The Case Study Summit, Sport without Winners, A Cinematic Life Frame-by-Frame, Worst Case Best Fix in the Design Process, RIP Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, and much more....
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Fontana is a “social designer," meaning he explores the impact of design on society. Since childhood, when he became acutely aware of the stressful social sorting around sports, he has set himself the project of rethinking sports games — in ways that downplay winning and emphasize fluidity and "allyship." This involves interchangeable uniforms, three-team games, and other innovations that have been acquired by MoMA and showcased in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
In some ways, this effort might be quixotic, but it's also fascinating, and Fontana will tell us all about it at this event next Thursday. Find out more in Design Things To Do, below, along with many other attractions, including a book and exhibition of intriguing movie set photography by set designer Lauri Gaffin (image, above), and a "Case Study Summit" about two post-fire rebuilding programs that take inspiration from John Entenza’s legendary Case Study House program.
Speaking of rebuilding, a challenge confronts those longing to get back to their once bucolic lives in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. The very thing that makes life in the hills so alluring — the home embedded in vegetation — may be outlawed as state authorities, insurance companies, firefighters, and forestry managers push for five-foot-wide buffers around houses that are kept largely devoid of trees and other plants. They say this is the only way to protect properties in "very high fire hazard severity zones."
Homeowners and many environmental experts have mounted a challenge to what they see as a blanket rule that doesn’t make sense in many situations, on grounds that "urban fires are spread more from house to house than plants to house, and many irrigated trees and other plants can actually protect structures from fire." They foresee homes surrounded by treeless moats of concrete that don't even provide fire resilience.
Following many months of discussion in Sacramento, two public meetings will be held this week: an early evening Community Town Hall with Supervisor Jeff Gorell on Wednesday, September 17th at the Ventura County Fire Headquarters in Newbury Park, Ventura County; and an all-day meeting with representatives from the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection's Zone 0 Regulatory Advisory Committee on Thursday, September 18th, at Pasadena Convention Center.
Share your thoughts at these meetings, read more about Zone Zero in the LA Times, and stay tuned for more reporting on KCRW in the coming days.
Design Things To Do
The Case Study Summit A Conversation hosted by FORT: LA Monday, September 22nd, 5:00–6:00 PM On Zoom
The Case Study House program was founded in 1945 with the goal of adapting wartime-era technologies and materials into future-forward, mass-produced, middle-class homes for a peacetime economy.
Now, eighty years later, the devastation caused by the Eaton and Palisades fires of 2025 has called again for radical housing solutions. Enter two initiatives: Case Study: Adapt™ and Case Study 2.0. One offers bespoke designs by ten selected architects for fire-struck homeowners; the other makes available a catalog of pre-approved Standard Plans from 50 architects, intended for wide use and greater housing affordability. Both aim for innovative design and fire and climate resilience.
Just how they will achieve these goals is the topic of The Case Study Summit, a conversation hosted by FORT: LA, with the leaders and two of the architects from these programs: Case Study: Adapt — Dustin Brammell and Nicholas Hofstede (Johnston Marklee & Associates); Case Study 2.0 — Alison MacCracken and Brandon Welling (Morphosis Architects).
I will talk with them about the programs’ similarities and differences, their applicability to today’s challenges, and to what extent they advance the visionary goals of the original Case Study House program.
Case Study 2.0, a "resilient house" for a typical Los Angeles lot, designed by Morphosis.
Designing Togetherness: Sport by Design Thursday, September 25th, 7:00–9:00 PM Helms Design Center, 8745 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232
Winners and losers, the strong and the weak. Nothing creates tribes and pecking orders like sport, which equates to war minus the shooting, as George Orwell once observed. But does it have to be that way?
Not according to designer Gabriel Fontana, who has set himself the project of reinventing sporting games “to reflect the values of today’s generation: mental well-being, fluid identity, and social justice.”
Fontana co-created Multiform, a new team sport game, with transformable uniforms (so the teams continually change), and alternative sports field layouts. His concepts are held in MoMA’s collection and were on show during the Paris Olympics. He transformed the Dutch Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale into an alternative sports bar, containing “a fluid foosball table that subverts binary thinking,” and “anti-trophies” celebrating values like solidarity and vulnerability.
Fontana will share his fascinating and provocative concepts next Thursday, at a conversation with me, hosted by Villa Albertine, The French Institute for Culture and Education, LA Design Festival, and Helms Design Center.
SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness, 2025 Venice Biennale. Photo courtesy Giulia Virgara
Architecture After the Fires: LA in Progress
SCI-Arc Open Call for Designs
Submissions close Friday September 26th (Exhibition: Friday, October 3rd– Sunday, October 5th)
Many homeowners who lost homes in the Eaton and Palisades fires have expressed their desire to recreate something very similar to their prior house. Meanwhile, a good number of architects see the burned-out properties and neighborhoods as an opportunity for innovation — in fire resiliency, material choices, land-use, and more.
As with the Case Study revisited programs, above, the experimental school SCI-Arc wants to model new paths forward — and wants your ideas for how to do so.
The school's Resilient Futures Task Force has put out an open call for "submissions of architectural plans and concepts in the zones recently affected by wildfires." These will be judged by Michael Rotondi, Neil Denari, Eric Owen Moss, Hernán Díaz Alonso, and Winka Dubbeldam, and selected projects will be displayed at the SCI-Arc HQ.
Resilient Futures Task Force, Marti Vera Marsal; image courtesy SCI-Arc.
