It seems that this store's design is so uninviting that someone felt the need to add a sign pointing to the entrance! I'm used to stores having some sort of defining architectural feature around the entry doors, but this mall is a monolithic mass of ugly sun-bleached brick. (The other entrance to Ralphs is a bit better, but still pretty bad.) I absolutely love traditional concrete brutalist buildings, but this later-era "brick brutalism" is one of my least favorite architectural styles; I consider it overly heavy and oppressive in the same way that other people feel about traditional brutalism.
There are a lot of strange things going on here. Certainly one of them are the red signs on red brick! Red brick does present some challenges for signs which aren't white, even Kroger's blue signs sometimes clashes a bit with the brick color. Of course, this is far worse!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I don't know what they were thinking. Maybe it looked better when the signs were installed since everything here looks severely sun-bleached. Thankfully, the building has been painted in a lighter color scheme since my visit, which looks a little bit better.
Delete