Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

Los Angeles is a city in a desert.  It's easy to lose sight of that fact.  Given the context, however, it's pretty easy to see that, in such a place, Water and Power are pretty much synonymous.  Years ago I thoroughly enjoyed a book called Rivers in the Desert, which is an historical account of the land-and-water-rights grab perpetrated on the people of the Owens Valley, and subsequent development of the aqueducts by William Mulholland.

I am rather sympathetic to Mulholland, inasmuch as he was a self-trained, uneducated man, who eventually achieved tremendous feats in the area of hydraulic engineering and civic infrastructure.  Of course, the above mentioned land grab was an abhorrent violation of the property rights of the people of the Owens Valley, and I don't mean to diminish that.  But I digress.

Sometime in the '50s and/or '60's the LADWP built a lot of really nice looking modernist facilities all around town.  The iconic DWP Headquarters was built around this time, but there were also a number of substations and the like constructed, that have a coherent visual identity all their own.  Said identity includes smooth concrete walls, thin stacked modern brickwork, and bronze lettering set off of the face of the building on posts.  If you do a google image search under DWP station, or DWP substation, or DWP distributing station, you can see a few examples (although I was disappointed that there weren't more.  I should get out there and take more snaps of these).  Some are more modern, some are more neo-traditional, but almost all of them share the bronze lettering in common.

If you pass by just at the right time of day, you get this:

or this:

or even this:

One of the lovely things about Los Angeles is that, even for all the smog, we do have fabulous light.  *sigh*

Wut

Wut

Sullivan Sketches

Tonight I fly out and leave L.A. behind.  This weekend I'll be in Atlanta for ATLOSCON, where I'll give a talk about the origins of modern architecture.  One of the central figures of my talk, and indeed of modern architecture itself, is Louis Sullivan.  Frank Lloyd Wright is also in my talk as is Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.  I greatly admire all three, but I have a special place in my heart for Sullivan these days.

Why is that?  It seems that Sullivan finally formulated the fundamental theories that Viollet-le-Duc was just beginning to shed light on.  Wright wouldn't have been possible without Sullivan.  Wright applied and perhaps expanded upon Sullivan's ideas, but he didn't particularly revolutionize architectural thinking like Sullivan did.

I'm not sure anyone has since.

So today I bring you a few sketches in Sullivan's own hand.

This Week's Objectivist Round-up

This week's edition of the Objectivist Round-up has been posted over at Try Reason!

Check it out!  John Drake's blog is one of my favorites.  That man has a way with words.

John Herman Dersch

My Grandpa Dersch would have been 101 yesterday.  He died in 2005, just shy of his 95th birthday.

Here he is with his first pickup truck.

It is a 1937 GMC 1/2 ton, with 6 cylinders under the hood.  If this was taken around the time he bought it new, that would make him 27 or 28 in this picture.

He was a farmer in Southern Indiana.  The house behind him was their farmhouse where he and Grandma lived, and where Mom and her brother were born and raised.  He was very innovative in the way chickens were raised for market, and along with his brothers, developed a very good chicken business.  Later, he and Grandma built a big chicken house and went into the egg business.  They also had cattle, pigs, and grew corn on their farm.  He and his brothers were well known and highly regarded in that part of Southern Indiana for their innovations.

He could fix anything that broke and do anything that needed to be done on their farm; that had a big influence on me as a kid growing up.  I think of him often.  He was an amazing man.

Happy Birthday, Grandpa Dersch!  I miss you, but I know you would be proud of me today if you were here.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels: Quick Post

A couple months ago I took my students on a field trip, to the L.A. Cathedral, officially known as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.  At some point, I would like to write a longer post on that building, as it is one of my local faves, and I have a lot to say about it. Today, however, we're just going to have a quick look at the way the sunlight and shadows move and play across the facade over the course of the day.

These were taken in early April, so the times given in my descriptions are PST.

Here is the Cathedral as it looked when I arrived, at 9:25 a.m.  It's not first thing as the sun rises, but the sun is still relatively low in the eastern sky, and the building is getting a more or less straight-on blast of sunlight.   You can see that the adobe-colored concrete is treated in 2 different ways: it has smooth, flat surfaces and horizontally banded surfaces.

Here is the horizontal banding up close, with a flat section also, so you can get a better idea about what it's like:

The portion of the building I am interested in for this discussion is this area above the main entrance.  The right section is flat concrete, and has a recessed window very high up.  The center section is horizontally banded and has a less-deeply recessed, larger window; the left section is also horizontally banded.  Note also that none of these surfaces are related to one another by right angles.  This affects the way the sunlight and shadows react with the building, as we shall see.  The photo below was taken at 9:31, and the shadows are pretty much the same as the one above

Here it is about 30 minutes later, at 9:58.  Notice how the flat surface is still in the shade, but it is no longer casting any shadow on the adjacent surface; the shadow line between the two surfaces has receded right into the corner.  Notice also how the next surface over, with the larger window, is just barely being grazed by sunlight, so that the lower edges of the horizontal bands are subtly dabbed in light.

Now (below) it is a bit later, 12:21 p.m.  Look at the fantastic play of light on the surface to the left!  The sun is high in the sky, causing long shadows on the horizontal panels, and the glass of the window is reflecting sunlight back onto the wall as well.  The flat surface to the right, by contrast, is getting a direct blast.

Here is a closeup, just a moment later, at 12:30.  Another nuance you can see, if you click to embiggen, is the way the small concrete wall segment above the large window is also reflecting a small but noticeable amount of light onto the adjacent darker surface, at the corner.

And finally, about an hour and a half later, here is how it looks at 2:07 p.m.  The surface to the left is in complete shadow, and the window reflection isn't doing its thing any more.  The surface in the middle is just getting enough sunlight to make little triangular tips on the edge.  One of the things I like about this building is that there are no right angles at all in the floor plan, and how that leads to this kind of richness and variety in the way the surfaces interact with the sunlight throughout the day.

It also leads to some really interesting things on the inside, but I'll have to leave that discussion for another day.  Have you been to the Cathedral?  Did you like it?  Hate it?  Let me know in the comments!

A Sullivan Detail for Today

I took this picture last December at the Art Institute while I was in Chicago visiting my sister and her family.  Somehow, I didn't write down exactly what it was (or photograph the description tag, which is usually what I do in such a situation).

It's definitely Sullivan, and I'm pretty sure it's part of the elevator grillwork from the Chicago Stock Exchange.  Although, now that I'm thinking about it and writing this up, I think it could also be an air grille from that or another building.

It's fun to bring images like this into CAD or some vector-based drawing program and analyze them in terms of their fundamental geometry of lines, circles, and arcs.  Hey, that gives me an idea for another whole post!

But now I have to go teach, so that's for another day.  Cheers!