Category: Architecture

To get to move the masses within a fake Paris that mixes the centre, the Eiffel Tower and the worst of Chinese mass housing (Sky City), working somewhere between the assault on archetypal symbols, the synchronised swimming girls of the musicals with Esther Williams and the human geometries of Michel Gondry’s electronic music videos, takes years of work and refinement on a precise imagery. To have a view as clear as the one Romain Gavras displays in the music video for Gosh by Jamie XX, one must perfectly master that visual universe, those references and be able to film open spaces as well as closed ones. Which, as it happens, are exactly the skills needed to create a Shakespearean epic of the modern metropolis, a Lord Of The Rings that pits angry suburbia with bandanas over the mouths and tracksuits against police officers in riot gear, in other words Romain Gavras’ next film Athena, which will be on Netflix from 23 September. The apotheosis of his career, pure rage on film.

A conflict on an unprecedented scale, shot as if it were a music video, made up of sequence plans and a creative use of drones within a suburban neighbourhood (namely Athena, in Paris). If there is one thing that Gavras has stated through images throughout his career, it is that the architectural aggressiveness and brutality of those places, buildings and areas, imposed by society on those who have less, has ended up affecting the people who live there. Construction has contributed to creating an angry youth that now gathers around those buildings and draws its rebellious strength from them.

So if there is one object that most represents Romain Gavras’ style, it is the Molotov cocktail. A recurring fetish in his music videos that then became part of the films. The perfect symbol of an artist who founded a contemporary aesthetic centred around the rage of the outcast, the suburbs, social housing and a style of clothing that never imitates official fashion but instead is made up of aggressive elements, jumpsuits, chains, bomber jackets and bandanas. The contemporary Kombat Banlieue that bring urban spaces to life in ways that are both familiar and new. Gavras does not found a new mythology of the suburbs, but elevates the one that already exists, the world of streetwear, of street gestures and attitudes, merging it with the buildings, the poorly kept green areas, the graffiti on the walls, the areas that are empty for no reason and the shacks. Everything contributes to creating anger.

His first music video already had it all, I Believe by Simian Mobile Disco, in which a group of guys with faces, bodies and clothing from the suburbs show off, flaunting their swag and the places they live in as if they owned who knows what refined and attractive places. That world is theirs, it represents them and they represent it. It will be a few years later, with Stress by Justice, that Gavras’ ability to frame characters in a landscape would become clear. In that music video made up of gangs, council houses, jackets that all look the same and logos on the back, nastiness, vandalism, beatings, high-rise buildings and arrogant kids, he takes Kassovitz’s La Haine a step further, because those who come from the banlieue no longer need to look like victims but fight back without a real reason. And there, 14 years ago, there is an insane shot that returns in Athena, of racing cars seen from the side, taken with a high-speed drone.

The bodies, the anger and the naivety of 13-18-year-old kids are Gavras’ real passion. In his imagination they are always trained people (often all dressed alike, as if in uniform), with iron wills and desires, an almost military organisation and no limits in what they are willing to do. Perhaps because he was no different from them. Indeed, it takes a lot to found a collective at the age of 13, Kourtrajmé (French slang verlan for court métrage), with a couple of friends and keep it so active until he was 40. Athena was made with other members of Kourtrajmé (Lady Lj at the screenplay) and Les Miserables, a film from two years ago all about banlieue and resistance, was another product of the collective (directed by Lady Lj and produced by Gavras).

With that kind of knowledge, you can also blow the kids up, as in M.I.A.’s controversial music video Born Free, in which the kids respond to the police in riot gear that are harassing defenceless people, unleashing a bloody desert war that spares the viewer nothing, designed and shot to disturb, with its human parts exploding towards the camera. The city is missing, so a piece is missing, and you can feel it. Born Free has great political nastiness but very little style.

The same will be the case in another video for M.I.A., Bad Girls, also filmed far from the metropolis, which plays ironically with the Arab world by placing dusty cars from the 90s on stretches of paved road in the desert, and women posing as men usually do, holding the typical objects of phallic power and exhibiting an ironic pose of domination on cars that move on two wheels. A pure showcase of petty skills, screeching tires and self-display. People who want to take over the world. But what editing and what drone shots! The world of angry suburban kids is so crucial to his visual references that Gavras even manages to slip them into his commercials, such as the one for the Adidas Is All In campaign, in which he places the ardour of his boys alongside major sports figures, or the one for Powerade, in which the grit of a boxer is shown to be rooted in a childhood of suburbia and beatings.