Moving Still: A Cinematic Life Frame-by-Frame. Booksigning: Arcana: Books on the Arts Saturday, September 27th, 4:00–6:00 PM 8675 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232
AND
Exhibition: Galerie XII, Bergamot Station, Gallery #B2 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90404 Saturday, October 4th — November 22nd, 4:00–6:00 PM
Lauri Gaffin is a longtime set decorator and photographer whose work has been featured in numerous Hollywood films, including Fargo, Charlie’s Angels, Iron Man, Thor, and Captain Marvel.
While working, she documented life on set, and some of her photographs are the subject of a new book, Moving Still: A Cinematic Life Frame-by-Frame (Damiani Books), written with Florence Fellman, and introduced by LACMA photography curator Britt Salvesen. Arcana Books will host a book signing with Gaffin and Fellman next Saturday, September 27th.
Highlights of the book include images and memories of filming Fargo in the “frozen silence and deep isolation of the north in winter,” and reflections on her personal challenges off-set, in observations like, “my immersion in the frivolity of Charlie’s Angels was the antidote to the crises evolving within my family.”
Click herefor details about the booksigning at Arcana Books. Click here for details about the exhibition at Galerie XII.
Cover image, Moving Still, Motel, 2009. Photo courtesy Lauri Gaffin.
Worst Case Best Fix, at LA Design Weekend Sunday, September 28th, 5:30 PM to 10:00 PM; Talk: 6:30 PM Days of Being, 4519 Lexington Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90029
So often we see a design project at its glorious unveiling, and have no clue about the landmines scattered on the road to success. How to manage those challenges is the topic of a conversation hosted by Dezeen magazine and software platform Programa.
Dezeen's US editor Ben Dreith will talk with Anton Yupangco, director at Kelly Wearstler, architect Paul Chan, and Programa co-founder Zoe Lowres about “worst case scenarios to the breakthrough workaround.” You can de-stress at a party to follow.
Worst Case Best Fix is one of the many events that comprise LA Design Weekend (not to be confused with LA Design Festival), the three-day showcase of architecture, interiors, furniture, products, and more taking place from Friday, September 26th–Sunday, September 29th in downtown and in Northeast LA.
CarbonShack Open House Sunday, September 28th, 4:00–8:00 PM
Also, on the LA Design Weekend line-up, an open house and natural wine tasting at the CarbonShack Open House at the Mt. Washington Biophilic ADU, created by Home Front Build, to model integration with nature at a level both delightful and didactic, from its recycled timbers to its decorative tiles inspired by E. coli bacterium.
Nature is the muse at CarbonShack. Photo by Frances Anderton.
Legacy in Motion Sunday, September 28th, 9:30 AM–4:00 PM ArtCenter, Hillside Campus, 1700 Lida St, Pasadena, CA 91103
ArtCenter, co-founded in 1930 by “advertising man” Edward “Tink” Adams, marks its 95th birthday with a ticketed “Day of Creativity, Community and Inspiration” at its Craig Ellwood-designed campus high on the hill.
Attendees will get to witness the school’s outdoor transportation design showcase, and hear from longtime faculty member Matthew Rolston, photographer and director, in a keynote with journalist Christina Binkley, about his “image-making philosophy, the artistic influences that have shaped his career, and his lifelong involvement with the College.”
Automobile prototype in ArtCenter's Mullin Transportation Center, admired by visiting architecture student Matthew "Match" Haak. Photo by Frances Anderton
What I'm Digging
Shark Attack
Seeing the costumes, sets, and technology behind a film can be illuminating or can deflate the magic of the movie. Seeing the Orca fishing boat, and various drawings and prototypes of the model shark in the just-opened Jaws: The Exhibition at the Academy Museum, has the effect of relieving the sheer terror of Spielberg's triumph. You may want to simply revisit the film, being rescreened 50 years later, and, says hubby Robin Bennett Stein, "still a thrill, good enough for a protein spill." Robin has a personal connection to Jaws. He and his brother were vacationing in Martha's Vineyard during filming. They rented a Boston Whaler and floated into Katama Bay. "A guy nearby on a megaphone barked that we were too near the mechanical shark, hoisted up on a pontoon floating dock. 'This is a restricted area, turn around,' the guy said. We got so rattled we took our eyes off the boating charts and ran aground."
Jaws at the Academy Museum. Photo by Frances Anderton
Wool at Work
On one hand, it's exciting to read about ingenious new technologies and materials like these 3D printed homes in Texas designed by Bjarke Ingels Group. It is perhaps a bigger thrill to discover ancient, vernacular materials being revived, such as wool. Sheep's gift to humankind is currently dumped in vast amounts into the landfill, even though, reports Metropolis magazine, "No man-made fiber can rival wool’s ability to filter volatile organic compounds from the air while regulating temperature and moisture and being naturally flame resistant and biodegradable." Happily, some select companies are trying to revive wool for use in buildings, as insulation in place of synthetics like styrofoam. Yay!
It used to be that London Transport, while a vast network, felt clunky and old (Mind The Gap!) Then came architect Nick Grimshaw's sinewy, transparent London's Waterloo International railway station, and more recently, his gleaming white-with-dashes-of-purple identity for the new Elizabeth Line stations, and mass transit became a hot ticket to ride. Now the quiet maestro of British high tech has died, at the age of 85. LA's transit system bears the hand of Grimshaw. The LAX/Metro Transit Center, designed with Gruen Associates, opened in June, yet again making a sleek machine aesthetic out of mobility. RIP Sir Nicholas Grimshaw (October 9th, 1939–September 14th, 2025).
Elizabeth Line at Bond Street, designed by Grimshaw Architects.
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.
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