Cesar Pelli to finish RGB dev. in LA  

Part 2
He drops a rotund, electric coolaid acid test blue building in the middle of it. Old Los Angelenos bitched and moaned (and still do) but for me (and others) it is something that bouys my spirits and orients me spatially within the seemingly infinite continuum of two story LA. Its the only building in LA, and one of the few in the world, that evey time I drive by it, I have to resist the urge to park my car, jump out and run over and touch it. I'm serious. I actually have gotten out of my car a couple of times just to run over and lay my hands on it. Its not like Il Duomo in Florence where you have to touch the scaredness. Its that you have to confirm that the Blue Whale is not one of Hollywood's illusion. Laying on of hands is the only thing that can donfirm its reality to me. Am I the only person who has to touch amazing buildings with his hands to come to grips with them? I think not Well, I hope not.
The Blue Whale is incongruous in a most wonderful and edifying way. So much modernist architecture tried to jar one's sensibility through juxtaposition, but the jarring was not ultimately pleasant nor optimistic. Pelli, more than any other nonlocal architect embodied the playfully hallucinogenic quality of LA's dreamy quality. Not all dreams are nightmares. Most dreams are kind of sanguine. They just occassionally have amiably absurd events or things in them. The Blue Whale is like that.
No matter how many times I drive by it, it is like something out of a dream. Bluer than blue. Rotund. Out of scale and all proportion. And yet, as in a good dream, it does not worry me. Its just inexplicably and wonderfully there. Its a helluva first act as they say in Hollywood, but script files are full of good first acts with nothing to follow.
The green building near by is like a lot of second acts. It doesn't get much respect. It is work man like. Its job is to bridge the first and third acts. To fill out the plot. To keep'em in their seats for the third act.

Part 3
But the third act seemed like it might never come. The Blue Whale got built in the seventies. The Green building got built in the 80s. Then nothing. Waiting for the third building got to be about like waiting for the next big earth quake. You knew it was out there waiting, but you might not live to experience it, which was okay, because you might not live if you did.
But now Pelli FINALLY gets to do the third act! And what a potentially exciting third act. The building is going to be a BRIGHT RED. Ferrari red. Blood red. Tulip red. RED-RED. Oh, my god, I may have to move back to LA just to touch it on a regular basis.
But Pelli is playing with magic in these buildings far beyond what is totally within his control. He's building a building that has fit into a dreamscape felt individually and collectively. There are very few great third acts. There are even fewer great third sequels, if you want to look at it that way. Ask Speilberg and Lucas. But Pelli seems to have the weird combination of humor and flare to pull it off. It is good that he is doing this building when he is old. Fellini's movies were dreams of dreams. And his final movies were not even movies. They were dreams of dreams of dreams. I have a feeling Pelli is far beyond all of the worldly trappings (and chains) of ideology and philosophy. Late in life a man can not so much attain his dreams, as live in them and create them. If Pelli does this, LA will have the third crown jewel of its Red Green Blue dreamscape complete.
It could be awful. Or it could be as sublimely incongruous as the Blue Whale.
Regardless, when it comes to red, there is no one I would rather have designing than someone with at least some Italian blood in him.
I'm ready to jump out of my car again!
Go, Cesar, go!

Pelli
Pelli has designed the new BOK center a large Arena in my hometown of Tulsa Oklahoma and It looks like it is going to be a great building.

Cesar Pelli
I didn,t stay in LA, but I think I should, to see the blue Whale in person and to experiment the sense of feeling buildings by touching!!!.
I enjoyed reading your nice story, and I would also want to add:
1
Building when he is old…, He opened his own studio when he was more than 50 years old, (He followed Koen,s advice "to be patience" and learned with other "teachers" before open his own studio). Cesar Pelli himself recommended the same in an interview, and said that he wanted to learned so much that he couldn,t do it before.
2
Florence Duomo, Ferrari red and Fellini films, are linking Cesar Pelli with Italian RED-Blood. Isn,t it?
Well it,s OK but, Cesar Pelli is argentine, from Tucuman. Nevertheless, saying that, you,re right, If he is argentine he has a lot of Italian blood in him. (Argentine blood: An average of at least 50% of Italian blood. 25%Spanish and the rest 25% could be German, Portuguese, Polish, Irish, French, Croatian, English, Welsh, Arabian, Japanese, Rusia, Jew, and Nowadays Ukraine, Romania, China, Corea, and then Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and sorry for all the ones I am forgetting.)
3
You said, -Late in life a man can not so much attain his dreams, as live in them and create them.-
And then with the third crown jewel of its Red Green Blue dreamscape complete, he will do it, but he had also archived with –Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, and some of the others….
Other buildings that helps him to dream…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Pelli

