Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Jim Heimann's
California Crazy and Beyond: Roadside Vernacular Architecture
is a romp
through the zany, whimsical building-blocks world of California, where lemonade stands
look like giant lemons and motels are shaped like tepees.
Postmodern Evolutions
True to its anti-establishment nature, California veered away from strict high modernism
to add unlikely postmodern shapes to the local landscape. In 1997 Richard Meier made his
mark on West LA with the Getty Center, a cresting white wave of a building on a sun-
burned hilltop. Canadian-born Frank Gehry relocated to Santa Monica, and his billowing,
sculptural style for Downtown LA's Walt Disney Concert Hall winks cheekily at shipshape
streamline moderne.
Into the 21st century, San Francisco has championed a brand of postmodernism by
Pritzker Prize-winning architects that magnifies and mimics California's great outdoors,
especially in Golden Gate Park. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron clad the MH de
Young Memorial Museum in copper, which will slowly oxidize green to match its park
setting. Nearby, Renzo Piano literally raised the roof on sustainable design at the LEED
platinum-certified California Academy of Sciences, capped by a living-roof garden.
Oddball Architecture
Hearst Castle, San Simeon
Theme Building, LAX Airport
Binoculars Building, Venice
Tor House, Carmel-by-the-Sea
Solvang, Santa Barbara Wine Country
Winchester Mystery House, San Jose
Visual Arts
The earliest European artists to capture California were trained cartographers accompany-
ing Western explorers, although their images of California as an island show more imagin-
ation than scientific rigor. This mythologizing tendency continued throughout California's
Gold Rush, as artists alternated between caricatures of Wild West debauchery and
