Editorial: In Defense / Indefensible ... 2Op-Ed: In Defense Of The Drought, Rob Berry ... 2

Synthetic Turf, Ian Besler ... 3Natural Orders, Wendy Gilmartin Interviews Artist James Benning ... 6

White Light: On Vincent Lamouroux’s Projection LA, Steven Chodoriwsky ... 8

Ugly Buildings, Wendy Gilmartin ... 9Utopia Mytopia, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon ... 14

Los Angeles Forum

for Architectureand Urban Design

Winter 2016 Newsletter

Op-Ed: In Defense of the Drought Rob Berry

First they came for our almonds. It wasn’t a bold, frontal assault, but a whis-per campaign played out in the aisles of Whole Foods and the missives of social media: “Did you know that each thirsty little nut guzzles down over a gallon of water before ending up in your cup-board?” We soon figured out what we had expected all along: all food takes water (of course), and the industri-ous almond requires much less than any animal protein (and less than the reported gallon), but not before a staple crop and economic generator had been scapegoated for our collective thirst. At least our cheeseburgers were safe.

The attack on our lawns began as an inside hit. Amid talk of shortages and murmurs about rations, envious neigh-bors began to shame one another about conspicuous consumption until a brown

front lawn became a badge of honor. Taking advantage of this homegrown agi-tation, officials set up hotlines for anon-ymous informants to squeal on those who insisted on maintaining the myth of Eden. Rewards were offered to those who willingly exchanged their lawns for less-thirsty gravel abstractions of para-dise. The money ran out just about the time we realized the loss of the lawn meant a loss of biodiversity and the potential death of trees. We were hoping to talk about the ubiquity of the lawn as a symptom of the substantial lack of eas-ily-accessible public open space when we were distracted by Tom Selleck and a reported brazen attempt to siphon off municipal water for his private estate.

And then the restaurants stopped offering glasses of water unless we asked first. Civility had truly lost.

- - -What are we conserving when we con-serve water? We’re safeguarding a limited and essential resource, to be sure, but we’re equally maintaining the status quo through our existing con-servation practices. The continued and increasing scarcity of water indeed poses a valid existential concern, but the encouraged sacrifices are decidedly temporary and reversible. None of these measures depend on systemic and per-manent change. After the drought, we can easily return to our world of almond-milk lattes, lush gardens, and bottomless helpings of tap water. That is, we can go back to how things were before—and that’s ultimately what’s being conserved

by our current approach to the drought.We’re likewise preserving the

social, economic, and cultural divi-sions that come with our current way of life. Recent conservation efforts, as evidenced through the public debates around almonds, lawns, and unsolicited glasses of water, further entrench long-standing riffs: rural vs. urban California; the privileges of the wealthy vs. the plight of the masses; the token ges-ture in lieu of meaningful but difficult transformations of our daily lives. The affirmation of these dualisms acts as a form of resistance to change; well-worn arguments, with lines drawn and alle-giances entrenched, are fundamentally conservative deliberations. By retreat-ing to our respective camps, we’re pre-cluding new alliances and the resultant comingling of thought as a source of innovative and transformative solutions to the water crisis or any other pending environmental calamity.

As a result, we’ve failed to pro-duce a convincing alternative to the aging Southern California dream. Abundance is an easy sell; austerity, not so much. Our only choice has been to defend our way of life with as few con-cessions as necessary. If everyone does their part, we’ll get through this. This is largely the message of Save the Drop, the outreach campaign launched in April 2015 by Mayor Eric Garcetti to encour-age Angelenos to reduce their water consumption through shorter show-ers, less-frequent lawn-watering, and more-efficient plumbing fixtures. The

campaign, complete with a cartoon mascot known as The Drop, is the pub-lic face of a set of more extensive guide-lines and mandates issued through an executive order from the Mayor’s Office in October 2014. The executive order, to be fair, establishes significant goals for the reduction of usage and waste, an increase in local sources, and a decrease in our reliance on imported supplies of water at a municipal level. These goals, framed as an emergency drought response, seek to create a “water wise” city, but fail to offer a vision of this new version of Los Angeles: What will it look like? How will it work and perform? Will we even want to live here? Without such a vision, we have to assume the city as we know it will be preserved.

Perhaps it’s time to give up our vain defense against the drought and instead rally around it. The drought seems less extreme and daunting when positioned as a lasting and knowable condition rather than a catastrophic but anomalous event. The drought is not an exception or an emergency, but the new normal. We should embrace the drought as commonplace; we cer-tainly don’t need another impending doom to add to our ecology of fear.

In this drought-positive context, we should take advantage of the creative capital of L.A. to propose responses that reframe our notions about how we live. The research efforts of the Arid Lands Institute, for example, offer strategies for capturing and reusing urban storm-water as well as suggestions for changes in patterns of development and build-ing typologies. Let’s push for collec-tive efforts that integrally link individual accountability with larger urban design strategies, transcending conventional boundaries of private property and public jurisdiction. Projects such as the Elmer Avenue Neighborhood Retrofit in Sun Valley demonstrate how on-site private collection can be combined with both infrastructural and pedes-trian improvements to transform the physical, environmental, and social character of a neighborhood.

These types of efforts should be the baseline. We should promote signif-icant urban innovation along with con-servation, encouraging solutions that are technical and spatial, infrastructural and social, to imagine the kind of city Los Angeles could be. Let’s leverage the drought to make L.A. a model city (again), one that thrives because of, rather than in spite of, its environmental conditions.

Synthetic Turf: A Taxonomy Of Patent Drawings Ian Besler

Gardens always mean something else; man absolutely uses one thing to say another. Vegetation in gardens is sym-bolic, hence one can write about them without using the names of plants, and people sometimes do without plants entirely in sculpture courts and sand gardens. But the trees in gardens are already statues and the grass a coun-terpane. Here the outside is arranged to suit the inside, in mocking imitation, in imaginary threat, in soothing remi-niscence, as it leads the soul through all the old situations, portraying comforts and dangers enlarged or diminished in neutral unhuman green.

—Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, 1977

As the drought in Southern California carries on for another year, depleting groundwater reserves and demand-ing large-scale restrictions on usage, Californians are regularly forced to con-front and appraise the more unsustain-able aspects of contemporary American life. For some residents, it may mean washing their vehicles less frequently, or not filling swimming pools.