His mother a film producer and his father an idol of the angry cinema of the 70s and 80s (Costa Gavras, short for Kostantinos Gavras), Romain Gavras grew up in a family with all the right references, where fighting was a topic of discussion at the dinner table. Translating it into a clear and complete aesthetic key was therefore an achievement, that came with No Church In The Wild. It is 2012 and that video for the Jay-Z and Kanye West track with Frank Ocean is the dress rehearsal for Athena. An almost five-minute-long clash between the police and angry kids, edited by choosing the essential parts and set no longer in the desert but finally in the streets. Parisian-like city centre architecture, clean streets to be smeared with tear gas, expensive cars to overturn, high class shop windows being smashed while behind them the mounted police charge as in a medieval fight. After the experiment of Stress, the real Kombat Banlieue was born here, that idea for which the movements of protest and struggle, the clothing choices of the rebels, are all about style, that it is the crucial aesthetic of our time and that style is a form of power. His rebels are not desperate because they don’t look like it and their cheap clothing becomes a uniform.

Meanwhile his feature debut, Our Day Will Come, was already out, the crazy story of an absurd rebellion. A teenager and an adult, both with red hair, rebel against a world that marginalises them for it. It makes no sense (and is not memorable), but it is no coincidence that it comes on when the fighting madness takes over and someone sets a car on fire. It does not get much better with The World Is Yours, the second, somewhat more accomplished film, a gangster comedy that is neither really funny nor is it a real crime film. There, however, there is a shot of the kind few can boast of, the first, in which a group of men stand motionless in a suburban setting, tense, holding a hammer to smash something and waiting for an overground train to pass by so they can do so without being heard. Streetwear, desolation, Maghrebi faces, nastiness and a surge of sound for the wagon’s arrival that corresponds exactly with the start of the furious action: an assault to free a dog (!).

This is the path that leads to Gosh, his most accomplished work before Athena, an electronic musical within the fakest of cities and the most popular and aggressive of the world’s suburbs at the same time. Masses with identical clothes but also identical made-up faces and a crazy way of fitting people into architecture. There are at least a couple of perfect sequences (which not surprisingly involve a drone), the one that move backwards from the face of the video’s protagonist, until he becomes a white dot in a forest of high-rise windows, and then the other, one that alone defines an entire career, in which a group of people move drawing a spiral to perfection and the movement of the drone shows us they are inside the Eiffel Tower (or rather its replica). The people assault the most important locations of cities and make them their own through movement, occupying them with the grace of coordinated dance and the style of clothing but with a manner that is always aggressive.

In Gosh, Kombat Banlieue has no Molotov cocktails and clashes but choreography as a means of appropriating space; in Athena, on the other hand, buildings become towers, bridges become the walls of a medieval city, the various levels of the green areas are caves and escape routes. In a brutal regression, the periphery becomes a pre-civilisation space, a stronghold for defence and counter-attack. When at the end of the first furious 10-minute sequence shot, in which the rebels storm a police barracks, steal their weapons and return to the neighbourhood to barricade themselves in, the drone shoots them with a backward movement that widens the perspective and frames them as feudal lords guarding their empire (and the title ATHENA appears), it is clear that Romain Gavras has understood, and knows how to display without words, the purest essence of audiovisuals: to compress a political concept into a style-based visual allegory.

The sun is setting in Jeddah, which for centuries has been the Red Sea gateway to Mecca. In the northern part of the city, not far from the sumptuous new airport terminal inaugurated in 2019 and next to a currently abandoned plot of land – a rectangle of desert swarmed by pigeons and from which you can see the American consulate – stands a new building: an icy parallelepiped that is an element of discontinuity in a mainly residential neighbourhood. It is Hayy Jameel, the city’s new arts hub.

At this time of the day, the pearly white façade changes colour. As Lebanese architect Wael Al Awar, who designed this building, points out, the gold and blue reflections are unique: “something like this could not happen in Singapore or the United Kingdom”. It is Jeddah’s light, “a special light, which cannot be found anywhere else”. It is the light of an extremely hot sun, which during the day bleaches everything. As it sets into the Red Sea, it casts soft, precious shades.

