An Architectural Fiction

Later, chucked into the boil, battering their death tattoo against the tin, pockmarking the sealed cylinder of their doom.

Then the emergence, the miracle: masque of the red death. Bright babies. And delicious.

Chow down, little Lobster, my gramma would tell me, tail cracking and butter dipping, handing over lumps of meat so delectable it wasn’t possible to have enough.

Afterward, shells in a heap, soaped and washed, handed to me. I’d collected a multitude. And (here the dream begins) built amazing houses, bound with tape and Duco Cement. Here happy little shell-less lobsters lived, plump, fleshy, cherubic, tended by me. I mopped their little crustacean brows, still fevered from the pot. Why always penance for pleasure?

I was actually born here. Grew up in Hollywoodland, in the valley of the shadow of the original sign, before our premier symbol collapsed into inaccuracy. My parents had emigrated from Detroit shortly after their marriage. According to a favored family account, yours truly was conceived on the Twentieth Century Limited on the way out. To this day, I’m unable to hear the cadence of a train’s clickety-clack without summoning up an image of rhythmic humping, pa athwart ma. I dream of the interruption of the porter’s knock but know well the consequences for myself of interruptus just then.

I do not get my artistic propensities from my father. He was an accomplished accountant of great arithmetic acumen (this gene was transmitted to me) and self-defeating honesty. His life crisis came when he was working at MGM and was approached by no less than Irving Thalberg to make some modest culinary modifications to the company’s books. After brief but intense agonies, he left their employ and was from that moment a bitter and broken man. To the end of his days, he held Thalberg responsible for his misfortune. He was unable to forgive Scott Fitzgerald for the flattering portrait of “that Jew Mephistopheles” in The Last Tycoon.

My mother was for many years under contract at Paramount. Although her roles were never large, they were numerous, and she moved gracefully from pert maids to bloated dowagers. She once—in the otherwise forgettable Mongoose Serenade—even received a kiss from John Barrymore. This became the cause of considerable friction between my parents. After his debacle at MGM, my father took an even more jaundiced view of Hollywood morality and increasingly saw my mother’s continued employment in the industry as an affront to the memory of his own scrupulosity.

My childhood was spent in a stucco bungalow in what my mother referred to—with considerable latitude—as Hancock Park Adjacent. My boyish fascination with liquid death of lower life forms turned to the faint primeval prurience of the nearby—if vastly more viscous—tar pits of La Brea. Mind, this was long before the civic weal, in its wisdom, scenographied the place with the current heart-rending elephantine statuary. On the banks of the pits stands little mammoth Dumbo, trunk extended in amazing poignancy and despair towards the perpetually sinking figure of Mama Jumbo, about to slip beneath the slime.

Angeleno emotions crest in such moments of surrogacy: we are all cartoon characters out here. The place incites us. In my nursing dreams, the figure ministering to the lobsters is drawn in plain, if deft, strokes, a troubled-looking baby Huey, topknotted and swaddled in diapers like a tiny Mahatma. I spent endless hours at the tar pits imagining the way different persons and things would sink. My mother, Donald Duck, the house, the car, the Griffith Observatory. In my head ran Warner Brothers Technicolor reveries of slow death . . . tha . . . tha . . . tha . . . that’s all folks! Thus passed many happy hours.

I sometimes think that this rhapsody of displacement was what led me to architecture. As I stood beside the pits wondering if the sinking of the Pan Pacific auditorium would cause the scum to rise enough to envelop my Keds, I became a whiz at the mental calculation of volumes. My speed at such math certainly contributed to my indispensability during my early office career. I could make any idea, however fraudulent, substantial. Where would the world be without men like me?

A sensitive but indolent young man with vague literary ambitions, I was sent by my parents to the University of Southern California to polish my tennis and acquire other rudimentary trappings of higher education. After four bibulous years of beer, blondes, and bathos, I had decided to be a poet. Duly, I established myself in a noirish flat on Bunker Hill, Angel’s Flight out my window. Alas, the flight was inclined but I was not. Daily, I would set out fresh bond and fill my Schaeffer for the labors I hoped would come. Mind you, though I may have drawn a writerly blank, my pages were nonetheless filled. I was a demon doodler. Reams of inked skeins and cryptographic variations on my name were balled and trashed on the way to a conclusion that accumulated weight with my waste. Finally it dawned on me: I preferred to draw.

Architecture was only natural. It is pointless to be a painter out here. The struggle is precisely to resist the two dimensions, against illusion. How, after all, could even Vermeer, even Picasso begin to compete with Walt Disney? What is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon next to Bambi or Snow White? However many thousands of paintings the balding satyr may have produced, they are as nothing against the gels oiled for Walt, tens, hundreds of thousands of paintings framed and sent to dance in the dark before the rapturous eyes of millions!

