The Ugliest Building in L.A.

The 18-story (W)rapper building is not AI. It's real.

Remember the skyscrapers in the background in the 2005 Mike Judge comedy Idiocracy that have been haphazardly wrapped in twine to keep them from falling over?

Well, now, 82-year-old Los Angeles architect Eric Owen Moss has taken that joke literally for his 18-story “(W)rapper” building at 5790 West Jefferson Boulevard in western Los Angeles on the border with Culver City. It looks like it has been randomly encased in masking tape:

Because what’s funnier than a 235-foot tall pun? After all, nobody will ever tire of this witticism looming over them.

By the way, the (W)rapper is next to the nice black neighborhood on the north slope of Baldwin Hills, near Obama Boulevard and the architect’s office.

And that raises in my mind the question of whether Eric Owen Moss is a tiny bit black or not:

But his son, Miller Moss, currently starting quarterback for the Louisville Cardinals college football team, looks like the bad guy in a lot of 1980 teen comedies:

After 7-3 Louisville fell out of the running for a playoff berth this weekend on a one point defeat keyed by three unsportsmanlike conduct penalties, the young Moss got in trouble with the press for saying after the game:

“I don’t think something like that [penalties] gets fixed week to week,” Moss said. “That’s a cultural thing and an off-season thing that’s going to need to be addressed.”

On the other hand, ever since Patrick Mahomes made it huge, lots of college coaches have been recruiting quarterblacks of ambiguous ancestry. Maybe a coach who follows architecture leapt to the same conclusion? But are there football coaches who follow architecture? And how did I get off track onto sports yet again? It’s not October anymore.

Speaking of looming ominously, consider the other side of the (W)rapper, as brought to us by Antoine Mörck:

It’s too bad that acrophobes aren’t an officially privileged Victim Group who could lead the opposition to architects exploiting advances in structural engineering to design terrifying cantilevers.

And what’s the word for the opposite of acrophobia where instead of worrying you’ll fall off high things, you worry that things will fall on you from on high?

Paywall here.