Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Each month I join Kurt Achin, host of Koreascape on Seoul’s English-language radio station TBS eFM, for an exploration of Seoul’s urban spaces. This time we’re joined by German-Korean architect Daniel Tändler of Urban Detail Seoul for a walk through Ikseon-dong Hanok Village, a 1930s-era housing development near downtown that has in recent years seen an influx of restaurants, bars, […]
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Though most moviegoers will have seen a lot of Bradbury Building, they may not recognize it as a landmark of Los Angeles architecture – unless, of course, they’ve seen Thom Andersen’s documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” which devotes a solid block of its nearly three-hour runtime to the many roles it has played onscreen. “The […]
Like many a Westerner with an interest in Korea (and without any stake in the relevant historical conflicts), I’ve also cultivated a parallel interest in Japan, and I find few things Japanese as interesting as I find Japanese architecture. Who, I began to wonder as I learned more about the architecture of Japan and the […]
Thanks to (past Notebook on Cities and Culture guest) Nathan Masters of Lost L.A., I’ve returned to KCET, where I previously spent a year excerpting pieces of my book-in-progress A Los Angeles Primer (still collected on my author page here), to write a new series called “Los Angeles in Buildings.” It begins today with the Pico House, the booming […]
Saturday, October 22, 2016
한국에 큰 관심이 있는 나는 일본에도 오랫동안 관심을 기울려 왔다. 요즘에 나한테 가장 재미있는 일본에 관련된 것은 건축이다. 좋아하는 일본 건물과 쿠로카와 키쇼나 탕게 켄조 같은 건축가들이 꽤 많아서 언젠가부터 한국 건물과 건축가에 대해서도 알아가게 되었다. 건축에 관심이 있는 사람의 대부분은 일본에 비교하면 볼만한 좋은 건물들이 거의 없다고 생각하지만 서울을 살펴보면 의외로 흥미로운 것들이 풍부하다. […]
Last week I joined Kurt Achin, host of Koreascape on Seoul’s English-language radio station TBS eFM, for a journey around, through, and all the way up the observation deck of the 63 Building. Known locally as the “gold tooth,” this iconic, gold-glassed skyscraper beside the Han River opened in time for the 1988 Olympics, providing a piece of the background for […]
Boom: A Journal of California has completed the online roll-out of “Re-coding California,” their spring 2016 on architecture, planning, and the built environment that I guest-edited (and which contains my essay “Our Car Culture Is Not a Problem; Our House Culture Is”). You can read it all at the issue’s page on Boom‘s site, or you can […]
Like so many fascinated by Los Angeles, I grew up worshiping the Case Study houses. With their crisp edges, clean lines, muted colors, and vast planes of glass, they struck me as the perfect objects of aesthetic desire, especially when seen through the loving, era-defining eye of architectural photographer Julius Shulman. I think of the […]
Thursday, October 1, 2015
What building most clearly signifies Los Angeles? In a built environment with few easily legible architectural icons, the Bonaventure Hotel has come to stand for the city as no other building does. Since opening in 1976, John C. Portman Jr.’s quintet of reflective cylindrical towers atop a stark concrete base has played in urban Los […]
I had lunch not long ago with Geoff Nicholson at Mr. Ramen, Little Tokyo’s finest perpetually reggae-soundtracked noodle shop. He reminded me of the existence of the James Irvine Japanese Garden, a fixture of (and fairly well-known wedding venue at) the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. Built to the side of the JACCC’s not-particularly-loved gray […]