Author: Lyra
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Silverlake Conservatory’s New Home
Playing music is both a solitary and communal activity. There are the focused hours spent alone, practicing something repeatedly. Then there’s the pleasure of hearing your sounds blend with someone else’s, or playing with an ensemble and getting swept up in something large, unified, and complex. These two poles of musicianship are highlighted in the […]
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Thinking Big by Designing Small: Kounkuey Design Initiative
At the edge of California’s Salton Sea, a community arts event called Projections kicked off on a warm evening last November with poetry readings and music performances ranging from heartrending Spanish ballads sung by a weathered man in a cowboy hat to teenagers grinding out speed metal. As the sun set, flocks of pelicans skimmed […]
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Bestor’s Blackbirds: The Woonerf Lands in L.A.
The hills of Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood are carved by steep narrow roads and studded with oaks, eucalyptuses, and neon bursts of bougainvillea. A quiet, sleepy air pervades the sidewalks, which run by faded stucco apartment buildings and modest Craftsman-style homes tucked behind dense foliage. A few trendy cafes and boutiques are scattered along […]
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Midcentury California Cohousing: Crestwood Hills
THE ORIGIN of Crestwood Hills begins in the cadence of a fairytale. Four musicians, returning from war, dreamt of combining their resources to build four neighborly homes around a swimming pool. It was 1946, in the midst of a severe housing shortage in southern California, and the musicians’ dream proved attractive to many. After placing an […]
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Playing the L.A. River
“Park vs. condos debate—costumes recommended,” reads one of the instructions on a playing card for a plot of land near the Los Angeles River. This tongue-in-cheek prompt for open-air theater comes from a recently launched initiative called Play the LA River. Every card in the Play the River 51-card deck focuses on points of interest along […]
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Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design, 1936–1986
“MONOTONE DOES NOT signal class (at least in Southern California),” writes designer Lorraine Wild in Louise Sandhaus’s recent survey Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design, 1936–1986. Wild’s observation, like many others in this captivating, dayglo-jacketed book, celebrates a visual history of an environment that seems to counter the stringent, sometimes monotone rules of […]
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Why Letting Thousands of People Take Over the Streets Is a Good Idea
On a recent afternoon, the Second Street Tunnel in downtown Los Angeles was not jammed with noxious, idling cars. Instead, hundreds of bicyclists rode through, whooping and shouting to hear the acoustics of the gloriously free tunnel. They could enjoy the sounds without the congestion of cars because of CicLAvia, a wildly popular event where […]
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Being There: On the Center for Land Use Interpretation
Occupying a bleached-out building on a busy street and marked only by a small logo, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has spent nearly 20 years redefining geography, and inviting the public to join them. This isn’t about mapping roads and elevations, but looking at more unconventional aspects of the land, from satellite dishes scanning the […]
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Competing Utopias: Modern Design on Both Sides of the Iron Curtain
“I always thought of the [Soviet] East in black-and-white, and the West in color,” says filmmaker Bill Ferehawk. He is one of six curators of the installation “Competing Utopias,” which puts this preconception to the test by placing furniture and objects from the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War into the rooms of […]
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The Design Solution for Homelessness
The glittering skyline of downtown Los Angeles is bright and close from the roof of the Star apartment building in L.A.’s Skid Row. “We can see them, and they can see us,” says Mike Alvidrez, the executive director of Skid Row Housing Trust, the developer of the sleek Star, an uncommonly beautiful respite for formerly […]
Lyra Kilston 