Am I 1000% besotted with the wonderfully esoteric Los Angeles neighborhood that's home to The Wilfair Hotel and Motel Fairwil?
So much yes.
Within one tight, walkable area you have the La Brea Tar Pits, one of the world's most famous fossil sites. You have the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, known affectionately as LACMA. Within the LACMA campus you have Urban Light, those 202 vintage lamps, and Levitated Mass, the "floating" boulder.
Next to that, on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, will be the new home to The Oscars' movie museum. And let's not forget the craft museum, which is currently covered by 12,000 yarn squares.
If you've come to take a photo with me, you know it is a trafficky, bustling section of LA. But it is full of mystery and wonder, too. It attracts really strange stuff, and ideas burble at its edges, like so much tar.
So, yeah, I had to build The Wilfair and Motel Fairwil there. (With words, of course.)
That long prelude is leading to this: LACMA is hoping to rebuild part of its campus in the coming years. When I saw the models, my eyes bobbled: The new museum is straight out of a science fiction novel. In fact it looks, to me, like a giant tar pit.
Not joking.
Two things here:
1. Is there something about that area that breathes offbeat buildings? Because my radio is tuned to that signal, if so.
2. Simply put, the new LACMA would be one of the world's most modern, innovative buildings, if built. It will be raised 30 feet in the air, all undulating concrete and huge windows, and part of it will extend over the tar pits (actually over the exact spot where Fair's favorite mastodon statue currently rrowrs).
So... my heart is feeling half Wilfair and half Fairwil.
Call it conflicting concepts occupying the same space. :)
The Fairwil in me? I like the older buildings of the LACMA campus, though they are not energy efficient and are in need of renovation. I wish they could be moved somewhere. I have issues with goodbyes of an architectural nature because I'm in love with this element of the past, deeply.
My Wilfair half likes the idea of trying new and interesting stuff. I'm mad for most modern architecture, and a giant, flowing, window-lined, tar pit-shaped building next to Wilshire and Fairfax makes my thoughts twirl.
I'm also interested in buildings with organic shapes and the rounded edges found in nature. We humans have been making blocky structures for centuries. Why shouldn't we look to the natural world for architectural inspiration?
Maybe that's the Hobbit in me, talking.
You can bet if this plan moves forward, though, that our aspiring architectural physicist will be next door at the construction site nearly every day, observing. ("Hey Fair. Where's Gomery?" asked Monty. "At the LACMA construction site, again," I said. "If the builders don't give him a hard hat and some scrolled-up plans he can carry around while looking serious, I'm throwing a fit," sighed Monty.)
Can you see the motel and hotel in the photo below? They're just beyond the top left corner, fictionally.
The large dark shape is the museum, and the small dark shape near the center is the main tar pit.
* Why yes, I did have Fair know where Gomery was in that exchange, instead of Monty knowing. Call it a change of pace and/or a sign of things to come. La la la la la...
