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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]