These thoughts were not exactly on my mind when I made the decision to pursue architecture. Maybe some weeny germs of them, but nothing specific. My tenure among the beleaguered citizens of Bunker Hill as a sniveling would-be writer had also awakened a certain John Reed-esque sense of hubris vis-à-vis my own credentials as proletarian slug. And my personal colossus—architecture-wise—was Frank Lloyd Wright, mediated via Ayn Rand and Gary Cooper, whom I loved for Beau Geste and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Needless to say, this conflation of freedom fighter, leading man, and architect was bound to appeal to an asthmatic twenty-two-year-old on the cusp on an uncertain career commitment.

I went to work for old Lawn Johnson, the builder (a neighbor of my parents), shirtlessly framing spec houses in Los Feliz. Apt name! Happy I was. Burnt penitentially red like a lobster, blessed with incipient musculature, I joyfully nailed my way through a cloudless summer. Johnson, as you may know, was not simply G.C. for those stick rancheros; he was contractor to the stars of the L.A. architectural firmament for close to forty years, the man who brought the work of three generations from becoming to being. Johnson built them all, from Schindler to Soriano, Eames to Ellwood, Wright père down to Wright fils. I was aware of none of this at the time I started out.

Lawn knew more about the work of those architects than they did themselves. After all—as he never tired of repeating—he’d designed most of it, converting “piece of shit details” into the elegant economy of the building trades. We soon developed a nice rapport based on flattery and gin, and he began to take me around to the job sites of his more interesting projects, showing me exactly how he had “saved that Heinie’s ass.” This was my education in wood and steel, stucco and glass, then as now the favored Southland building materials. It was also on these tours—me at the wheel of Johnson’s Packard convertible—that I first began to learn of the powers I had acquired on the banks of the pits.

It seems that I could walk into a room—barely framed out—and estimate at a glance its dimensions and volume to the inch. Johnson pretty quickly realized the utility of this particular knack and put me in charge of cost estimating. I was a wizard here. Once I got up to speed on a few basics, I found I could ballpark a four-thousand-foot house in ten minutes and come up with really accurate figures in about an hour, tops. I rapidly became, for the first time in my life, indispensable, the measurer of all things.

When war broke out, though, the work dried up. Asthma kept me from the army (fear my wheezing might betray my unit to enemy fire, I presume), and I wound up with time on my hands. I had a Nisei friend, Ted Fujitsu, who was studying architecture at USC when the authorities put it to him that he could either go sit in a concentration camp in the desert or head inland to some place where he would be unable to signal Jap subs from the Santa Monica pier. Ted wound up at the Armour Institute in Chicago, and I decided to join him.

Mies himself greeted us from behind a cloud of Havana smoke as we strode in disheveled from the Super Chief. His greeting was perfunctory: “Gott iss in se details. Go draw bricks. Flemish bond, ja?” And so we passed two years, drafting elevations for our Liebermeister, passing from brick to steel, from houses to skyscrapers. My thesis project was a shoebox-shaped glass and white steel house, up on little stilts, which I was somewhat chagrined to see several years later standing in Plano, Illinois.

There still was not a lot of construction going on in 1943 when I got back to L.A.—mansion building was a little sluggish—so I was obliged to look elsewhere for work. I also felt a tad ambivalent about my non-contribution to the war effort and looked for some assuaging employment. I wound up as a draftsman at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. It was a perfect situation, really. I was working nights, which left the day for the beach and my own artistic endeavors. These, despite my initial thinking on the subject, took the form of paintings.

I began to paint Los Angeles. I figured that since the subject matter was itself surreal enough, there was no need to dress it up with any fresh strategies of distortion, although I did—more often than not—manage to work a bright red lobster or two into the view somewhere. I rapidly became enamored of the horizontal format: my reading of the town was all lateral, long cruises down Wilshire with the rangy hills following to the right or left. And I loved the palms, especially the tall royals, rising like skyrockets to burst a hundred feet above the street. I did a particularly fine series of portraits of gas stations in oversimplified one-point perspective that I still wish I’d held on to.

At war’s end, I demobilized myself and went back to Lawn Johnson. Armed with Uncle Sam’s credit, the Southland was aswarm with vets chasing mortgages. The mortgages were chasing houses and business was booming, split-levels hatching like lobsters in the springtime. Johnson was getting on in years and had come to prefer nine holes of golf in Brentwood to screaming at his carpenters in the valley. This left me at the end of a lot of phone calls that the old man would otherwise have taken. One day, a Dr. Bricklmeier called up and wondered whether there was anyone at Johnson’s who could design him a house. Said he couldn’t understand why he should have to hire both an architect and a contractor. I said, why sure there was somebody, and set to work.