I'lll be damned, Gustavo...
You have exposed a great ignorance in me, one that has entrapped me since the moment I heard of Pelli several decades back. I thought sure he was Italian all these years. This may be the problem of growing up in Kansas City and eating lasagna and garlic bread at Gennies on the Near North Side as a boy, where the cooking was Sicilian, the produce market was full of fresh goodness, the Italian names often ended in 'i' and the Mafia wasn't just characters in a movie.
But back to an Argentine building a red building.
Oh, my god, a southern (and western) hemispherian loose in my beloved, horizontal LA with RED! Now my sense of anticipation is stricken with apprehension. Blue? Safe. Green? Eh, okay. But RED?! This is the most dangerous of colors!
But wait, Gustavo, I can rationalize this to reduce my anxiety. Watch me.
Juan Manuel Fangio, born in Balcarce, Argentina (please, Gustavo, don't tell me he was a Brazilian--I may not be able to bear it) drove Maseratis and the blood red Ferraris (sandwiched around his awesome stint with Mercedes) and dominated Grand Prix racing in the 50s and early 60s. Perhaps there is some spiritual/philosophical link between the Argentines and the Italians that allows Argentines to operate in Italian and in red, as well as Italians. Perhaps the same link that empowered Fangio in racing empowers Pelli in architecture.

Part 2
There. I feel much better (though just as foolish). Thanks for waking me up so gently.
I enjoy all your posts and only regret that I am sadly limited to English and so cannot get the full rush of your intellect, wit and charm which is obviously manifold. However, my wife speaks French, Spanish and a touch of Italian and so I sometimes get her to translate for me when required. So: if you suddenly have to break out of the shackles of English and into the expansiveness of your native tongue, I will make every effort to get it interpreted.
Post Script: Judging from the lack of confessions on anyone else's parts, I infer I am the world's only dedicated building toucher. Man, people are missing out. When I finally get to see the Great Pyramids, and the Sphynx, there's gonnna be a whole lotta touchin' goin' on. 🙂
As long as I'm confessing this predilection for building touching (some will no doubt call it a fetish, though I assure you there is nothing lewd about it), I'm also a big sculpture toucher also. In fact, I've almost stopped going to museums that prevent me from touching their sculptures--the temptation is soooooo great.
My adult sculpture touching began in earnest in my hungry years in LA when I was a regular at the LA County Museum for reasons of austerity. There, one could touch and even, I suppose, climb upon, the Henry Moore sculptures outdoors (the climbing upon was of course frowned upon and discouraged by the authorities, but back in those days the authoritarian streak in LA was considerably less pronounced and so one could occassionally partake sitting upon primal form struggling mightily to escape stone without the threat of rubber bullets and water-boarding).
They also had a humble statue garden, which was, nonetheless, rich in opportunity for a sculpture toucher such as me. I came to appreciate the feel of statues much more than the look of them. It takes much more taste and education than I possess to truly appreciate great sculpture, though I still give it a go. Moore's sculptures felt the best to me (and still do). Rodin's the most neutral, despite their eye fetching dramatics, though perhaps these weren't Rodin's best, or his hand-chiselled-and-stroked originals (almost certainly not).

Part 3
Post-post script: Oh, all right, I'll take this building touching and sculpture touching calculus one derivative further back.
I suspect it all started with playing in the small town graveyard where my great grand parents and my grand parents were buried. These white, grey and slate grave stones were my first real contact with sculpture. The cemetery had the obligatory Civil War veteran on an obelisk, which was good for climbing, but it was the grave stones that were most exciting. Between the ages of 5 and ten, they held no fearful, or ominous, message for me at all. Well, I knew they marked dead persons planted in boxes, but that seemed not all that consequential in those days.
Regardless, these markers were these wonderful stone abstractions (some unadorned to the point of modernism, others practically Victorian in their ornateness, some more in line with Louis Sullivan's functionalist ornamentation) of all shapes and sizes that were perfect for running among, climbing over, riding on, and running one's fingertips over to feel the extremes of glass like smoothness and the rough hewn, straight out of the ground grit. And of course there was the game of braille to be played with the names and dates. Located on a hill top in the shade of oaks overlooking a green eastern Kansas river valley, this was, and remains my favorite sculpture garden--with all due respects to the great artists of the world who have labored their lives at making something better for the likes of me.
Uh, wait a moment. I do think Mr. Moore gave better feel that these commercial stone masons. Alas, the poops in Florence wouldn't let me touch the David. And I couldn't find a way to climb up on the dome of Il Duomo, so, I had to make due with touching some statuary of Michaelangelo's out doors. But I was later advised that these were likely reproductions and that the originals had long since been protected from the likes of me and the pidgeons and statuary thieves.
Touring the Uffizi was, for me, of course, something of a curse. I literally had to keep my hands plunged in the depths of my pockets in the hall of busts, don't you know?

