A rebirth of cool, as "Shade LA" seeks great designs for heat-reduction on the streets

Dear DnA friends,

Hope you are doing well, especially now the world has been set to rights with the restoration of the Cracker Barrel logo, and the engagement of America’s Prince and Princess.

Now let's get gloomy.

Rebirth of Cool

In a region that boomed due to love of the sun, it is hard to make the case for shade.

But that’s exactly what a coalition of schools and policymakers are doing with a campaign, Shade LA, and a newly launched design competition, Shade Zones.

Millions of visitors are expected to descend on Los Angeles for the World Cup, Super Bowl, and Olympic and Paralympic Games. Organizers hope many of them will get around using public transport, which currently means getting scorched at bus stops and on sidewalks devoid of any protection from the sun.

Lack of shade has long been a problem in the Southland, especially in less affluent neighborhoods, and its dangers are growing with intensifying heatwaves. So the forthcoming mega events are providing an impetus for change.

A Shade LA coalition (helmed by Public Exchange at USC Dornsife and UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation) has partnered with USC Architecture School and LA Metro to create Shade Zones, a competition that tasks students with imagining “modular, temporary shade that can go up fast around public hot spots like bus stops, event spaces, and parks.” Think sails, curtains, canopies, awnings and tents and pavilions. Or something in the spirit of the gorgeous Interwoven, the temporary, shaded seating that I got to relax in at this year's Venice Biennale, designed by Enter Projects Asia (below).

Structure in Venice, Italy, photo by Summer Bennett Stein, IMG_3153 Interwoven, by Enter Projects Asia, at the Venice Biennale 2025. Photo by Summer Bennett Stein.

Amplifying LA's supply of shade is an exciting initiative which also demands something of a shift in self-identity in the region known for both sunshine and noir, but generally favoring the former.

After all, in its early boom years, many people moved to Los Angeles for the curative powers of sunlight. In his new book, Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource, environmental journalist Sam Bloch points out that in US cities at that time, “solar codes were written into urban plans, and new materials and technologies allowed architects to design brighter buildings flooded with natural daylight.”

Exhibit A is the Lovell Health House, designed by Richard Neutra (see Design Things to Do, below), which proudly incorporated snazzy innovations like glass admitting ultra-violet light. Or there is the skinny palm tree, which came to take the place of generous arboreal canopy, in an LA where residents increasingly sped through the sunshine in an open-topped car rather than perambulating on shaded sidewalks.

So Shade LA is asking designers for a rebirth of cool.

76 gas station, Beverly Hills, IMG_7496 Bring me sunshine. The 76 gas station and palm trees in Beverly Hills. Photo by Frances Anderton.

The competition, which calls for "digital-first" designs, is open to all graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in LA County colleges and universities. Registration opens today and closes on October 15th. A jury of public sector leaders, design experts, and community members will be announced soon, and they will confer a range of awards. Designs may be showcased at Metro stations and other public spaces across the city.

As for anyone who is not at school but would also like a bit more shade in their life, the Shade LA coalition urges you to take the "Shade LA pledge."

Design Things To Do

A PIERfect Benefit
Saturday, September 6th, 3:30 PM–7:30 PM
200 Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA

On checking out Angeleno magazine’s "6 Iconic L.A. Landmarks That Stand the Test of Time," I was pleased to see one of my neighborhood favorites, the Santa Monica Pier, make the cut.

It is a timely reminder of what is dear about the pier, first opened in 1909, with its old-world funfair out there in the salty sea air.

So if you treasure it too, you may want to head over to the historic Looff Hippodrome (home of the carousel) this Saturday afternoon when the Santa Monica Pier Corporation will host its first fundraiser.

Financial support from the city and sponsorship world has dried up since the pandemic, explains James Harris, Executive Director of the nonprofit Corporation and author of Santa Monica Pier: A Century on the Last Great Pleasure Pier. So now they need to raise funds to support maintenance of jewels like the 1916 Hippodrome and public programming on the pier, from Wellness & Waves to Save the Pier, a forthcoming play about how the Pier was saved from demolition to make way for a 35-acre artificial island in the bay!

Click here to buy tickets (students can enter the discount code SMSTUDENT for 75% off). Or show your love simply by having a fun day out at the pier.

Photo by Frances Anderton.

Party at the Wende Museum for the Glorya Kaufman Community Center
Wende Museum, 10858 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90230
Saturday, September 6th, 6:00–9:00 PM

Some 20+ years ago, historian Justinian Jampol founded the Wende Museum, a fascinating collection of Cold War-era artifacts he had found in Eastern Bloc countries. For several years, it was located, oddly, in an office park in Culver City, with a chunk of the Berlin Wall sitting out front.

Jampol next secured a former United States National Guard Armory building and transformed it, with designer Michael Boyd, into an airy museum with a cactus garden for parties and talks, while mounting shows like the current Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency, a look at the historical roots of the surveillance software and hardware that has been “supercharged” by recent technological advances.

Now they’ve added the Glorya Kaufman Community Center, a century-old theater that has been renovated and expanded by AUX Architecture, to include classroom and meeting spaces for local nonprofits, and on-site housing for refugee artists.

