Category: land use
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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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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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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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Sun Belt Cities from the Sky
Michael Light often snaps his photos from a two-seater plane — at a bumpy 70 mph — that he pilots himself at the same time, but you’d never know it from his well-composed aerial shots. From swimming-pooled suburbs in Phoenix to razed hills awaiting their luxury homes in Nevada, Light has been documenting the western […]
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Seismic Shift: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984
Joe Deal, reflecting on his landscape photographs of the early 1970s, wrote: “Why contribute, I reasoned, to the growing pile of photographs of an idealized American landscape while it was being chewed up before our eyes by advancing suburban development, interstate highways and shopping malls?” Deal’s sentiments were shared by a new school of Southern California-based […]
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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 