The result is pretty well known today, in all the guidebooks. Less well know is the fact that the neighbors used to call it “Bricklmeier’s Shit House” when it first went up. Chicago had paid off. The house is not altogether unrelated to one of Mies’s designs for a brick villa (turnabout is fair play!). His never got built. Mine did. As did my next house, for Dr. Schutz (why these doctors?), which I decided to do in steel. I do believe the first crisp-cornered I-beamed house (outgrowth of my thesis) was mine for Schutz. There are others who agree with me on this.

Unfortunately for the historical record, Schutz was a quack: he had been selling various suckers (and we are the capital of credulity here) some kind of horse piss which he claimed to be the secret of eternal youth. He was shot to death by one of his marks barely hours after taking possession, and the house passed to his nephew Cerwin, who could not stand the place and had it done over in pastels and fake timbering, obliterating the evidence. There was some justice, though. About six months later Cerwin was apparently smoking in bed and the whole thing (including Cerwin) burned to a crisp.

This pretty much jinxed my career as an independent operator in the field. The potential client base just dried up. I had already abandoned Johnson to strike out on my own and was not about to go crawling back. Having established that I could turn out houses just as good as the next modern architect, I was loath to go to work for anyone. But a boy’s gotta eat, and my enforced indolence wasn’t putting too many lobsters on the table. What to do?

For the first time in my life I responded to the waking dream of every Angeleno and headed for Hollywood. Celeste, my then girlfriend, had a friend who was—I thought—a middling level “creative” type at Disney. He had been over to visit (I was living at this point in the High Tower apartments at the end of Hightower—the one with the Bolognese elevator), had admired my paintings and my hapless houses, and had suggested that there might be a place for me in the organization. He had especially admired, unsurprisingly enough, the work I had been doing on crustacean themes.

I didn’t know exactly what awaited me at the studio—I had imagined a job as a set decorator or painter of forest (and sea) creatures in the animation mill. Things turned out differently: I had—like Philby or Blunt—been plucked from sincere obscurity to serve a higher purpose. It was 1952, and the greatest imaginative undertaking of the era had, under cover of secrecy, begun rapidly to emerge from the realm of ideas into the world of forms. I had been recruited to become one of Walt’s first Imagineers, the brain trust that would deliver Disneyland.

I moved up fast. I flatter myself that I became the Oppie on this particular (anti-Manhattan) project.

You see, I could do everything. I could conjure an image fast. I could manage the technical drawings—my years at Douglas had given me a pretty good grip on machinery. And, in no time flat, I could tell how much it was going to cost. And as a designer, I soon discovered I had no scruples. If only Mies had been able to see me sketching the papier maché bricks for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride or drafting up the chomping mechanism on the fiberglass hippo that has scared so many millions on the Jungle Cruise.

Walt and Mies were the yin and yang of 20th-century visual culture. I have often imagined what their meeting might have been like. Perhaps, like matter and antimatter, they would have simply annihilated each other. To be sure, I did not see much of Walt myself. He mainly communicated with me as if from the beyond, mysteriously, notes appearing on my desk overnight, doodles on my drafting board. The comments were often minor, but that was not exactly the point. If Walt understood one thing, it was that the appearance of authority was inseparable from its substance. The man was a metaphysician.

Conventional wisdom had it that Walt knew just what he wanted at Disneyland. Well, he did and he didn’t. Walt’s imagination was L.A. incarnate, a straining collection of fragments. It was me who gave it some kind of logic. Walt’s vision was really just of an incredibly clean amusement park with really good rides enshrining the members of what he cloying called his “family.” Every time the man would get dewy-eyed over Dumbo, my mind would waft back to the tar pits. I could see dozens of Dumbos, trunk to tail to trunk to tail—an elephantine daisy chain—marching down Wilshire Boulevard with glazed eyes, gigantic lemmings, longing for the tar. And in they would go, each with a comforting slurp of suction as he sank beneath the mire. Many was the night this happy narcotic saw me safely to sleep.

One of the keys to my power over the situation was the fact that Walt was not simply a terrible draftsman, but was also filled with secret anxieties over it. I, of course, am a splendid draftsman, a facility that has been central to both the successes and failures of my career, such as it is. Walt’s charm and his genius were both linked to his—you should forgive the phrase—retention of the capacity for childlike wonder. There was always an undercurrent of weirdness around the studio, prompted by the fact that there we were, nominal adults, educated and talented, whiskey drinkers and womanizers, spending our days creating the cult of a talking mouse.