For others, it might mean swap-ping their natural lawn for a simulated version. As the New York Times and Los Angeles Times recently attested, the demand for artificial turf (com-monly referred to by the brand name AstroTurf) is on the rise. Some propo-nents celebrate the removal of natural grass as a meaningful step in water-use reduction, others point out that the resource-intensive synthetic coverings reduce eco-habitats.

The debate provides an opportu-nity to examine technology, engineering, and manufacturing, and the impor-tant role they play in how we expe-rience the designed environments around us—from the millions of square feet of ubiquitous lawns that stretch across the country down to the repre-sentation of the ideal blade of grass.

Editorial Statement: In Defense / Indefensible

Defense requires serious energy. Defense is not tacit approval; it is a holy action. De-fense is the other partner in the dance of battle. In defense, we sit straighter, speak louder. Defense doesn’t nod or shrug. Its fists are raised, chin up. Strategy-mak-ing, pomp, rhetoric. Recognition or cri-tique would be a tempered approach suited for a study of the issue at hand. So why spend the energy supporting some-thing never to be accepted as reasonable or necessary, something never to be for-given or deemed unflawed? There’s Net-flix to watch.

It’s easy and feels good to click the “like” button, dutifully and safely advocating for just about any wor-thy cause. One tends to pause before a defense of the untoward. In this era of brute populism, where our envi-ronments are stylized, tailored, and customized into pure imagery, we’re resisting a withdrawal into cool con-ceptualism or obtuse observation. LA Forum’s alignment with the underdogs may come at an inconvenient time, because we need members. We need you as a member. And we’d probably be more popular if we published a newslet-ter about something cherished, lovable, and nice: bike lanes, Modernist houses, and (lately) the L.A. River. However, our contrarian streak won out.

Within this current volume, we’ve got our game face on and our gloves laced and up; AstroTurf, ugly buildings, and bleeding all over some-one’s art don’t need to be neutralized, solved, or ironed-out. Dramatizing the indefensible, the gaudy, the reckless,

the petulant and perverse, we pro-mote a heuristic process of pot-stirring those allergic, irresolvable tensions—all their choreographies and contre-temps. Artist and filmmaker James Benning finds illuminating inspiration in the expressivity and blaring sincer-ity of Theodore Kaczynski’s (aka The Unabomber) architectural design and writings. Steven Chodoriwsky relays a clumsily unfolding bad idea. Guest edi-tor Wendy Gilmartin builds a case for L.A.’s ugliness. Ian Besler is persuasive about fake nature. Barbara Stauffacher Solomon reminds us of the offenses of Good Design.

Within the visceral hideous-ness revealed to us in the flawed and the downright wrongness through-out, there’s also a revealing about our perception of that object onto which our worries, cynicisms, and diffidence play out. We may not be indefatigable defenders of the indefensible, but we are surely siding with bad taste for now ... and mostly hoping for a good read.

Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

Winter 2016 Newsletter

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A hard divide between concrete and synthetic turf on a sidewalk on 11th Street in the South Park neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles. (Photograph by Ian Besler)

The original AstroTurf (initially marketed as ChemGrass) patent drawing is carpet-like in its unnatural uniformity. (U.S. Patent No. 3,332,828, “Monofilament Ribbon Pile Product,” James M. Faria & Robert T. Wright, issued July 25, 1967)

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A golf ball is dramatically dissected in the pursuit of the perfect playing surface. (U.S. Patent No. 3,995,079, “Artificial Turf-Like Product,” Frederick T. Haas Jr., issued November 30, 1976)

Material Performance and Convincing Synthetics

Early versions of artificial grass were available prior to the development of AstroTurf by chemists at Monsanto in the mid-1960s. The first patent filing for the ubiquitous name-brand prod-uct notes that “[A]ttempts to make artificial grasses have been made dur-ing the past several years” but asserts that most were only intended as deco-rative covering. AstroTurf was the first product to make a claim for an effect beyond the merely cosmetic. Research and development in synthetic polymers and stitching techniques made for a surface that could withstand heavy ath-letic use and outdoor installation, and promised performance characteristics “comparable with those possessed by natural turf.”

To a certain extent, the develop-ment of artificial turf mirrors many facets of American culture in the 20th cen-tury, and perusing the database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the product reveals as much. Through the late ’60s and into the ’70s, when syn-thetic turf was just becoming commer-cially viable, technological specifications often focused on the wants and needs of middle-class American suburbanites.

Perhaps no other recreational activity in America has been so closely associated with middle-class aspira-tions and professional ambition than golf. And because of the comparatively small size of the ball in play, the tech-nical challenge of engineering the per-fectly performing span of simulated grass was of significant consequence to gameplay. The patent filings for arti-ficial turf reveal the focused atten-tion that inventors and engineers were willing to devote to every aspect of the product’s performance.

Additionally, there are patent filings for cigarette burn–proof artifi-cial turf and systems meant to simulate the challenges of the putting green for those who couldn’t make it to a well-manicured golf course. The use of arti-ficial grass in stadiums and fields took off through the 1970s, following its use as a replacement for natural turf at Houston’s Astrodome.

But artificial turf both bene-fited and suffered from societal and cultural trends that existed around it. AstroTurf entered the market at time when American confidence and enthu-siasm for chemistry and technology were surging. In the 1960s, synthetics, plastics, and polymers promised mid-dle-class lives of ease, security, and comfort. But artificial grass soon had to contend with a national sentiment that became far more critical of technology,

chemicals, and their implications. The 1970s saw revelations over the effects of dioxin, in use by American forces in Vietnam, the burying of toxic waste at Love Canal, and industry efforts to con-ceal deaths associated with asbestos.

The Gaze of the Patent DrawingThere’s a clear theme that

emerges in these collections of pat-ent filings, claims, and drawings: the increasing fidelity with which artificial turf attempts to depict real grass. The inventors’ engineering efforts seem squarely focused on reproducing, to an almost reverential extent, every nuance and peculiarity of natural flora.

The earliest patents describe the basic process behind manufactur-ing artificial turf: small pellets of nylon synthetic polymer, along with color-ing pigments (usually shades of green and yellow) and stabilizing additives are heated and extruded into thin, bladelike strands or ribbons. These long strands are then tufted and stitched through a thick backing, generally rubber or latex, and sliced to create the impression of individual blades. The backing is then coated with adhesive and punctured for permeability.

Over the years, technological advances centered on perfecting the tufting and structural methods behind the look of the strands, and on making synthetics and weavings more durable and resistant to ultraviolet degradation.

