Over the rest of this year, I will continue posting a selection of 50 photographs of stucco commercial buildings along LA’s east-west thoroughfares from 101 Stucco Façades, a self-published booklet that I referred to in On Blankness, and Getting over the Generic City.
These photographs were all taken by architect Darin Vieira twelve years ago. At that point, Darin was an intern in my studio, and I was still teaching at SCI-Arc, running the urban design program. My studio was in mid-city, located over a neighborhood barbershop next to the Lion of Judah, an Ethiopian travel agency.
As I wrote previously, I suspect that this ubiquitous background commercial architecture “explains” Los Angeles best, less so the Disney-fied or ersatz stage sets that are sprinkled around town or the more refined version of LA that some architects like to imagine is what this city should aspire to.
These buildings are part of LA’s lingua franca, our broken English version of a city— or what’s left of it. So try to catch it before it all vanishes under the weight of our genuine and pressing housing crisis.
In any case, here is the next set of ten photographs in no particular east-west or north-south order. Eventually, these photographs will help to illustrate a book of my collected writings and projects.