This ever-changing light is deeply symbolic. It corresponds to the essence of an architecture designed to change over time, remodelling its spaces according to the needs. In the most extreme case, the steel parts – all standard pieces – can be dismantled and reused. “This architecture is not static”, sums up Al Awar, founder of waiwai studio and curator of the UAE pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, which was awarded a Golden Lion.

Jameel is the name of the philanthropic family originally from Jeddah who financed the construction of the building that has become the younger brother of the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. Hayy is the Arabic word for neighbourhood, and it is the name that was chosen for a space aiming to be “accessible, communal and collaborative”, as the official website reads.

However, Hayy Jameel does not explicitly reveal itself to the street and the neighbourhood. “This is a residential area, we couldn’t do otherwise,” says Al Awar, explaining that the building, already taller than the surrounding houses, was designed so as not to invade the privacy of others. It does not offer itself to the eye and at the same time does not allow looking outside. It is a treasure chest full of surprises, but at the same time, it is opaque, designed to be discovered only from the inside.

The only way to ideally see inside Hayy Jameel is through its façade, a 25-metre-long surface which each year will display the work of a different artist, as part of a collaboration with Lexus. Nasser Almulhim, from the capital city Riyadh, gets the ball rolling with a drawing inspired by a local fable about birds in a time of famine.

On either side of the façade, there are stairs leading up to the main courtyard, called Saha. If Hayy Jameel is a neighbourhood, to Al Awar this space is its square – or more precisely, the agora. The challenge, he explains, was to bring its dimensions back to a human scale, whereas urban design in the Gulf countries is car-oriented – his inspiration was the courtyards in Damascus, where the architect was born, or those in Morocco. “But even in Jeddah, we have an example of this kind of scale, that is, in the old city”. He refers to Al-Balad, the historical centre of this metropolis of five million inhabitants that dates back to the seventh century. A spider’s web of alleys and lanes winding between palaces and mosques and bazaars, where citizens and pilgrims have always moved on foot or ridden on camelback.

Saha is a multifunctional place that can be transformed into a small multi-level arena for concerts, a market space, a garden in which to read a book or drink coffee with friends, but above all it was conceived as a place to meet and feel close to people. A human-oriented oasis for the inhabitants of a car-oriented city.

In Hayy Jameel’s 17,000 square metre complex there is room for art residencies, exhibitions and events, performances and workshops, shops and educational platforms, and even a comedy club. And cinema: when the project was conceived, seven years ago, it was a black box. The reason is simple. For thirty years, cinema was banned in Saudi Arabia.

It was designed by Bricklab, a studio founded in 2015 by brothers Abdulrahman and Turki Hisham Gazzaz. “There are no film libraries in the city, there are no archives, so this space was created to be both educational and a landmark for experimentation”, the brothers explain. Born in Jeddah, they recently returned here after studying abroad. Preceded by an installation, Hayy Jameel’s audio-visual centre will open in spring.

During our conversation, Bricklab’s founders gave me a fundamental piece of information to understand their hometown, pointing out that the city’s keywords – following a chiastic pattern – are “art and culture, culture and art”.

The story of the Gazzaz brothers is a very common one here among millennials, or at least among the millennials I happen to meet in the few days I spend in the Saudi city: almost all of them are under 40 and have studied abroad – in Canada, London, Bristol, some in the United States – and have recently come back, bringing an important contribution in terms of knowledge, creativity and energy.

This is also the case of young entrepreneur Tamara Abukhadra, who came back after 18 years in London. In 2014 she founded Homegrown Market, a concept store that brings together the best the Arab world has to offer in terms of fashion design, food and beauty. It is now also a pop-up store inside Hayy Jameel. “I am honoured to be part of such a creative community,” says Abukhadra with genuine enthusiasm during our chat over lunch. Unlike many of the women here, wrapped up in the traditional black abaya, she is not wearing a hijab, but a colourful dress that is overtly local but globally Arab. She tells me about the life of young people in Jeddah, how the central area of the city is mostly inhabited by the older generations, while the young people prefer to live in the northern area, where the new trendy neighbourhoods are – and where her shop is.

Here, she explains, social life is organised mainly through invitations between friends on WhatsApp or via e-mail. “There are no clubs, only cafés. The parties are all private, organised at home”. It’s perfectly normal for them to be men-only or women-only. Sometimes there is also alcohol. She then mentions the parties in the desert, which are freer, but they are all outside Riyadh, on the other side of this vast country.

