Glacial Errata, No. 31

[editor’s note: another Glacial Errata mystery has been solved!] 

One: Bradbury Building, Los Angeles

Whenever I’m in downtown Los Angeles, I try to make a pilgrimage to the atrium at the Bradbury Building. For a couple of years it was closed to the public, and I felt the lack of access acutely—now I do my best not to take it for granted. The kind of space where stopping inside for even 2 minutes will make your day better.

It’s odd that it continues to be so well known for its appearance in Blade Runner, given that Ridley Scott distressed it in so much trash and decay and moody lighting that in the film its beauty is all-but-unrecognizable. Standing in the middle of the building, gazing up at its interior, one is reminded that its comes in part from its clean, geometric lines—even as it maintains a pure idiosyncrasy that differentiates it and makes it feel far more organic than the kind of angular fascist vibe of something like neo-classicism.

Two: DZ Bank Building, Berlin

Another great atrium is in the DZ Bank Building in Berlin, designed by Frank Gehry. The exterior of the building is nondescript limestone, to complement the nearby Brandenburg Gate while also not taking away anything from its significance. If you didn’t know to look, you’d never guess what was waiting inside. So the building has a really fascinating interplay between its staid exterior and the atrium within.

Frank Gehry is I suppose a bit of a passé cliché by now, but I still love the way he responded to this building—talk about angular fascist neo-classicism!—by inserting into it a supple and undulating organic form that cuts against the dead vibe of the rest of the place.

It’s hard to get a good photograph of Gehry’s work from the limited vantage point that visitors are allowed, and this is the best I could do, despite repeated attempts.

Three: Embassy Suites, Charleston

A few years ago I wrote about the extremely cursed and haunted history of this building for the New York Times. Unlike the atria of some of these other buildings, the atrium here doesn’t make immediate sense until you understand why the building was built, and for whom.

Four: The Rookery, Chicago

The architects Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root (names that will be familiar to readers of The Devil in the White City) finished this building on La Salle Street in Chicago’s Loop in 1888, and for a time it served as their offices. In 1905, Frank Lloyd Wright redesigned the atrium, adding the white marble and the steel staircases and generally brightening the “light court” that serves as the building’s focal point.

This is another atrium that I could not, despite my best efforts, capture in a single photograph. But this is something of the nature of atria—unlike the façade of a building, which you can face head-on, the atrium surrounds you on all sides. The beauty of a great atrium comes in part from the fact that requires a total immersion in space. The artwork envelopes you. There’s no single vantage point from which you can take it all in, and that’s one of the singular joys of such places. Photographs can’t do them justice. You have to be there.

Five: The Pyramids of North America

I was going to end this week with the Bass Pro Shop in Memphis, Tennessee. But, man, talk about cursed, and talk about the inability to get a photograph of the thing.

Basically, the building started life as an arena, in the shape of a pyramid, home to the Memphis Grizzlies for years. At some point they got a new stadium and the pyramid sat dormant until Bass Pro Shops took it over. And they have utterly wasted the space—when you walk in you see that the entire store (and there’s a LOT of retail space) occupies only two floors. (There’s also some restaurants and I think a hotel and maybe a bowling alley? And alligators, and a duck pond. A lot of taxidermy. It was all a bit overwhelming.) Above you is just empty, black, nightmare space—the top of the pyramid is unused and unlit, and everything just recedes into the overhanging void. They could be projecting giant ads up there, or Youtube videos of cute cats or news anchor fails! And instead it’s just a black hole that sucks all the light out of all creation, a sprawling open expanse of horrifying abyss looming above you like the End of the World. I took dozens of photographs but even my iPhone, which generally does well in low light conditions, came up with nothing but blurred weirdness.

Probably for the best. That place is also haunted—who knows how many crystal skulls are still hidden in the infrastructure?

Anyway, here’s a photo from the Luxor Las Vegas, which boasts the world’s largest atrium by volume, and as pyramids go is at least better lit (but, to be honest, is still an unpleasant place to spend much time in—there’s a reason we build pyramids for the dead, not the living). And despite rumors to the contrary, it’s not going anywhere any time soon.