House museum collects iconic chimneys left after fires; Galka Scheyer, the Ackermans and Clara Porset revisited; Lore Leimert Park opens its doors, Marta at Mahte closes theirs; the meaning of luxury, from the White House to Westmont Village, and much more...
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One of the indelible images left by the fires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena was the surviving brick chimneys, standing eerily like tombstones amidst the ruins of houses. Going forward, many property owners plan to exclude fireplaces from replacement homes, in part because they are obsolete.
But these extant chimneys have captured the imagination, especially among public artists and designers wanting to memorialize the fires, like Evan Curtis Charles Hall. Hall is the Founding Director of House Museum, which calls itself an “alternative preservation agency that uses conceptual art methods to revitalize historic landmarks.”
He has developed Project Chimney, a concept for a public memorial composed of chimneys sourced from destroyed Palisadian homes designed by architects including Lloyd Wright, Paul R. Williams, Richard Neutra, and Ray Kappe. As he recently explained to FORT: LA, which sponsored a design competition, Healing the Heart of LA: Design for Memory, Resilience, and Recovery, “There is a beautiful diversity of chimneys within the Palisades that represent 100 years of design development, from Spanish Colonial to Normandy Revival to ‘Pally Cod’ homes” and on to midcentury modern. He points out that even the bricks have their own history, dating to a time of abundant brick development before stick and stucco dominated construction in L.A."
His concept is for seven chimneys to be installed in a circle, “standing tall like obelisks catching the sun’s rays," reminiscent of Stonehenge. “With each minute, the environment changes with them. The landscape has become a clock, showing the past and counting the days towards recovery.”
Palisades Fire Memorial [Artifact Catalogue G–L], 2025.
Hall is still fundraising for the project and seeking a public location for it. But work has now started on disassembling chimneys promised to him by property owners, and moving them to storage. This week, he and a masonry team led by Dan Ricketts, President of Mason Contractors Association of California (MCAC), embarked on the first, from a 1959 home designed by Ray Kappe for the Hal Erdley Family.
The race is on to source the funding and move the chimneys, says Hall, because on May 31st, a temporary hold on properties will be lifted by the Army Corps of Engineers, meaning the sites will be put into a queue for clearing. But owners have been willing to wait, to preserve these last vestiges of their homes. In a press release issued by House Museum, Kraig Hill, a Project Chimney homeowner (see his extant chimney at top of page), views the forthcoming memorial “not as a mere tribute to past architecture, but as a focal point where the greater community can share their remembrances and collectively process the tragedy.”
"Digital twins" have been captured to aid with reconstruction following disassembly and relocation of the chimneys. Here is a 3D Point Cloud of an Eric Lloyd Wright chimney in the Palisades. Captured by AQYER, LLC..
Design Things To Do
Rediscovering a Modernist Visionary: Clara Porset’s Design Legacy Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024 Wednesday May 28th, 7:30 PM
The designer Clara Porset was born in turn-of-the-century Cuba, studied art, design, and architecture in the US and France, and spent many years in post-revolutionary Mexico, where she, in MOMA's words, "embarked on a journey of design inspired by heritage and tradition."
Deeply engaged with design education and the intellectual and political foment of the time, her contributions have been gathered in a new book, LIVING DESIGN: The Writings of Clara Porset. Her place in global modernism will be discussed at the Hammer Museum on Wednesday evening, in a conversation between Hammer Director Zoë Ryan, co-editor of Living Design; Brenda Danilowitz, editor of Anni Albers: Selected Writings on Design; and Jane Hall, author of Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women.
Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman: California Midcentury Designers Thursday, May 29th, 6:00–8:00 PM CB2, 8000 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90046
Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman were partners in life and work, together creating an outpouring of decorative ceramics, tapestries, wood carvings, textiles, and enamels that embodied midcentury California Modern living, in all its cheerful color, craft, and refined absorption of Bauhaus and Abstract artistic influences.