No damned at all!
As we say, -el que no hace, no se equivoca-, (the one that dosen,t do, don,t make mistakes).
You write a lot here, and it,s OK. So keep on posting!.
Thank you very much for your kind words, and for understand when it,s not easy to understated me.
Please, Don,t talk about Juan Manuel Fangio, you want to make me cry?
About Cesar Pelli and the building.
RED! The most dangerous of colors?, I don,t think so, I think that IS the color, An abstraction of the world would be Black and white, and if you want to add color, it would add red. And then with less abstraction all the colors abstracted would be : blue – yellow(or green) – red. If you don,t think the same, then you could be right and I like red because I live in Argentina. Jaja.:-) (((A)))
Post-script notes 1:
Don,t worry mistaken Italians and argentines.
It,s true when I said that Argentines are very Italians,.
(((Note A)))
By the way, by the way, my tiny shop is all red exterior (all white interior) and the name is Red Sur(Red is –Rojo-in English, Red is Net in spanish). If you think red is wrong, you,re asking the wrong person, I think!

Post-script notes 2:
Hey, Mr building and sculpture toucher!, I,ve never listen this before!,
You,ve got something very specially there I think…, There must be others over there to
Make the BSTC, The Building and Sculpture Touching Club. :).
When you said, touching buildings, (About touching the Blue Wale, in your first/second post). It only came to my mind, about feelings, the pyramids and other Egyptian temples,
I,ve been living there some months, and it,s absolutely true, I had these strong fellings, and it was not often in me to have these feelings before, as you.
Prepare yourself for when you,ll be there!!!!!.
I experimented two touching: outdoor/exterior touching and indoor/interior touching. I say this because there are two very deep and different sensations.
Both very deep: Bright shiny dry outdoor /dark-shadow/humidity indoor.
May be touching the great pyramid it,s not as one could think, because when you are just beside it, each stone (each ,,brick,,), are so big each one, that you forget the scale, as the ceramic cover it,s not there anymore. I felt it more than a single very big stone, because if you don’t look up to the sky, one could forget that the huge tons of single stones shape the pyramid.
But pyramids are the most known, but there are hundreds of other magnificent temples all over there (I remember that someone told me that those hundreds are about only 10% of the existing temples. (The rest is lots of feet (about 50 -100meters) under the sand!!). (((B)))

.
I remember that feeling in one temple ( I don,t remember the name), but no any particular one, these that I tell you that there are many, Imagine a temple one block long 3 stories high, with full of hieroglyphics talking to you, The sensation was that because you didn,t access to the temple by the front, the bus left you back, so to get in, you must walk all the temple (one block long 3 stories high) with all the -weight –over you, But you are then –sucked--, by the front because in the end of this wall, there is a small hole to pass through (you needed to pass to acces to the temple)It,s so small that you think you,ll can,t pass through “standing up”. It,s seems to be smaller than a man height . You are ,,sucked,, because all the big wall is in shade, and through the hole you see a tiny part of briht/shiny sun light.
Imagine yourself a non-stop touching time aaaaaall the wall long, you alone, no other tourist over there (may be one or two inside the temple).
When you get to the hole, it has the exactly size of a human body, you have to walk abot ,,only,, 10 steps or less, Here you are forced to touch the walls!!!the ceiling is two inches over your head, and the walls two inches far from your hands!!
And when you finally stay in front of the temple……, the second part!!!, Another bigger suction, this time to get into the temple. (the sensation was this because the sunny-dry exterior had the middle the dark-humid-wet- access). And then inside an incredible ,,false perspective,,. But that,s another story.
(Do you think that in Spanish you,ll understand anything of alL that I wanted to tell?)
And now that I said this, I remember that in Cusco, and in Machu Pichu, happens about the same, and I remember some people ,,connected,, with other worlds or who knows with what. (I would think that in Machu Pichu is more a mix of funny –comercial- mad-hippy, but dosen,t sound so –real as in Egypt, mybe one or two in Peru with 5000 tourists, and in Egypt you could stay almost alone touching and touching a non-stop touching time. (((C)))
I don,t know Mayas and Aztec temples, Provably could fell something…
End
(((B))) To show how many temples there must be, an example: There is a Mesquite that was constructed somewhere, hundreds years ago, they discover a temple (constructed thousand years before). Obviously the Mesquite it,s not in the center of the Temple, It,s just in one corner of the temple. Almost falling. Please imagine the picture: One huge -1500 BC temple, discovered in 1960, with a mid-small 1500AC mesquite ;;hanging;; in one corner!
(((C))) If there is any Egytian – Peruvian is over there, They could correct me in many details, And you,ll could be happy DC, I,ll get the same.