As I was saying, the keys to my manipulation were draftsmanship, Mauskultur, whiskey (of which, more later), and that faint pornography that undergirded so much of the operation. If I had an idea for the park that I wanted to put over, I would draw up a magnificent perspective, vanishing points galore, ink washes, fiendish detail. At the bottom, I would draw a little winking Dumbo, pen in trunk, nominal auteur, surrounded by a dozen tinkerbelloid nymphs, anatomically correct under gossamer. This I would leave on my desk, caught in the beam of my drafting lamp. Mornings, on my return, the drawing would be gone, the lamp shut off, and faint fumes of Chivas Regal suspended in the room. Inevitably, next day, a drawing of a leering, winking mouse with a hard-on would turn up on my desk, captioned in Walt’s unmistakable calligraphy: “Mickey likes it.”

Walt and I did occasionally pass time together. There were meetings, naturally, but these were perfunctory rituals at which we assented to foregone conclusions. But Walt and I had a secret life. It began one evening when I was at my board, working late on a rendering of Cinderella’s Castle. I remember the warm smell of Chivas drifting over my shoulder and turned to find Walt. I was prepared for this and produced a bottle and a couple of glasses. Walt was all maudlin volubility, and we schmoozed about his life and dreams for the better part of an hour, me, as ever, artfully inserting the concepts and phrases I thought were key, embedding them for future retrieval.

Suddenly, Walt said to me, “Let’s go someplace else.” It was clear he had someplace in mind. We drove in Walt’s big Chrysler convertible out toward the desert along the Vegas road, top down, whiskey-serious, silent under the dome of stars. Around Palmdale, we turned off and roared down dirt to what was, in those days, described as a roadhouse. Walt parked and, reaching under the seat, produced the most ridiculous looking red rug imaginable. He gave me a wink, put it on, and in we went. It was a dark bar, a crowd of a dozen or so in their desultory cups, evidently waiting for something to take place on a small stage. The barman asked “Mr. Smith” if he wanted the usual, and at Walt’s nod he brought the Chivas bottle over to the table and poured us each a stiff one.

A spot lit the tiny stage as the piano man began “When You Wish Upon A Star.” From behind the curtain, a little girl—no more than eleven or twelve years old—in a tutu emerged, dancing on pointe, a star-topped wand in her hand. Walt sat bolt upright, transfixed as she pirouetted and pliéd to the music. As the now attentive clientele shuffled their chairs in for a closer view, she peeled one and then the other of her leotard straps and slowly slipped out of her costume to stand prepubescent naked, except for her toe shoes. Walt was quivering with excitement, his eyes swimming with tears. The girl pirouetted round and round, ever so slowly, irradiated by leering stares. Then, she stopped, turned her back, grabbed her cheeks, and threw Walt a lingering moon before prancing offstage. Walt stared and stared in silence at the place she had been, finally murmuring, “innocence.”

Now I am not a person to deny a man his proclivities. Indeed, as a premiere devotee of L.A., the holy terrain of dumb preference, the free-fire zone of anything goes, where every man’s castle is his home, I can hardly regard myself as anything other than staunch, ACLU-firm in defense of whatever he harmlessly pleases to do within. But—call it a weakness, call it conventional—I have just never cottoned to that kind of short-eyed entertainment. Now, the astute among you may well observe that my activities on behalf of the Mausmeister were themselves much the same. Ah, but there is a difference. This place, this hallowed pueblo site, this Angelus, this sump of hopes, this last resort, this testament to the banality of freedom, this shrine to the possibility of physical health without mental . . . isn’t it about childhood? About life forever? Why is Walt presently a nitrogen ice cube, daily converting his senescence into cryogenic youth on the lengthening span of his time? But there is the point! It is one thing to be a child, another to take advantage.

After that evening in Palmdale, I drifted away from Walt and his works. In truth, the thing, the degenerate utopian park, was done. Unbeknownst to Walt and his sycophants, I had patterned the whole thing on Los Angeles, twisted with craven irony. In the self-congratulatory palaver of the office, we persuaded ourselves that we had created an enclave in the city of the automobile, a sea of pedestrianized tranquility in the motorcar’s very maw. Ha! What had we really made? A shrine to the car. After all, what was there to do in Disneyland? Ride on cars of all descriptions, ride them outdoors, ride them indoors! We had conquered the last zone to be free of them. Imagine the sight. Millions of meso-Americans sweltering on lines, overpriced ice cream dripping down their fat credulous faces, as they awaited their three minutes of bliss on a teacup car or submarine bus. And the lines! After inching for hours on the freeway to Anaheim, they got it again: the ultimate traffic jam, waiting carless to ride. You will admit, the inversion was masterly.

I took my leave of Walt in the midst of what we now call the Fifties, an era I had in no small measure already helped to shape. Although I had served Walt well—better than he would ever know—I felt a little sullied by it all. I resented his having exposed my aptitude for mendacity. Oh the sow’s ears I had plucked from the fire for him! Who was it who benignified that trashy Main Street by reducing its scale to 5/8ths of “reality”? Like those giant cars that marked the era, I empowered millions of citizens by enlarging them, scaling up their presence in the world. I was the Harley Earl of the built environment.