During one of my many trips around this city, where there is no metro and public transport in general has remained a sort of urban legend for me, partly due to my unfamiliarity with the Arabic language, I end up sitting next to a French government official who has been working for years on important collaborations between museums in Cisalpine and Gulf countries, such as the Louvre in Abu Dhabi or the Pompidou in AlUla.

The official roughly sums up the reforms introduced by the young prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud – also known as MBS – thanks to which Saudi Arabia is rapidly changing. They mainly concern the rules that relegated women to a position that we Europeans like to summarily define as ‘medieval’, from the dress code (now gone) to work (now women can do any job they want). It tells of the optimism of a country that is changing, opening up to international tourism. But also of what happens in Deera Square, the so-called Riyadh “chop chop square”, where the heads of criminals, opponents and homosexuals are cut off; of all the times he entered a club and those inside, seeing a European enter, decided to leave. He tells me of the 2007 attack against a group of French tourists, and more recent episodes.

A few weeks after my visit, Mayeul Barbet, a French Paris-Dakar rally driver, was the victim of an attack right here in Jeddah. The moral dilemma, according to the French official, is whether to disregard what is happening around here, or to stay here “to make things better”. On the other hand, the petrodollars of the Saudi family, the richest rulers in the world, are a very strong attraction for countries like France (or Italy), where culture is one of the last relevant economic assets that can be exploited on a global scale.

In Jeddah, a multicultural city in terms of both history and vocation, there is certainly great optimism about the reforms brought about by MBS. The locals seem enthusiastic about the future, which is almost overwhelming. But outside the Kingdom, this is still the country of Khashoggi, the dissident journalist murdered in Turkey (probably) by Saudi agents, as well as the country where Lewis Hamilton won the first Formula 1 Grand Prix, held in Jeddah, wearing a Pride flag helmet as a slap in the face to the Saudi system. “Do I feel comfortable here? I wouldn’t say I do,” the Mercedes driver commented before the race.

A few days after the Grand Prix, you could still catch a glimpse of the podium as you strolled along the Jeddah Corniche, between the recently renovated waterfront and a Starbucks. Without knowing the context, you could mistake it for one of the many statues that dot the city, many of them being odd, others beautiful, some a masterpiece. Almost all of them are located in the middle of the many roundabouts that mark the road network of this metropolis-highway, or along the junctions where, for a few moments, solitary human beings locked inside air-conditioned cabins approach each other before speeding on straight roads.

The statues are the legacy of the ambitious public art operation launched by Mohammed Said Farsi, the mayor who, by inviting masters such as Joan Mirò, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Alexander Calder and Henry Moore in the 1970s, was the first to bring Western art and sculpture to an Arab city. “It left Jeddah a surreal cityscape of desert monuments that might have delighted JG Ballard,” wrote Jonathan Jones in 2015 on the Guardian.

To understand how Jeddah has grown and changed since the oil boom, I visit Saudi Modern, Bricklab’s initiative to document the unforeseen urban and architectural evolution of Saudi Arabia in the decades after 1938 – a date that counts as year zero in the Kingdom. The venue is a two-storey house across a street where a sink is mounted on the outside of a boundary wall, an almost surreal detail. In a room, a map and a large-scale model illustrate the expansion of Jeddah, a metropolis squeezed between the sea and the desert, and one can clearly see how the intricate network of streets in the old city, whose proportions now look like those of a postage stamp, unravels a divergent system of orthogonal grids, very similar to those of American cities, which with their wide grids characterise today’s urban fabric.

The exhibition focuses on a period going up to the early 1960s, the time of the first big boom, but it is clear that today this city is once again undergoing a major transformation. During my conversation with Al Awar, the architect points out that when the project for Hayy Jameel was conceived seven years ago, Jeddah had 4 million inhabitants. In 2024, it will be 7 million. But it is not just a matter of numbers. This is where the world’s tallest tower will be built, where more than $200 million was spent to create a waterfront that would become a fairytale backdrop for tourists’ Instagram pics. And in the days following Hayy Jameel’s inauguration, the new Red Sea Film Festival has brought Jeddah back in the international film scenario. Not to mention the events dedicated to contemporary art, the Bienal Sur for example, the many fairs such as Shara or 21,39 Jeddah Arts, plus everything that happens in the already lively circuit of galleries scattered throughout the city.

