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OMA’s first big Los Angeles project: daring but overwrought
Is there a compound word that describes the feeling of alienation induced by really wanting to embrace a new piece of architecture but being viscerally unable to do so? A disarchpointment? A designchantment? A stuporstructure? Because I could really use a word to describe my feelings toward the first major building in Los Angeles by the international design studio Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). The building in question is the new Audrey Irmas Pavilion, a leaning and gleaming 55,000-square-foot event space for Koreatown’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple — which, had the COVID-19 Omicron variant not touched down with such sticky ferocity, would have held its official opening last week. (That event…


