I had an amazing opportunity to meet architect, artist, designer Eddie Sykes. Correction, this was the third time I have met him. Crazy thing, when we first moved to Los Angeles in 2005, we visited the studios of Eddie Sykes and were totally blown away by his work. At the time, he was building a large scale, translucent facade for a hotel in New York. Five years passed and I found myself at his studio for other tangential reasons, this was meeting #3. Eddie met us outside, we both looked at each other, and it was like deja vu from our encounter years earlier.

As we were talking casually, Eddie’s sculptures were dangerously hung in his Frogtown studio. His work very delicate, industrial, raw, refined, luxury, rudimentary… a balance of opposites is very present in his work. Especially the Yakuza Lou–a kinetic sculpture, but also a working chandelier. Each one meticulously handcrafted, requiring up to 4 months to complete a single piece.

The Yakuza Lou chandelier came as a more affordable and production friendly solution to the large scale Yakuza Lou sculpture exhibited at M&A in Silverlake in 2009. That piece was an outdoor sculpture that opened and closed revealing metal and greenery triggered by motion sensor placed in the outdoor gallery. This was meeting #2 with Eddie… well, not Eddie himself but his work.

Re-encounters like this are special. I love how Los Angeles can do that. Even though sprawling, Los Angeles is intimate enough that one can rediscover a person, place, or feeling spontaneously.

More on Yakuza Lou here.
Also, a great interview with Eddie Sykes on the Modernica blog.

Walking Men 99 is a 500-foot-long public art installation by New York-based Israeli artist Maya Barkai. The project features 99 international variations of the ubiquitous traffic light symbol in a life-size installation that wraps around a construction site at 99 Church Street. She elaborates on her website, “The ‘walking man’ is an international celebrity and one of our most recognizable figures. Standardized yet diverse, they commonly show us the safe way of travel.” Diverse indeed–these walking men, placed next to each other in a life-sized photo-collage, come in various colors, types of lighting, styles, and states of undress.

Image courtesy of Maya Barkai

The project came to life through a collaboration with Barkai and amateur photographers from around the world.

Image courtesy of Maya Barkai

I’m particularly curious about the cultural background behind each country’s walking-man icon and the decisions that went into each design. Perhaps a book should be made… but until then, fellow pedestrians can view the installation through January 15th, 2011 and infer for themselves!

About two weekends ago, when the weather was an easy, breezy 80 degrees, I went on a Downtown L.A. excursion with my friends. We drank creamy horchata’s at the Grand Central Market, had 30-45 blissful seconds of simulated flight inside the Angel’s Flight Railway, and ended our day admiring MOCA’s permanent collection.

Alas, it seemed our day was coming to an end, when my friend pointed out a peculiar sight at the corner of Olive and 4th:

Image taken from Google Maps

Can’t see it? How about my newly edited version?

Those were fake, painted window reliefs! You can’t really see it in these photos, but the painter went as far as replicating shadows from his fake window ledges as well. Was this art? Or was this a really bad paint job?

As much as I was convinced it was the latter, I conducted heavy, non-academic, purely Google-based research. And although there were no specific results that came up relating to Olive St. and 4th St. in Downtown LA, I did discover an artist by the name of Richard Haas who is famous for his “Trump l’oeil” facades in New York City. Take a look at his work, and you be the judge.

His murals seem to appear intentionally fake and more theatrical than the one I saw on Olive and 4th.

Have you seen the work of this mysterious,repeated offender of bad-facades anywhere else in LA?

Las Vegas is kind of awesome–in an artificial and excessive way unique to America. I never thought that I could get much out of Vegas, having little to gamble and an aversion to clubbing, but during a recent trip there, I found it difficult not to appreciate the outrageous architecture, visible-from-space lights, and of course the crazypeople.

From March 21st-to June 20th, Las Vegas will be in LA. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles presents Las Vegas Studio: Images From the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

The exhibit is an architectural study in photographs taken by American architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, along with students from Yale. The photos were published in 1972 in the book, Learning from Las Vegas.

Images courtesy of the MOCA

For Sin City signage enthusiasts, check out this neon sign graveyard in Vegas located here (via Artificial Owl), where you can find old signs from the torn-down casinos of yore.