The Hayy Jameel cultural hub and its architecture are both a reflection and an integral part of this ferment and transformation. “A place to coexist”, defined it Antonia Carver, director at Art Jameel. The building represents what Jeddah is in actuality and potentiality. It reflects it symbolically, and it shows what it would like to look like. It does so without frills, without vainly presenting itself with the ambition of being a cover landmark, but with a genuinely Islamic modesty. And an optimism that can only be exotic to my European eyes.

Hayy Jameel’s opening saw the inauguration of the exhibition “Illuminate”, with 11 large installations by Saudi artists dedicated to light, “Staple: What’s on your plate”, in which the exploration of food becomes an opportunity to get to know different cultures and artistic practices, and “Paused Mirror”, with portraits of Saudi artists taken by Syrian photographer Osama Esid that follow each other in different parts of the building. And there is also “Red Sea: immersive”, the virtual reality section of the Red Sea Film Festival.

What should I do, go down to the basement and laugh…

Tobsucht, 1998, German Band

On the continent and especially in Austria, the Basement is a place for obsessions, from the very private and secretive to the benign and utilitarian. Some dwellers spend most of their free time (Freizeit) in the basement rather than in their above-the-earth living rooms, exchanging the dream of socio-cultural conformity for the gritty reality of obsession and darkness.

While European trends point toward a sustainable wood construction movement that can rise into the clouds, the Californian subcontinent is increasing its reliability on concrete to go more underground. Not only is the scarcity of real estate finally catching up with the LA LA Land of single-story buildings producing ever more underground parking structures and higher concrete buildings for speculative housing and new commerce. In addition, California is grappling with the highest cost of lumber ever, caused by Covid delivery backup. It is this shift of building technology and the circumstances of pandemic life that prompt me to reflect on the value of the and in-the-ground construction. It is in the nature of a building under the earth that the building material is matched with the conditions around it, using more permanent materials that can withstand moisture, earthquakes, marauders and animals.

The darker side of the underground and its secrets can be glimpsed in the work of Ulrich Seidl, the Austrian filmmaker and documentarian who exposes us to the human dimensions of the cellar as an obsessive space. His film, In the Basement (Im Keller) is a 2014 documentary film about basement escapists, and their underground lives. (It premiered in the “Out of Competition” section at the 71st Venice International Film Festival.)

The extreme side of basement obsession is embodied by the real-life Josef Fritzl. From Amstetten, a town in Lower Austria, he started to build a vast extension to his cellar in the 1970s under his suburban house, in order to enslave one of his daughters for over 24 years. He pretended that she had run away, raped her over a thousand times and fathered seven children. One of them died, three remained in the cellar, and three were allowed above ground: to explain their existence, Fritzl concocted a story for his wife according to which their run-away daughter had left them on his doorstep like “foundlings” for his wife to care for. At his trial, he claimed to have been a caring father and to have brought toys and videos to the basement.

To outside observers, such a crime seemed almost unfathomable in the wholesome normality of Austrian suburbia, but there is documentary evidence of similar cases of dark behavior in basements across the European Continent. An exception to this stereotype for me has always been Peter Noever’s The Pit in Breitenbrunn, Austria, built in 1970 (published on Domus 529, 1973). In this project the darkness of a subterranean wine cellar is forcefully undone by unearthing the underground space, a space that now reaches out to sunlight and opens to the surrounding landscape. Thus, the light-filled underground can now receive human interaction by creating an open and luminous ending to an otherwise dark conclusion. This project which also features Walter Pichler’s Conversation Pits, has over time become an optimistic example of how to escape the tyrannies of convention by reversing the intentionality of an existing programmed use into a newly found paradigm of an optimistic new beginning.

In contrast to the more dour Austrian reality, the sun-drenched West Coast and Central America feature garages that function as equivalent places of obsession and escapism: from garage bands (Nirvana), to the invention of consumer-oriented computers (Apple), to the frequent suicides by carbon-monoxide suffocation. Garages are the spaces where conventional behavior can be avoided and extreme behavior can take over. But being above ground, American buildings are more vulnerable to observation and surveillance by others, thus never rising to the clandestine status of darker basements. Even attics, another potential dark place, are compromised when reduced to superfluous spaces used only for the placement of heating ducts and blown-in insulation rather than to keep secrets. Californians may hide their criminal secrets in the vast universe of remote storage facilities, but that is another conversation altogether not yet exploited by current reality TV shows.

