TWO: SANTA MONICA CIVIC CENTER PARKING STRUCTURE SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA

摘要

For better or worse, Los Angeles invented car culture. For the late academic Reyner Banham and his continuing, devoted band of theory-mongers, ostensibly every building, public space, and fragment of architecture in Los Angeles is really about the car. Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners' new parking structure for Santa Monica's civic center is but the latest shout-out to Banham's influential thesis, set forth in 1971 in the book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. There is always a new example to reaffirm Banham-his book is now unanimously understood as the first honest (and perhaps most gushing) critique of Southern California's freeway culture-because the trashy, flashy, global architecture culture that has emerged in Los Angeles from the late 1960s onward took the critic seriously.