This evening I'm posting an essay by one of my favorite thinkers, the late Michael Sorkin, New York’s eminent architectural critic, designer, and educator.
Sorkin was a polymath capable of juggling many roles: critic, designer, teacher, social justice activist. He was also someone exceptional: a humorist in an often unfunny and overly serious profession.1
I've always been intrigued by how and why architectural thinkers from Europe and the US East Coast frame Los Angeles, how their wider agendas around architecture and urbanism instrumentalize LA as either a paradise, a local form of hell, or something in between.
Many— in particular, British and Mid-Atlantic architects, critics, and theorists like Sir Peter Cook, Charles Jencks, and Reyner Banham— have tended to celebrate Los Angeles for its particularities and peculiarities: its oddness and quirks.
Others, more specifically continental European architects and/or other malcontents, tend to take a less charitable view of Los Angeles, mixing their disdain for American suburbia with an evident lack of understanding about the subject matter.
For instance, in April, I shared a text about Los Angeles by Rem Koolhaas, probably his only piece of writing about LA. Little-known, it ends up trading in the usual clichés about Los Angeles: that it has no center, that it is made of freeways, that it can only exist in comparison to the East Coast etc. Sadly, if Delirious New York was a brilliant exegesis about Manhattanism, this take on LA doesn’t tell us anything new, despite the author’s alleged interest in the subject matter.
On the other hand, Sorkin's 1982 essay, “Explaining Los Angeles,” shows us what a subject-matter specialist, even one from the East Coast, can bring to the conversation. His writing is funny, bittersweet, and damning of “…the invention [of Los Angeles by] outsiders, the traveler’s version, chained to the hyperbole of invention.” His list of twelve rhetorical tropes for Los Angeles, although now almost 40 years old, still reads very well and is quite hilarious.
Remarkably, on re-reading Sorkin again— some 16 years after I initially included this essay in an exhibition catalog— I was shocked to discover the extent to which my own thinking about Los Angeles sometimes falls, quite sloppily, towards these clichés about LA and other Southern Californian myth-repetitions.
I do hope you enjoy tonight’s post and that you can take a moment this weekend to remember Michael Sorkin, a thinker and an architect who was taken from us by the coronavirus pandemic far too soon.
His birthday is on Monday, he would have been 73 this year.
Explaining Los Angeles
Michael Sorkin
It never rains in Southern California. Seems I've often heard that kind of talk before.
Albert Hammond
In an era when so much of our architecture seems to stagger under an explanatory—even exculpatory—burden, the architecture of Los Angeles is especially encumbered. If it has come to be a near norm that buildings explicate themselves, the coastal kin must, in addition, provide some decent account of their setting. As with no place else, we demand that this architecture produce some sort of regional I.D., that it pull over to the curb and demonstrate a little license. Whereas talking about "New York-ness" would be cringingly retardataire, nobody erects a stick in L.A. without seeking to understand and justify Southland to man.
The East is a career.
Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, 1847
Go West young man.
Horace Greeley
Let me try to help. The whole culture buys the myth that California is adjacent to the U.S., not exactly contiguous with it. Beyond that, the prejudice loses its unanimity, the arena of interpretation appears. It's a hoary business developed to the point of industry. More, its collective impact models visions which cohere and grow, occluding large, shadowing successor efforts. L.A. is probably the most mediated town in America; nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers.
Like the "Orient" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the common image of L.A. is the invention of out-siders, a traveler's version, chained to the hyperbole of discovery. In the abiding atmosphere of otherness at the core of such views, there is always an implicit superiority. Edward Said calls Orientalism a form of paranoia, and so it is with the Occidentalism of the Los Angelists, who persistently remain unsure of whether they have journeyed to Eden or to the Brave New World. Let's not labor the point too much —Reyner Banham is no Richard Burton nor Jencks exactly a T.E. Lawrence. But the analogy has appeal. Banham's exultant celebration of learning to drive a car in order to attain one of the pillars of wisdom as a prerequisite to writing about the city might a hundred years earlier have involved a camel. Jencks's efforts to organize the natives—like the two concurrent shows of their work (mea culpa) orchestrated from back East—conjures up General Gordon or the Revolt in the Desert.
