the wife and children, as glowing symptoms of success...everything here testifies to
death having found its ideal home.
THE BONAVENTURE HOTEL, LOS ANGELES
The top of the Bonaventure Hotel. Its metal structure and its plate-glass windows rotate
slowly around the cocktail bar. The movement of the skyscrapers outside is almost
imperceptible. Then you realize that it is the platform of the bar that is moving, while the
rest of the building remains still. In the end I get to see the whole city revolve around the
top of the hotel. A dizzy feeling, which continues inside the hotel as a result of its
labyrinthine convolution. Is this still architecture, this pure illusionism, this mere box of
spatio-temporal tricks? Ludic and hallucinogenic, is this postmodern architecture?
No interior/exterior interface. The glass facades merely reflect the environment,
sending back its own image. This makes them much more formidable than any wall of
stone. It’s just like people who wear dark glasses. Their eyes are hidden and others see
only their own reflection. Everywhere the transparency of interfaces ends in internal
refraction. Everything pretentiously termed ‘communication’ and ‘interaction’—
walkman, dark glasses, automatic household appliances, hi-tech cars, even the perpetual
dialogue with the computer—ends up with each monad retreating into the shade of its
own formula, into its self-regulating little corner and its artificial immunity. Blocks like
the Bonaventure building claim to be perfect, self-sufficient miniature cities. But they cut
themselves off from the city more than they interact with it. They stop seeing it. They
refract it like a dark surface. And you cannot get out of the building itself. You cannot
fathom out its internal space, but it has no mystery; it is just like those games where you
have to join all the dots together without any line crossing another. Here too everything
connects, without any two pairs of eyes ever meeting.
It is the same outside.
A camouflaged individual, with a long beak, feathers and a yellow cagoule, a madman
in fancy dress, wanders along the sidewalks downtown, and nobody, but nobody, looks at
him. They do not look at other people here. They are much too afraid they will throw
themselves upon them with unbearable, sexual demands, requests for money or affection.
Everything is charged with a somnambulic violence and you must avoid contact to escape
its potential discharge. Now that the mad have been let out of the asylums everyone is
seen as a potential madman. Everything is so informal, there is so little in the way of
reserve or manners (except for that eternal film of a smile, which offers only a very
flimsy protection), that you feel anything could blow up at any moment. By some chain
reaction, all this latent hysteria could be released at a stroke. The same feeling in New
York, where panic is almost the characteristic smell of the city streets. Sometimes it takes
the form of a gigantic breakdown, as in 1976.
All around, the tinted glass facades of the buildings are like faces: frosted surfaces. It
is as though there were no one inside the buildings, as if there were no one behind the
faces. And there really is no one. This is what the ideal city is like.
SALT LAKE CITY
Rethinking Architecture 210