Category: architecture
-
Good Design Is for Everyone: The Evolution of Low-Income Housing in L.A.
The phrases “public housing” or “low-income housing” do not generally conjure thoughts of architectural innovation. Instead, one may envision rows of faded pastel cubes surrounded by dead lawns and tall fences, or looming concrete towers gridded with small windows. Both schemes are typically weighted with a grim institutional air, appear to have been built as…
-
Moshe Safdie: A Retrospective
We begin with Habitat, Moshe Safdie’s revolutionary prefab housing constructed for the 1967 Montreal World Expo. His first completed design of 85 projects and counting, it is an exhilarating opening for a retrospective, and a lucky one – how many young architects get their thesis project built, and featured at a global expo? Habitat’s fractal…
-
Tomas Koolhaas’s Film about his Father, Rem
On the poshest stretch of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, couture boutiques line up in a solid row of glass, concrete and metal, each towering doorway guarded by a sharply dressed greeter. Occupying the middle of the block is Prada’s Epicenter store, designed by Rem Koolhaas in 2004. While the facade has been altered significantly…
-
Ball Nogues’ Yucca Crater in the Desert
Heading east out of the tiny town of 29 Palms, in southern California’s Mojave Desert, the two-lane road cuts through miles of flat land. After a 20-minute drive through this monotonous landscape, a dirt road turns off to the left. There, looming incongruously, is a large wooden cone with a skin of scaffolding rising out…
-
Playa Vista Bandshell by Michael Maltzan
By day it’s a brilliant white turban, or a scoop of ice cream hollowed out; by night it glows like a Japanese lantern, afloat in a dark sea of grass. Michael Maltzan’s bandshell is an astonishingly light affair, a sheet of canvas stretched over a dramatic curve of scaffolding that Maltzan likens to “bones set…
-
L.A.’s Modernist Ruins
When I was a docent at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock house, I became fascinated with the ruins of the Little Dipper school on the side of the hill. Co-designed by the dream team of Wright, R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra, it was meant to offer a holistic, European-style elementary education including music, art, theater, and…
-
Arid Empire of Signs – Thom Andersen’s film
A city like Los Angeles can nearly disappear beneath its own mythos. Deemed a city of quartz, of “dreadful joy,” of golden dreams, an “autotopia,” a paradise, and hell, it has provided a malleable stage set, reborn in thousands of scripts and assumptions. The most popular myths are the sun-kissed rise to fame and its…
-
Nostalgia for the Future/Future of Nostalgia
The Future of the Past: The World Trade Center Memorial and the Politics of Memory, surveys monuments to major political and national events, tracing their arc from triumphant and chauvinistic to melancholic and contrite. It sits unpublished on my bookshelf in severe black hardcover binding. Above is Deborah Aschheim’s lovely drawing of the Theme Building at…
Lyra Kilston 