Around the turn of the century, the California sun and dry air also inspired the Sicilian immigrant Baldassare Forestiere to build a citrus grove behind his modest home near Fresno. He discovered that frequent watering made the root-balls of his trees so heavy that they fell 20 feet below into the already hollowed hardpan. After most of the other trees fell into his orchard’s understory, he started to horizontally connect the deep holes and thus created a network of tunnels and underground rooms. The trees thrived and his marriage fell apart, since he spent so much time underground. A developer talked him into digging a driveway into this underground paradise to open it up as a naturally cooled roadside motel. It is now preserved as a landmark, where a plaque celebrates the Forestiere Underground Gardens’ “creative and individualist spirit unbound by conventionality.” I visited these gardens in the late 70s and was struck by the optimism and life-affirming images of the orange trees reaching out of the dark into the light.

I conceived my own first architectural project as an underground building in the hills of Napa Valley in 1978 following my conceptual studies of appropriate architecture for a new California. The project, 10 Californian Houses (published in Domus 601, 1979) explored extreme living conditions void of representational features such as facades and conventional floor-plans. Mostly built into the ground, they offer a reading of different Californian obsessions manifested through dwellings, like the house for a runner, condominiums for high divers and surfers, a house for two fighting brothers, and a hotel for mountain climbers carved into a mythical rock formation. This exploration led me to my first client, who wanted to build a barn to live in and an underground storage space for all the clothes the family ever wore. This extreme programmatic contradiction prompted me to suggest a building built into the slope of the hill with the clothing collection fully submerged into the ground and the dwelling area reaching for the sun out of the ground. (Goldman/Ashford Residence, St Helena, 1978/Batey&Mack)

While the darker human obsessions can thrive in a world without natural sunlight, I would like to now take a more optimistic and positive view of the underground. Current West Coast building trends reflect the cultural and global concerns of climate change and it is just prudent to consider the warm earth as a companion in this journey towards using less energy for heating and cooling. On a recent surf trip to the Baja Peninsula, I encountered several buildings and enclaves that use the brute force of concrete as a new expression of form and comfort.

In Todos Santons, Baja Sud, Taller Terreno, Kevin Wickham and Mark Cruz created an underground home and ceramic studio on slightly sloping terrain overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Its brute concrete form peeks slightly out of its earthly embrace, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Entering from above via a desert roof-scape, stairs lead down into its protective belly of living and sleeping rooms. The solar lap pool and south-facing glass front creates a minimal high-end interior where the harsh concrete walls are humored by eccentric furniture and surreal ceramic art pieces.

Similarly the nearby Paradero Hotel, built only of rough formed concrete, forms a protected oasis in an otherwise parched landscape. Designed by Yashar Yektajo and Ruben Valdez, the cleverly arranged compound locates all guest services (such as reception, restaurant, kitchen and spa) in fully outdoor concrete freestanding structures. The open, oasis-like space is surrounded by a protective ring of a two-story concrete rooms that are accessed by individual staircases. The almost nostalgic brutalist architecture is softened by a trendy Farm to Table dining concept and forces one to spend as much time outside as possible. The luxury hotel provides locally knitted ponchos and blankets for the cool desert evening and caters to design and food aficionados with its natural yet rough aestethics. Rammed earth construction re-emerges as a residential and commercial building material in the work of RIMA. The artist complex Casa Ballena in San Jose del Cabo, designed by Gerardo Rivero celebrates the natural prolongation of earth as a natural building material that was envisioned already in the 60’ and 70’ as a Hippie-favorite, DIY, building material.

So, with this new appreciation of brutish organic building materials, are we entering a more substantial way of building, close or into the ground, or is it just a trendy new view of architectural materialism? It has always been a wet dream for most architects to build with more real and solid materials and reconvene with the rigor of early modernist architecture. An architecture in its natural, pure state of haptic permanence. The investment in the subterranean suggests not only a new reality of building technology, but also leads to a more optimistic utilization of the usually hidden dimensions of the buildings. Unafraid of the darkness and of the underground, we can embrace now the opportunity this old material offers, by not burying our head in the sand but rather warming the body with warm earth, lying low to the ground, embedded and literally surrounded by our planet.