The Ackermans' legacy is in the spotlight right now. Later this year, both Cranbrook Art Museum and Craft Contemporary in LA will host exhibitions of their work. Meanwhile, “Piece by Piece,” a selection of Evelyn Ackerman’s mosaics, is currently on show at R & Company in NYC.
The book event is at CB2, 8000 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90046. No RSVP necessary.
Image courtesy Laura Ackerman/Craft Contemporary
Out of Office Marva Studio at Mahte, 737 N Western Ave, Suite C, Los Angeles, CA 90042 Finissage, May 30th, 5:00–9:00 PM
The Mexican designer José Bañuelos works with artisans in San José de Gracia in Michoacán to create decorative functional artworks, using the ceramic technique pastillaje, described by Bañuelos as “a baroque, hand-built approach to clay once reserved for sacred and ornamental purposes.”
For the past few weeks, a collection has been on display in Los Angeles, at Marva Studio at Mahte. This Friday, the show will close out in good cheer with a “finissage.” Come mix and mingle among creations like “El Sol” and “La Luna,” towering cherry red and high-gloss black vessels that “merge celestial symbolism with utilitarian shapes,” or the “Piña Anana Cempasúchil,” the pineapple-shaped sculpture that gives a nod to “the iconic piña form native to the region.”
Click here to RSVP, or email at hola@marva-studio.com.
Now this arts and culture hotspot is opening a new bookstore and creative space “rooted in Black art, design, and storytelling.” It opens this Saturday with a day of “celebration, community, and creativity” and the chance to explore their new space and its books and objects, carefully chosen to spark “curiosity, connection, and cultural discovery.”
Big Picture Josh Sperling atPerrotin Los Angeles, 5036 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019 — May 31–July 3rd, Tuesday - Saturday, 10 AM–6 PM
I’m not fully clear why the colorful modular seating by artist Josh Sperling is fine art when the colorful modular seating of the 1960s and '70s he admires, by the likes of Pierre Paulin and Mario Bellini, was labelled furniture and its creators were designers. Maybe it's the price point and the limited supply; Sperling has made an edition of 10 (+ two artist proofs).
Or maybe it’s that they started life as paintings: the Spectrum Modular Seating, 2025, is a three-dimensional version of Sperling's "Double Bubble" paintings, says the gallery Perrotin Los Angeles, which will host Big Picture, Sperling’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast.
No matter, the flexible chairs look like delicious eye candy, and will be on display starting this Saturday, along with a selection of Sperling's exuberant paintings of interlocking swirls and curls.
Josh Sperling, Spectrum Modular Seating, 2025. Wool, foam, buttons, plywood. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Split Diopter 2 SCI-Arc Gallery, 960 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013 June 6th–July 20th; Opening reception: June 6th, 7:00–9:00 PM
The SCI-Arc Gallery unveils its latest installation, Split Diopter 2 exploring the relationship between fine art and cinema through a meditation on the “split diopter,” a "half-lens applied over an existing one, allowing one side to focus on a nearby object while the other is trained on something farther away, creating an image that is simultaneously shallow and deep."
The curators Reza Monahan, longtime director of the SCI-Arc Channel, and Jan Tumlir, art-writer, teacher, and curator, have assembled photographs, a soundtrack, dance video, and documentary, to provoke reflection on the “general concept of resolution in our data-driven visual economy” in which “contemporary cameras increasingly override human perception, producing evenly distributed, high-definition images where no detail escapes.”
This show opens as SCI-Arc welcomes in a new era with the selection of its next director, the Dutch architect and academic Winka Dubbeldam. Her firm Archi-Tectonics NYC is known for “hybrid sustainable materials, smart building systems, and elegant, innovative structures,” so she sounds like a good fit for the institution founded on realizing experimental architecture through hand-fabrication, and now in the vanguard of computational design. While the school is not touting her gender, Dubbeldam also happens to be the first female director of the school, not to mention she is the first not to have come from within the school’s faculty.
