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Category Archives: Archinect

Archinect: Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles at 50

Saturday, August 21, 2021

If you have an interest in Los Angeles, you also have a copy of Reyner Banham‘s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. My own is a mid-1980s Pelican paperback, which I chose because it had the dumbest cover of all the editions. Though it shares with previous printings the image of David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, an unimpeachable […]

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Archinect: What Died with John Portman and Syd Mead, America’s Last Urban Optimists?

Sunday, April 26, 2020

“The science-fiction world of Buck Rogers and the twenty-first century have not left us,” write David Gebhard and Robert Winter in their Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles. “Five bronze-clad glass towers rise from their podium base, just like one of the 1940s drawings by Frank R. Paul for Amazing Stories.” The work in question is the Westin […]

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Archinect: For Los Angeles’ Future, See Tokyo’s Present

Monday, February 3, 2020

On the very first morning of my life in Los Angeles, I went to Little Tokyo. With its Japanese bookstores, its undigested chunks of 1980s architecture, and its late-night East-Meets west diners, the neighborhood had done much to draw my attention to the southern Californian metropolis in the first place. Los Angeles, a banner at […]

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