ARCHITECTURE : Le Mondrian: Art for the Masses, Where the Bland and Bold Merge

I sometimes wonder whether Le Mondrian was designed to confirm East Coast visitors’ preconceptions about architecture in Los Angeles. Just a splash of bright color thrown over a bland stucco box, this inhabitable billboard flaunts itself as high art, an imported bit of class painted by an Israeli artist in homage to a Dutch-French modern master and serving to advertise a luxury hotel.

Yet I have grown to like Le Mondrian. Its staccato colors, slightly faded in the seven years since they were first painted, blend with the confusion of the Sunset Strip, summing up the image-driven nature of this part of town. Le Mondrian shows how all of this city’s high art pretensions soon become part of a lively culture.

The basic building in question here is pretty forgettable. It is a 12-story, L-shaped former apartment building of white stucco with absolutely no distinguishing features. You will find no grand entrance, no composition for the different pieces of the building into a sculptural whole, no ornament to grace the most salient parts of the structure. The building rises straight up past rows of dark glass windows to an only partially hidden crown of mechanical equipment. Where its site drops off sharply to the south, it hovers over a pool deck that tops a parking garage.

When the hotelier Ashkenazy brothers bought the apartment building almost 10 years ago, they knew that it did not look like a luxury hotel. So they brought in Agam, an artist who is famed for performing visual tricks with bright colors. The art-collecting brother, Arnold, likes to name hotels after modern artists, so he asked Agam to turn the hotel into an artwork that would reflect the name he had chosen to honor one of the great masters of abstraction, Piet Mondrian. Agam obliged with a color scheme for the building that makes faint references to Mondrian’s linear intersections and blocks of primary colors.

I have never been able to quite understand the logic of the progression from reds, through yellows and blues and greens to purple that march up the east side of the building, or the particular calibration of aqua and mauve stripes that criss-cross the south facade, but their effect is to dematerialize the building. From the south, Le Mondrian dissolves into points of color that turn out to be, on closer inspection, balconies, fire stairs and the spaces left between the black voids of the dark glass windows.

From the east, the building becomes a more abstract composition, while from the north it presents a more restrained face of gray shades highlighted with a few colorful moments. Only the western facade is confused and rather unappetizing, probably because the shape of the building from this angle is not a simple plane, but two similar wings.

This is the biggest work of art in Los Angeles, as the Ashkenazys like to remind us. It may not be the best, but its sheer size and the way it dissolves what was an ugly mass into just another intersection in the urban patchwork of Los Angeles makes you wonder if there isn’t the germ of an idea here: As soon as one of our local architects produces another of his or her bland abominations, hire an artist to hide the mistake. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that bad doctors bury their mistakes, while architects plant ivy. In Los Angeles, we could just paint them.