It is striking that so many Los Angelists are English, out-come of whatever mimetic gene that has made them such a race of colonizers and impersonators. Banham is salient. Jencks (an American impersonating an Englishman impersonating an American) is a more recent case. The city of angels is a crucial destination on the Archigram/Architectural Digest pilgrimage route. Nor should one forget the assimilation in varying degrees of Huxley, Isherwood, Waugh, Hockney, and the myriad lesser lights in their wake and thrall. Nonetheless, theirs is a relatively recent intervention. The pattern of expatriation has a considerable tradition. Like any colonially conceived clime, Los Angeles embraces both exile and expectation. The most emblematic embodiment of this bind is surely the literary pilgrim to Hollywood, struggling to vitiate guilty greed by the act of understanding. The writer erects a bulwark of irony, confesses in order to expunge.
Because, like the "Orient," L.A. is by definition exotic, the forms giving an account of it have special perquisites. Richard Burton called the chronicle of his great disguised journey a Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Mecca, and it is just such a personal narrative that has become L.A.'s most characteristic form. Such personalization embraces novels, movie-star autobiographies, license plates, putative works of scholarship, "custom" surf-boards, architecture. This is part of the larger Los Angelist myth. Since there is no "there" around, only individual versions are supportable. A long view is simply what you see from the hills.
Which suggests another Los Angeles mode. A recent special double issue of AD [The UK journal Architectural Design] devoted to Los Angeles is sparse in text but illustrated with an enormous number of photographs arrayed as in an album: collection becomes interpretation. Carrying a Nikon may be more wieldy than transporting the Elgin marbles, but there is a kinship of impulse. New arrivals in L.A. covet a special kitschy house they have "discovered" and eagerly explore unfamiliar terrain in the hopes they will stumble upon something hitherto undocumented. Perhaps they will publish a little photo book of Krazy Kottages or dog-shaped drive-ins. While the situation is changing fast, much of L.A. is still regarded as terra incognita, wanting the civilizing gaze of a 35mm lens. And, as it is unfamiliar, any framing or comment must be considered fresh.
L.A.'s architecture has been obliged to uphold ideas about its particularity at least since the beginning of the century. In 1908, Montgomery Schuyler reported in Architectural Record on a western swing made three years earlier. Like most early observers, he extolled Los Angeles's natural beauties and frontier dynamism. He also expanded on the great formal and civilizing impact of the architecture of the area's original colonizers. "Going about Southern California," he wrote, "one always finds reasons for being thankful that the 'Greaser' preceded the 'Gringo' in those parts." He describes his hopes that the city will produce a truly democratic kind of architecture, one which would "avoid the vulgarity of crudity on the one hand and the vulgarity of ostentation on the other." This pretty much sums up the turn of the century line, expectantly affirmative though often mingled with some alarm over the disorder and mess of the cheap and hasty hovels of the hopeful newly arrived poor. "The West," Irving Gill wrote in 1916, "has been and is building too hastily, carelessly, and thoughtlessly."
But this was a quibble: Gill was far more concerned with setting the region's heroic agenda. "The West has an opportunity unparalleled in the history of the world, for it is the newest white page turned for registration." With the other, largely émigré, American architects of California's great first wave (the Greenes, Maybeck, Coxhead, Polk), Gill wanted to invent an architecture that was quintessentially indigenous yet a great departure (a difficult irony at the core of everything Californian). This was to be done, to quote a familiar phrase, by quaffing at the "source of all architectural strength—the straight line, the arch, the cube, and the circle...." As it turned out, of course, there were quite a few fonts at which to quaff in California, and this first wave of architects set out in as many different directions. Yet, any of these could be marshaled to support the hegemonic descriptive ideology. A 1912 article on the Greene brothers in The Craftsman proclaims, "The main virtue of those Western homes lies in their essential fitness for democratic American life."
The great Los Angeles-centered second wave, which effloresced in the thirties, was also largely émigré, although from a more considerable distance. Ain, Schindler, Neutra, Harris, Soriano, et al. also assumed a sense of mission (challenging the dominance of Mission), if one more clearly tempered by the going architectural missions of the times. Yet as this wave was reaching its crest, signs of a break were washing in from all sides. Democracy and the innocently progressive longings of arcadia were sinking fast, and in their place came a slightly more temperate nexus of aspiration, centering on a nature-proximate lifestyle and on an idea of California as creatively liberating. "I realized," exclaimed R.W. Sexton in a piece entitled "A New Yorker's Impressions of Californian Architecture," "as any other New Yorker would realize when visiting California for the first time, that the San Diegans live entirely different lives than we do in the East."
