The Sights The Sounds: Imperial Highway: Boeing and Aviation Station

Coming to LAX I'm always intruiged by this Boeing building because of the giant balls on the side of it. It seems this building is part of Boeing Sattelite Systems (I may not have the official name correct) and according to their website, at this site Boeing works on:

the body-stabilized Boeing 601 satellite and the body-stabilized Boeing 702, the world's most powerful communications satellite, two lines of satellites designed to support mobile communications, and a series of weather satellites, global positioning satellites and military communications satellites. At any given time more than two dozen of these powerful spacecraft are in varying stages of production.

I still have no more of an idea why there are balls on the building than there are balls on Dockweiler Beach.

Down the street from Boeing is the MTA's Green Line's Aviation Station. This is where you'd get off for LAX if you ever decided to take the train to get there. Apparently it would be much too convenient to actually have the train drop you off at the actual airport like in other cities. No instead of that the LA MTA drops you off a mile away and makes you transfer to a bus to take you there.

Anyway, here is the overpass you go under to get from Imperial Highway to the station, which run parallel to the 105.

I did appreciate the alternative power I saw in use at the station. This vehicle for example.

This station was designed around a 1950's beatnik theme. Here is what the MTA website said about this freaky 1950's beatnik design:

Untitled, 1995
Richard Turner, artist
Escudero-Fribourg Architects
Working with the station architect and engineers, artist Richard Turner celebrates the exuberance of mid-century modern American design and the expansive optimism of the 1950's aerospace industry. References to the landscaping and furniture of the middle-class American home are combined with elements of Los Angeles vernacular architecture to create a station that is a synthesis of the home and the workplace.
Flagstone paving, suburban landscaping and furniture casually arranged in conversational groupings bring the comfortable ambiance of the middle-class home to a potentially impersonal public space. The colored concrete chairs and coffee tables are arranged on terrazzo "rugs" and invite passengers to sit down and feel at home. Streamlined boomerangs, palettes and kidney-bean shaped wall sculptures recall the vocabulary of 1950's modernist sculpture. Overhead, the cantilevered roof of brushed aluminum barrel vaults and decorative struts at once suggest both aircraft structure and California's renowned carwash architecture. Silhouettes of classic modern furniture float down the elevator glass, and pay tribute to innovations of mid-20th-century design.
Waiting for their trains, passengers are shielded from the wind by glass screens printed with quotations from Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, as well as by African American writers Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, reminding commuters that the prosperity and optimism of the 1950s were not shared by all.
"My intent is that the design serve as a transition between the home and the workplace and as a 'hail and farewell' to the passenger on his/her way to LAX. Leaving the state or leaving the country, returning from abroad or coming here for the first time, the traveler will be reminded of a classic epoch of modern American culture."
RICHARD TURNER (this link is not about the artist, but you should check it out, its about another Richard Turner who I'm guessing was way more interesting) was born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised in rural Michigan, and spent his last two years of high school in Saigon, Vietnam. Between undergraduate work at Antioch College and graduate study at the University of Michigan, he spent a year in India on a Fulbright scholarship. Turner lives in Orange, California, and is a professor of studio art and art history and is the Director of Chapman University's Guggenheim Gallery. His public commissions include Market Square Park in Houston, Texas; Westside Light Rail in Portland, Oregon; Newton Police Station in Los Angeles; and two wastewater treatment plants in San Diego, California.
ESCUDERO-FRIBOURG ARCHITECTS was established in 1972 and has designed six Metro Rail Stations as well as a number of institutional/health care and educational facilities.

In case you're unfimilar with Ralph Ellison (I admit I skipped reading this book in high school because I was a bad student sometimes) check the link.