Interiors: Lobby of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles.
Where do humans fit in this massive concrete and glass cathedral of commerce?
This is a strange interior space, one that instantly invokes modernism but also has a curiously retro vibe to it. The lobby and interior common areas of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel are so vast that one cannot capture them in a single shot. Multi-leveled, mostly oriented vertically, the hotel’s concrete columns and glass panels look clean and futuristic, like a no-nonsense office building (which the hotel is surrounded by in downtown L.A.), while planters full of carefully-trimmed greenery try to inject the atmosphere with a bare touch—not too much—of nature. The little rounded pods surrounded by railings, in the center on the mid and upper levels, are landing spaces for humans, but this room is not really meant to operate on a human scale. You can almost tell instantly by looking at this photo that the Bonaventure was designed and built in the 1970s. That was a curious transitional phase in the trajectory of our civilization as becoming subordinate to technology and machines. We still loved the aesthetic of the modern and the futuristic, but we had not yet fully surrendered to the cult of technology in the way we seem to have done in this century. Consequently, spaces like this are a bit of a relic.
The Westin Bonaventure opened in early 1977 in the very center of Los Angeles. Seen from above, the configuration of the hotel looks like a bundle of cylindrical glass towers, four of them surrounding a central core. Even if you’ve never been to L.A. chances are good that you’ve seen this building, as it shows up in movies and TV productions all the time. The glass elevators that move up and down through the cavernous lobby have attracted a lot of cinematic attention. John Malkovich took Clint Eastwood hostage in one of them in the 1993 film In The Line of Fire; a year later, in True Lies, Arnold Schwarzenegger brought a horse into one of the lifts. The visual look of the Bonaventure looks custom-built for a 1990s action film. It speaks of modernity, wealth, and technology, the kind of postmodern canvas on which Important Men do Important Things, like trying to shoot each other. I’ve not stayed at this hotel myself but my guess is that it’s probably a little dull.
