Quote:
Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire
Safe to say that the builder of the current building was completely uninterested in art and design but rather more interested in exploiting the value of the property. Nothing wrong with that, but neither does it do much for anything but very local commerce--just makes Los Angeles that much uglier. Now, RiT... Santa Fe may be a concocted cityscape, but, as someone who spends time there, I've never seen anything like this. Certainly there is lots of this crap in old Mexico aside from the tourist towns, maybe in Texas border towns, but not in Santa Fe.
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Well
GW, yes in Santa Fe. And no you won't find an exact duplicate for a variety of reasons. What you will find is what in New Mexico and specifically around Santa Fe is a lot of what is an architectural style that has come to known locally as "Territorial", whatever that is. It appears to me to be an attempt to blend Pueblo with a bastardized form of shopping center modern. I personally find no great similarity with it and the true nature of structures that would have been built in New Mexico's territorial period. As a comment on Santa Fe in general, since the loons have discovered Santa Fe what we commonly see in new residential and commercial buildings are horribly exaggerated "Pueblo" style structures with an appearance that historically never existed anywhere with in the region, not even in Santa Fe's historic region.
As for the L.A. buildings in question, once one strips away the tenant junk that building owners have unfortunately allowed what we have is a variation of Streamline Modern with distinctive 1950/1960's perceptions of Southwestern leanings as I see it. Whether the buildings "ugly up" downtown L.A. I think that would be hard to do given the profusion of "ugly" already there. I think you are allowing cultural creep deflect you from the basic design nature of the buildings.