By Katharine Schwab
June 4, 2018
Introduction:
Read more here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90174419/t ... ore-crazy(Fast Company) If you were driving down Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1950, you’d be able to spot the Sanderson Hosiery store from a football field away. Why? The shop’s owner, A.A. Sanderson, built a giant female mannequin leg and set it up directly on top of his storefront.
Sanderson Hosiery wasn’t the only store in Southern California to use giant sculptures of animals and objects as a way to catch drivers’ attention as they were cruising down the street. Some went a step further, making their storefronts themselves into great big flower baskets, pigs, windmills, and milk cans.
“If you were driving down the street in a car, you had to see the business ahead of you in a much smaller time frame, because you’re driving 30 miles per hour,” explains Jim Heimann, an editor at Taschen and author of the book California Crazy. “If you saw a giant ice cream cone, you knew ice cream is up ahead. That kind of architecture worked well with an environment that had a lot of space.”
In 1980, Heimann introduced this unique form of architecture to the world with a book called California Crazy. Now, Heimann is back with his third edition of the tome, published this summer by Taschen. He’s been collecting images and ephemera, like postcards and drawings, of the region’s wild vernacular architecture for many decades.
His research sheds lights on why, exactly, Southern California produces such wacky structures. Car culture is a big part of it–these structures were often designed to grab the attention of motorists from the highway. But Hollywood and its need for large-scale sets played a major role as well. Heimann points to one example from 1915: That year, an amusement park built for San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific exhibition featured giant architectural-scale animals, like horses, ostriches, and elephants made out of a plaster substance and chicken wire. The director and filmmaker D.W. Griffith, who was there to speak at the convention, saw these fantastical buildings and convinced the craftspeople who’d created them to build a set for his latest film, Intolerance.