I'm in la la land, pinch me!

Peter Martinka on Los Angeles, California with (Supposedly) Ma Yansong

We drive slow circles around blocks, looking for parking; or can the school reimburse valet? I don’t trust that, I just walk. We are suspended in the grey goo of Los Angeles - more a state than a city, if you’ve yet to go. Our hostel is a transnational chain two sunny miles and three Erewhons from the Santa Monica shoreline. If I cup my hands over my eyes and ears and stand in the surf I could love this city.

Ma materializes on Wednesday to hold court over dinner at Westfield Mall. Architecture is about beauty and nature, or something. The orchards have long been ripped out, their valleys now farming oil, film, and mortgages until those profits slow as well. Each harvest is piled onto the hills as architecture and art, protected by peoplemovers, keypads, and hollywood hedges. Angeleno architecture is a story told through residences, we hear from Yi, a salesman of residences and a progenitor of The Line.

We play hide and seek with our professors, who’ve kept their thoughts on LA secret for a month. They’re quite busy people: journalist-killing kings aren’t patient with their ego projects. Our own projects, marketed sight-unseen to the next Biennale as cities of the future, may too need to reckon with a few moral compromises if they are to be ICONIC.

Our site is the single-biggest remaining parcel in the valley, preserved under private ownership for the last century of urban growth. Fracking gave it a second financial wind and has until now kept it out of the hands of real estate speculators. Industrial bloodletting has left its body poison for the air, for the soil, for its neighbors. It has been contested for generations. We’re reassured that it is free from local context, from nature, and from history. ‘The great part about it is that it doesn’t have to relate to its surroundings.’ We are in line behind a hundred years of carpetbaggers, descending into SoCal to land a spaceship and call public art public good.