Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In 1919, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst commissioned California's first li-
censed female architect Julia Morgan to build Hearst Castle. It would take her decades to
finish.
Post-Modern Evolutions
True to its mythic nature, California couldn't help wanting to embellish the facts a little,
veering 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 sunburned hilltop. Canadian-born Frank Gehry relocated to
Santa Monica, and his billowing, sculptural style for LA's Walt Disney Concert Hall winks
cheekily at shipshape streamline moderne. Also in Downtown LA, the Cathedral of Our
Lady of the Angels, designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, echoes the grand
churches of Mexico and Europe from a controversial deconstructivist angle. Renzo Piano's
signature inside-out industrial style can be glimpsed in the sawtooth roof and red-steel
veins of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Bay Area's most iconic postmodern building is the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, which Swiss architect Mario Botta made stand out with a black-and-white
striped, marble-clad atrium in 1995. Lately SF has championed a brand of postmodernism
by Pritzker Prize-winning architects that magnify and mimic the great outdoors, especially
in Golden Gate Park. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron clad the MH de Young Me-
morial Museum in copper, which will eventually 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.
To find museums, art galleries, fine-art exhibition spaces and calendars of upcoming
shows throughout SoCal, check out
ArtScene
(
www.artscenecal.com
)
and
Artweek LA
(
www.artweek.la
)
magazines.
