Category: ICON magazine
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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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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Cell Phone Trees
Perhaps you’ve noticed them in your neighborhood – tall, oddly stiff trees that appear seemingly overnight, with a ring of mysterious metal rectangles visible through the branches. Depending on the surrounding landscape, they might resemble pines, oaks, palms, elms, cypresses or cacti. Their bark can be textured or mottled, and their leaves are appropriately spiky,…
Lyra Kilston 