AstroTurf and American LandscapesSynthetic turf does more than

simply reveal a discomfort with aspects of our environment that we perceive as false or artificial. It also exposes some disquieting relationships in how we think about nature, wilderness, and our domestic spaces. In his book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Mike Davis writes about suburban lawns as spaces that reveal “the clear-cut, imperme-able, but essentially imaginary boundary between the human and the wild.” Our homes provide us with a reassurance of boundaries, shelter, and safety. The grass that so characteristically sur-rounds the typical suburban home is a symbolic gradient between the wilder-ness of the outdoors and the comfort of the indoors. The lawn serves to soften the metaphorical edges of the walls and roofs around us, and to make this stark-divide between indoor and outdoor less visually jarring. Perhaps, when applied to the spaces around our homes, syn-thetic turf is a way to make the natural

world more stable and predictable—to bring the wilderness under our control.

The occasional imposition of an undesirable aspect of the wilderness—a wandering coyote or prowling cougar, say—disrupts the yard as a buffer space, as impenetrable boundary. “The ideal suburb is adjacent to nature but never directly implicated in it,” Davis contin-ues. In this case, then, we might say that the artificial landscape could be seen as a more forceful assertion of the divide between indoors and outdoors, devel-opment and wilderness, civilization and nature.

Consider, too, how these unnat-urally bright green swaths funda-mentally change the ways in which we interact with the landscapes around us. Home ownership is a central com-ponent of the ethos of the American Dream. Therefore, much of our cul-tural meaning and identity is wrapped up in the imagery of the single-fam-ily home, residential neighborhoods, and the span of yards that punctuate them. Add to that the cultural values of self-sufficiency, independence, and do-it-yourself assertiveness, which for many Americans have historically been expressed through the care and atten-tion that we put into working on our homes and gardens.

The effort that many people devote to their foliage, flowers, shrubs, and bushes is a labor of nurturing and sustaining a collection of living organ-isms—the plant life that surrounds our homes. But opting for artificial turf changes much of this work into an effort to simply maintain something that was mechanically produced, not nurtured and grown. Instead of watering, edging, fertilizing, weeding, mowing, trimming, and cutting, the synthetic yard demands a type of upkeep that is less attached to the ambition to nourish and encourage natural growth, but simply to maintain a product in “like new” condition.

Rather than cultivating a living thing, the focus of work becomes main-taining as much as possible the perpet-ual sameness of a factory-produced artifact. Artificial lawns are installed, occasionally brushed or sprayed clean, and eventually removed to make way for a replacement covering. The typical lifespan for an artificial lawn is 25 years. In many cases, the turf may be subject to a product warranty, or to some other guarantee of satisfaction.

Turning a natural span of lush, grassy turf into an artificial consumer product reflects almost perfectly on the ambition of the very yardwork that it makes redundant. The yard, after all, is a space where wildness is tamed, brought

under strict control for the appreciation of the property owner. The American lawn is a public display of control, sta-bility, and ambition. The more fussily agonized and excruciatingly finished the detail, the more the property owner’s mastery of the landscape is asserted. And so too, we might imagine, is that property owner’s mastery of the social and professional realms of life.

As digital design and fabrication technologies play a greater and greater role in the production of the world around us, it’s not difficult to imagine a day in which extruded petroleum fil-aments and layers of synthetic backing can be manufactured in such a way as to blur any easy distinction between fake grass and real grass.

And as shifting environmental patterns continue to impact the acces-sibility and abundance of resources—including fossil fuels, plant habitats, and freshwater reserves—it’s worth focusing more of our collective atten-tion in consideration and discussion about which cultural artifacts and social practices are worth maintaining, radi-cally altering, or doing away with alto-gether. Is a natural grass lawn worth the threat of depleted aquifers? Are fac-simile yards worth the expenditure of fossil fuels? Or would we be better off fundamentally rethinking the organiza-tion and distribution of the built envi-ronments around us?

Digital design and fabrication technologies now play a greater and greater role in the production of the designed world around us. Platforms for 3D printing, scanning, and online distribution of 3D files suggest the pos-sibility for more engagement with the general public and the designed objects that characterize our everyday lives.

We might agonize the idea of the lawn as no longer a space of clear distinctions and boundaries, whether between drought or flood, indoors and outdoors, or real and fake. But at least we can derive some comfort in the knowledge that the patent drawings for “Real Fake Grass” will probably look amazing.

Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

A hard divide between concrete and synthetic turf on a sidewalk on Los Angeles Street in the Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles. (Photograph by Ian Besler)

The representation from manufacturing process and method to convincingly simulated outcome. (U.S. Patent No. 6,551,689 B1, “Synthetic Grass with Resilient Granular Top Surface Layer,” Jean Prevost, issued April 22, 2003)

A cross section of a spiraled blade of artificial grass, among the more recent advances in aesthetic fidelity to natural grass. (U.S. Patent No. 5,601,886, “Artificial Turf,” Yoshio Ishikawa & Hiroaki Fukumoto, issued February 11, 1997)

The ambition to control and perfect nature, while still capturing its richness of variety, makes for a difficult and often visually perplexing representational outcome. (U.S. Patent No. 4,850,594, “Perfect Putting Surfaces,” Peter Manzione, issued July 25, 1989)

Chemists and inventors approached the problem of manufac-turing convincingly natural landscapes on micro (a single blade of grass) and macro (an entire landscape) scales. (U.S. Patent No. 5,419,561, “Method of Playing Golf Game on Reduced Size Course,” Charles G. Webber, issued May 30, 1995)

Drawings for the methods and apparatuses for tufting—making blades of synthetic grass appear less uniform, and therefore more natural (U.S. Patent No. 4,061,804, “Non-Directional Rectangular Filaments and Products,” Walter Graham McCulloch, issued December 6, 1977)

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Winter 2016 Newsletter

Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

Natural Orders Wendy Gilmartin interviews artist James Benning

Filmmaker and artist James Benning’s lat- est film, natural history (2014), screened at the MAK Center’s Mackey Apartments & Garage Top last summer.

The 74-minute film features pub-lic areas of the museum but also, more significantly, staff conference areas, coffeemakers, locker rooms, mechan-ical ducts, cluttered office desks with a phone ringing that goes unanswered. The secret life of spaces when we’re not in them.

Wendy Gilmartin spoke to Benning about the film and his project Two Cabins (2003–2011), in which he built full-size replicas of Henry David Thoreau’s and Ted Kaczynski’s cabins and hung replicas of paintings by a handful of little-known folk artists like Mose Tolliver among a collection of Kaczynski’s books.

Wendy Gilmartin Could you tell me about natural history?

