new broad in town

come winter 2012/2013 there'll be a new building in downtown LA: the broad art foundation(left image), a museum of contemporary art designed by new york architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. the broad will be blatantly flirting with frank gehry's walt disney concert hall and arata isozaki's museum of contemporary art (moca), hoping to arouse attention and add urban tension to the bland grand avenue hilltop. you can read more about it here: new york times architecture review.

as contemporary as this extravagant design may seem, the porous skin enveloping the building is actually something that can be found in older modern buildings around the world. take the nearby the american cement building (right image), designed in 1960, with its permeable precast concrete exterior. although i personally prefer the unpretentious simplicity of modern architecture, maybe what this town really needs is a lady who's a tramp.

the return of the bucket

this holiday, a small christmas miracle happened at our home. the bucket that we "lost" at the park last summer came back to us. it appeared underneath our tree on christmas morning, bearing a delightful book, our california, in spanish. apparently during its half year absence, it developed eyes and tentacles and morphed into an octopus (flex, the octopus, to be exact). i wonder if santa, realizing that we don't have a chimney, squeezed the octopod through our door's mail slot and instructed it to wriggle its way to the tree and take a bite out of the dreidel-shaped sugar cookie coco decorated and left out with a cup of milk.

the real mystery is how santa deciphered the hieroglyphic letter coco left in our mailbox to be sent to the north pole, in which she specifically asked for a bucket and a book, no more, no less.