Lux Art Institute

[Darren Bradley]

This LEED-certified building by Santa Monica (LA) architect Renzo Zecchetto won San Diego's "Grand Orchid" award for best architecture design in 2007.

I accompanied my daughter and her class on a school field trip to the Lux Art Institute today, and couldn't resist taking a couple of shots of the building. Here's one. There are a couple of others posted on flickr (just click on this shot to see them).

I used my 24-70 f2.8 for this shot, since it was already on my camera for taking pictures of the kidlets and I couldn't be bothered to switch lenses. I didn't use a tilt-shift lens, but I still held the camera level and found an elevated position to shoot this. Because I held the camera level, I had a fair amount of street in the foreground, but I cropped that out. This is hand-held.

 

[Hamish Gill]

... That's my trick for architectural stuff ... Get as high as possible, hold the camera completely level then crop ... If I can't get it all in I tend to not take the shot... or go for a silly angle where converging parallels are part of the compo ...

Does the wing thing on the top have a perpous ... Or is it just decoration!

Nice shot too ...

 

[Darren Bradley]

The wing thing on the top contains solar panels, and is meant to provide protection against the afternoon sun. It's also supposed to look cool!

 

[Hamish Gill]

dont get it my self ... its to angular! ... but what do i know ...

 

[Darren Bradley]

That's why you're not a famous architect, I guess ;-P I rather like the design.
To be honest, it's hard for a Brit to imagine what the harsh sun is like in Southern California unless you've lived with it. It's fairly typical here to see sun shades and other passive solar solutions.