I hope you are doing well and enjoying the fall busy season, which heats up this weekend.

We’ve had several months of openings of big-ticket cultural places: the LACMA David Geffen Galleries, Dataland, Lauren Halsey’s sister dreamer, and the Lucas Museum (packed this past opening weekend with visitors wandering not only its exhibition spaces but also its free library and scenic gardens, where even the most serious art lover has to crack a smile at the Yoda fountain, below).

Photo by Frances Anderton

So now it’s time to turn our attention to the smaller stars in the LA design firmament, which will be sparkling citywide this week, courtesy of the West Hollywood Design District, which holds its twice-yearly ArtWalk on October 3rd, and LA Design Week/end.

The latter, a continuation of the model previously established by the similarly named LA Design Festival, is a decentralized flowering of events where designers, architects, showrooms and galleries open their doors for a range of ticketed talks and public open houses. LADW has moved to the fall, and from three to five days, September 30th–October 4th, with some 130 exhibitors spread over 15 Los Angeles neighborhoods.

Deodar Cedar and Coast Redwood seating at Platform Park, designed by Terremoto. Image courtesy Terremoto/ACL

LADW kicks off Wednesday with events spanning rooftop cocktails at Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel and a pop-up at Angel City Lumber in Boyle Heights — that you might want to attend if you love the smell of wood or the roughened shape of a knotty tree trunk.

The company sources logs “from fallen trees in residential, municipal, and national forests within Los Angeles County.” It sometimes names and builds a story around them, and saws, sands and buffs them to usability as benches, tables, and more, by designers of landscapes and interiors who seek wood with a deep personality, such as at Uchi (designed by ORA) in West Hollywood, below.

Following the Eaton Fire, which destroyed many homes and much-loved trees, ACL launched The Altadena Reciprocity Project, a nonprofit aimed at repurposing fire-damaged trees into usable lumber for Altadena residents who are rebuilding. Find out more about it at their showcase taking place from 5:00–10:00 PM Wednesday night.

Uchi, West Hollywood; photo by Eric Staudenmaier, courtesy ORA

The LADW attractions are too numerous to list; suffice it to say there is something for everybody: for example, a talk about public space in Los Angeles and the women shaping it at NCA Studio’s Open House, a group show at Alabaster in Echo Park, including rugs made by the LA-Delhi mother-daughter duo at Agnya Living (below), or a journey back in time to The Paul McCobb Museum, a Silver Lake treasure founded by self-described "conceptual archaeologist" Yogi Proctor.

Click here for all the details, and now read on for more Design Things to Do!

THE BANJARA in PANJIM 12; image courtesy Agnya Living

Design Things To Do

Top Pick: Material Beauty

Who would have thought that curtains would become one of the most talked-about features of LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries? But that’s what happened after the museum turned to the Japanese designer Reiko Sudō to help figure out how to screen the heat and light that would otherwise blast the artworks through the floor-to-ceiling glass perimeter of the building. After much iterating with architect Peter Zumthor, she came up with the diaphanous, metallic wonder, LACMA x NUNO Sputtered Chrome.

Photo by Frances Anderton

Now you can see a stretch of the cloth, amidst many others, in Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudō & NUNO, just opened in the Resnick Pavilion. This lovely survey of inventive fabrics and fibers created by Sudō and her textile collective NUNO shows how her collaborations with artisans and clients — including the architects Kengo Kuma and Toyo Ito — bring together traditional handcraft, technological experimentation, and a painterly eye.

Photo by Frances Anderton

On a recent visit, curator Sharon Takeda, above, explained how the designer created a fabric by applying mercury droplets to silk plain-weave organza, above left, and another involving wet rayon and rusted iron. Her Nami osa (“Wavy Reed” / “Reed Ripple”), top of page, is made of stainless steel. You can enjoy the show and also buy the product. A pop-up of the original Nuno shop in Tokyo is part of the exhibition, complete with its first Maneki-neko good luck cat! 

Quick Picks

Robotics in architecture x 2 at SCI-Arc…. This Wednesday, September 30th, 6:00 PM, hear from Dutch designer Lucas ter Hall, of Studio RAP, about his Bespoke Ceramics in Architecture and how he uses technology to “reintroduce expressive ornament into the built environment.”

New Delft Blue, a 3D-printed ceramic facade. Image courtesy Studio RAP

Then on Wednesday, October 7th, 6:00 PM, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, of Oyler Wu Collective, share their work, including the 2025 Dunhua Tower in Taiwan, below, and their new book, Puzzling Assemblies, with a foreword by Thom Mayne, examining “the robust relationship between architectural concepts and puzzle logics.”

Image courtesy Oyler Wu Collaborative

Following the 2025 Palisades fire, the architect Clive Wilkinson and his firm teamed with a group of homeowners and Comstock builders to create Seaview Homes — leveraging economies of scale to deliver easy breezy SoCal homes at a reasonable cost. Wilkinson will talk about rebuilding in the Palisades, with me and other guest speakers Reza Akef, Metro Capital Builders, and Christine Ross, Addition Building & Design. It takes place next Sunday, October 11th, at 12:30 PM, as part of the October Recovery Expo, hosted by the PaliBu Chamber of Commerce. Click here to RSVP.

