Good Evening,
March saw a big bump in readership.
It is so exhilarating to welcome so many new subscribers to tHF!
Looking ahead, here’s a preview of the rest of the month, and in case you missed anything, here’s a rewind for January and February.
As ever, if you are enjoying my posts, please do share them with your friends and colleagues.
1. Downtown Again II. 2004/2021
Last Wednesday, the Related Companies completed the topping out of the US 1 billion dollar mixed-use project, the Grand by Gehry Partners, across the street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
With the completion of the Grand nearing, I have updated an essay I wrote in 2004 for the LA Forum about the decades-long effort to redevelop Bunker Hill and Grand Avenue. I’ve added a new postscript with some initial hunches about the future of urban redevelopment in the Biden era.
2. Alex Reed at Marta Gallery
This is the second installment in a planned series of essays and interviews on individuals bridging design, architecture, and art.
As a follow-on to my feature on Ettore Sottsass, founder of the Memphis group, the Milanese collective of designers, I’ll be posting a catalog essay I penned for the artist, designer, and ceramicist Alex Reed’s 2019 exhibition at Marta Gallery.
Next month I will reissue a discussion about art versus design practice with curator Christopher Mount, New York artist Justin Beal, artists/musicians, the Muistardeuax Collective, and myself. Initially, it appeared in KLAT magazine.
3. Ray Kappe
Whatever Happened to LA? Part 1 of 16
In the mid-2000s, I co-curated an exhibition at SCI-Arc with Jeffrey Inaba about architecture and urban design created in Los Angeles between 1970 in 1990.
The exhibition highlighted works 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 for the exhibition that included a series of interviews with the exhibitors and some boot-legged essays about LA from that era by Charles Jencks, Peter Cook, Michael Sorkin, and Rem Koolhaas.
I will be posting the interviews I recorded in the spring of 2005, a selection of those boot-legged writings, and the original catalog essay with a new epilogue.
Up first is a conversation with SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) Founder Ray Kappe. In April, keep your eyes open for an interview with Cesar Pelli, the designer of West Hollywood’s Big Blue Whale and several other taut, glass-skinned buildings in Southern California.
4. Here Pity only Lives when it is Dead
“Qui vive la pietà quand' è ben morta” (Here pity only lives when it is dead) Dante Alighieri Inferno, 20.28
In May of 2016, the AIA|LA organized Design for Dignity, a forum I helped to chair.
It was devoted to finding actionable solutions for the Los Angeles homelessness crisis.
Earlier in that year, I wrote a piece for the Architect’s Newspaper about the homelessness in crisis in LA. It will be posted here at the end of the month, featuring a series of arresting photographs taken on LA’s Skid Row by photographer Monica Nouwens.
One key question the AIA|LA asked then was, "How will design professions respond to the nearly 47,000 homeless people living in L.A. County?"
That number rose to 66,436 people in LA County experiencing homelessness in 2020, representing a 12.7% rise from 2019’s point-in-time count of 58,936 individuals.
Last December, Los Angeles County, with federal approval, canceled its 2021 homeless count due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Count or no count, LA County will still likely edge over 70,000 homeless individuals in 2021, especially in light of the current joblessness crisis.
As the Los Angeles Times recently reported. “L.A.’s homeless residents are 50% more likely to die if they get COVID.” Despite this, the County won’t expand the number of hotels rented to shelter homeless people at risk of contracting COVID-19, citing concerns about delays in federally funded reimbursements.
I also provided closing remarks for the 2017 follow-up to the first AIA|LA Design for Dignity forum.
I will be editing those remarks and posting them on tHF soon with some additional thoughts about the homelessness crisis in Southern California, in light of COVID-19, and a look at some promising, innovative housing solutions in LA and elsewhere.