My next job was only apt: I went to work for the architect Owen Wister, the mad dog of the Arts and Architecture crowd. Wister—late blooming Marinetti—had been making noises about architecture’s aspiration to be “as good as a fin-fun Caddy Eldorado” for some time. Infelicity of language notwithstanding, I figured I was the man to help him make good on his promise. The first thing he gave me to do was to work the original Chee-Chee’s drive-in on Sunset. It’s been torn down since then, but the place remains forever amber in the eyes of partisans of the higher kitsch. And god knows, there are plenty of them. Hell, I have talked to dozens of graduate students—beady-eyed semioticians from the land grants—writing their dissertations on the sign alone.

I take full credit (or blame, if you prefer to see it like that). Of course, we would never have done the sign the same way today. At the time it seemed a stroke of genius. After the thing made the cover of Life, Wister made me partner on the spot. The sign’s origins are not exactly shrouded in mists of confusion. I had seen The Seven Year Itch, and of course, there is the scene where Marilyn’s skirt just will not stay down. The conceit was a cinch in neon. And those, needless to say, were the days when a hamburger could not be sold without at least a whiff of musk. A more innocent time, as I believe it is often described.

The genius of the sign, as these whelps never seem to figure out, was not the idiotic bottom-baring carhop, it was the whole spatial thing. The shapes were different obviously, but the perspectival relationship between the sign and the triple doors (skaters in, skaters out, and customers) was borrowed from the proportions of the Duomo and the Baptistry in Florence. I tried to persuade the management to include a Giotto Burger on the menu as a little joke, but the philistines balked. Not that it would have stood out exactly, sandwiched between the Fonda Burger (“Young Mr. Burger”) and the Hayworth Burger (“coated in a sweater of melted all-American cheese”). Then again, maybe it would have. At least they didn’t question the lobster in the carhop’s hand. Universal symbol of fine eating. That they swallowed.

The other big deal I worked on at Wister’s was the so-called Flying House, which we built for that schmuck producer from Paramount. Little did we know how that moniker, all poetry and line, would come back to haunt us. As the litigation demonstrated, the fault lay with the soils engineer and the subcontractor for the footings. But that was seven years after the fact. Too late to save Wister’s career.

Still, the concept was a piece of brilliance. The massive, spread-winged bird form, soaring out from the hillside, supported by those two skinny steel columns. Wister was just so enamored of reinforced concrete (who wasn’t in those days?) that the thing was too damn heavy for a structure we’d inadvertently underdesigned. But the idea, all that weight almost magically airborne, was pure Wister. Unfortunately 3.1 on the Richter was enough to send it halfway to Hollywood Boulevard and six houses with it, not to mention the little mogul. The thing that really broke Wister up, though, was that it pulverized that old Lincoln of his, the one he had bought off Mister Wright. Only time I ever saw the old man show the slightest emotion.

For my money, Owen Wister was the best architect of his generation in L.A. That was not his real name, of course. Alois Winkelmann. From Graz, Austria. To hear Wister tell it, half the architects in L.A. before the war spoke German. Wister started out with Van Nest Polglase at RKO. The way he remembers, the white telephone was his idea to begin with, the whole damn big white set. “Like Christmas in Obersalzberg.” There are those who dispute the specifics, but there’s no doubt that Wister (he loved cowboys and learned English from Tom Mix, reading his lips, which must account for his strange accent; it certainly accounts for the Stetson) got his flair for the dramatic from the movies. The rest of the expatriate crowd—Schindler, Neutra, and that bunch—always smirked at him a bit, at all the taffeta and colored lights and such—but it was only the envy of lesser men. Wister thought that they were a bunch of “Teutonic stiff-boys,” a category that also included Mies and Gropius. Even after the war, he never tired of telling Neutra to lighten up. I remember how he used to talk about them: “Vat do I need vit all zis Apollonian shit ven I am Dionysus playing on hiss flutes.”

After I left Wister, I went to Herrera. Personality-wise, Chuck Herrera was everything Owen Wister was not: agreeable, smooth-talking, well-connected, patrician, eager to please, crazy to be rich. His office stood in comparable counterpoise. Where Wister’s place in an old building on Vine was tumbledown, ink-stained, and casual, Herrera’s shiny tower on Wilshire was Barcelona chairs, neckties, the whole corporate culture (you’ll pardon the oxymoron) package. Adaptive as I am, an afternoon in Bullock’s had me fit to fit in. I can work with anyone.

