ARCHITECTURE : There’s Something Fishy About Marina’s Angeli Mare Restaurant

When Los Angeles architecture was young and innocent, buildings would sometimes tell you what they were. Old-time restaurant afficionados may remember an establishment on San Vicente Boulevard whose appearance told you exactly what you would be eating inside: Before dining on your salmon or swordfish, you were consumed by a giant blue fish that acted as the door into the establishment.

The blue fish has gone the way of many of our great pop icons, only to be replaced by restaurants with a little more subtle one-liners.

Angeli Mare, for instance, is an Italian seafood restaurant-- mare means sea in Italian. In case you didn’t know that language, you could tell that there was something fishy about the place by the boat-like appearance of the building and the waves of steel that embrace the main dining room.

Enter into Angeli Mare, and you feel as though you are under water, or inside a boat. The vagueness of the reference is deliberate.

Angeli Mare, 13445 Maxella Ave., Marina del Rey, is a prime example of a new kind of architecture in Los Angeles, one that hints at, but never mimics, existing forms or gives a simple message.

The designer of this restaurant, Iranian-born Michele Saee, was confronted with a rather uncompromising site: a new strip shopping mall. Conceived as a kind of watered-down version of the Westside Pavilion, the building was covered with grids and bays in different pastel-colored materials.

Saee differentiated his design from the mall by treating the restaurant as a completely different animal. Like all of his architecture, Saee’s Angeli Mare is a curvy prehistoric monster clad in steel and stained plywood that seems about to devour its site. Green-tinted plates wrap around the building’s columns and bulge out at the middle. They rise and fall as if with an unseen tide.

One enters the restaurant through a massive door of folded wood, and immediately faces more ripples of steel, plywood and white plaster. The outline of the space itself disappears behind six giant metal trusses that arch over the dining room. These arches support wooden slats that hide the mechanical equipment, and the dip they make in the middle to accommodate all that unsightly stuff helps to give the room a clear focus.

A crowded bar contrasts with this big room. There, patrons sit wedged between the curving walls and a heavy bar, while spindly fishbones of steel suspend lights overhead. A wine rack in between these two spaces is meant to resemble both a piece of water-worn debris dredged up from the ocean and the outline of a reclining woman.

Again, none of the references are clear, but all of the forms give you that feeling of being submerged in some other world.

It’s an elegant, but not necessarily pretty world. Saee left his steel to rust, then sanded it and covered it with the kind of lacquer boat builders use to seal their vessels.

The space is surrounded with big, cutoff, unfinished gestures. There is nothing particularly refined about the plywood and welded steel that surrounds you, but there is a sensuous luster about the green tints and smooth arabesques that dance around the restaurant. At night, when Angeli Mare glows from behind its inward turner curves, its layers folding in on themselves in darkness, it promises an undefinable but luxurious world caught within the webs of this almost industrial architecture.