FEEDBACK

Your architecture critic applauds LAUSD’s new High School #9 as adding a “mysterious and unconventional silhouette to the downtown skyline.”

Am I supposed to be happy that this is the result of the board spending more than $230 million of taxpayer money on a project budgeted at $87 million? I thought the school board’s job was to educate our children. Instead, we have a palace to “the arts” and teachers who are being furloughed, schools that are virtually uninhabitable and a dropout rate of 35%.

The real value of this monstrosity is that it is emblematic of the dysfunctional school board, providing little in the way of real education, and indifferent to budget overruns of appalling size.

Arthur O. Armstrong

Manhattan Beach

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That arts school reminds me of the stage design for the Rolling Stones’ “Steel Wheels” tour. The set was also reconfigured as “Urban Jungle” for the European leg of the tour. It was a parody/comment on the cold industrial world we live in.

Why would Coop Himmelblau want to create a structure that is essentially a parody of a parody? At least it’s in the appropriate part of town, just down the street from L.A.’s other architectural atrocity, Disney Hall.

Maybe the city should consider promoting this area as the Goofy Architecture District.

Earl Reinhalter

Los Angeles