Category: ruins
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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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Llano del Rio
“Squaring the Circle” was a celebration of the centennial of the socialist colony Llano del Rio in the Antelope Valley, founded in 1914 by Job Harriman. Harriman ran for mayor of Los Angeles on the Socialist ticket, but an ill-timed bombing by labor activists destroyed his chances. Fed up with local politics, he decided to create…
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Dune Forum
A magazine on art, literature, and politics (with the occasional treatise on nudity) Dune Forum was published in the early 1930s in the artists’ colony of Moy Mell, on the central California coast. Its founding editor, Gavin Arthur, aimed to provide a view point that would “express the creative thought of America looking not toward Europe but toward the…
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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…
Lyra Kilston 