.
Dear Dcwilson:
,,,,,,,,,
So: if you suddenly have to break out of the shackles of English and into the expansiveness of your native tongue, I will make every effort to get it interpreted.
,,,,,,,,
Is still that English-Spanish translation offer available?
Es que a veces quiero comentarte algo, y no encuentro el modo correcto, y si pudieramos tratar directamente el tema..., es muy arriesgado comunicarse por mail?
gustymoreno@gmail.com

Somehow I missed this...
...thread when originally published. Both CDWilson and Gustavo know how to make a thread exciting so when you put the two together who needs anybody else...
There should of course be an addition to the U.N. charter of human rights to include the right to touch art. It is no less than cruel to invite people to a museum and subsequently tell them that they can only satisfy their eyes. The tactile qualities of a sculpture are very real and intentional. As far back as Stonehenge have people selected materials in function of their tactile qualities. (Part of the circles is in a stone that heats up more when exposed to the sun) So did all civilisations since. Why would one not be allowed to touch a Moore when even Henri himself could hardly speak about sculpture without holding on to one of his works large or small. In Antwerp (Belgium) we were fortunate enough to have a large open air sculpture park called Middelheim. The lack of guards or the size of the park, maybe the large number of sculptures made it simply impossible to apply any no-touch rule, so I have spend many many days?some years 30 times in one summer looking at and touching the sculptures. I can still close my eyes and feel the endless Mobius loop of Max Bill, Moore?s King and Queen and standing figures, the Marino Marinis, the unusual feel of cast lead of the large women Maillol sculpted, the polished Jean Arps, the modelled surfaces of Rodin?s Iron age, Manzu?s soft patinas covering his many versions of the roman catholic cardinals. It is horrifying not to be able to touch and feel why Maillol?s large nudes are so much better in lead than bronze. It?s like a nude dancers show, it is so frustrating not to be able to touch that people drink away there frustration (at least that?s what the owner of such a place explained me). So what is exactly the argument? Conservation? How can people learn to touch respectfully when they are not allowed to touch at all? Especially in the open air the bronze, because of it?s colour and because it is a metal is always warmer than the surrounding air, it is just a great feeling, it is as if the sculpture has been waiting for your hand to come along and be welcomed by this unexpected warmth. Sculptures in public places usually age well. The most touched surfaces get the higher polish and witness of previous tactile admirers. Sometimes it is revealing, sometimes it just adds an highlight where highlight was due.
Let's start and touch, no matter how hard the alarm bells ring!!

cont.
It is not unlike Juan Manuel Fangio. The excitement of seing him racing was that you could actually feel how he was gripping the steering wheel and pulling his Alpha Romeo through the curves. In spite of the on board cameras now, nobody has been able to create this feeling again through a visual image. Already in his first major victory in a Maserati Fangio did exactly that. When his car came in sight you as a spectator were in the drivers seat...No Sterling Moss, no Jacky Stewart could give you that feeling!Oh yes, I admit not being a car race fan but the memory of Fangio brings tears in my eyes indeed.

Momo Taro, 1977-78, Isamu Noguchi
"This nine-part, 40-ton, commissioned site-specific stone sculpture provides seating atop a specially landscaped hill with sweeping views of the Art Center fields, reflecting the artist's life-long desire to create functional spaces for personal interaction. While gathering the stones for the piece near his studio on the island of Shikoku in Japan, a huge boulder was split, reminding the artist of Momo Taro, an ancient Japanese folk hero who was born from a peach pit. This is one of two sculptures in the Art Center that is intended for visitors to sit on and in."
http://www.stormking.org/IsamuNoguchi.html