit there and try to justify the design of the Beverly Center to yourself or to me. From the exterior, it’s a colossally hideous factory slapped down into a boutique neighborhood. The only purpose that the design has served is to turn the streets around the intersection of La Cienega and Beverly into a planning nightmare. Oh, and it also ruined the cityscape for small street shops and restaurants in the area who can’t afford a parking lot. When you know that you can have a strip of comfortable, walkable outdoor space fit perfectly into the Los Angeles landscape, why would you want your shopping complex to look like a giant refrigerator? I wonder if any of the businesses that originally moved into the complex felt ashamed that they relocated to this place.

Where’s the sense of design and originality? Where’s the sense of personal involvement in the community? Where’s the sense of social responsibility? The Beverly Center sits on its corner, crammed with shameless stores it goaded into taking a location, clearly not giving a shit about any of those things. Clearly.

Lastly (in regards to more recent developments in the new urbanist handbook), it’s amazing to think of how much less energy Beverly Center could be wasting if it were all an outdoor, walkable community instead of what’s essentially a shopping warehouse. Hindsight is 20/20, so we must’ve been drunk when we took the Beverly Center home. It’s just not as good-looking as we thought.

This isn’t the first time you’ve made this mistake, Los Angeles. So many ugly buildings ... really, you should know better by now. Don’t you have any self-respect?

2. 1778 4th Street, Santa Monica

Let’s be clear about what this space is: a parking structure. I’m sure it’s used for local businesses, including the Doubletree Hotel across the street, but I’m not interested in judging it based on usefulness. Santa Monica is, fortunately or un-, a community jam-packed with both residents and visitors. Despite how walkable the city center is, it’s still a better idea to use a parking lot toward the outskirts than to let cars flood the street at the center.

But this article is about ugliness and, really, what’s uglier than overly-ordaining a giant brick that’s planted in an open space? Ultimately, this parking lot is ridiculously ugly for the same reason L.A. Live is: the building serves a sole purpose (L.A. Live’s is shopping, this one’s is parking) and the developer believes (somewhere deep down in his soul) that a little tinsel here and a splatter of paint there will keep it from looking intrusive and monolithic.

But do such superficial decorations save the fact that the parking lot is easily higher than the new design for Santa Monica Place. The latter sent the community into an uproar, so why does this parking lot somehow get a special pass from community outrage? Having a multicolored façade shouldn’t excuse the fact that it’s higher than the three stories allowed to the new Santa Monica Place design. Being a useful structure on the edge of the center shouldn’t excuse the fact that the exterior design and color scheme is so erratic that you’d never see it elsewhere in the city. This parking structure is a full-blown negative compromise in a community that prides itself on consistency of design, not negotiated design. It will look more and more dated as time passes, and will start really annoying people once the second phase of the Expo Line stops just around the corner from it.

3. 5800 Wilshire Boulevard, the Axium Building

I’m not the only person to hate this building’s design, as it came out pretty high on the list of ugly buildings on Curbed LA.

Sure, it’s ridiculously designed. Sure, it has a marble façade on the front of the building only (not the side facing the Folk Art Museum: classy). Sure, the super-sized screen sits solitarily on the building like a giant bug-zapper, washing out the rest of the street at night, cleverly keeping your eyes averted from the flat, utilitarian container. But are any of those things really the problem?

Really, the problem is something deeper and much uglier: what 5800 Wilshire represents about the culture of quick and dirty development in the city of Los Angeles. This building says something about the guise that developers need to keep up, an attempt to manipulate the denizens of this city into either using or overlooking their spaces without a second thought. The building, originally constructed in the 1950s, was updated to its currently level of ugliness in 2002; not even the lipstick-pig metaphor can do this “renovation” justice.

What the developer is trying to say with this building is, “Don’t judge, just use.” On a purely cosmetic plane, I hate this building because of its obvious deficits. But, like a cruel, materialistic spouse, it harbors so much more ugliness. They can hang as many LED screens as they can muster onto this structure; nothing will stop the fact that the design is terrible ... because the developer or architect let it be terrible. A building isn’t a box to store androids. People actually need to use it, and no one wants to work in an ugly building. Do you?

Of course, 5800’s hideousness is accentuated by the fact that other buildings nearby are well-planned and designed at least to par. Hell, it’s across from the La Brea Tar Pits ... that’s an incentive to attempt to develop an eye-catcher, right?

Clearly, the developer just doesn’t agree with that sentiment.

Next up is South Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the list of terribly-designed structures to whittle down is depressingly long, but if something in particular jumps out at you and you just can’t ignore its atrocity, please fire me an impassioned e-mail.

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