While this registration of difference was typical of many observers, the quaintly unabashed enthusiasm of this author was less so. By the end of the thirties, a number of negative readings had attached themselves to the Eastern view of L.A. The sources were diverse, ranging from the sinister account of Nathaniel West to the more flippant view of Dorothy Parker. Los Angeles, by depression's end, was no longer seen as peopled by the raw material of Jeffersonian democracy but by citizens who were, charitably, yokels or, in the worst suspicions, pathological. What civilization there was either patently false—Hollywood—or hopelessly in exile—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and those Germans desperately huddled on the cliffs, looking out to sea. And there was a new idea to accompany all of this, the gathering notion of a place that was incomprehensible, understandable, in Fitzgerald's phrase, "only dimly and in flashes."
Architectural observers, though predictably less articulate, were similarly swayed. While enthusiasm continued for the work of the state's architects, there was often concern about the health of its culture. Talbot Hamlin includes, in a 1939 round-up, a photo of a mild-looking strip, captioning it “A Los Angeles Highway Traffic debauching the countryside. The real estate speculator's delight. Suburbanites un-controlled, a disease not limited to Los Angeles!" Something of a contrasting view was also expressed, informed by modernist messianism and containing the seeds of an idea not fully developed until after the war. This posited the hope of salvation through the automobile, the national symbol of democratic mobility, then nearing the apex of its charisma. Its effects on architecture might also be salubrious. H.R. Hitchcock waxed enthusiastic in a 1940 essay entitled "An Eastern Critic looks at Western Architecture," over the "anonymous" drive-ins along Sunset Boulevard which he declared the most interesting things in Los Angeles outside of the work of Neutra and his group." He hoped that they might be models for "a new widely popular architectural expression" to be based on "the development of new functional types," something at which he found Los Angeles "peculiarly adept." More recent history is too familiar to need much recapitulation. In the postwar years, L.A. boomed into the city we know today. These were years of partisanship, a celebration of the manifest destiny that had anointed Los Angeles as the galaxy's premier motor city and which was flinging the great grid of model homes toward all available horizons. Architecturally, it was the time of the case-study houses, those stunning refinements of technical enthusiasm, outdoor living, and optimism for the Future. It was also the period of America's most effulgent consumerism when cars were cars, and roadside architecture of pure attraction hit kismet. Then, of course, the shit hit the fan.
By the sixties, a new set of "progressive" ideas had become architectural writ, and by their light, Los Angeles became monstrous. Now L.A. was the great spawning tank of anomie, a centerless matrix of nothingness, enslaved by the cars that were to have set it free. It was a monument to banality and to the awful haphazard tawdriness of consumer culture. It was the town that apotheosized ugliness. Before long, though, an alternative discourse arrived. Using an ironic wedge to pry forms loose from meanings, what had been hideous became beautiful. New legitimate sounding cultural aspirations were affixed, historically corroborated relevances were adduced. The freeways again began to look like they worked, and those little houses—whether they managed to aggregate into a walkable community or not were a damned sight more comfortable than that dingy, overpriced studio apartment on West End Avenue, recently left behind. And it was fun. It was about driving around looking for amusing craziness, about the beach, hot tubs, parties, exercise, health, sunshine, the movies. Los Angeles had a renaissance on its hands. Inevitably a new architecture had to be discovered and the old redefined in terms of this adulatory resignification. But something was very different here. Unlike its predecessors, the new wave of Los Angeles architecture was widely interpreted before it was created. Instead of seeing the viewpoint of their work elucidated and described, today's group must struggle to produce work which embodies descriptions already made. This can be tough. Los Angeles is America's city of ideas, known predominantly by description rather than by substance. As the currency of the former is vastly more ephemeral than that of the latter, an architect, trying to get a grip on just what L.A. is all about anyway, runs into a welter of possibilities, too densely packed for their private cogencies to really sparkle. But the rules of the game demand a choice. One from Column A, one from Column B...
