If you've ever visited Charles and Ray Eames' home in Pacific Palisades, CA, you'll know exactly what Ice Cube means when he says, “Everybody who comes here thinks they got the place figured out, but you can never get this place figured out." “This place is like The Wizard of Oz” Behind the curtain of smog, and the glut of sprawling, bogus McMansions is the Eames edenic ideal of a home, which is an unassuming, multi-colored steel, glass, and color-paneled box, perfectly sited toward the back of a simply landscaped, medium-sized lot which opens out to a view of the ocean. In a video for Pacific Standard Time, the rapper/actor waxes poetic about the Eames' sensibility, and in an interview with the NYTimes, he says, "If you were an artist, which I am, this seems like the house that you want to be in. It reminded me of something that defined the style. In Los Angeles, you see a lot of McMansions, where the house takes all the land. Here, it seemed they built this thing inside of a park. It kept the serene, quaint feel. Anybody could go there and collect their thoughts." It's not surprising, that Ice Cube is a fan given that fact that he studied architectural drafting at the Phoenix Institute of Technology before becoming a rapper. Though the two passions aren't dissimilar. As he says in the video, "[The Eameses] was doing mash-ups before mash-ups even existed.”