James Benning It’s set in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, which was celebrating its 125th anniver-sary. The director of the museum likes my work. He had invited me there five or six years ago to look at the storages spaces, and I was intrigued that nine-tenths of what they own is in storage, and you see just a little bit [of the collection] in the top rooms. I was very intrigued with the idea of classification and how natu-ral history museums collect things over time and then classify and name every-thing. Naming everything is a way to con-trol things, but it’s also understandable because it’s a way to communicate, to talk about things too.

Over two weeks I filmed every day at the museum from five to ten hours a day. I would get really tired after four or five hours because I had to make deci-sions and observe at the same time. I was overcome by the exhaustion of that.

And I mean collections in themselves are obsessive. In the last five or six years, a lot of my work is trying to understand obses-sion through looking at other artists that were very obsessive. I found that too in the Two Cabins project, with Thoreau and Kaczynski, who had certain obses-sions too. All this started to work into my own ideas and philosophies.

I used my own classification sys-tem to suggest ways of putting all the things that I would film in a box, and it wouldn’t be the classification systems of naming, but it would come from what I finally decided was the number pi, the ratio of the diameter to the circum-ference of a circle that’s an irrational number and goes on forever. The whole film was based on the number pi and its structure, using the digits of pi to suggest duration.

WG So the timing of each shot is based on a number in the sequence.

JB Each shot in itself is based on the number pi, but I used two

classification systems at the same time, a short classification and a long classifi-cation, so the number pi is 3.1415926535 and, as I said, it goes on forever. I used the first 53 numbers after the decimal point. Those would suggest a length. I would use 3 twice, first to describe a short length and then a longer length and the shorter lengths went between two sec-onds and nine seconds. So if the digit was 1, it would be two seconds, if it was 2, it would be four seconds, so the first digit is 3, so the very first shot in the film is six seconds long.

WG Do you have a chart with all that?

JB I could write it down for you so you can see exactly. The average amount of time that somebody looks at a painting in a museum is about nine seconds, so that’s the short section, and then there’s a longer duration, which I’m more inter-ested in because I think through obser-vation you learn, and it takes time to learn. Those quick observations aren’t very useful.

WG I’m interested in hearing more about the museum’s service spaces and your decision to privilege those. They’re places that maybe don’t get into a design magazine, but they’re still a place.

JB I really liked the older part of the building with the pipes and all that. For me, that’s the most fascinating part of the whole building, where the utilities are kept and kind of hidden, but they’re needed not only to heat the whole build-ing, but all of these different rooms of storage have different kinds of climate control. All that causes the rooms not only [to] look different, but they had

different sounds. I was interested in this piece becoming as much about sound as about image. In fact, I felt that all of the movement in the film comes from the sound, hearing the air in the room chang-ing and different machines that might be humming or clicking. All of that inter-ested me as part of architecture, too.

WG I really picked up on the sound while watching the piece and other qualities of the space too, the light qualities of the space and the sound qualities of the space and the traces of how people have used the building in the long, long shots. You stand back and let the audience consider that stuff.

JB The sound suggests an off-screen space. You might hear peo-ple working in a room or two away, or through the walls. And then I think there are two or three people in the film that accidently stumbled into the frame. I like that surprise of actually some humans that are there.

WG So, I was thinking a lot about the Two Cabins project when I watched natural history. I feel like both projects highlight spaces that are seen as insig-nificant, but there’s obviously a lot of significance there, because Kaczynski’s cabin was disassembled and shipped to the courthouse to prosecute him.

JB To prove he was crazy.WG I again come back to the

back-of-house spaces you privilege in the film. They seem insignificant to most people, but quite significant to you, like the structures in Two Cabins, and I sus-pect that’s why many architects are drawn to your films and your work. Are we reading into that?

JB Oh, not at all, because the whole Two Cabins project really didn’t start as a project at all; it started as con-struction. I wanted to build something

and, I wanted to build a house, so it was very much about architecture to begin with. And then I said, Well that’s silly, I’m too old to build a house, and then I thought, Well I can build a small house, and Thoreau’s cabin came to mind immediately—the quintessential small hut that he lived in for 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days, and where wrote this beau-tiful text.

Once I had the Thoreau cabin built and I had been doing these replicas of outsider painters I was finding myself very obsessive in trying to understand their obsession and, in turn, my own obsession. Then I hung some paintings in the Thoreau cabin and thought, This isn’t just construction problem anymore, it needs a counterpoint. I was moved by Kaczynski’s writings—or at least infat-uated by his writings—and I tapped in about his complaint that the left was over-socialized, which I thought was really interesting, and how that over-socialization brings about ego and trou-bles within those kinds of movements, which one can see happening in Russia now with the political art group Voina, Petr Pavlensky, and Pussy Riot. They used public media as a device to actu-ally make political change, but it also brought about celebrity.

WG Documentaries on HBO …JB Yeah, then they’re all fight-

ing against each other, and that’s a con-flict. As I did more research, I realized that Kaczynski and Thoreau were much closer together than far apart. It wasn’t a binary system at all; it was something that was kind of packed together. And then of course, in replicating two cab-ins, one from Montana and one from Walden Pond in Massachusetts, I had these two different locations, two dif-ferent kinds of cabins. Kaczynski’s is

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project anything on it? Is the artist here? Can we go inside? Can anyone?

I turn to see a man approaching down the street, a guitar slung around his neck. He’s humming before speak-ing a word. He nods at me, others. Open collar, dangling chain, chest hair bristle, his hand moves down to strum some-thing. The fingers know what they’re doing, they’re practiced, they punc-tuate his instincts with major chords. No thought’s too small to go straight to a song, G to C and back to G again quick. “Oh man, rad, it’s all white!” And then sings/strums: “White… White—light!!” He pauses a split second before singing “light.” Was it the right time to rhyme? So soon? He is a gaunt Petty/Petty/Branson hybrid. (Richard/Tom/Richard.) “I was talking to my friend down at the Vons, you know, the one on Alvarado, and well I don’t know him really I just met him but he said I should come down see this thing.”

A few Mississippis, and then: “I’m Eddy.” “Steve.” He turns back toward the white, toward the afternoon light, and says, “It’s, you know, it’s pretty great, but—” and there’s always a but. “But I just wanna bleed all over it!” No one hears, or no one pays attention. I nod at him, encouraging him. “Yeah.” With that, he is emboldened.