Although the Ansonia and Cecil shared similar ambitions, past turbulences during their history bearing similar characteristics, the different surroundings and class conditions produced a totally different outcome.

By now everybody has heard about the sordid history of the Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. The subject of various docs in the crime investigation genre the building received added exposure when Netflix jumped into the fray with its own series highlighting the disappearance of a Canadian College student there in 2015.

Is this building cursed, one might ask? Is there such a thing as a curse on an architectural artifact, such a that a building consequently acts to fill headlines of tabloid journalism and its insatiable lust for crime stories solved and unsolved? One season of the popular series American Horror Story was supposedly inspired by the recent disappearance at the hotel.

Among the facts and urban legends surrounding the Cecil Hotel, most mentioned are its listings of unfortunate deaths in and around the hotel as well as some of the gruesome guests staying there. It occurred to me that is not so much that the hotel itself is a character in a crime story but rather its surroundings. Its historic economic rollercoaster ride, and of course its change of status to a hotel that houses marginal inhabitants account for its reputation.

Located in Downtown Los Angeles the Cecil was built in 1924 to rival other hotel constructions in a booming economy, which saw a meteoric rise in the number of residents. All those who moved to Southern California in the early 1920s, constituted the largest internal migration of the American people, and Los Angeles replaced San Francisco as the largest city on the West Coast. All while the city struggled with a troubled socio-political configuration that pitted an emerging working class against the brutality of capitalism favoring any freeform entrepreneurship over unionization and labor rights.

With its 15 stories and about 700 rooms, the Cecil was one the largest hotels built to compete in the LA market with appointed luxury and urban convenience. But all these intentions were soon eclipsed by the incoming global economic downfall of 1928, making the need for cheap and more flexible residential choices necessary. This ended its rise to opulence and provoked a fall into the category of Single Residence Occupation Hotel.

By chopping up rooms and suites and installing shared bathrooms and kitchens it became a home for the down and out, within close proximity to the emerging Skid Row, a place where people were starting to live on the street, created by the Great Depression.It is no wonder then, that the clientele went from aspiring entrepreneurs and Hollywood wannabes to those with down-spiraling careers, to forgotten veterans and lost souls depending on government handouts. The closure of state mental institutions in California reached a high point under Governor Reagan, who had business ties to operators of profit care homes, when he abolished the Mental Health Systems Act ( instituted by previous President Jimmy Carter).

The infamous “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez is rumored to have stayed at the hotel for a few weeks when he was not residing on the streets of Skid Row. Austria’s most notorious serial sex worker murderer Jack Unterweger , posing as a crime reporter, used the hotel as a residence while supposedly researching the literary atmosphere of Charles Bukowski and stalking out female victims on the side.

Jack Unterweger’s background that startled me, as he was born in the town as I grew up in; Judenburg, Austria. Born to an Austrian waitress mother and an American soldier, he was a year younger than me and went to the same Elementary school as me and my close friend Fritz, whose mother taught all of us German. I don’t remember him personally since he was not in my close group of friends, but it makes me shiver now to know that we might have been in sports class or altar boys together.

When I arrived in California in 1976 to act on my dream to become an architect for rock and roll musicians (a subject for another story), Mr. Unterweger was already serving a life sentence for murdering a sex worker in Austria. While in prison he wrote short stories, poems and an autobiography account and became the darling of the press and literary elite, who petitioned the government citing his case as a study in rehabilitation and redemption. After his lawyer had fallen in love with him he was released after a mandatory 15 years in prison, he was offered his own national show, enjoyed celebrity status among the intelligentsia and helped the police solve crimes in public all while murdering 11 more sex workers, 1 Czech and 7 Austrians. Three Americans were strangled while he was a resident at the Cecil Hotel in the early 80’s. He was in Los Angeles to research crime stories and was even invited to drive around with a Police patrol car as a guest investigator, in order to solve crimes that he even probably committed.

