psychic garage sale

Rebloggin’

So much great stuff to see on Tumblr.

Credit where credit is due, of course.

Building in London via Polychroniadis

Berlin subway via Elforo

Shanghai via RyanPanos

Sliver of green via GentlemanBastard

Model via Sentimetalboy

Neon city via Noirlac

Puerto Rico via Sofiatortilla

Tightrope walker via I can’t remember (sorry!)

LAX Part 2, so nice, I’m hanging up stuff twice.

Turns out I get to another project at LAX (the airport).

If you are flying out of LAX on Southwest Airlines, you can check out some of my original drawings in the departures (upper) level from now until March.

They’re located behind the security checkpoint, so you’ll need to have a ticket to see them.

It’s always hard to describe where things are in the complicated maze of hallways, checkpoints and gates at the airport.

But they’ll be in a hallway near the Starbucks, if that helps.

If you have time to kill, you can think of it as a treasure hunt.

It will give you something to do.

You’re welcome.

Peter Alexander, Van Nuys, 1987, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 60 x 66

Peter Alexander, Bell, 1990, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 60 x 66

“There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from cracks in the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch’s hell can match this inferno effect. The muted fluorescence of all the diagonals: Wilshire, Lincoln, Sunset, Santa Monica. Already, flying over San Fernando Valley, you come upon the horizontal infinite in every direction. But once you are beyond the mountain, a city ten times larger hits you. You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this before. Even the sea cannot match it since it is not divided up geometrically. The irregular, scattered flickering lights of European cities does not produce the same parallel lines, the same vanishing points, the same aerial perspectives either. They are medieval cities. This one condenses by night the entire future geometry of the networks of human relations, gleaming in abstraction, luminous in their extension, astral reproductions to infinity. Mulholland Drive by night is an extraterrestrial’s vantage point on earth, or conversely, an earth dweller’s vantage point on the galactic metropolis.

-Jean Baudrillard, America, 1986

The eternal question - is Los Angeles a city

Sustainable cities collective blogger Geoff Manaugh (who is also a contributor to this new book) discusses the book No More Play - Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond. It’s basically a book by an architecture firm about the context in which their projects exist. The discussion is played out through interviews with artists, bloggers, urban thinkers etc…

There were a lot of these types of books that came out in the 80’s and of course the gloomy Mike Davis books of the 90’s, but this one seems unique because although it’s from the perspective of a builder,  Maltzan is not interested in ego driven, navel gazing but in contributing to the dialogue of where the concept of city is going. There are no discussions or pictures of his firm’s projects in the book.

You can read an excerpt here.

“Extreme scales of activity, development and social intensity are evident in the examples of powerful metropolises. The same indicators are present in Los Angeles. We are about to tip over, accelerating at an unrelenting pace. We have reached a point where past vocabularies of the city and of urbanism are no longer adequate, and at this moment, the very word city no longer applies”.

“Los Angeles is a place of constantly overlapping layers, complications and evolutions. As an evolving being, its dynamics make description difficult. Perhaps it is not a city — perhaps it can only be described as Los Angeles”.

via latimes and sustainablecitiescollective,

I took the photo on the 110. Don’t worry, I was a passenger.

more LAX pics

If you happen to travel through Los Angeles this weekend, check out my mural at LAX, Terminal 1 (Southwest, US Air), downstairs in baggage claim.