|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dear DnA readers,
I hope you’re doing well. Party season is upon us — Modernism Week! Art Fairs (Frieze, LA Art Fair, Felix, at the Roosevelt Hotel, above)! Desert X! Oscars! — though it's hard to celebrate amidst the ruins.
Jump ahead for Design Things to Do, and What I'm Digging (Norbot and Cat more than The Brutalist!). Stay on this page for notes on the fires.
I'm sure you are tracking the support and ideas for recovery that are erupting like spring blooms, even from sources as unlikely as the musician Grimes — who co-authored this article in The Atlantic about speeding up the building permit process by outsourcing it to licensed third-party architects and engineers. You could view this as an echo of her sometime partner Elon Musk's hostility to government workers, except that the LA City permitting process is notoriously glacial (thanks in part to too few staff), holding up the construction of much-needed housing. Now some lawmakers are getting behind a radical change. This is just one of many aspects of construction that may get shaken up, as LA faces a rebuild on a scale that demands ambitious solutions.
Listen up to KCRW's ATC on Thursday, when I'll report from Altadena about how a couple plans to rebuild in the high-risk fire zone; and follow FORT: LA for some upcoming public conversations, "Straight Talk about Building Back," that I'll moderate as part of Heart of Los Angeles.
 Kaufman House, designed by Richard Neutra. Photo Credit David A. Lee/Modernism Week.
As for Modernism Week, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, I just attended the opening weekend, and while there did a Q&A with Raymond Neutra, son of the legendary architect Richard Neutra. It marked the hundredth anniversary of Neutra’s 1925 arrival in Los Angeles, where he proved so influential for LA’s lifestyle and global image, with his biophilic approach to architecture, embedding elemental houses in nature, exquisitely modern in the wild.
That architecture and lifestyle however is the one we've just seen go up in smoke. Three Neutra houses in the Pacific Palisades were burned to the ground in the Palisades Fire. Raymond Neutra revealed that his father’s most famous house, the Lovell Health House in Los Feliz, narrowly escaped immolation just before it was completed. (The Neutra VDL House in Silver Lake also burned down, though not from wildfire, and was rebuilt.) So it was hard not to separate the iconic California home, celebrated at Modernism Week, from its vulnerability.
There is a conversation underway about a future in which we might rebuild sustainably in ways that go beyond simply making the replacement house fire-resistant. This was eloquently laid out in a LinkedIn post by the land use attorney and property developer Alfred Fraijo.
He writes that recovery must be equitable, prioritize the people who form the backbone of our communities, and also, “We must use this moment to rethink how we plan and build our neighborhoods...Climate change has altered our landscape in irreversible and life-altering ways. Our recovery efforts must prepare us for the future, not simply recreate the comforts of the past. We need to embrace density, with taller, greener, and more affordable housing in areas with robust resources.”
Neutra himself modeled green, affordable housing. He worked on public housing set amidst wildflowers in San Pedro during the war, he designed and built lovely low-rise apartment complexes, steeped in greenery, in Westwood Village. He also designed, with his onetime host and friend R.M. Schindler, the 1929 radical, “International Style” Marathon Apartments in East Hollywood, nicknamed Jardinette (little garden).
This building expressed early twentieth-century ideas in interwar Europe about living well in very small spaces. The petite apartments had open plans, built-in cabinets, Murphy beds, borrowed light via translucent glass panes, a kitchen planned as a “machine for the preparation of meals,” and "little gardens" in pots on balconies.
Jardinette was originally intended for the luxury market, but thanks to the Depression and the sudden disappearance of its owner who didn’t pay his bills, fell quickly downmarket and became what is known as “naturally occurring affordable housing” for many years until it was finally shuttered in 2018. At his talk this past Saturday, Raymond Neutra shared the exciting news that a restoration is underway under the direction of architect and Neutra expert Barbara Lamprecht and that Jardinette will reappear as low-income housing.
Unfortunately, the city is not helping advance the cause of great apartment living: according to the article co-penned by Grimes, the permitting process for apartments on safer ground has been slowed down as permits for replacement houses lost to the fires jump to the front of the queue! As the French would say, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Read on for designers who are trying to bring about change.
 Jardinette, aka Marathon Apartments. Photo shown in Common Ground, courtesy California State Library.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
.jpg?upscale=true&width=712&upscale=true&name=Helmut%2BLang%2B(replacement%2Bimage).jpg)
%20loveletters/email(600x74).png?upscale=true&width=1200&upscale=true&name=email(600x74).png "email(600x74)")
Wallace, Gromit, and the naughty gnome. Image courtesy Netflix.com
