Architectural Design

The Federal Building, like the rest of the buildings from its era, wants to be seen as a block of marble. Its family is modernism with a suit and tie. It keeps its distance, but is always a tower in the garden, a Veteran blockade. It is a Freeway ghost; a Wilshire curtain; a Sepulveda hermit. 

The building is interpreted as introspective photographs that would make the Federal Building blush. Embarrassed to exist yet standing tall, she leans over to glimpse at herself. The building no longer retains a proper likeness nor does it persist to have a single reading; but becomes numerous and irrepressible across the mesa. Every very tectonic that made this building distinctive, sources the disturbance. The building longs to dance, because those who dance were once thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music. 

Corporate modernism is always corporated. The federal building is always unincorporated, maybe at least to Los Angeles. I like the Los Angeles Federal Building. 

I feel a little bad liking the Federal Building because it’s a federal building, and full of the worst aspects of government bureaucracy; because it’s not particularly “architectural” modernism. Even though it was done by Charles Luckman, it wasn’t until recently that Luckman became cool. And Luckman became cool only because his modernism was a kind of anonymous modernism that proliferates across LA. It’s the very corporate kind of modernism that Joan Ockman speaks about in her discussion of normative architecture. OK, it’s supposed to be boring. 

But, the Federal Building is really not boring.
Like the rest of the buildings from its era, it wants to be seen as a block of marble. Its family is modernism with a suit and tie. It keeps its distance, but is always a tower in the garden, a Veteran blockade. It is a Freeway ghost; a Wilshire curtain; a Sepulveda hermit.
This thesis is NOT about absolutes; it is about tolerances. It strives to push the tolerance of Charles Luckman’s Modernist Architecture to one embedded with implications. It sees the Federal Building not as universal, but as full of latencies.
Corporate modernism is always corporated – it is an identifiable unit describing a unity. The federal building is always unincorporated, maybe at least to Los Angeles. It sits on unincorporated ground. The government is not a corporation.
The first moves to draw out this conundrum were to triple the mass of the building. Philosophically, the role of repetition is not the same as sameness but to make the exceptional exceptional and the difference emerge. Here, the tripling of the buildings mass is more than the postmodern doubling, and the opposition. It is the production of seriality instead of singularity.
As the Building also presents itself as something, wildly severe, benevolently closed off, covered by louvers, striated by concrete slabs inherently white, innately black, and 50 shades of grey & some others in between; The very tectonic that makes up the federal building is expressive and emblematic of corporate modernism. The building refuses to disclose the contents of its interior; instead it is picky and permanently disjunctive. No longer do the terms ‘vertical’ or ‘horizontal’ mean anything but messing up the balance and broken trajectory’s become the dominant language. The visual strengths that dominate the exterior begin to penetrate its interior in this interpretation.
The point of this thesis is representational, in that I assert that the variations necessary for urban contextually, that might be located within even the most austere and blank of formal examples. Yes, this is a geometry exercise, but the critique implicit in this exercise goes beyond any particular building and is actually aimed at the urbanist model of de facto modernism. This is an exercise in Deformation, as described by Jeff Kipnis. For Kipnis, far from being blank, Deformation perceives the modernist language as nothing less than a historical fiction. Kipnis suggests that Deformation searches for Blankness by extending modernism’s exploration of monolithic form. At the same time, Deformation rejects essentialist appeals to Platonic/Euclidean/Cartesian geometries.
This dialog between the blankness of modernism and the deformative geometry anticipates a generation, as you can see here, of new, sometimes incoherent urban forms. It’s difficult to, say, “HEY YOU Walk” through the building in the traditional sense because it’s no longer about procession and hierarchy but about a confusion between the two.
The sections have qualities that are like plans (such as here – point). The plans here might as well be sections, & the section could be mistaken for plan. These are all just cuts through a wiggling building. Undisciplined and incongruous formal relationships are produced through this series of extrusions, bends, and intersections ---------.
As corporate modernism in Los Angeles fails as an urbanist model it also fails to serve the city. Deformed forms transform their context by entering into strange relationships with the city not as corporate entities, all buttoned up. It’s much looser than that. Somewhere between psychotic and iconic – I’ll end with a quote from Nietzche
The building longs to dance, because those who dance were once thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.