Rendering of Seaview Home. Image courtesy Clive Wilkinson Architects

L.A. writer Jade Chang had fun with the pretensions of the art world and other contemporary mores in her debut novel The Wangs vs. the World. Now Chang, also an esteemed design critic, has taken on the wellness industry in the internet age, in What a Time to be Alive, about Lola Treasure Gold, a grieving 31-something who becomes an accidental self-help guru. Chang is launching the paperback at The Loved One on October 8th, from 7:30 PM–10:00 PM, with a curated “marketplace of experiences.” Expect a Flower Machine and “Confrontational Sandwich Bar” among other creative treats. Info and RSVP here.

Portion of the cover of Chang's new novel  What a Time to be Alive

Also, at UCLA, on October 12th, 5:30–7:30 PM, cityLAB, the mighty little think tank that co-created Small Lots, Big Impacts and propelled the state’s game-changing ADU legislation, considers what LA problem it should solve next. It takes place at UCLA AUD’s Perloff Decafe and Courtyard. Click here for information. 

Jardin Truillot, Paris. Photo by Joséphine Brueder/Ville de Paris. Image courtesy GPSC

In the newly opened exhibition Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias, curator Wendy Kaplan and Grace Converse “have assembled an extraordinary array of objects and images to show how the US was transformed in those six decades and how the optimism of that era soured,” writes critic Michael Webb. See furniture, photos, magazine articles and films displaying the breadth of ideas for future living, from the all-plastic "Monsanto House of the Future (1956)" to the hippy-era "Environment for Contemplation," a biomorphic shell with a black shag-lined interior by Wendell Castle (1970). The show is accompanied by The Kitchen and Its Discontents, based around two groundbreaking kitchens from LACMA’s collection: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s post-WW1 Frankfurt kitchen, and Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier’s post WW2 kitchen for L’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France. Terrific! 

Environment for Contemplation, designed by Wendell Castle. Photo by Frances Anderton

What I'm Digging

Laughing... as Jalen Brunson, captain of the New York Knicks, has fun on Saturday Night Live as the office worker who can’t shoot a paper ball into the trash can, among other skits. But Jane Wickline killed it as a nervy, self-soothing Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO and co-founder. Reflecting on the real-world AI industry wake-up call penned by Amodei, Wickline captured the weirdness of now, deadpanning to Michael Che that “Sam Altman, myself, all the major AI players... We do not condone what we are doing… but I want to assure you that if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me.” This Atlantic review explains just why this skit was so good. 

Still from SNL Weekend Update, on YouTube

Inspired by… Together California, a foster care village built by actor Christian Bale, his wife Sibi, and supporters, designed by LA firm A.C. Martin. I am no expert on the foster care system, but this seems to offer much to admire — from the longtime, deep commitment to this project by the duo, to the design and social concept, which aims to keep siblings together and create a community of foster parents in a cluster of homes around a shared central courtyard. The goal for Bale and team, explained The New York Times, is to “transform an experience that can be isolating in its challenges” into one that “instead nurtures community.” 

Image courtesy A.C. Martin

Learning from builders … LA has been driven by ceaseless growth, but it is in a slump right now, despite numerous policy measures aimed at stimulating more housing for low- and middle-income workers. Builders share their thoughts about why, in The Good Developer series for Friends of Residential Treasures Los Angeles. In this latest interview, Sandy Albert (Citypads) doesn’t mince words about the obstacles to development (ULA! DWP!), the pointlessness of "gentle density," and his love and admiration for his apartment-designing architect, his dad Steve (Albert Group).

Photo by Frances Anderton

What I'm NOT Digging

Opaque Olympics

For anyone wondering why it is so hard to get a sense of what is going on with the Olympic and Paralympic Games scheduled to take place in under two years from now, this report in the LA Times helps shine a light in the fog. City Controller Kenneth Mejia says recent annual reports from organizer LA28 contain insufficient details about contractors and their fees, listing instead vague “categories of the work completed — such as “engineering consulting services,” “mascot design and production,” and “office buildout.”

Not only is the scant information troubling for the fiduciary reasons explained in the article, but LA28’s opacity, not to mention the city’s, is making it hard for the rest of us to get in the spirit of the much-touted “Games for All.” After all, when dribs and drabs of information come our way, they can be exciting, like the newly announced L.ocal A.uthentic Program for an Angeleno favorite: food trucks. 

La Oveja Food Truck LA; Image courtesy Food Truck Connector

That's it for now. Thank you as always for reading this newsletter. Send design news, questions, and comments to francesanderton@gmail.com. Get back issues here. Remind your friends to sign up for the newsletter here.

Yours with very best wishes,
Frances