Page 3 of 5
Pomona, California
When the architects of the war are handing out the swords
An introductory quote, stolen from a previous slideshow from 2004:
Pomona is in the Southland, but a good hour east from anywhere you would want to be. The only legitimate reason to go there is to see a building, or more accurately a campus- Diamond Ranch High School designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis. Before I left for California I checked two different, recent guidebooks, and both had said it was permissible to walk around the outside and take pictures- it is a public building after all. I also checked the surprisingly boring Diamond Ranch High School internet site to see if any tours were offered or any restrictions were in place, neither question was answered on their site. My research effort ended there, in retrospect it shouldn't have.
With proper advance notice, the Pomona Unified School District allows visitors to Diamond Ranch, but without proper advance notice, well, then I guess there's nothing to see here, move along, move along. The gruff but pleasant enough guy in the plaid shirt showed me where the security cameras were and said that the building was guarded twenty four hours a day, and that there was in fact plenty to see but I wasn't allowed in. As compensation for my whining, I was allowed outside at one corner- as long as I stayed in plain sight in the parking lot. I actually tried calling the Pomona Unified School District, but unlike the gruff but pleasant security guard, they remained unreachable that Saturday. Despite that setback and the fact I was almost killed on the 210 on the way back (there was a rocking chair on the freeway), I remain optimistic for a future visit- Los Angeles is a terribly convenient stopover, I know it's only a matter of time before I find myself back in Pomona and allowed to stand in such hollowed, well guarded space.
My history with the building (over) explained, it was finally payback time. I used the AIA tour as a ticket into Diamond Ranch High School, a place I have admittedly mixed feelings about. While the cantilevered forms were certainly heroic, there was something in the textured gray metal panels that fought such sleek, tectonic shapes. It does take a damn cool picture though.
The courtyard view, somehow free of all those other digital camera toting architects, with the orthogonal classroom wings on the left and the main entrance straight ahead.
The cantilevered, programmatically empty forms protect the public spaces and try and distract you from all those rectangular, almost conventional classroom spaces. I realize that saying a project includes workable, traditional spaces is an odd and usually unfair complaint, but in both Morphosis projects that I toured they felt extraordinarily square in such a punk building.
Downtown, diagonally across the street from City Hall and directly across the street from Little Tokyo, Morphosis' CalTrans building looks cool from a distance, interesting from outside and oddly conventional from the inside- it still seems wrong to see rows and rows of institutional, boring workstations inside. The same could be said about all that operable screening- from up on Grand Avenue it catches the light and looks phenomenal, while from the inside it almost looks dreary.
The inside may be boring but the outside is almost science fiction. This is the south view from the exterior exit stair, a quick view of the space between the photovoltaic cells (on the right) and the reflection of the photovoltaic cells (on the left).
Six more pictures of the CalTrans Building feature all the good parts- the facade, the courtyard and the lobby.
