I called it a piece of junk. But it was a Frank | Real Estate news

The early Nineteen Eighties Los Angeles of my childhood always felt like a place where you could possibly brush against greatness and not even acknowledge it.

Take the unusual, faceless building at Melrose and Sycamore avenues, just up from the home where I grew up. It stood aside from the Melrose Avenue hodgepodge, which included an auto physique store, an previous bookstore well-known for promoting film scripts, and a fashionable boutique that bought classic fedoras and marked the start of Melrose’s flip as a fashion mecca.

In a avenue crammed with signage screaming for your consideration (“THOUSANDS OF BOOKS,” yelled the bookseller), that nook lot had nothing. Just two concrete-plastered bins seemingly closed off to the world. The only trace of life was a tree growing from what appeared to be some variety of courtyard hidden from view. I handed by all the time — sneaking a Chunky bar at the nook liquor store, grabbing an ice cream cone from Baskin-Robbins.

I didn’t give the building a second thought until my best pal and I began a little weekly newspaper we photocopied for 3½ cents a copy from a store a few doorways away. Jack and I hit up Melrose retailers to buy adverts (often just their business card), and a few agreed to help these teenage publishing tycoons. Because of this, cracking the code of that unusual little building turned a transient obsession. One day, I discovered a door around the facet and knocked. No reply. So I left a copy of our paper and returned a few days later. No luck. So I gave up. Why was I losing my time with this piece of junk?

It took another 15 years to study that the concrete box I so simply dismissed is one of L.A. architectural treasures. It is called the Danziger Studio and was one of architect Frank Gehry’s first L.A. commissions.

Even back in the Nineteen Sixties, it was hailed as one thing particular. Architecture critic Reyner Banham called it a good elevation of the “stucco box” so ubiquitous around town. As it turned out, the floor was not concrete but “a gray rough stucco of the type sprayed onto freeway overpasses. Gehry had to learn the decidedly unconventional technique himself,” according to the Los Angeles Conservancy.

In his obituary for Gehry, Christopher Hawthorne described the studio as a “spare, even self-effacing stucco box, plain outside and filled with light and surprising spatial complexity inside.” The building “looked Modern but also suggested sympathy for the postwar visual chaos of L.A. evident in the work of artists such as Ed Ruscha and David Hockney.”

I found the provenance of the hidden gem in the Nineteen Nineties, when Gehry had reached “starchitect” standing with his shape-shifting museum in Bilbao, Spain, and just before he gained legend standing for L.A.’s Disney Hall. The Danzinger Studio shared none of those over-the-top designs. But that made me more impressed. I began driving by whenever I was in the neighborhood, slowing down in hopes of understanding what made it great. One day, I even gave it a walk-around, assuming it must look a lot better inside. (It turns out it does.)

I got here to admire its magnificence and grace — as properly as one thing a lot bigger about L.A. design. Suddenly, my thought of great structure broadened past the ornate church, grand mansion, distinctive Spanish Colonial or gleaming glass skyscrapers just like the Westin Bonaventure resort. I gained a respect for the simplicity of design and operate over model, like a cute working-class courtyard condominium, the streamlined simplicity of a May Co. division store and even the crazed effectivity of a mini-mall.

Plaza Cienega is in the Beverly Grove space of Los Angeles.

(Google avenue view)

I have questioned whether or not I would have valued the Danziger Studio had it not been designed by Gehry. But it didn’t matter, because this discovery gave me the arrogance to have my own, sometimes unpopular, L.A. opinions. I am in the minority, for instance, in loving the much-derided Nineteen Sixties brown-box addition to the previous Times Mirror Square advanced just as a lot as the landmark Art Deco authentic. And sorry, the mini-mall at third Street and La Cienega Boulevard is one of my favourite L.A. buildings, period.

Trust me. I know.