Triforium

Whenever my family drives around downtown, my father will scornfully say «That’s the Triforium. They put lights and bells in it, but they ran out of money.»
Much like the adjacent LA Mall, the Triforium is basically a late, late, modern (ca. 1975) architectural folly with some futuristic (albeit nonfunctional) ideas that have finally started to come into vogue.
When it was built in the mid-​1970s at the cost of nearly a million dollars, there actually was an electronic carillon and light system in the structure that supposedly changed with people’s movement. Of course, not long after the unveiling, the primitive computerized equipment broke down and the Triforium became a really expensive sculpture.
But today, experientiality is quite important subject in many architectural schools. With the advent of inexpensive (i.e. $ 0) advanced parametric software like Grasshopper for Rhino with plug-​ins like Arduino, the systems that failed in the Triforium can be recreated– and even expanded upon. With these plugins, systems can even be controlled not only by movement below, but by something as commonplace as Twitter– a certain hashtag can control movement or change the color of an LED.
It’s as if the Triforium’s «Old Man in the Cave» can now fit into the palm of anyone’s hand.
These advances in technology; only science fiction 40 years ago, have allowed servo and light systems to be installed at a fraction of the price of the Triforium’s original system.
Much like Cayley’s 1843 design of a steam powered monoplane, the Triforium certainly was ahead of its time. The concept of an automated experiential structure the designers envisioned 40 years ago have now become a reality. Today, it can be an effective, relevant, attractive project.

Disgusting place! Avoid at all cost, over ran by transients. Smells like a cesspool :(
Unfortunetly I work underground here so it is what it is…

An explanation of what this thing is can be found below. Suffice to say its awesome. Really kitschy but cool. It was broken for a long time and has just been fixed. Go check it out… Its funky, silly and totally obsurd in its location next to city hall and other Government buildings. At the same time its whimsical and amusing. I might even go so far as to say it would be a cool place to go for a date to just go and watch it… but you’d prolly get mugged and beaten in the park after dark.
The Triforium is the name of a public sculpture in the Los Angeles Mall Civic Center complex, located at the intersection of Temple and Main Streets in Downtown Los Angeles. Designed by Joseph Young and installed in 1975, the Triforium incorporates three two-​legged concrete pillars, each supporting a bank of multicolored glass prisms (1,494 in all), as well as an electronic «79 note glass bell carillon with two octaves of English bells, and two octaves of Flemish bells» [1], which were synchronized to lighting effects contained within the glass prisms. Meant to play «everything from Beethoven to the Bee Gees» [2], the carillon was operated manually, or by computer.