Sun King

The image of the radiating sun (referred to variously, from the Baroque period forward, as Sunburst, Sunrise, Sun-in-Splendour, Sunset, and Sun-in-Glory), was the most popular turn of the century decorative motif .

Top image: Classic example in gable, glowingly rendered in gold leaf paint.

Many ancient patterns represented the sun, including the swastika, wheel, and Egyptian sun disc; still, figurative examples are the most common.

Middle image: corner brackets with delicious detail.

Bottom image: Craftsman era rendition with attic vent as fiery sphere.  

Looks Like Teen Spirit

The University Gateway Project, latest in the Figueroa facelift,  jettisons its hijab.

Bricks and chunky massing, Brutalism with a masonry veil, giantic volumes masquerading as decoration.

Neo-trad(itional) to the max, bookending the more laudable Galen events center, shunning revered, Islamo eccentric neighbor, The Shrine Auditorium.  

Ugly.  Effective?  TBD.....

To There and Back

Terroir d' hood

Terroir, typically translated from the French as, "a sense of place," is a term largely associated with viticulture and uniquely local attributes.

The attributes that generate the

 aura of a neighborhood, and perhaps best define it, should not be bedimmed by presumptive semiotics, or colonializing instincts.  

The need for a culturally validated landscape consumes many home buyers, bewitched by radical traditionalism, unreceptive to resemanticising forces.

Intangibles, an obsession of sporting reporters, are always difficult to document.  Expertise is useful.

Ch-Ch-Change

Change is the only constant in urban quarters, the most prevailing characteristic.  A challenge then, is to view place not as still, but moving.

University Park, for example, amidst efforts to reframe the Figueroa corridor and USC's

 manifest destiny, might resemble a time lapse effect.  Flashy eateries and popular chains are sprouting along Figueroa, as is a mid rise cluster of student living complexes.  Once the district was a moribund slum.  Earlier still, it was home to the city's elite. 

Fifteen years ago Palmdale was an up-and-coming bedroom community with new municipal works, and a celebrated growth pattern.  Today, the city's image has been radically reset by meteoric foreclosure rates, and mounting social problems amongst its latch-key youth.

Like the expanding universe theories, different neighborhoods

move at different rates of speed.

A few nights ago, I attended a United Neighborhood Neighborhood Council Zoning & Planning

meeting, wherein two of the agenda items concerned Jefferson Park.  The meeting was held, without significant fanfare, on a weeknight, during the final game of the World Series.  Still, over a dozen residents attended, to further the drive toward a historic designation, one of the invisible rudders that helps steer transitional neighborhoods to productive waters, by more effectively managing change.

Outside Outsider Art

Backyard murals come in an all shapes, sizes, and sophistications (including driveway trompe l'oeil).

Cultural landscapes revealed: highly romanticized renderings of the old country, chronicles of the immigrant experience, appear frequently (see Caribbean beach scene bottom).

In 2001, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art relocated three walls from a garden structure in Pacific Palisades, bearing Portrait of Mexico Today, the only intact U.S. mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros, painted in 1932.  

Old Lyme meet tool shed, might there be other significant backyard works?