The central dilemma of the Los Angelist is that his or her faith dictates the city's ultimate mysteriousness, yet his or her duty is to explain. As successive efforts skirt piecemeal around mist-shrouded essences, faith in the possibility of a (probably unknowable) unified field theory spurs the effort. The catalogue expands, the taxonomy branches. Los Angeles is hermeneut's heaven: everybody expects an answer. The deity here is Quincy (Jack Klugman's, that is, not Quatremere). All this activity tends to produce in-conclusive ways of speaking rather than ways of knowing. Los Angeles has a rhetoric but no epistemology. Like any rhetorical system, the Los Angelist product organizes itself into a series of tropes. The list of these topics outlines the range of strategies for argumentation as well as the parameters of a sufficient description of "Los Angeles-ness." What sets the system apart is its heavy reliance on irony and unrestrained enthusiasm in argumentation. The brilliance in this is that it permits current Los Angelists to subsume the entire inventory of their predecessors into their own canon. If the results sound foolish or inconsistent, never mind. Foolishness and inconsistency are what L.A. is all about. The following list is by no means comprehensive, aiming mainly to show high points and something about range and the problems of working on an architecture that carries an inescapable rhetorical charge.
1. Apocalypse
We reached California in time for an earthquake.
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
Apocalypse poeticizes the entire discourse, gives it tragic stature. The "big one" could strike at any moment. Potential apocalypse gives nature an edge. Things are so beautiful and yet... Floods, quakes, or fire can carry it all away in an instant. Architecture is similarly charged since buildings are likely to be the main agents of megadeath. The architect responds by rigorously adhering to the building code (knowing full well that no code in the world will save a building from the "big one"), by a complete pretense of normalcy, by an abandoned celebration of flimsiness, or by the kind of anticipatory skewing so brilliantly embodied by Frank Gehry.
2. The Weather
Boosterishly salubrious except as embodied in the preceding or the following.
3. Madness
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come dawn through the moult, lain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind," 1946
This trope has an animist core. Perhaps more than any other place in the world, Los Angeles is seen as a city which irresistibly induces behavior, mainly demented. The craziness celebrated is by no means benign, not the New Yorker's Woody Allen-charming neurosis. L.A. breeds Manson, Freeway Killers, random violence. Latent violence gives the city power and stature, adds another dimension to the heroism implicit in its tragic reach. In architecture, it encourages gesture, sometimes cynical, sometimes sensitive, always irrefutable. Pelli's Blue Whale edges up to this sensibility—not for any madness of form but because of the apparent arbitrariness of the placement of its mass in the city.
4. Disney
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.
Joan Didion
Disney is perhaps the transcendent Los Angelist concept, the probable site for the resolution of the city's enigma. For mainstream Los Angelists, Disneyland itself represents an ideal of benign manipulation, the crypto-vindication of the planner's fantasy no architect is ever truly without. Charles Moore's Perspecta article "You Have to Pay for the Public Life"—a seminal Los Angelist text—offers an early formulation of the position, arguing that Disneyland provides a highly successful solution to the problem of public place-making, comparable, in some way, to Versailles. The article is a benchmark in the emergence of the current argument that Los Angeles truly has found alternative answers to conventional city problems.
But Disney is more than an argument about urbanism; it is also an argument about style. Its legitimation—and by extension the legitimation of all one-dimensionally iconic commercial architecture—frees the present, licensing a limitless profligacy in rummaging the past. But this is relatively unimportant. The Los Angelist view of Disney critically institutionalizes a kind of quicksilver taste by introducing a standard based on amusement which is here purged of most —but not all—traces of patronization. It permits the architect to appropriate virtually anything he or she wants from among the forbidden fruits of commercial imagery and yet still hedge the bet.
5. Death
Ridging them, Hook realized that beyond his grief as Chris's father and beyond his rage at the suicide lie, was another, smaller hell, and it was simply that his son had died here, in this land of sunshine and desperation, For it struck him that to die in California was to fall not on foreign soil so mud" as in a foreign time, an alien and brutal and loveless Mum that he despised as well as feared.
Newton Thornburg, To Die in California, 1973
This is a concept more ambient than central, except as it figures in other categories. Los Angeles as Necropolis was certainly an abiding motif in local fiction, from Day of the Locust to The Loved One. To Los Angelists, Forest Lawn is less a shrine than a Disneyland for stiffs. For them, death is simply a lesser attribute of the region. Frederick Fisher's solar crematory is interesting in this sense, for its regionalism rather than its architecture.
