[music] I haven't been down here in so long.

I think that's the main-- Oh, they covered it.

Oh, no.

Oh.

You're only here if you're trying to argue a parking ticket or doing jury duty.

It's haunted vibes, to be honest.

It's very liminal.

This is the ancient control room for a long-dead interactive light and sound musical instrument that once lit up downtown Los Angeles but has been dormant for over 50 years: the Triforium.

Paris has the Eiffel Tower, New York the Statue of Liberty, and now Los Angeles has its riforium?

The Triforium is an iconic LA artwork.

The world's first polyphenoptic sculpture.

Maybe only polyphenoptic sculpture.

It's over 60 feet high.

It has the multicolored glass.

Joseph had this image, I think, of having lasers pointing up into the sky.

It was incredibly full of all sorts of new technology.

The problem with the Triforium from its inception, it was ahead of its time.

It was ahead of its time.

It was really ahead of its time and controversial when it was installed.

We asked to see the Triforium in action so you can judge if it's worth a million dollars.

Then decades have passed, and they've let it become inoperable.

It was derided at the time.

Three wishbones in search of a turkey.

It looks like a burned-out part of the spaceship.

It was a beautiful design, actually.

Three reinforced concrete pylons.

Very Jetsons.

It was meant to evoke a happy and positive outlook on the future.

It's not quite the future the '70s dreamed of, but it is a future that has a lot of the capacities that Joseph Young, the architect of the Triforium, dreamed could someday be possible.

"I'm a very optimistic person."

Triforium Project was an informal association of enthusiastic artists, documentarians, Angelinos, who were very invested in the success and the future of the Triforium.

Together as a coalition, we managed to raise some funds, do some programming, make an appeal to the city to bring the Triforium back to life and connect with the family, and just hold the candle for the Triforium for another decade.

I think every 10 or so years, someone comes along and is like, what's going on with this thing?

The Triforium came to be through, actually, the Los Angeles Mall project, which was something the architect Robert Stockwell oversaw.

It was Stockwell who was the one to select and commission the artist, Dr.

Joseph Young, to not only create a focal point for the Los Angeles Mall, but also something that would be seen as a symbol for the whole of Los Angeles.

Joseph Young was a ceramicist, worked a lot in tile, mosaic work.

I think he went to study fresco.

Having gone around, he saw that frescoes do not retain their vibrancy.

When you look at mosaics, they could be 2,000 years old, and they are as vibrant as the day they were made.

He realized, I think, on that trip that mosaics was the medium that would allow his art to last into another millennia.

A lot of his work previous to this were these kind of mosaic tile works that depicted historical events or cultural communities within Los Angeles.

One of the first ones, of course, was the Los Angeles Police Building mural.

Then there was also the Los Angeles Hall of Records for the building that was designed by Richard Neutra.

He was tasked with, the architect of the Los Angeles Mall wanted a reason to attract folks to this pedestrian mall.

He was spending time in Europe and was really inspired by these pedestrian plazas where people could hang out.

He was operating in a moment in the mid-1970s where there was a lot of enthusiasm for art and technology together.

Joseph Young was excited about the prospect of branching out from mosaic and his more traditional sculpture work and doing something that was dynamic, activated electronically, involved this sort of fusion of light, art, science, and music.

He designed a computer-controlled instrument.

Ultimately, the goal was to use science to activate space and draw people into a part of downtown which, at the time and probably still now, wasn't getting a lot of foot traffic at night.

It was something that really was the first of its kind in a lot of ways, especially it being a municipally owned and operated office and shopping complex.

There really was no work or just the scale of that public art commission was something that the city had never done at that time.

The Triforium is what its Latin name suggests, a three-sided work of art designed as the crown glory to the new multimillion-dollar downtown mall.

The Triforium being placed next to a mall, basically, it's an attraction for foot traffic, right?

It's something that people going to shop at a mall to just use the public square could look at and see a symbol of something larger than themselves that was thought about by the city, right, to really have passersby engage the space differently than just a commercial space, but an idea space.

One of the main purposes of the whole Los Angeles Mall project was to create a space that would really reflect the democratic activities that were happening through the government, just to really celebrate that.

He took a mission statement or a program.

He expanded it.

He took it beyond what they thought they wanted, which is what the essence of all the futurism is, right?

You propose something that people don't even know is possible.

The Triforium has 1,494 hand-blown glass prisms, each of which contains an incandescent bulb, and was activated and controlled by the computer downstairs underground.