Although I will never be given the credit, it was I who steered the firm into the phase that nobody disputes was its greatest glory. Since the early fifties, bread and butter at Herrera had been shopping centers. Basically, they had all been the same. A vastness of cars fronting a long, undistinguished, porticoed enfilade of shops, just a pituitary version of a Western town, the parched parking lot standing in for the street. Clearly, this would not do. It was boring. And it was replicable. Any hack could throw one up: the Herrera formula lacked sufficient signature.

Now I was a man who knew a thing or two about signature. Disneyland hardly slouches in the John Hancock department. And this is what I told Herrera was wanted, a little reach to go with the grasp. I had another insight that was pretty key, a notion I had glommed from Walt. It was a southward view, down-coastal, the Orange County strategy. The insight was not simply over the axis of development: any boob could see that the lust for lebensraum would ultimately lead that way. No, what I recognized (and had reproduced in Anaheim) was that there was culture aborning, that there was hygiene and homogeneity undreamed of in the relative liveliness, the melting pottery of El Lay.

So I put it to Herrera, if shopping is culture, our job was to invent the culture of shopping. And as Disneyland was the greatest architectural implement ever devised for separating fools and their money, this was the road we should follow. Chuck took all of this with a certain amount of circumspection. The man still harbored dreams of becoming a modern master, a stylist, a Mies. But I hammered home my point, that style was stiff and dead, irretrievable victim of styling. I declined to suggest that Chuck had about as much talent as a lobster (no offense meant, life form of my dreams), despite his great and distinguished silver head of hair and matched Porsche. But there he actually had the point, the key slippage. The silver hair and the Porsche were what mattered, we were after appearances.

But let’s not talk philosophy. The result of my persuasion was what was initially known as United Nations Plaza. You may not recognize the name. That was pretty quickly changed by the developer to U.S. Mall after a flurry of pressure from the John Birch Society. For us, it just meant a change of flags. But I am getting ahead of myself. U.S. Mall has earned its evergreen status, its Ezra Stoller photo in every standard work, by being no more than the apotheosis of what I had begun chez Diz: bringing it all indoors. Before me, there were shopping centers, linear jobs, mere intensifications of the strip. After me, the city had a fresh form. Changed forever. My gift to the race: civitas for sale.

Herrera loved it, which should come as no surprise since I had turned him into even more of a Croesus than he had ever dreamed. I had cannily copped another page from Diz by animating U.S. Mall with marching bands, baton twirlers, teen folk-singing shows, and every manner of rank amateur talent that passes for culture in Orange County. Chuck took no end of delight in telling civic groups, newspaper reporters, anybody who’d listen, that he had brought Main Street back to America, given our communities a heart. For architectural audiences, there would be slides of the Stoa of Attalos and the Piazza San Marco and a raft of other self-serving, entirely irrelevant examples. In front of merchandising groups, preening Chuck let the fat cat out of the bag. Our malls were moving merchandise at blinding speed, leaving the old shopping centers in the dust.

I stuck with it for a couple of years, drawing up endlessly artful occlusions of the parti, with their anchor stores and specialty shops, their Adolf Eichmann glass-box elevators, their shiny, crib-stimulus mobiles and playfully gurgling fountains into which the shopper drones mindlessly chucked endless coin, propitiations of the shopping gods, grim rehearsal of the day’s activity. Whatever. To the sleazy magnates of the industry, though, each mall was just another profit center. When Herrera was a few gimlets to the wind, he liked to boast that his (his!) architecture was of such sublimity and popular appeal that people couldn’t resist throwing money at it. The hubris of the jerk.

Not that I wasn’t making money myself. I was. But Herrera had persuaded me to invest it in the development corporation he had set up to build the malls, a sure-looking thing. It was a con, of course. To Herrera, the corporation was no more than his own private wishing well, and he looted its capital accordingly. Fortunately, poetry and justice coincided for once. Herrera had devoted considerable of his ill-gotten gains to the construction of the Mall Deuce, a grotesque yacht of ocean-liner proportions. I had often wished that Herrera might simply turn into the Los Angeles version of the Flying Dutchman, endlessly cruising on his monster boat, unable to find anywhere to dock. What happened was perhaps more sublime. Sailing near Santa Barbara in a fog, Mall Deuce struck an oil rig and went down with all hands, including Herrera’s, which I might note were grown sleek and slack from not having touched a pencil or drafting implement in many a year. The resulting slick killed half the marine bird and mammal life, every hapless abalone, pelican, and clam, on a hundred-mile stretch of coast, an aquatic La Brea such as I had never dreamed. The delicious irony is simply this: this was the big spill that galvanized local antidevelopment forces into cogency, the death dong for many a mall.

