Reverse beauty pageant

[tags]los angeles, curbed la, hollywood, red line[/tags]

The Hummer limousine in the foreground of Hollywood & Highland is candid, but this photograph has the most self-indulgent chunder per pixel that is still capable of being transmitted within current bandwidth limitations.
Credit: Wkivinski via Flickr

Hollywood & Highland was the right pig with the right lipstick to win Curbed LA’s Ugliest Building Contest. The competition was intense in the architectural reverse beauty pageant, with entrants open only to structures within Los Angeles city limits.

This is actually a coup for H&H’s owners and its PR people. In modern communications, publicity is value neutral, measured by raw quantity and not “good” or “bad”. Members of Generation X and people younger are skillful at turning notoriety into memes that achieve the opposite effect. This honor is a blessing in disguise, since H&H can profit from something that should be its undoing.

It is quite an achievement to be recognized as the Ugliest Building in Los Angeles, especially when the nominees and judges can articulate ugliness. And look at the odds H&H had to overcome. It had to compete in a very broad field, considering Los Angeles’ architectural gift to the world is the strip mall. Los Angeles “attracts the world’s creative class,” yet the Babbittry should be looked at clearly as the slumlord to the rest of the world’s flakiest and most unemployable tenants. These bright minds come to a place where there’s the weather, vestiges of ecological beauty and amusement to help creativity bloom, yet end up petulant and stultified enough to grow crap out of a rose bush.

H&H happens to be the topmost stratum of this crap heap. Here’s Curbed LA’s clean and articulate panel of judges to explain why:

It’s not based purely on aesthetics, that we can all agree. There are other factors - the pedestrian unfriendliness of the Highland side of the structure. The confusing and somewhat nauseating escalators. The portions of the mall that remain empty of shops and tourists despite being at one of the most visited intersections in the City. The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency. The mish-mash of architectural styles. The Egyptian reliefs and elephants. And then there are the tourists. Oy! Never has a greater display of mid-westerners, comprised of fat women wearing capri pants and their skinny husbands been gathered into one locale than at Hollywood & Highland.

Even better were user comments left by Rob Dawg (numbers 9 and 30), familiar to MetroReaders and the blogosphere as the Ray Romano of internet lurkers.

Ugly buildings need lovin’, too. Visit H&H via the Metro Red Line, Metro Rapid Line 780, and local lines 2/302, 156, 163, 212 and 217; and LADOT DASH Hollywood, Hollywood/West Hollywood and Holly Trolley.