Art, Architecture & Urban Design

I’ve always wanted to know more about this location’s arrangement and symbology in Los Angeles near Wilshire Blvd: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Santa+Monica,+CA&hl=en&ll=34.067681,-118.35537&spn=0.012585,0.01929&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=48.555061,79.013672&vpsrc=6&t=h&z=16

It’s a private community with some very interesting geometry. Can you check the angle it is nestled within between 3rd and 6th street? It sure looks close to 6º

It’s also right across the street from the LACMA which houses some of the oldest artifacts on earth from northern Iraq, including two huge tablets depicting the Sumerian winged gods.

I can no longer locate the website I associated with this property, but I saw it once in 2006. If you search for Los Angeles gated or private communities, it does not come up on the list. I wonder what it takes to ‘get in’ to a place like this?

I rediscovered this is the infamous Park La Brea apartments in mid-west Los Angeles. Search for reviews online and see what it is ‘infamous’

Google Earth has a nice history-map feature. When I first found this location in 2006, I must have been looking at the 2/2004 images because if you zoom in on the center ‘park’ circle, with the three inner circles, you can see carefully designed curved pathways around these circles. The curious thing to me was they continued the pattern on to the roofs of the buildings surrounding the inner circles! The shapes of the pathways don’t seem significant to me, so why would they do this since it would obviously only be visible from the air? It was apparently this way for over a decade before as recently they have removed or painted over the roof patterns.

parklabrea.com

From the wikipedia entry on Park La Brea, Los Angeles:

‘The street layout was created in a masonic pattern as a reference to the masonic heritage of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which built the complex toward the end of World War II and immediately thereafter.

‘Park La Brea was designed in the early 1940s by architects Gordon Kaufman and J.E. Stanton. Inspired by the innovative housing of Le Corbusier in Paris’

The entry on Le Corbusier is interesting, especially under the heading Modulor:

‘Le Corbusier explicitly used the golden ratio in his Modulor system for the scale of architectural proportion. He saw this system as a continuation of the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”, the work of Leon Battista Alberti, and others who used the proportions of the human body to improve the appearance and function of architecture. In addition to the golden ratio, Le Corbusier based the system on human measurements, Fibonacci numbers, and the double unit.

‘He took Leonardo’s suggestion of the golden ratio in human proportions to an extreme: he sectioned his model human body’s height at the navel with the two sections in golden ratio, then subdivided those sections in golden ratio at the knees and throat; he used these golden ratio proportions in the Modulor system.

‘Le Corbusier’s 1927 Villa Stein in Garches exemplified the Modulor system’s application. The villa’s rectangular ground plan, elevation, and inner structure closely approximate golden rectangles.

‘Le Corbusier placed systems of harmony and proportion at the centre of his design philosophy, and his faith in the mathematical order of the universe was closely bound to the golden section and the Fibonacci series, which he described as “rhythms apparent to the eye and clear in their relations with one another. And these rhythms are at the very root of human activities. They resound in Man by an organic inevitability, the same fine inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages, and the learned.”

And there we have it – a little bit of Paris in Los Angeles!