script: California: (Fritz Haeg’s ‘Salons’) Is Everybody In?

Anyone Home?

Los Angeles architect Fritz Haeg’s ‘Salons’ create a sense of community 
for people from various disciplines who might otherwise never meet
by James Trainor

One summer night in 1947 the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury and a 
friend decided to take an after-dinner walk down Wilshire Boulevard. 
Even then, just two years after the end of World War II, Los Angeles was 
in the expansionist thrall of the automobile. The idea of two men 
strolling, not driving, down the Miracle Mile was already seen as 
somehow deviant, anti-social, potentially criminal. Within minutes a 
police patrol car came up alongside the two suspects, who were 
questioned at length just for attempting the Old World social activity 
of flâneurie. In LA, a place that thinks itself a city but is just a 
centreless agglomeration of low-density hubs that could not communicate 
were it not for the freeways and boulevards that link them, it has 
become a cliché that no one walks, that people are separated by 
distance, by the cocoons of their cars, by their insular lifestyle. It 
has become the guiding myth of its own self-image of modern alienation. 
It creeps into films such as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) or Crash 
(2004), whose opening voice-over monologue confides that ‘In LA, nobody 
touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss 
that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel 
something’.

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http://www.frieze.com/column_single.asp?c=318