ARCHITECTURE : Inside It’s Chicken and Biscuits, but the Outside Manages to Crow

The architects call it “just a chicken shack,” but the spiral of metal spinning away from the corner of Western and Oakwood avenues is more like a postmodern temple of fowl.

From the theatrical window at ground level to the portrait of the Colonel threatening to careen off of a cube cantilevered 65 feet above the sidewalk, this Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet is the grandest, most outrageous and aesthetically most successful fast-food emporium you will find anywhere in Los Angeles.

“Fast food restaurants are our new meeting places,” says architect Elyse Grinstein, “and they should be treated as such.” That meant that she and partner Jeff Daniels had to create a place where eating would be theater, where the architecture of grease would become the condensation of a community.

Their solution was--with the help of their art-collecting client and their own experience designing rather fancy restaurants like the Chaya Brasserie--to throw the basic box out the window. Instead, they designed a curving structure that seems to both point to the Hollywood Hills in the distance and seduce you around the corner to the drive-through window.

Metal fins (in reality solar shades) make the facade look like it is part of a world of automobiles, and a combination of stucco and corrugated metal ties the skin of the building back to the surrounding neighborhood of stores, garages and apartments. The scale of the building is more reminiscent of a church or civic monument, so that this piece of sculpture becomes both something that gives focus to the neighborhood and a giant advertisement for itself.

It is a collage of forms that mixes crass commercialism with sculptural expressions saved from abstraction by both the down-to-earth materials in which they are carried out and by the sensitivity the architects have shown to the different scales of Western Avenue.

Inside, the plastic realm of franchised standardization threatens to take over, but luckily Grinstein and Daniels were given a larger program than could comfortably fit on the site, so they invented a second-floor dining room. They get you there by drawing you past the take-out counter to a stair that moves around a dumbwaiter, past a big window providing a panorama of the city and up to the second-floor dining room. There, a 400-foot-high skylight twists its way over your head, allowing light to spill into the airy space, while a small balcony provides outdoor seating. This is actually a nice place to sit, a room whose grand proportions, torqued forms and strong light make you forget the food you are eating.

Is it dangerous to blow a simple chicken shack up to the scale of a civic building, endow it with all the attributes of postmodern architecture and then plunk it in the middle of an already confused neighborhood? Perhaps, but I for one will take good architecture where I can get it, especially since the building seems to be such a forceful sculptural counterpoint to its surroundings. I will even eat fried chicken for it, though I do hope that this KFC is only a prototype for a more serious attempt to create true community focal points in our city.