today i’m including just one picture of one house.
a very pretty center hall colonial with stately pine trees and a nice little yard.
or lawn.
lawn yard.
‘why?’ you might ask, 'include a picture of a pretty and conventional center hall colonial in an architecture blog?’
well,
the following reasons (i like lists, by the way)

a-it’s pretty.
b-semiotically and rosebuddy it reminds me of the houses my friends lived in when i was growing up.
c-it sits perfectly parallel to the street.
d-and, most importantly, it’s completely incongruous with any contemporary and conventionally agreed upon sense of what urban architecture could or should be.

i mean, center hall colonial houses with stately trees and green lawns:
in california
in a city of 15,000,000 people
in the desert
75 feet away from crack smoking spiderman
?
and that just makes me like it more. it’s not modern, it doesn’t represent an innovative use of materials, it wasn’t designed by morphosis or bernard tschumi (nothing against either one, but they generally are published more than pretty center hall colonials).
it’s a pretty house in the middle of a desert city and everything about it is nice and disconcerting and probably baffling and annoying to most architecture critics.
oh, and ok, i’ll include a second photo, another pretty picture of the sun hitting the hills after todays crazy rainstorming.
i’m sorry if my utterly uncohesive approach to documenting the weirdness and random beauty of l.a is, well, uncohesive and off-putting.
but it all makes sense to me.
which probably means i need more therapy.
i hope you had/have a good weekend.

moby