I went on the required pilgrimage to the 1960 Richard Neutra designed apartment house at 6847 Radford in North Hollywood. The eight unit building is being decorated by 7 different designers who include: Modernica, Design Within Reach, Sundayland, NoHo Modern, Cletus Dalglish, Sunset Orange and Steven King. It is open for $10 a person viewing this weekend.

The Los Angeles Times recently profiled owner Mike Resnick, who purchased the complex for $700,000 and has spent $250,000 upgrading it. Units, which average 600 square feet, will rent for $1,000 a month. [A family of four could live here with 250 square feet per person.]

I congratulate Mr. Resnick for his savvy purchase, and for his even more clever way of marketing his real estate as a socially and artistically beneficial contribution to Los Angeles.

“Good design isn’t just something you read about in shelter magazines, or see on home tours,” says Resnick, who with his baseball cap and unshaven chin looks like he might drive a cab. “It’s not just for coffee table books — you can live in it!”

But is there a yawning emptiness in shouting out the name of Neutra to push a rather plain idea into public sight? Like the Schindler House in West Hollywood, this piece of architecture is fawned over like a pre-mature infant in an incubator. Every line is praised and every banal feature revered. To see the groupies and pilgrims make their way to these alleged holy shrines of architecture, is to witness Los Angeles at its most sychophantic. Does the Emporer really have any clothes?

Inside the Resnick-Neutra complex, I saw not a new social order of sunlight and enlightenment, but the same old story: Mexicans buried deep in the dirt, in 90 degree heat, carrying pick axes, shovels and paint brushes, while they hurried to plant, paint and lay down sod in time for the weekend art festivities.

Upstairs, in one moody, brown and blue hued air-cooled apartment, a sweet and sexy young woman was waiting to hang photographs on the wall, as the exhausting work of arranging throw pillows and amorphously shaped vases on the low-slung tables proceeded. The great mid-century set piece was under assembly, a stage-set for the elite who believe that salvation is only a makeover away.

The neighborhood, hot, sun baked, poor and unversed in the contents of Wallpaper Magazine, must have silently wondered about all the photography and moving vans. If they could think in quiet….every five minutes or so, the skies roared with the deafening approach of jets landing at Burbank Airport.

I left the modern oasis and bought an ice cream cone on the corner.