{"id":2238,"date":"2014-05-09T07:44:01","date_gmt":"2014-05-09T14:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2238"},"modified":"2014-05-09T07:45:35","modified_gmt":"2014-05-09T14:45:35","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e35-path-and-place-with-doug-suisman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2238","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E35: Path and Place with Doug Suisman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dougsuisman\"Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with architect and urban designer Doug Suisman<\/a>, author of\u00a0Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public<\/em><\/a>, soon out in a new 25th anniversary edition. They discuss the difference in cycling to his office on Wilshire Boulevard versus Venice Boulevard; the conceptual importance of “path” and “place” in any urbanism-related discussion he gets into; his arrival in Los Angeles in 1983, after years spent in Paris and New York, and the mixture of disappointment and fascination he first felt on the boulevards here; what it meant that he sensed\u00a0movement as well as abandonment; how Los Angeles wound up with the its\u00a0destructive-car-culture rap, and how its freeways have less to do with that than the way its boulevards also became a kind of freeway system; the mistaken notion that the city “doesn’t have transit,” and what specific kinds of transit it actually does still lack; his work with the design of the Metro Rapid buses, and why they’ve struggled so long just to get a dedicated lane; the combined optimism and complacency of Los Angeles in the 1980s, before any rapid transit had appeared; the excitement he first felt at the the city’s private architectural boom, despite its seeming lack of a public realm; how Los Angeles has begun to overcome its “enclave instinct” and find an\u00a0“urban public language” as Amsterdam did in the 1930s; the importance of the Olympics, MOCA, LACMA’s Anderson Wing, and now the Ace Hotel’s opening in downtown, that “50-year overnight sensation”; what caused Wilshire’s “wig district”; what his childhood trips from his suburban home to downtown Hartford, Connecticut taught him about city life; coffee shops as harbingers of human connectedness; the basic differences between “apartment cultures” and “house cultures,” and how a city moves from one to the other; and the way the boulevards fit into the psychological framework of Los Angeles alongside the mountains and the ocean.<\/p>\n

Download the interview\u00a0<\/span>here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<\/span>iTunes<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with architect and urban designer Doug Suisman, author of\u00a0Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public, soon out in a new 25th anniversary edition. They discuss the difference in cycling to his office on Wilshire Boulevard versus Venice Boulevard; the conceptual importance of “path” and “place” in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2238"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2242,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions\/2242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}