HS#9CENTRAL LOS ANGELES AREAHIGH SCHOOL #9 FOR THE

VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS

“power for art”

WOLF D. PRIX

essay by Sylvia Lavin

COOP HIMMELBLAU IS NOT A COLOR BUT AN IDEA,

OF CREATING ARCHITECTURE WITH FANTASY,

AS BUOYANT AND VARIABLE AS CLOUDS.

1968

essay by Sylvia Lavin

PRESTELMUNICH · BERLIN · LONDON · NEW YORK

HS#9CENTRAL LOS ANGELES AREAHIGH SCHOOL #9 FOR THE

VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS

REVOLUTION 9 essay by Sylvia LavinBACKGROUND URBAN CONTEXT POWER FOR ART CHESS CONCEPT PROJECT DRAWINGSTHE LOBBY THEATER BUILDING THE TOWER LIBRARY BUILDING CAFETERIA ACADEMIES / ART BUILDING ANNEX

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CONTENTS

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“Revolution 9” is a song recorded by the Beatles and released on The White Album in 1968, that heady year when students were demonstrating across Europe, the Vietnam War was at a fever pitch, and Coop Himmelb(l)au was founded in Vienna. The song has been described as the best-known work of avant-garde music and the most disliked moment of any Beatles album. Key to the work’s Jekyll and Hyde reputation is that unlike most Beatles songs, with their sweetly straight-forward lyrics and comparatively unencumbered sound, “Revolution 9” is frustrat-ingly difficult to understand. For some, this suggests a connection to musique con-crète and opens the Beatles up to more than just a pop music legacy. For others, however, the song’s sampling of bits of music by Sibelius and Beethoven opens the Beatles up to accusations that they abandoned their audience and the band’s obligation to make listeners feel good. The result has been a mash-up of inter-pretations and misinterpretations, the most famous being the one celebrated by conspiracy theorists who listen to the song backwards and claim that when John Lennon repeats the words “number nine, number nine,” he is confirming—in secret code intelligible only à la Leonardo da Vinci, in reverse—that Paul McCartney had died and had been replaced by a doppelgänger in 1966. It is uncanny how much of this description applies to Coop Himmelb(l)au’s High School #9. And I don’t just mean the uncanny coincidence of the number nine itself, but of the trauma of interpretation and value that the two number nines have produced. Like the song, the building has been both celebrated for its radical form and chastised for its apparent abandonment of its obligation to its audience who

essay by Sylvia LavinREVOLUTION 9

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URBAN FABRIC IN THE LOS ANGELES BASIN. HIGH SCHOOL #9 IS LOCATED AT THE EDGE OF DOWNTOWN ALONG THE 101 HOLLYWOOD FREEWAY.

LOS ANGELES BASIN

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DOWNTOWN

HOLLYWOOD H I LLS

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COMPLETION

THE LOBBY /

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LE FT PAG E: MODE L STU DI ES DEVE LOPI NG TH E LOB BY

EXTE R IOR SK I N AN D E NTRANCE. TASKS WE R E TO

R ESOLVE TH E PE RCE NTAG E OF G LAZ E D VE R SUS OPAQU E

AR EAS AN D TH E TRANSIT ION B ETWE E N TH E MATE R IALS

AN D TH E I NS I DE AN D OUTS I DE. TH E F I R ST STU DY SHOWS

AN OPTION FOR M U LATI NG TH E OPAQU E AR EA AS A

“HAT”; TH E F I NAL SOLUTION IS D I FFE R E NTIATE D WITH

“POP-OUTS,” WH E R E M ETAL PAN E LS AR E LAYE R E D OVE R

G LASS TO CR EATE AR EAS OF I N D I R ECT L IG HT ON TH E

I NS I DE. TH E BALCONY B LU R S TH E L I N E B ETWE E N I NS I DE

AN D OUTS I DE AN D PROVI DES A LOOKOUT POI NT TO

DOWNTOWN.

The lobby embodies the front door of the school and gives it an address on Grand Avenue. Itself a tower space of eighty-six feet in height, the lobby anchors at the corner of Grand Avenue and the 101 Hollywood Freeway, manifesting the importance of the facility as a cultural building.The lobby is a hybrid space, serving the school and the theater simultaneously. In the theater function it is utilized as ticket lobby, VIP entrance, gathering space for visitors before and during events, circulation space to the several levels of the theater, and—with its balcony pointing toward downtown—lookout point toward the city’s prominent downtown skyline. In the school function, the lobby is a con-nective circulation space for the students and doubles as the school’s gallery, where works of the school’s students can be exhibited and viewed by the public. In direct connection to the lobby, the art building corridors provide an extended gal-lery network originating from the lobby.The public character of the tall space is reflected in the choice of material—a steel, metal, and glass structure. With its hard materials, the lobby is less an interior space than an extension of the sidewalk. In its lower portion the lobby is glazed and open, the faceted structure resembling a crystal; above the usable levels it is clad in metal with a skylight on top. The planning challenges arising out of the height, geometric complexity, orienta-tion, and materiality of the lobby were solved through structural, climate, material, and detail studies using both physical and three-dimensional computer models, and computer simulations. The resulting structure is layered and composed of the primary structure and its skin, with the primary structure visible on the interior of the space.

BRIDGEHEAD TO DOWNTOWN GRAND AVENUETHE LOBBY /

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