What was I then to do? I repaired to Tuscany, thinking I would paint, a perfect transition for an incipient retiree sinking into his cups. But I could not. How could I spend my sunset years away from the sunset? I had been spoiled by L.A. Every Tuscan cypress reminded me of home. Every whitewashed villa and farmhouse conjured up Holmby Hills. Had I spent too much time with Walt? All of Italy seemed to be Los Angeles in a bad state of repair. I had come to prefer “Tuscany” to Tuscany. I had been the Svengali of surface for so long that I had come to prefer an orderly fabric of lies to the unpredictabilities of what passes for “real life.” Indeed, I had gone to Italy for a dose of same but could only think how much more I enjoyed the costumed version, those teenaged Swiss Guards and pumped-up Buckaroos at the real Magic Kingdom.

The fates, as was their wont, found me undone, and took a hand: mine, as usual. While I was at Herrera’s, we had had a designer named Gary Lonigan (known to one and all as “Studs”). He was a bright boy, and clearly destined for better things. Predictably, after a few years, he had left the firm to strike out on his own. The lad was talented but confused, lacked the instinct for organization that’s necessary for propulsion to the stars. Still, he was doing something that interested me, and when he asked me to come into his office, I said yes. Is it too grand for me to say that I smelled redemption? You see, Lonigan was about everything I no longer was. He was young. He was a mess. His friends were artists. He was endlessly talking about his psychoanalysis.

Still, his work stank. Gary exuded potential but his projects remained on the stiff side. I thought I could help him. And I thought I knew how. L.A. was bubbling, a happening place, America’s then version of the city of the future. It was time for an architecture that would capture the city, say it all. I would be Svengali, here, or Victor Frankenstein, and Gary would be my Trilby, my creature. It would be all skewed newness and dazzle, the reproduction in form of every subterranean current running through the town.

Where to begin? How to limn the quintessential placeness of the unmappable spread? Daily I sent Gary off to his shrink with some rummy concept to chew over while I worked out the labyrinthine thing. I begin below, tectonically, with the primal latency, the unstable earth. Our architecture, I thought, must not merely quiver but shake, readily fall, freeze-frame the disaster of perpetual perhaps. And burn. Parched earth. Maddening Santa Ana’s shoving conflagration down hillsides, flames tonguing at smug suburbanoid arcadias desperately trying to keep green and safe, resisting apocalypse with lawn sprinklers. Ha! Ha!

Those prayed-for fire-time rain torrents never do come. But yes, they do. Months later. Disasters never cancel each other out, they multiply. Now, the earth is saturated beyond bearing and the slanting gray shower loosens whole mountainsides, which cascade like thunder, reducing prideful architecture before their fall. Retaining walls, relief pits, and barriers are as nothing before the onslaught, cadencing their slide. I would make an architecture as mesmerizing, as random, as frightening as this heap of ruin, this terminator moraine, an architecture of the downside.

Excuse this enthusiasm. But I realized that I was on to something. Beneath the glitz, the roil, I would be—like Nathanael West or James M. Cain—the shrink of the town, exposing its demons, ventilating its innermost repressed fears and desires. It was time to cash in, and I became an old fellow aflame, and Gary bent like a twig before my kindling enthusiasm. He had just bought himself a house, a smug little hispanico in Mar Vista, and I persuaded him to modify it to conform to the new vision. I knew that the change had to be dramatic and—I’ve spent my life in this town—that the transformative event had to be just that, an event. I hired klieg lights and a wrecking ball and got the media down to cover my stroke of genius.

One drop of the ball accomplished it—total demolition of the front of the house. We made all three local networks and the national broadcast of CBS. We then spent two weeks stabilizing the rubble exactly as it fell and covering it with an artful quilt of glass, inside and out. The effect was fabulous. Equally successful was the ensuing trial in municipal court. Gary was charged with conducting demolition without a permit. Well, canny me managed to turn this into some kind of a cause célèbre. We argued that the charges were no less than an assault on artistic freedom, the response of narrow-minded philistines to genuine innovation, the paranoid reaction of little minds to a confrontation with genius.

We were fined $50. The publicity was priceless. None of this could have been any comfort to the neighbors, whose happy complacency and sense of the familiar was irrevocably dislodged by the daily sight of the glittery ruin. In a pathetic act of revenge, several of them attacked the alteration with sledgehammers late one night. It took a week and a half to notice that the addition had been damaged. The more they assaulted it, the more they improved it. Studs’s wife, initially sympathetic, was herself displeased with the mastic-covered (O La Brea!) mobile home we had installed in the back yard to compensate for the space lost to the primary alteration.

The mobile home completed the basis for this new architecture, this LArchitecture, as some slavering art-critical running dog logoed it for us. The establishment fell rapidly in line. I cannot begin to enumerate the number of articles praising Gary for his cunning synthesis of vernacular expression with inspired, rarefied artistry. “The seismograph of contemporaneity,” as one magazine put it so felicitously, so usefully. My needle was certainly wiggling.

