Hello Everyone,
Closing out this third week (!!) at the Horizontal Fault with an expression of my gratitude for your continued readership, words of encouragement, and enthusiasm for this newsletter.
Looking ahead, here’s a preview of some forthcoming posts:
1/ Downtown Again, Reexamined
With the pending completion of the Grand, across from Disney Concert Hall, by Gehry Associates, I will be updating an essay I wrote in 2004 for the LA Forum about Bunker Hill and Grand Avenue's history and future. As a treat, I’ll also be posting a little-known, boot-legged article by Rem Koolhaas from Traces (1981) about the California Plaza design competition: ‘Arthur Erickson vs. the LA All-Stars.’
2/ Arata Isozaki in LA
RIBA Gold Medal (1986) and the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2019) winning architect Arata Isozaki is probably best known in Los Angeles for his work on Grand Avenue for MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. He also designed a house on Speedway Avenue in Venice Beach, an uncelebrated art gallery in West Hollywood, and a set of sleeping pavilions near Joshua Tree. I’ll be posting a short essay I wrote about those desert structures for Domus, along with some comments about the legacy of his other efforts in LA.
3/ My name is Ettore Sottsass
In 2006 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged a large retrospective exhibition to celebrate 65 years of work by the Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass, a founder of the Memphis group, the Milanese collective of young designers. The show was conceptualized by Sottsass and featured close to one hundred objects. As a coda to my last piece on the Brechtian architecture of Edmond and Corrigan, I will amend my review of the show, also for Domus, with some additional musings about Sottsass, a designer who valued human relations above the illusion of artfully manufactured objects.
4/ Whatever Happened to LA?
In 2005 I co-curated an exhibition at SCI-Arc with Jeffrey Inaba about architecture made in Los Angeles between 1970 in 1990. The exhibition featured 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. The gist of the show was that a
…distinguishing characteristic of architectural production in LA during the period was that it was made up of a combination of mostly realized designs for houses and mostly unrealized urban proposals. To the visitor and resident alike, the Los Angeles architectural scene at the time was set in a city of houses— a stunning display of domestic architecture designed by young architects spread across the LA basins low-rise fabric.
Over the next six months, I’m going to be posting the brief interviews I conducted with the exhibitors, along with the original catalog essay with a new epilogue appended.
As another treat, I’ll also be posting another boot-legged article, this one written by the late Michael Sorkin, ‘Explaining Los Angeles,’ for IAUS/Rizzoli in 1982, about the phenomena and the dilemma of the “Los Angelist” architect.
5/ Think Small, Part 2
For this follow-up to my earlier piece about the need for a more fine-grained urban approach to planning and zoning in Los Angeles, I’ll discuss some recent and older small-scale single-family and multi-family LA residential projects in light of our pressing need for viable new housing models.
Have a great weekend!