Category: KCET Artbound
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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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Little-Known Stories: Map Showcases More Than 50 Landmarks by African-American Architects (Part 1)
Los Angeles was home to arguably the most successful African-American architect of the 20th century: Paul Revere Williams. Born here in 1894, Williams designed thousands of buildings over his five-decade career, from landmarks like the LAX Theme Building, to glamorous homes for the city’s rich and famous, to civic projects and public housing. He was…
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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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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 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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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…
Lyra Kilston 