after dropping a friend off at work thursday morning, i turned right to explore LA a bit. i cut through koreatown and the macarthur park area to get to silver lake. i was disappointed by silver lake. i guess i keep thinking these hyped up neighborhoods are going to be more urban than they are and then when i get there they just aren't. not that it seems all bad, it's just so hard as an outsider to the city to find what any of these places are all about. someone want to give me a tour? i did find intelligentsia coffee which is going to be a new pilgrimage point for me with out of town guests, this place is almost everything i want a coffee shop to be!
side note: macarthur park is a great old park in LA that holds the most potential of any ungentrified neighborhood to bring LA into the realm of walkable cities. its location is perfect for tying together important and emerging neoghborhoods and it holds an interesting stock of older buildings waiting for people with the vision to bring them back to life. future project?
onto what this is really about. well, the pictures at least. the schindler house! after driving around silverlake and checking out new development in hollywood, i drove over to west hollywood to see the shindler house. what an amazing place. i havn't felt this inspired by a work of architecture since vals or the kunsthaus bregenz. it is so simple and crudely built yet so human and accessible. the spaces are claustrophobic by todays standards, but the scale is perfectly in tune to the human body. i could have spent the whole day soaking it in or passing time on one of the sleeping decks. sleeping decks!!!
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