Converting this capital to commissions was a cinch. That, after all, is where Hollywood comes in. Once I had—with one masterstroke—established Lonigan as the ne plus ultra of hip, we practically had to beat the producers and ham actors from our door. We did twenty houses in the first year (ten of them demolitions, ten from scratch). The best, I think was the so-called Casa Montalban, constructed primarily of baled Chryslers. We signed a novel contract with the client that holds us harmless in the event that a quake or other “natural or artificial” disaster results in the “rearrangement” of the house. It surely offers the client an important sense of artistic empowerment to share so explicitly in the risk of the new!

Work came in from everywhere, and we were especially popular in the Land of the Rising Sum. We were deluged. Art Museums, Corporate Headquarters, Apartment Houses, the works. At first, our relentless skewings seemed right and resonant, but soon our imitators grew legion. It was time for something new. We had been having some difficulty organizing the plan for a golf club in Fukuoka, and Lonigan and I were sitting in Gladstone’s for Fish, desultorily doodling on napkins one day, when the waitron arrived to bib us for the coming repast. I upended my Margarita, gazed out to sea and back, and my eyes fell on Lonigan’s newly protected chest where I saw not the object of my endless reveries printed on plastic but a fully realized perspective drawing of a red and bloody wonderful building. Visions of brick arches in sinuous curves, dark interiors, waving antennae!

It was not immediately easy to sell to Gary. This was a fairly considerable change in direction, inimical to what we had so assiduously hyped as inevitable. But I had an answer. It went to the heart of the Angeleno methodology. Our tumbledown constructions were the fossils of abstraction, too arcane for a town that thrived on, exulted in the very surface of surfaces. The world, I told Gary, fervently cracking a claw in perfect twain and sucking out the dripping meat with a violent cyclonic slurp, was ready for the restoration of representation! When Disney drew a duck, was it some Rorschachian inkblot (I said, manipulating the pathetic dweeb)? No, no, a thousand times no! It was palpably duck, bill and tail, webbed feet and, by god, a quack!

Our buildings (of course, I said his buildings, the story of my life) could no longer afford to be less. In theory, I had allayed his fears about killing the goose that laid the golden egg (representation, what would mythic life be sans?), but he remained troubled by the particular. “Why lobsters?” he wondered, briskly unaware of the personal categorical imperative behind the creatures. I decided to argue in the Angeleno mode: no particular logic, just an irresistible tsunami of images. There was Nerval’s originating lobster, strolling down the Boul’ Miche, mascot of surrealism, father and mother of anything goes. The lobster quadrille, the Disney version of course, happy square-dancing arthropods. Red Lobster, for the seafood lover in you. And then, how I embroidered on the immigrant status of the pure succulence that we were, even as we spoke, polishing off. An abalone, that over-tough indigenous mollusk, was altogether too modernist: one curve, however compound, and it’s done. No, like all the best in town, lobsters were migrants and scavengers. Every lobster in Los Angeles was an outsider, flown in, resituated, recontextualized, like the Schwarzwald bungalows in boy’s town or those Dryvit Taras in Brentwood, old fish transformed by stimulating new water. It had to be lobsters.

He bought it. We built Fukuoka. It was the right thing. The age fawned over such stupid accessibility, and before long we were invited to recross the Pacific in triumph, our way to the top clawed at last. Studs had been offered the commission of a lifetime. In 1984, eager to bleed off surfeit capital, Michael Milken approached us to build an enormous cultural center in the San Fernando Valley, a zone into which culture had barely impinged, save, perhaps, in the Ruth Benedictine sense. The office spent two years working on the project, which was fiendish in its complications. The same tilers who heat-shielded the space shuttles would have toiled for us, sheathing the endless red carapace curves (perfect acoustic shapes) that covered the numerous auditoria.

One day in 1987 it all belly upped. Damn junk bonds! Damn the SEC! Damn Drexel Burnham!

The day after Milken bagged us, I left Lonigan, who had, in truth, matured into the role himself. I spent long days at Zuma beach, just walking. I stared into the eyes of wiggling, pegged, and rubber-banded green lobsters in the cooler at Ralph’s, wondering what they would tell me were they unimprisoned by evolutionary destiny in tank and phylum. I wondered why they could not thrive on their own out here, what Lotusland withheld from them. Gradually, I came to see the expressiveness in their crusty physiognomies, detected, I thought, a wisp of a smile on their sea-colored carapaces. And I thought I knew why. They had what I wanted. Little lobster babies, wearing of the green, always at home, wanted only to serve and be served. Looking into the eyes of a three-pounder one day, the meaning came clear.

Ladies and gents. I am that lobster.