6. The Movies
My first evening in Hollywood. It was so typical that I almost thought it had been arranged for me. It was by sheer chance, however, that I found myself rolling up to the home of a millionaire in a handsome black Packard. I had been invited to dinner by a perfect stranger. I didn't even know my host's name. Nor do I know it now.
Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945
Like death, movies are peripheral to the Los Angelist. What they crucially represent for writers—simultaneous artistic degradation and a lottery for very high stakes with deceptively good looking odds—they do not suggest to architects, for whom success is somewhat differently calibrated. Like death, the movies are a regional attribute that is important in setting tone. To a limited degree. They do represent an alternative practice, but a truly discontinuous one. The role the studios play for writers in symbolizing and propagating a culture of fantasy and shadows is, for the architectural Los Angelist, played by Disneyland and related effluvia.
7. Banality
He dropped off his work clothes, hung them in a closet, and stepped naked into the bathroom, where he turned on the water for a bath. Here again, was reflected the civilization in which he lived, but with a sharp difference. For whereas it was, and still is, a civilization somewhat naive as to lawns, living rooms, pictures and other things of an esthetic nature, it is genius itself; and has forgotten more than all other civilizations ever knew, in the realm of practicality. The bathroom that he now whistles in was a utile jewel; it was clean as an operating room, everything was in its proper place and everything worked.
James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce, 1941
Again we near the heart of the matter. The cheerful inclusivism of the Los Angelist must embrace this tradition as well. Thus must banality be stripped of its evil and so confer the pluralist benison. If to any enterprise, it is to this one that the emerging wave devotes itself. Gehry, of course, is the titan, the single-handed redeemer of a whole home supply mart of taboo possibilities. He is joined in this by the swelling Gehryschule. The problem is that they—unlike James M. Cain's character— are not naive at all as to lawns, living rooms, pictures, and other things of an aesthetic nature. Which leads to a troubling hierarchical confusion: there is yet no cogent view of the actual relationship between aestheticized banality and its predecessor sensibility, which relies for its art on a gaze. Equality is clearly not in the cards. Nor, I think, is an evolutionary model; certainly not a thuggish Pevsnerian dividing line which forces architects involved with this trope to wink at their own work.
8. America
Los Angeles is the Middle West raised to the flash-point...
Reyner Banham
Such is the common view: Los Angeles as America in extremis. The position differs from that of the Los Angelists at the turn of the century who saw the West as the tabula rasa on which a perfected version of America might be written. Both then and now, though, the issue is the same: the relation of California to the rest of the country, the problem of isolating its singularity within the American context. The new view springs from a much-modified take on the U.S., full of destiny still but drained of charm. Indeed, the pejorative vision of the Los Angelist shapes up right at this locus. Los Angeles is a place where nothing is done by halves, a culture which exaggerates by nature, a town that gives full throat to others' latency. For L.A., this represents integrity... For the rest of the country, it conjures a hulking, evil un-conscious, waiting to vent its rage. If anything, it is this sense of virtuous difference that cements a bond between architects of the region and exonerates them from misunderstanding.
9. Cars
And now, as he drives, it is as if some kind of auto-hypnosis exerts itself We see the face relax, the shoulders unhunch themselves, the body ease itself back into the seat. The reflexes are taking over; the left foot comes down with firm, even pressure on the clutch pedal, while the right prudently feeds n gas. The left hand is light on the wheel,- the right slips the gearshift with precision into high. The eyes, moving unhurriedly from road to mirror, mirror to road, calmly measure the distances ahead, behind, to the nearest car. . . After all, this is no mad chariot race—that's only how it seems to onlookers or nervous novices—it is a river, sweeping in full flood toward its outlet with a soothing power. There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream speed, a sense of indolence and ease.
Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, 1964
The Zen view is definitive Los Angelist. How could any real embrace avoid the main symbol of the culture? Architectural consequences are fuzzier, more to be grasped by tourists that practitioners. Banham's paean to freeway landscaping and auto-liberation with its invocations of Six-tux and Haussman is most representative. The opposing view has been made eloquently by Peter Plagens in his article "The Ecology of Evil."
