Category: architecture
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Book review: Dig It!
IN 1971, PHILIP WYLIE wrote the teleplay for an episode of the TV series The Name of the Game entitled “L.A. 2017.” Set in a future where Los Angeles had been moved entirely underground due to lethally toxic air, the episode opens with a man driving to an environmental conference in 1971 who suddenly time-travels…
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Neutra’s Health House – 90th Anniversary
White walls & date-fig-walnut balls. Scenes from the 90th anniversary celebrations, in December 2019, of this iconic landmark built by Richard Neutra for naturopathic doctor Philip M. Lovell and his family in 1929. The sold-out anniversary celebrations, organized by Lyra Kilston and Josh Gorrell, featured sunset house tours, talks, and homemade vegetarian treats from Dr.…
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Protecting Fair and Affordable Housing
I was invited to contribute an op-ed to public television station KCET on the topic of Trump’s appointee for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson. You may have seen developer Geoff Palmer’s luxury apartment buildings clustered on the fringes of downtown Los Angeles. Massive, and dressed in wan tones…
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New Map Highlights African-American Architects’ Work in Los Angeles (Part 2)
“In architecture, I had absolutely no role model,” said Norma M. Sklarek, the first African-American woman to earn an architecture license in the United States. In the mid-1960s, Sklarek moved to Los Angeles from New York to join the firm of Gruen Associates, where she became director. In 1980, she was the first African-American woman…
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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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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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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…
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The Wedge: Redesigning the Cabin
After his first camping trip to Yosemite, in 1921, architect Rudolf Schindler declared that he wanted to build a “permanent tent.” A couple years later, his newly built home in West Hollywood featured sleeping porches sheltered by canvas for outdoor slumber, and yards landscaped to function as outdoor living rooms, with fireplaces in case one…
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Review: Everything Loose Will Land
“Tip the world over on its side, and everything loose will land in Los Angeles,” said Frank Lloyd Wright. He was referring to the city’s salmagundi of building styles, but a fascinating exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House has repurposed the phrase. It looks at LA’s architecture and art from the…
Lyra Kilston 