Even though I was fascinated and distracted by this coincidental personal confluence, I grew to doubt more and more the myth of architecture as an enabler of crime. Despite the lurid details that put this hotel on the map of crime-related tourism, it is rather the circumstances around socio-economic configurations, its distorted reprogramming, and its questionable management among changing ownerships that redefined the Cecil as a Hotel of Horror. I contemplated the influence of social factors in Design, a subject vigorously meditated at progressive architecture schools such as Berkeley and Princeton in the late 70’s and early 80’s and defensible-space theories that made bad designs responsible for social ills. It was a time where economic exploitations and the diminishing governmental safety-net for an endangered class of socially vulnerable worsened. In a society dominated by capitalism as the core of American Conservative / Republican values, only the “strong” will get richer and live in gated communities while the “weak” have to fight it out on the streets.

Before coming to the West Coast I worked on a proposal for a similar category hotel in New York after arriving from Vienna in 1974. I was hired to work for Haus Rucker Co, an experimental Austrian Architecture group that successfully put together an architecture show at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art and was consequently granted a study of rooftop use in Manhattan as part of the National Endowment Awards. Consequently I spent my first 6 months on the roofs of this magnificent city marveling at the possibility of utilizing the unused roof-scapes of New York for public, commercial and private uses. One of our case studies was the Ansonia Hotel, uptown on Broadway, built with the goal of revitalizing the glory of the once largest hotel in the city, which covered 550,000 square feet of space divided among 1,400 rooms, 300 suites by an heir to a Copper fortune.

While in the past the hotel had its share of scandals, suicides and crime related incidents, it was also an exercise in extravagant planning and content exploration. Besides it size and grandeur inspired by the hotels of Paris, the fanciful 17-story limestone and turreted structure, was a lavish vision of a residential hotel that offered amenities that no other residence could offer. It was clairvoyant to erect it in this location when it opened in 1904, since the subway extending north providing convenient transport, thus benefitting from its transit-oriented location for its future sustenance.

The Ansonia contained several grand ballrooms, restaurants decorated in the style of Louis XIV, a palm court, tearooms and cafes, a bank, a barbershop and tailor shop, writing rooms, Turkish baths, and the world’s largest indoor swimming pool.

Within a few years of its opening, the hotel would garner an unsavory reputation, known criminals and sport celebrities would mingle in the vast hallways and public places. The infamous Black Sox Scandal, a plot which planned for the Chicago White Sox to intentionally lose the 1919 World Baseball Series, was orchestrated there. Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth lived there among the tenor Enrico Caruso, the conductor Arturo Toscanini, and the composers Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff. To facilitate communication throughout the vast building, vacuum tubing was installed within the walls to carry messages in capsules between the residents and staff.

The grand lobby, with its large open stairwell and huge domed skylight, featured a large water fountain with live seals. On the roof top the owner kept four geese, a pig, and a farm in the sky, containing about 500 chickens, many ducks, about six goats and a small bear; with fresh eggs delivered to tenants daily until the Department of Health shut it down. When I first visited the hotel it had lost most of its glamour, but it featured the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse “reminiscent of the glory of ancient Rome” with palm fronds, a waterfall that emptied into the pool, a discotheque, and, in one cubicle, drug dealers. The best-known element was the cabaret, featuring Bette Midler and her piano accompanist Barry Manilow.

A decade later the same space would become “Plato’s Retreat,” the infamous heterosexual swingers club whose reputation as a magnet for undesirable characters and actions only added to the Ansonia’s demise.

Inspired by this colorful past we designed a grand rooftop glass house reminiscent of an Art Deco Crystal Palace for grand dancing and other inclusive events in addition to topiary trellised outdoor dining areas, to imitate the original copper turrets that were melted down in the war effort to make tanks.

Even though the Ansonia and Cecil shared similar ambitions, past turbulences during their history bearing similar characteristics, the different surroundings and class conditions produced in each city a totally different outcome. In New York the Ansonia became a high-priced housing Coop for the wealthy on the Upper Westside near Central Park, commanding one of the highest real estate prices in the world. On the other hand the Cecil moved closer to Skid Row in an Ersatz Metropol of a Bladerunner-like apocalyptic looking part of Los Angeles. In LA, where officials and other urban boosters have continually catered only to the capitalist developers exploiting tax benefits in a futile attempt to create DTLA as a symbol of urbanity and metropolitan grandeur, never addressing the socially exploited or neglected population that have resided there for many generations. The Cecil is now closed for renovation in wait for the next economic upswing or urban development that can gentrify the neighborhood, and is forced to cash in on its reputation as a hotel of horror tourism.