They were hand-blown in Murano glass in Italy.

They run through the pediment of this 60-ton concrete sculpture into a computer control room downstairs that had an original, also custom-built glass bell carillon instrument that could be played both live and also, I think it was able to run sequences of prerecorded bell tones.

In fact, his design included having laser beams.

The heavens above, it had the most beautiful reflecting pool.

He really had imagined this was going to be a beacon for all other cities around the world.

He had these very grand plans in his mind for what LA could represent.

It was discovered what the budget for this was, which at the time seemed like a lot of money, $300,000.

Nobody could wrap their heads around the fact that this was going to be a centerpiece for downtown life.

It was just how much money it was.

The construction of it was delayed due to the earthquake and some other delays, and the cost skyrocketed and basically tripled the cost.

Then the journalists, the media whipped up the frenzy of the public to go on the warpath.

"The Triforium will be a different kind of a landmark.

It'll be the landmark which people will come to and say, what the hell is this?

They don't know what it is, and they don't know why the people of Los Angeles went along with the $1 million expenditure."

As far as the opening is concerned, that was before me.

What I hear, it was chaos.

Nobody knew what to do with it, really.

Apparently, they had a lot of VIP sitting out here, and it didn't work.

That's what I hear.

Our father was very proud, finally, that this had come to pass.

It was not until probably a year or so in where he started to feel just besieged because he worked so hard.

Then to find that the city council, well, basically, was the media.

They misunderstood it, really.

Nobody really wanted his version of things for the record.

You can also look at this as an object of Mayor Tom Bradley's tenure.

He really fought for this.

When the city council pushed against it, Mayor Tom Bradley really wanted it.

In this one particular piece, the reporter follows Mayor Bradley to an elementary school in the valley.

It's just chatting with the students.

One of the students asks, what's up with the Triforium?

I've heard my parents talking about it.

The quote is, Mayor Bradley said back, "Well, it's ours now.

We're going to have to learn to live with it."

A lot of what we have in our archive record really points to it being something that city workers who would use the LA Mall during their breaks and other visitors would enjoy.

There was programming that happened during the week during lunchtime hours.

Then there was also dedicated weekend programming.

During the summer, there were events that would happen at night and at dusk.

My mom was on jury duty in the early '80s.

She remembers coming across on her lunch break and listening to the bells.

There are a lot of memories, especially from people serving on juries coming here in the '70s, '80s, and '90s when it was still sort of bumping along the bottom of the sea floor.

Talking about what's downstairs as far as the musical instrument is concerned, which was a quartz carillon.

Invented by Benjamin Franklin and called a Franklin bell or glass harmonium.

Over the years, things happened like the judges' offices may have faced in that direction, and they felt it was distracting to have the carillon of bells or the music coming out of there, and so that just quieted the Triforium.

What I think is interesting about the Triforium is, again, how much debate there was when it was installed.

Then it really brings questions about, are we going to keep it, like, decades of maintenance?

All art needs to be taken care of.

Technology has changed, so our understanding of what that art is going to change as well, and that could be exciting as we reconsider our old murals, our old public art.

Our father had a vision for a very vibrant Los Angeles, and I think if he was alive today, he would want to see the Triforium utilized in that way to bring people downtown and really create a center that never truly existed in LA.

Yes, we were able to briefly reactivate it and do exactly what Joseph Young had wanted, which is to take live musical input, translate it through a very specific algorithm, and turn it into polyphonoptic visual compositions.

It was the most beautiful three nights of my life.

If I could leave anybody who was going to watch this with anything, I think it would be to believe that the future is still possible.

You'd think it did make a difference in people's lives, and that can be so again, and that's what art is for.

Public art can often be quite divisive.

People complain about how much it costs.

They don't like it.

They think it's not avant-garde enough or it's too conservative or whatever.

What was amazing about the triforium and is a real missed opportunity is that it was public art that was designed to be interactive with the actual public, which is quite rare to have something that actually responds to footfall, to music, to the presence of a community around it.

It was a rare instance of public art that was making a real effort to integrate itself into a community.

Everything that we feel inside is reflected in art that reflects us.

Every belonging to public art is a sort of watcher.

It is a sort of window by which one could imagine oneself through, and it reflects cultures that make the city.

It reflects communities that make this city.

It allows us an imaginary foothold that reminds us, like family, that we belong to this larger idea of our communal selves.

This program was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

[music]