10. The Artist
Ars Gratia Artis
MGM motto
The figure of the artist enjoys particular pride of place in the Los Angelist pantheon. For it is the artist who embodies the major element of the Los Angelist method: the organizing gaze. Los Angelism is more of a gift than a theory, a faculty for seeing things the right way, the power of the comprehending eye. Tod Hackett, Nathanael West's hero, is the archetype. Hired out of Yale to work in a studio, he watches fascinatedly from somewhere on the sidelines as the city's madness unfolds in front of him, storing and transforming it and finally putting it down in a painting called "The Burning of Los Angeles," which West writes would definitively prove that he "had talent." Has there ever been a book about L.A. that doesn't have a David Hockney or Ed Ruscha illustration? With Los Angelism, the artist is king because, like Plato's philosopher, his understanding is deepest.
How many architects in L.A. think of themselves as artists, how many chroniclers think of their slide collections as works of art? The answer is, of course, very many: the cooptation of view is the most important Los Angelist act. Alteration of some known reality, whether the surfboard decorated, the stick-style bungalow Hispanicized, or the Oldsmobile customized, affirms that you've got the basic operation in your grasp, that you understand at least something. Architecture likewise operates under an imperative to find the unfamiliar, which, in its strangeness, will attest clearly to what it is not. Just look at it.
11. Back East
Wish they all could be California girls.
The Beachboys
This good-natured anthem of local imperialism actually takes in the whole country of which the East is also not precisely a part. If Los Angeles is distinct from America in general, it is seen as the opposite of the East, which therefore represents the alternative. It is the place to go to shun the heightened Americanness which lies somewhere near L.A.'s ambivalent core. It is also the place to tap into jettisoned history, the only place where the affirming balm of continuity corroborated is dispensed. By now, bi-coastalism is a contemptibly familiar concept. But rugged in practice. The greatest threat to the Los Angelist is to lose grip of the balance and let his or her work get stained by the goo of sameness that comes from the Easterner's reverence for an architecture of convention. You could lose your bolds. This is what happens to mental or literal peripatetics. It is what happened to [Craig] Hodgetts, possibly the most brilliant of the group; whose built work pales into tameness beside the vivid imaginings that flow from his pen. The East is, above all, the civilization that created the Los Angelist, symbiotically locked into the system of falsification they invent.
12. The future
Why is our work missing here? What are we passing by, what aren't we doing? What aren't we listening to?
Frank Gehry
Los Angeles has ceased to be America's most current version of the city of the future, a role taken over by Houston or perhaps by EPCOT. This may explain the current surge of interest by the Los Angelists, for whom the place has taken on a comforting stasis, destined to be historically unique, like London. The less it seems a prototype, the more its special place is affirmed. Without the hounding impetus to progress, the system can close in on itself and shake off the troubles that come with being exemplary. Let the chroniclers move in as we internalize our system of references so that what we do becomes comprehensible. The future is over; we have arrived, so let us present ourselves to the public.
I have great nostalgia for the future. But the Los Angelist cannot abide these continual interruptions and upsets. Clarity overwhelms speculation; the parts—as in those exploded drawings Morphosis specializes in—obliterate the whole. It may be that the end of Los Angeles's prospects for unexpected transformation will prove congenial to the nurturing of new architecture, to the growth of some climax form. Who knows? At least it won't go unrecorded.
This essay originally appeared in California Counterpoint: New West Coast Architecture published as Volume 18 of Catalogue, by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies / Rizzoli International Publications in 1982.
The publication featured writing by Sorkin, Kenneth Frampton, and others and architectural works by Batey & Mack, Frederick Fisher, Frank O. Gehry, Coy Howard, Morphosis, Stanley Saitowitz, and Studio Works.
Today’s post is part of a series based on an exhibition that I co-curated at SCI-Arc in 2005.
The show featured drawings and models by Frederick Fisher, Hodgetts and Fung, Coy Howard, Frank Israel, Koning Eizenberg, Ray Kappe, Anthony Lumsden, Moore Ruble Yudell, Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss, Cesar Pelli, Glen Small, and Studioworks.
With a nod to Mimi Zeiger’s Loudpaper, we made a ‘zine with designer Brian Roettinger for the exhibition that included a series of interviews with the exhibitors and some boot-legged essays about LA by Charles Jencks, Sir Peter Cook, Michael Sorkin, and Rem Koolhaas.
To wrap up, I will post ‘Ersatz LA’ by Jencks and ‘City of Dreams’ by Cook later this year.
See for yourself: there is a group of lectures he gave here in LA between 1996 and 2014 at SCI-Arc; the first has a wonderful introduction by then-Director Michael Rotondi.