R.I.P. Joseph Young (But his Triforium Lives on!)

"Love it or hate it, it's part of the unique history of the city," she said. And what a history the Triforium has.

Young's $925,000 sculpture was touted as the sparkling crown jewel of the $30-million Los Angeles Mall subterranean shopping and restaurant plaza. But the six-story structure with its 1,494 hand-blown Italian-glass prisms quickly turned into more of a lightning rod than a towering symbol of culture.

Critics called it "Three Wishbones in Search of a Turkey" and "the Kitsch-22 of Kinetic Sculpture." When its colored lights pulsated to the glass harmonium music generated in a control room in the mall, some dismissed it as "the Psychedelic Nickelodeon."

From the start, the Gerhard Finkenbeiner glass-bell carillon had problems. An electrical snafu delayed the music system's debut at the dedication ceremony Dec. 12, 1975.

Legend has it that complaints from a federal judge in the courthouse across from the Triforium that the noise interfered with his trials prompted city officials to shut down the music.

The primitive computer system that synchronized the pulsating lights to the music had to be reprogrammed. Leaks in a reflection pond beneath the sculpture forced city workers to drain it. Pigeons soon took up lodging among the prisms.

Over the years, various attempts to keep the Triforium in working condition were unsuccessful.

Waving off the skeptics, Young predicted that his artwork would eventually become known as "the Rosetta Stone of art and technology." It was, he bragged, the world's first "poly-phonoptic" tower.