It has been hard to believe, but it has been one month since the Horizontal Fault1 (tHF) launched on Substack.
When I decided to start this newsletter, I created a venue to publish excerpts from my upcoming books, update old essays, test out new ideas, recast old ideas and share my current thoughts about cities, architecture, and art.
I didn’t anticipate that the Horizontal Fault would connect me to old friends and find many new readers. Thank you for your ongoing words of encouragement and support via email, Instagram, and LinkedIn. It has been a real pleasure to return to writing regularly for a growing audience.
Unless something unusual comes up, I will be posting here Mondays and Fridays at 6 am PST / 9 am EST going forward.
Look out for my next post this Friday on Memphis Group founder Ettore Sottsass.
In case you missed anything, here’s a rundown of last month’s posts below.
Please do keeping sharing tHF if you are enjoying my bi-weekly posts.
Kind regards,
PMZ
January 31, 2021
The Geometry of the World
To kick things off, I posted an essay from 2019 about policing, protest, and the future of civic space. It is the basis for my next book, The American City, Destabilized, A Crisis of the Commons.
February 4, 2021
Think Small, part 1
This revised opinion piece is about the value of micro-scale urban design for Los Angeles and creating a more “nuanced grain” in light of the city’s need for new forms of collectivity, new aggregations of social and cultural variety, and architectural invention.
February 8, 2021
Pierre Koenig, Reconsidered
Case Study architect Pierre Koenig’s primary ambition was to make high-quality, affordable architecture available to ordinary people. This post reconsiders his work in light of pressing housing needs.
February 18, 2021
Architecture is the Full Opera
My return to the work of Maggie Edmond and the late Peter Corrigan, two Australian architects who Daniel Libeskind described as committed to “…a deepening cultural program. Not Edenic…free of the stifling Wednesday routine and the permanent 31st of the month.”
February 19, 2021
Up Next
A look ahead to March, April, and beyond, including planned posts about Arata Isozaki’s work in California, the humanist design legacy of Memphis Group founder Ettore Sottsass, a follow up to my ‘Think Small’ piece as well a visit to an exhibition I co-curated at SCI-Arc about the LA architecture scene, 1970-1990.
February 22 and February 26, 2021
Badlands and Good Architecture Part 1
Badlands and Good Architecture Part 2
An essay for my friend and artist Amir Zaki appears in his wonderful book, California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks.
Notes
If you’re curious, my Substack title derives this great insight about Los Angeles:
“Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm.
New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno.
Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.”
JEAN BAUDRILLARD, Fatal Strategies, ‘Ecstasy and Inertia.’ 1983 / trans. 1990 / Semiotext(e); Reprint edition (April 11, 2008) p. 40