Category: los angeles
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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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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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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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Why Letting Thousands of People Take Over the Streets Is a Good Idea
On a recent afternoon, the Second Street Tunnel in downtown Los Angeles was not jammed with noxious, idling cars. Instead, hundreds of bicyclists rode through, whooping and shouting to hear the acoustics of the gloriously free tunnel. They could enjoy the sounds without the congestion of cars because of CicLAvia, a wildly popular event where […]
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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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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 