This Saturday, they will host a public party to celebrate the opening of this latest evolution of the Wende, whose German name means "turning point" or "change."

Click here for details about this free, public event.

Glorya Kaufman Center, Wende Museum, 2025, photo by Frances Anderton The Glorya Kaufman Community Center, 2025. Photo by Frances Anderton.

Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House
Conversation with the authors – In-Person and on Zoom
Sunday, September 7th, 11:00 AM–12:30 PM
2379 Glendale Boulevard, Silver Lake

AND

Screening of NEUTRA SURVIVAL THROUGH DESIGN
Thursday, September 11th, 5:00–8:00 PM
Silver Screen Theatre at the Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069

As you excitedly await completion of the immaculate restoration of the Lovell Health House (helmed by architects Escher Gunewardena and Barbara Lamprecht), indulge your interest in that seminal work with the new book Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House, 1925-35 (Lundh Humphries/Getty Research Institute, 2025), edited by Edward Dimendberg.

Dimendberg and contributing author Nicholas Olsberg will talk about the book this Sunday at an event hosted by the Society of Architectural Historians. Expect to hear about the in-depth examination of the realization of the radically novel steel frame, concrete, and glass building, and how a media-savvy Neutra kept the world apprised of the project via a stream of articles published in German-speaking publications, like Moderne Bauformen (below).

The conversation takes place, aptly, at the Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design in Silver Lake, and on Zoom.

Click here for details.

Then, get another Neutra fix with a screening of PJ Letofsky's 2019 documentary about Neutra's life and times, being screened at the PDC, as part of its Fall Market week, by the nonprofit Save Iconic Architecture (SIA). It will be followed by a conversation led by Yours Truly with Alan Hess and Barbara Lamprecht.

Click here for details.

Frank Romero: California Dreaming
September 13th to October 25th
Opening reception Saturday, September 13th, 4:00–7:00 PM
1110 Mateo Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Over a six-decade career, the Chicano painter Frank Romero has borne witness to injustices — such as the bigfooting of Boyle Heights by massive freeways and the murder of the reporter Rubén Salazar — with deceptively delightful paintings realized with bold, energetic brush strokes in vivid color.

Now comes California Dreaming, at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, a solo exhibition featuring famous earlier works and new paintings of "abstracted nightscapes" featuring mash-ups of LA icons — vintage cars, glowing neon, palm trees, saguaros, the Brown Derby, the Cinerama Dome, and “playful flying saucers.”

These UFOs, as in the marvelously composed Saucers Seen Over Hollywood, 2025 (below), bear a “cheeky resemblance to sombreros,” and are partly jokey. “When I was growing up, the UFO wasn't just related to science fiction; it was symbolic of a primordial fear of something coming. I thought it was rather silly,” says the artist.

Click here for details.

Frank Romero Frank Romero, Saucers Seen Over Hollywood, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 in (182.9 x 243.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

What I'm Digging

Let's Clear the Air

While on the theme of sunshine and noir... PBS has released a fascinating documentary about LA's historic war on smog. Clearing the Air: The War on Smog, produced by the American Experience out of WGBH public TV station, takes viewers back to the days when Angelenos could barely see due to the eye-stinging, noxious blend of sun-heated, exhaust pipe hydrocarbons. The struggle to figure out the cause of smog, and the fight to ameliorate it, is told with vivid archival stills and footage, and expert interviews. Sadly, this story of triumph over environmental blight comes with bad news. As explained by my former KCRW colleague Evan George, the 13-person team in Boston behind the American Experience has been laid off thanks to the defunding of public media.

Anti-smog protestors picketing the County Supervisors, Oct. 13, 1955. Credit: LA Public Library

Love as Timeless as an Oil Painting

In the media game of who can come up with the freshest take on the Swift-Kelce betrothal, perhaps the most highbrow came from the BBC, which offered an art historical analysis of the now ubiquitous image posted on Swift's Instagram (below). It echoes "a long tradition in art history of meticulously choreographed courtship," said Auntie Beeb, invoking artists from Van Eyck to Fragonard. "However candid the snapshot seems, it follows rules... not the "four cs" of the gemmologist — cut, colour, clarity and carat — but the "six cs" of love in old masters: Contract, Confinement, Covertness, Conflict, Ceremony, Composure. Fun. Can't wait for the wedding pics.

@TaylorSwift/Instagram

Caped Crusaders

Whenever possible, I like to end on a cat story, usually one that involves kitty doing nothing except being cute. But cats also have a job to do, at least according to GOP Mayoral hopeful Curtis Sliwa, who — in a bid to win against candidate Zohran Mamdani — proposes unleashing feral cats on New York's rat problem. Having grown up in the UK, where outdoor cats tend to be the norm (a contentious issue, I know), this sounded like common sense. But it turns out, cats may not even be up to the task. A little digging unearthed this Wired report about a Brooklyn-based researcher who found that "the vast majority of the time, the cats showed basically zero interest in the rats." Back to the sofa.

Twinkle has better things to do than work for a living. Photo by Frances Anderton.

That's it for this week. Thank you as always for reading.

Yours,
Frances

P.S. Subscribe to the KCRW Design and Architecture newsletter here, get back issues here, and reach out to me at francesanderton@gmail.com.