The thirst for blood becomes cho-rus and home chord. “Yeah, someone should just bleed all over it,” says Eddy. “Bleed, you know, for the pain of human-ity. What if I just stripped down naked and threw myself on the barbed wire? Or maybe that would be a bit too Jesus.” Then cackles. Then ogles. Then spits.

“I never talk to anyone, you know, but you’re a good listener! Hey—who’s the artist? Do you know him? It’s not you, is it?” “No, ha, it’s, um, he’s, a, French, artist,” with the stress on the nationality, perhaps distancing him from me, bob-bling words over to him, failing to meet him midway at some California casual. “Oh, he’s French,” as if that explained it all. “Yeah, that explains it,” he says. “They’re always getting to it before any-one else.” Oh yeah? “You know Da Vinci, Napoleon, the French Revolution—the greatest moments—they were always like, we ain’t taking this shit no more and they just got their heads chopped off.”

“America, man, we’re at the pin-nacle,” he says. “You know humanity’s never had it so good, we’re at the height of it all right now. Or maybe it was really the Beat Generation that it did it, right? It was all about artist freedom, and

I don’t have to, you know, like it, but I like that I live in a world that’s so fuck-ing advanced that they’d paint a whole building white! I mean fuck! I don’t have to like it! I don’t have to like him, he could be a total dick, and if he was a dick I wouldn’t care, I respect his right to make things white!”

“I hope he did this illegally,” muses Eddy, “then that would be radi-cal.” I tell him, no, the city had foot the bill. “Ah well, shit, of course.” He gets distant. You could see him picturing hundreds of people stripping naked and running upon chainlink—mass impale-ment. Our Sunset Bastille.

As he turns to leave, back the way he came, never getting closer to the white than the bus stop for the 2, he says, signing off, “If you come back and see blood, you’ll know it’s me.”

Ugly Buildings Wendy Gilmartin

340 N. Western Avenue, Mid-CityConceived at the tail end of the

radical ’80s by architect Jeffrey Daniels and completed in 1990, this KFC fran-chise epitomizes the blocky, color-ful, asymmetrical, and never subtle building-as-symbol style that typified Postmodernist architecture 20 years ago. With finlike windows for wings and a red roof for the rooster’s comb, the chicken’s “head” sports the weirdly mounted face of the Colonel, with his kindly smirk. Get it? It looks like a chicken and a chicken bucket. The jag-ged ceiling inside and corrugated metal siding out front remind us that Daniels apprenticed under Frank Gehry—back when Gehry was doing innovative things with mass-produced, everyday con-struction materials like asphalt roofing shingles as wall coverings and leaving the 2x4 framing lumber exposed behind windows. Architects adore this build-ing for its playful use of materials and its vaulted skylight next to the leak-ing Coke machine inside. They think it’s fun that the Colonel’s likeness is stuck where the “chicken head” should be. They stand up for it in casual conversa-tions and feel nostalgia for it. Everybody else thinks it’s really ugly.

Travelers from all the world’s burgs, barrios, and banlieues touch down daily at LAX with Kodachrome visions of salty mists falling along Malibu’s beaches, gleaming cars, spray-tanned celebri-ties, and mellow, purplish sunsets, only to emerge from the terminal and head up the 405, toward ever-slower traf-fic. When they finally come to a stand-still between freeway exits and begin to look around, they’re met with the bare back walls of parking structures, identi-cal grey condos peeking up from behind highway embankments, and black-win-dowed, soulless office towers. This relentless landscape of blah is what most visitors and many residents find visually unappealing about Los Angeles. “Why is L.A. so ... ugly?” they ask.

“The mountains,” we implore our visiting friends and family. “The beach, the hills, the Bougainvillea bushes, Chavez Ravine—those aren’t ugly!” It gets an Angeleno hot and itch-ingly defensive. But a proud Angeleno needs to simmer down, because a hat-er’s gonna hate. Even the Los Angeles Times’ own architecture critic recently relented: “Much of what we lay our eyes on as we move through the city every-day can be remarkably, even punishingly

Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design 9

supposedly based on Thoreau’s, but he denies it. But it has somewhat the same form; his is smaller and lowered ceil-ing and smaller windows, which makes sense in the harsher climate of Montana.

Doing the painting replicas, I thought a lot about framing when I make a film, how I find that frame. It also comes from an idea of proportion and again about the architecture, in a sense. I was invited to an architecture confer-ence in Hamburg and to a number of architecture schools—SCI-Arc was one, and I think another one in Blacksburg, Va. I was confused that they’d be inter-ested in my work, but from then on it became very apparent I was dealing with space in ways that architects think about—and maybe about the politics of the space.

WG What do you get out of these projects?

JB I make projects or films that would take me to places I want to physi-cally be in and then observe and under-stand those places to put my life in a large context so I could understand the world in a better way. Being in the museum, it’s a place of privilege to see things that most people can’t see. But the way it changes my idea of what edu-cation is and how we quantify things and how we try to control things, that was very useful for me to be in that place. It seems a bit self-indulgent, but I think if you make yourself a better person, you add to the world in a certain way—to make pieces that will bring about some kind of discussion and maybe even be a

little bit confrontational. I don’t believe in everything Kaczynski’s done of course, I don’t believe in violence, but I under-stand when he says if our government uses violence on a daily basis and we don’t, we’re at a disadvantage. Kaczynski ended up killing three people. My tax dollars pay for drones that have killed over 3,000 people indiscriminately over the last just four years. If people want to make Kaczynski into the bogeyman, they have to start pointing their finger at themselves, too, if they pay taxes.

White Light: On Vincent Lamouroux’s Projection LA Steven Chodoriwsky

I lean on a streetlight pole as the 2 bus comes in, and when the door opens, I catch a glimpse of the driver, pissed off. No doubt from all the commotion along the route. First it’s new corner-curb after new corner-curb construction on Sunset, and now this thing—this event—that building someone painted all white. And jaywalkers, shoppers, gawkers, eye-rollers.

Sunglassed security guards move at half speed. Keep keeping passersby, bemused by it all, back onto the side-walk but very gently, slo-mo, usually with casual banter mixed into the shepherd-ing. No noticeable police. Pylons, tem-porary fences, and VIP parked cars take up a whole extra lane as Sunday traffic crawls past.

The guard at the locked main “gate” of the building has a star-span-gled tattoo like NBC’s The More You Know campaign on her inner arm. Twirls her hair and seems to enjoy her station, often shifting to have one hand clutch the heavy duty chain that tethers the chainlink gate closed.

