#4. working 9 to 5

oh, how i sort of long for that.

sci-arc never sleeps. people live here, they even have pets.



coming from a school that closes at ten in the evening, is closed at weekends and that is basically way to small to house all attending students, sci-arc was a blessing. the experience of being able to hang around school 24/7 is one i will never forget. coming back to school, at 4 at night after a party in hollywood to do some work in a buzzed state is interesting, to say the least. having my own desk, not spending hours to look for one, is a thing of both joy and beauty.

now that i am ready to go back to my own school in the netherlands, what will i tell my friends about studying architecture at sci-arc?

being able to go to school 24 hours a day gives way to unbridled working ethics. bluntly said, people tend to work to much. i was no exception. back in delft i pulled around 4-6 all nighters a semester. here i think i did at least 15. in a one month shorter semester. it is all about being part of the gang and being dragged in. sleeping on the couch has transformed from being a job-related inconvenience to a comfortable moment away from architecture.

attending a school that has limited opening times does have its benefits. you learn a life without architecture. you learn to fit the amount of work in less hours than here at sci-arc. work in delft is all related to credits. 1 credit is 28 hours of work, and you have to generate 60 credits each year, which is 10 months. you do the math.

sci-arc studiowork knows no boundaries. there are studios where people have an average of two sleepless nights a week. because professors are reluctant to translate assignments into acceptable workloads, burnout is quite of common appearance.

anyway, back to work or else i'll have to make mine an all-nighter ;)

#3. one day too late

got stuck in traffic. my bet.

all because in the states we don't have rules for right of way, no, we have this:



meaning: at every junction we stop, look left, look right, look left again, and only then we slowly pull up.

here we have carpool lanes you can ride with only 2 (two!) people.

i don't know if it's just a dutch thing, but here we have never heard of zipping (ritsen) when the road narrows a lane. maybe it's the ultimate example of polder modelling - even in the car we tend to agree in general concensus - but people, it actually makes sense!

here we have automatic cars. one memorable quote by the great vincent gallo says it all:

"Is this a shifter car? I cannot drive a shifter car, alright, so we got a little situation here. I can't drive these kinda cars! What the fuck is goin' on! You think that's funny? Would you like to know, smartass? Would you like to know why I can't drive this kinda car? I'll tell you why, I'm used to *luxury* cars. Have you ever heard of a luxury car? You know what luxury means? Ever heard of Cadillac, Cadillac Eldorado? That's what I drive. I drive cars that *shift* themselves."

here we almost don't have any public transport, cause public transport is for suckers (sorry chao).

when i walk from home to school (just an 8 minute walk, across the 4th street bridge) people slow their cars down, lower their window and call me a cracker. okay, i am from europe, i don't believe that having a car is the ultimate sign of civilization or prosperity, but calling me a cracker, come on!

any way, next time i'll try to leave the home a little notch earlier. promise.

#2. there ain't no party like a LA party

and that's a fact.

even standing in line rocks like iggy did in his heyday. oh wait, he still rocks.

and now, a random list of venues to go to, if you ever happen to be in LA.

hear gallery - closed but reopened as blowupLA. very loftparty-like. nice bands, shitty dj's that do drop some raving tunes.

safari sams - nice, big freakin' dancefloor and they like the trashy eurotunes (justicia!)

cinespace - smells like vomit, but it has the cobrasnake and steve aoki ;)



boardners - nice. just that. but bring a friend and a camera and this is what happens. thank you carlos. and tony foxxxxx is a poseur.



vanguard - expensive as hell and they let the best dj's play in the shittiest room. however, thank you dfa dj squad for giving me a very entertaining evening.

the echo - girl talk brought the roof down, the resident dj's a little bit less. but it was fun buying our way in with the bouncer, while people staying in line for 5, 6, 7 hours were yelling all kinda things that i am not gonna say here. but fuck you, fuck you and fuck you too, i'm getting in!

the hyperion lounge - nice cosy little place, and it is always nice if the owners let you throw down some tracks.

spaceland - it's got the fishbowl for the smokers - look at them!

houseparties - i think every city has its own kind of house/loft/roof parties. good thing about LA roofparties is the skyline that nicely frames your attempts at not getting drunk.



and we also have the indoorparties. with japanese and hungarian people and a shitload of equipment. inside an architecture office.



last, but cliche-wise definitely not least, sci-arc very own fridays@five. normally starts at seven, but fridays@seven doesn't really sound as good, does it. anyway, lots of different themes; college drinking games, NightAtTheAlleyBar, polkadots, 4agoodtime, 3biza, and so on. bad thing (or good, depends on what you planned for the rest of the evening) is you will be drunk by nine 'o clock



ain't that nice.

out.

#1. On the LA river - dear mr. owen moss, i have to disagree with you

there is a big, concrete structure running through Los Angeles. it is, somewhat archaically, called the LA river. it is not a river. only once every few years, thanks to torrential rains, the river swells from its backwater-sized width that one can easily jump across to a stream of a more modest size. yet it can never be a real river again, like it was long ago, before the gold-rush, before the missionaries.

Eric Owen Moss, the director of sci-arc and principal of the aptly-named LA-based architecture firm Eric Owen Moss architects, recently won the History Channel's competition "the city of the future: a design and engineering challenge".



anyway, hooray hooray for mr Owen Moss. lots of interesting and less interesting articles and interviews on the competition have appeared in the last few weeks, and more and more i feel like Owen Moss' LA of the future is not the LA of the future we will live to see, even though the design premise actually sounds interesting and promising.

Taking the ubiquitous (i still think this is a word that should be made easier. come on, when we are talking about sex, who uses the expression copulation?), say omnipresent (still different, but a little bit less than the other one...) la river, as Owen Moss calls it, and treating it as just another piece of infrastructure, angelenos would re-inhabit the banks of this dying piece of nature, bringing east LA closer to downtown, thus bringing wealth and prosperity to new classes of people.

Moss starts off promising, but come on, the LA river is not omni-present. it is a gutter and it is treated like one. the bridges that cross it are not constructed to be tall to let great steamships through, just to let trains with cargo through.

on the statement that east LA is a different city, i can only agree with Owen Moss. but it is not just east LA. it is the whole of the built structure that fills the basin and the surrounding valleys. unlike most other contemporary cities, Los Angeles is not greater than the sum of its parts. why? those goddamned cars, and the infrastructure that serves them. if you want to bring LA together, a move that would completely disregard the current state of the city, why would you use the one structure that divides everything? why don't we transform all highways into bus-lanes only, forcing people out of the car.

Owen Moss' view of the future of LA is an honourable one, i have to admit. it is optimistic and tries to make the best of it. It is not, however, a realistic one.

can you imagine this stretch of land ever to be the instigator of overcoming racial, social and economic divide in Los Angeles?

from this:



to this:



i still see a big concrete ditch.
please read this links and reply. even you, eric ;)

Eric Owen Moss - The leading architect on why L.A. is poised to be the city of the future

and

LA Weekly - a vote for the future

and

Eric Owen Moss Architects - plan for the future of the city of LA (pdf)

fuck LA and fuck sci-arc, but i am still moved by them

bold statements require bold explanatory observations. so making up for my lack of posting during the past few months, i will make this one a homerun: 7 in 7.

seven statements about the city of angels, los angeles, and about the school that never sleeps, sci-arc.

from the desk of mr. lady: