Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Recall the uplift of the Santa Monica Mountains; the migration northwards and 90-degree rotation of the West Transverse Range Block, and the Embayment and deposition and inversion and final drainage of the Valley. All that, made all this. The white (reduced?) slate layers are light and soft and crumbly as old foam rubber. Spritzes of green and blue on the surfaces suggest hydro-chemical alteration of the rocks by water in the copper series, as I’ve noted in many spots in the Santa Monicas. I wish there was more information online about the visible geology of our hills for curious hikers, but there just isn’t.
Fans of LA architecture, as of LA geology, must kneel to a brutal truth: here today, gone tomorrow. Please appreciate the former Sunkist Growers’ Headquarters Building (1969; A.C. Martin and Assoc., arch.), while ye may. She will never again be a prominent landmark, since the parking lots that surround the building are being developed into a massive new mall.
Mid-November; an underground parking lot is being made out of the old loading dock. (A good idea. A much better idea would have been to ban cars from the campus entirely and use that portal for transit to give the development a “Sunkist Station”stop. Na ga happen.
Strange But False: Despite the anecdotes, the Sunkist Building wasn’t meant to look like an orange crate, or a wine crate, or even a milk crate. It seems the design was purely an economical way to house and park xxx workers in x,xxx square feet. It’s also not true that Sunkist wanted to be near the Valley orange groves, or to honor the rich fruit-packing history of Van Nuys. The groves and packers by 1969 were already mostly gone, and the site was selected because it was cheap empty suburban land near a new freeway. Finally false, and for the same reasons, is the idea that when Sunkist abandoned this site for their new HQ in Valencia, they were following the orange growers, or honoring the namesake LA citrus variety that made their fortune. Nobody in the organization apparently gave a thought to Valenicia, the city, as related to its product. (Sunkist is a corporation, even if it was founded by farmers.)
Below: Dec. 2019. This was after Sunkist had moved out, but the building was still intact with the original plantings.
Brutalism, that ghastly concrete corporate 1960’s-1980’s mistake, was mellowed here by an elegant and austere classicism. That drawn-in waist; she courts the eye with that Grecian bend. In the 1970s, when Sunkist Building was a landmark visible from the freeway, it subtly “matched” the craggy white slate hills of Sherman Oaks. (Thought I doubt that fitting in with local geology was intentional.)
At any rate, it seems they intend to keep the building and its courtyard as the center for the mall. A noble choice for this lovely site.
The Westfield Fashion Square mall in Sherman Oaks.
Shudder. The white-plastic, sterile, hermetically-sealed look has been chased far into the future from the early seventies, when “Sleeper” and “A Clockwork Orange”, “Star Wars” and “Logan’s Run” were hits. Tired, corporate and soul-crushing as it is, the airless white-plastic style still betokens “the future, right now!” for many.
The Valley Village View 