“Where’s the artist?” someone asks her. “Oh, he’s in that green build-ing over there,” down the hill past the organic pierogi stand, past the dog-walk-ers, past the valet, past the roadblocks. A man living “in the neighborhood for years” chimes in. “The artist has wanted to do this for a long time,” he explains. “He had the idea years ago,” repeating for emphasis.

Another person asks another guard, “So, are they going to project something on it?” With practice and with relish, the guard holds thumb and forefinger together near his temples and pulls them away, spreading his fingers into a star-spangled array: “No projec-tions. Just your own ideas.” He is a pub-lic service provider today, self-aware, in limbo between earnest and sarcas-tic. Earnest because it’s correct infor-mation; sarcastic because he’s been performing for the same question a few hours now. The shadows are get-ting long, but the crowd continues to mill about. Is the artist here? Will they

8 Winter 2016 Newsletter

unattractive.” Those who dismiss ugly Los Angeles will snark at our traffic, over-priced restaurants, and attitude, too. And they’ll never uncover the meaning and reward to be revealed in the city’s messy stew of urban elements.

Los Angeles does have beautiful buildings. These are conceived by phil-anthropic boards of directors and get reviewed by smart critics. They’re asso-ciated with high art and protected and preserved by conservancies. Beautiful buildings have had all their bugs worked out by historical trial and error, or by teams of specialists who meet frequently to discuss any functional or formal issues through the course of construc-tion. They’re often situated in Edenic landscapes, standing massively in solid stone and rustic timbers. They have glo-rious culture and music and taste pour-ing from them, and they charge entrance fees. Folks tend to agree: the historic houses of Hancock Park and Crenshaw are beautiful, as are midcentury des-ert ranch style homes and the Bradbury Building on Broadway downtown. Other local crowd-pleasers include Wright’s Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles City Hall, Pann’s diner on La Tijera Boulevard—the

quintessential ’60s incarnation of for-ward-thinking Googie design—and the Greene brothers’ Arts and Crafts–era Gamble estate in Pasadena. These struc-tures are exquisitely crafted, carefully kept, honored.

Coasting through downtown, one takes in a visual index of a certain devel-opment type—the city core—where sky-scrapers built in the 1970s and ’80s soar. Their glassy, steely architecture sym-bolizes financial stability, capitalism, investment, permanence. Older tow-ers from the 1920s and ’30s offer metic-ulous motifs etched in stone, arching entrances to ornate lobbies, and detail-ing in a style of elegant grandeur long lost in building craft. Combined, these two types of downtown buildings provide Los Angeles its skyline and visual locus. But as one moves out from the city core in any direction—on Third Street, Mission, Central—the environment changes. The buildings out here symbolize something else entirely. This is the vast, horizon-tal mass of Los Angeles’s built ecology—a landscape of tacked-on siding and black glass, McMansions, yawn-worthy stucco apartments on tiny stilts, dumpy offices, monotonous parking structures, and sad strip malls. Out here among the lords of bad taste also lies the potential for a drastically different urban situa-tion. Let the critics concern themselves with the architectural beacons of our

contemporary times. Ugly buildings are really where it’s at.

Ugly buildings are the stock of the people, products of their culture and history. They’re kind of like us, in a way. They suffer from financial hardship, or they don’t deal with wear and tear well as they age. Some flaunt their ugliness. Some doll themselves up in gaudy, mis-matched architectural accents like col-umns and spires and overly decorated copper drainpipes. Some are cloaked in gallons of beige paint so as not to stand out, or simply to disappear. Some are outfitted with intimidating spikes, fear-ing criminals or bird poop. These ugly buildings are contaminated with prob-lems; they may be tragically out of the realm of the human scale, have weird materials stuck all over, are messy and unkempt, are a mishmash of ideas and colors. But they have something else going for them that the architectural gems do not: they are a stealthy, prolific army that no one ever notices or talks about. We drive past, walk by, work in, and take the dog to the vet in ugly build-ings. They are the background noise of the city. Ugly buildings don’t alienate potential participants in their assess-ment or mocking.

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Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

8525 Valley Boulevard, San GabrielThis small commercial complex

is a three-story, textured, brown mass that steps down to the street like an inverse, inverted ziggurat. From within, a mirrored teal glass cylinder emerges to form a two-story volume above a porte cochère. The effect is that of a disco ball being hatched from a blocky brown egg. Tacked-on red and yel-low tiles near the front door make no sense. The utility lines are left hang-ing out in front, and the fire-alarm bell looks like a crowning pimple on the dowdy facade. The dirty, teal windows really accentuate the way the valley’s stagnant air stains mirrored and hard, craggy surfaces. This bad egg manages to turn a lovely blue sky into a sickly, greenish reflection. It’s like wearing brown-tinted sunglasses on a perfectly gorgeous day when the lenses make everything look smoggier.

Much of the ugliness in Los Angeles stems from an attitude of disposabil-ity toward buildings. Build it quick, flip it, tear it down, rebuild, repeat. Just as the abbreviated name of the city—“L.A.”—is tossed around because it is easy, swift, and colloquial, Los Angeles’ urban situ-ation mirrors a suffering of formalism. Invisible circumstances and the sub-structure of the twisted and nuanced political, historical, and economic land-scape directly inform the city’s physical one, and behind each ugly building lies an ever-unfolding storyline about politi-cal leaders, land speculators, handymen, and cottage industries written in dirty beige stucco and mirrored teal glass.

Angelenos have always been proud homesteaders, liberal in their front-lawn watering and conservative in their tax giving. Unlike other cities that enjoy grand civic spaces, Los Angeles prefers the open space of its backyards, and when Proposition 13 passed in 1978, it allowed California homeowners to maintain a steady property tax rate on their homes (and yards), even when inflated housing prices soared and con-tinued to peak through the ’80s. For local governments, however, Prop 13 was a death knell. The reductions in tax revenues spelled insolvency for some communities, and local governments quickly took aim at new construction for additional tax sources. (New con-struction was counted as a reassessed property—and therefore could take on an initial property-tax hike. New shop-ping malls and retail centers became

appealing to local governments, too, for their guaranteed return in local sales tax.) Cities also increased fees on their own services, which usually didn’t require voter approval. Real estate developers, consequently, were skew-ered with dueling attempts at collected revenue and were forced to skim as much fat as possible off their respec-tive projects in order to ensure the biggest payback on their investment. This meant constructing as many units as possible, as cheaply as possible, to the very maximum of the lots’ lines. In general, land use planning and devel-opment continues to encourage rev-enue production as a first-order goal. Condos, office buildings, and shopping centers exist as instruments to this mon-etary exchange, disassociated from their surroundings—and never unprofitable.