The Galka Scheyer House – A Conversation with Raymond Neutra & Alex Ross: Screening and Discussion Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design, 2379 Glendale Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90039 Saturday, June 7th, 7:00–9:00 PM
One of LA’s more remarkable interwar characters was Galka Scheyer (1889–1945), the German-American painter, art dealer, collector, and pioneer of modern art, who famously championed “The Blue Four” artists: Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Paul Klee.
Scheyer left Germany in 1924, and in 1933, she hired Richard Neutra to build her a house on a perilously steep slope in the Hollywood Hills. It became her home, a gallery and a salon frequented by luminaries including John Cage, László Moholy-Nagy, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg.
The house went on the market last year and was bought by a German art collector who plans to repurpose it as an arts and culture space again, run by a newly founded nonprofit named Blue Heights Arts & Culture, in honor of the street the house is on, Blue Heights Drive (named by Scheyer).
Now, a film has been made to celebrate the reopening and restoration of the Galka Scheyer House, as well as the centennial of Richard Neutra’s arrival in Los Angeles. The Galka Scheyer House – A Conversation with Raymond Neutra & Alex Ross, will be screened publicly for the first time on June 7th at the Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design. View the trailer here.
It will be followed by a conversation between architectural historian Barbara Lamprecht, and Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, principals at EscherGuneWardena Architecture, who will be restoring the Scheyer House.
Still from The Galka Scheyer House. Image courtesy
What I'm Digging
A Renovation Too Far
Your Friends & Neighbors, starring Jon Hamm as “Coop,” the fallen hedge fund manager turned thief of his neighbors’ expensive watches and wines, hit a high point in Episode 8, when Coop’s business manager Barney Choi (Hoon Lee) turned the meaninglessness of limitless luxury into poetry.
“We’ve got rooms in this house we’ve never even used and now we’re building more,” he told Coop, about his ongoing renovation. “Grace spends too much. I spend too much. It’s like a bodily function at this point; we eat, we drink, we buy all this sh*t. Then we talk about the sh*t we bought, and then we talk about other sh*t we’re going to buy, and then we go buy that. Sometimes I just walk around the house and I just look at the sheer volume of sh*t we have and it f**king mystifies me. I mean, when did we become these people? When did our lives get so empty that we have to constantly stuff them full of all this sh*t?"
Who knows if this is how the ultrarich in Westmont Village aka Westchester County really think, but it was great TV. The last episode drops this Friday.
Coop steals ultraluxury watches, like a Richard Mille Felipe Massa. Image courtesy Apple TV.
America the Rococo
Speaking of endless stuff, the current occupant of the White House clearly loves to flaunt it, in a manner far more florid than the "mausoleums of modern luxury" (hubby's phrase) in Westmont Village. But he's not alone, says Emily Keegin, author of this entertaining look back at America's long love affair with Rococo. She writes that Rococo gilt, replacing solid gold, was perfect for an aspirational bourgeoisie. "Rococo was itself revolutionary, in part because it upset the established hierarchy by making molded plaster look as good as solid gold. Four hundred years on, its cheap extravagance is still simultaneously elitist and democratic. Use it as a commoner, and you can feel like a king. Use it as a king and it might just get you guillotined."
President Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer sit in a gilded Oval Office. From Whitehouse.gov
Cool, Calm and Connected
If you yearn for better functioning mass transit in LA County, take heart that the system is being built out, section by section, with a long-awaited link to LAX about to open its doors. Starting June 6th, the LAX/Metro Transit Center, by leading transportation design firm Grimshaw Architects with Gruen Associates, will connect flyers to two light rail lines –– the C and K Lines –– as well as several bus lines including Beach Cities, Big Blue Bus, and Culver City Bus. It's not completely seamless; it is located at Aviation Boulevard and 96th Street, so arrivals have to get a shuttle there from their terminals. But that should change soon too, explains India Mandelkern in Metro's newsletter The Source. In 2026, the Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) will open the Automated People Mover (APM) "seamlessly connecting the airport terminals to our new station." Onwards and upwards!
That's it for this week's newsletter. Thank you so much 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.
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