A century before Proposition 13, men such as civil engineer and water baron William Mulholland, land mogul Henry Huntington, and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler ded-icated themselves to fueling a land-grabbing, money-making development machine in the city. This involved con-structing many things cheaply and quickly, the extraction of resources to make these built things run efficiently, and then the luring of new residents to live and work in said built things. The repeated cycle of speculative booms and busts over the decades rendered the region’s buildings less as contain-ers for people and more as real-estate investments, to be completed with all due haste. By the 1950s, these mini-cycles grew into a monstrous jugger-naut, and in an already ingrained system of land speculation where investors ruled, fast-and-cheap ugly spread like wildfire. Consequently, Los Angeles’

famous and seemingly unplanned “sprawl” (we’re actually more dense than New York’s five boroughs com-bined) is a contrived, if not routine, feedback loop of disposable building stock construction unfurling into the desert’s deepest reaches. Stop in any neighborhood and consider the cor-ner convenience store or an apartment complex built after the postwar period. The building’s ugliness is merely a gate-way to discovering this history.

Whether residents wanted it or not, Los Angeles never suffered or ben-efited from a dictatorial planner’s iron fist—think New York’s Robert Moses or Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago. Without much master planning or handholding by powerful, centralized, bureaucratic agencies, building owners in Los Angeles are free to become mad creators of a Frankenstein’s monster of a building. On a broader scale, this frontier-like freedom spawns a region of misfit Quasimodos driven by quick renovations for a resale, a handyman’s bad hunch, a developer’s notion of sta-tus and wealth, or a bland corporate branding strategy—all consequences of the city’s persistent defiance against rules and good taste. Ours is a histor-ically individualistic and corruption-fearing city. Los Angeles deliberately established a progressive political sys-tem in the 1920s (under the 1925 char-ter) and continues to be run by handfuls of councils and boards under the aus-pices of which any large-scale, impact-ful development projects stall or become watered down. Add an inten-tionally weak mayor (per the city’s sub-sequent charters), and it’s easy to see why a master builder never emerged in Los Angeles.

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Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

3712 Veteran Avenue, Palms Here’s the thing: rent is high, jobs

are difficult to get or keep right now, and on top of that, some struggling folks even have unlucky relatives or friends living on their couches. In general, liv-ing is hard, but it doesn’t have to be this hard. This sad, grey stucco box recalls the hideous public housing projects of Stalinist Russia or an experiment in min-imalism gone awfully wrong. But hun-dreds of apartments like this one dot the streets for a reason. In the ’60s the city needed cheap, multifamily apartments that could be constructed quickly. Folks were moving to Los Angeles in hordes. Low-cost, freeway-adjacent housing was a must, and developers complied. Today, these same structures are home to immigrants, actors, and college stu-dents—the demographics of transience.

ParexLaHabra is Los Angeles’s larg-est stucco provider. Known locally as LaHabra stucco and established in Anaheim in 1926, the company today is a subsidiary to a group of international entities specializing in residential and commercial cement and acrylic-based finishing systems including EIFS—a prod-uct that most people refer to as stucco plaster. LaHabra stucco provides the thick and bumpy white or pastel-colored coating found encasing the majority of apartments, office buildings, homes, and strip malls in Southern California and around the world. The easy, unre-markable uniformity and forgettable, depthless nature of the material makes it ubiquitous. It can essentially appear to be anything or nothing at all.

For an endlessly patched-up and tinkered-with home-improvement proj-ect or for a Franken-building, stucco is also the easiest, cheapest finish around. It’s simple to apply, and its texture cov-ers up any surface cracking that may appear over time. It weathers poorly when dirt collects in all those crev-ices, leaving a mangy look, and it covers almost every apartment building in Los Angeles built since 1950.

The prolific “dingbat” apartment building (named in the early ’60s by a UCLA visiting professor named Francis Ventre) format is as follows: skinny steel columns supporting a rectangular box that fills most of the lot’s property. This makes space for cars underneath. The sides, back and front are smooth and vast canvases of stucco (usu-ally), but each is always distinguished by a small decorative flourish along the

street-facing side, something to set itself apart from the others: a sprinkle of glittery tile (389 Palos Verdes Boulevard, Torrance); a terrifying, towering wooden eagle (321 Pasadena Avenue, South Pasadena); a fancy name in a cursive font (Adams Arms, 4316 Alla Road, Marina del Rey). But it was architectural historian Reyner Banham who neologized dingbat when making the connection between the car, postwar development, and the building type. “Wherever a freeway crosses one of the more desirable resi-dential areas of the plains,” he wrote, “it seems to produce a shift in land values that almost always leads to the produc-tion of dingbats.” Primitively modern, streamlined, cheap, and calibrated to be the interlocking residential component of the highway and its technology (the car), dingbats, in all their manifold varia-tions, became Los Angeles’s vernacular. They were also the best thing ever to happen to LaHabra stucco’s fledgling Anaheim storefront.

Best Western Royal Palace, 2528 S. Sepulveda Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

Most people drive past this snoozefest unaware, but if you live in the neighborhood or are lodging here on vacation, you’re sure to notice all the little things that make this Best Western just blah. The deeply inset, chocolate-tinted front windows help the rooms avoid the worst of the glar-ing afternoon sun, but that good inten-tion leaves the remaining expanse of the front facade flat and spare, cloak-ing it in over 5,000 square feet of pim-ply tan and faded peach paint. But just as midcentury highway motels recreated themselves by offering updated ameni-ties to a new kind of cross-country trav-eler, this Royal Palace (and others like it) could evolve as a new type of urban, transit-hub hotel. A little bit of brain-storming could reveal new amenities for a light-rail-riding tourist and hotel visi-tor that also outwardly serves the public waiting at the adjacent Expo/Sepulveda light-rail stop. The giant, flat nothing-ness of this Best Western’s facade is the ideal place to project movies, videos, or graphics for anyone whizzing by on their way eastward and downtown or going west toward the beach.

Artist John Baldessari has said he lives in Los Angeles because it is ugly: “If I lived in a great beautiful city, why would I do art?” In a 2010 interview he said, by way of greater explanation, “I always have to be slightly angry to do art and L.A. provides that.” Early in his career, Baldessari found inspiration by accident

in fragments of discarded urban trash—specifically, torn scraps of derelict bill-boards and rundown buildings. His goal was not to find the beauty in ugli-ness, nor to remedy it. Mining a nugget of potential from within the mechanics of ugly: that was Baldessari’s angle. He looked for something to make a paint-ing out of, an accidental manipulation of form, a new association, an intensifi-cation of an object’s bold unattractive-ness. He found ugliness to be a handy tool with which to dismantle the status quo. In this spirit, the visceral reaction to the city’s failures—its chicken-bucket KFCs, corporate blahs, and Frankenstein hodgepodge of a San Gabriel retail cen-ter—can be a creative impetus too.

Buildings are made of lumber, bricks, nostalgic associations, histori-cal references, personal style, and what was available on the shelf at Home Depot that one day back in 1994. Like a sun-set, which can be interpreted (visually) as an orange glow, (scientifically) as light reflecting through molecules of smog, and (poetically) as an ending, longing or love, a building, too, is a knotted-up mess of meanings and reality that one can’t pick apart to distinguish represen-tation, physics, symbols, feelings. The assertion of ugly is an assertion of com-plete subjectivity with specifics per each individual. Take Spanish architect Rafael Moneo’s Our Lady of the Angels cathe-dral downtown, for example. Haters think the hulking building that straddles the elevated slice of terrain between the 101 freeway and Temple Street looks like a windowless pile of baked terra-cotta blocks, or a prison. Boosters claim the cathedral’s impressive interior heights reproduce the religious, archi-tectural iconography of Rome and the Renaissance, but with a modern sim-plicity and refinement that is achieved effectively, precisely because of the contrasting heavy and somber shell of its concrete walls. Both opinions are cor-rect. Both are valid. Beauty is easy. Ugly is messy, confounding, fantastic, con-tradictory, complex, shifts with fash-ion—and anyone is free to name it.

Just as the dingbat or the develop-er’s maxed-out condo complex evolved at the intersection of larger economies and infrastructures like a homegrown cottage industry and the highway sys-tem, ugly buildings will continue to evolve at similar crossroads. Seldom do we con-sider what infrastructures could poten-tially coalesce to create new housing systems or public places. Or, conversely, what disruptions or redistributions in the white noise of building stock could spark a new economic/infrastructure mashup. How could the city be reimagined, using

ugly buildings as fodder? This is a con-versation that’s gone on exclusively in the academic realm of urban planners, architects, and critics. But on the side-walk, rarely is it debated how the less-desirables of the urban fabric might be modified to help or hinder privacy, par-ticipation, or recreation. Consciously or not, this path of inquiry already occurs throughout Los Angeles on a daily basis, during everyday routines. The scale of a Walmart’s front facade and its vast, flat parking lot on a hot August day obviously falls under the “doesn’t work” category, as does searching for an apartment on Craigslist, only to find overpriced crap; this points to a dearth of affordable, desirable hous-ing. Scrutinizing what “works” in the buildings folks enjoy and what “doesn’t work” in the ones collectively abhorred can only happen effectively in the place where residents and the city meet face-to-face—in buildings.

Indignation over ugly build-ings will go only so far. Toiling a bit lon-ger with our disgust of a pungent hue, a dated style, an aversion to something misshapen, or, on the other hand, a positive sense of nostalgia the building

inspires, the acceptance of some-thing less than beautiful because it has character and soul (the 32-foot-tall Randy’s doughnut at the intersection of Manchester and La Cienega boulevards isn’t a beautiful building, but is achingly loved in this regard), this exercise in reading the city is a gutsy move toward provocation. What arouses insecurity or superficiality? What makes us satis-fied or uncomfortable? What prods the sense of territorial ownership and the desire to defend it? Go on, Angeleno, take an unabashedly judgmental look at the city. Practice description. Offend someone. It’s a good debate to have, and it contributes to a broadened col-lective sentiment about our shared city. More important, it changes the way that “ugly” operates.

Eighty percent of Southern California’s buildings are more than 50 years old; the need for renovations is arriving quickly in Los Angeles. An inspired transformation that usurps the potential of ugly buildings will only be initiated by looking with an interested eye rather than a disdainful one. The freewheeling methodology of urbanism set in motion by developers and archaic

power players still makes for a scenario in which the private sector can build whatever it wants. Ugly buildings are now poised to enable the next incar-nation of L.A.’s slow-motion makeover: one with mixed-up boundaries, or a yet-unnamed hybrid, a shortcut, a parking structure that’s lived in or shopped in, an office park that’s a gathering area and a public landmark, or a manipu-lated street facade that changes traffic patterns. Rethinking the psychological and physical space in the city through a reimagining of its most typical buildings is easy to conjure—just step out on the street and start looking.

This chapter can be found in the re-cently published anthology LAtitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas. Ed. Patricia Wakida. Heyday, Berkeley California, 2015.

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Contributors Rob Berry is an architect. He is principal of Berry and Linné, an architecture and design practice based in Los Angeles, and former vice president of development of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Berry teaches in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.

Ian Besler is a designer, researcher, and writer whose work explores relationships between interfaces, media, software, and cities. His practice is especially situated in user-centered design, fabrication, modeling, and iterative making. Besler’s background is in journalism and graphic design, and he holds a B.S. in news-editorial journalism from the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MFA from the Media Design Practices program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he was the 2014 Milken Family Foundation Post-Graduate Design Fellow. Besler was raised in Chicago and is based in Los Angeles.

Steven Chodoriwsky is an artist, writer, and design researcher. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Wendy Gilmartin is a registered architect, journalist, and partner at FAR frohn&rojas in Los Angeles. Gilmartin has helped realize notable public and private design projects in the region, including Grand Park in down-town Los Angeles, the 2013 AIA restaurant design award–winning Nobu Malibu, and an artists’ retirement community at the edge of the Salton Sea. She has written for LA Weekly, KCET’s Artbound, The Houston Press, Coagula Art Journal, Glasstire Visual Art & Review, The Dallas Observer, and in the recently published anthology LAtitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon trained first as a dancer in her native San Francisco. Then, as a recently widowed mother of one, she traveled in the 1950s to Switzerland, where she studied graphic design under Armin Hoffman. So assiduously did she absorb the master’s hard-line Modernist doctrine that even when she returned to America to work as a jobbing designer, she doggedly stuck to the rigors of Swiss design at a time when, as she notes, “psychedelic squiggles” were the norm. Despite her varied and inspira-tional career, she is best known for the epoch-defining Supergraphics she created for Sea Ranch in 1960s California.

Editors Wendy GilmartinMimi Zeiger

DesignDante CarlosRiver Jukes-HudsonStephen Serrato

This publication is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs

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