Frame The Future! design competition, "Planetary Punk" at SCI-Arc, Ryan Preciado at Hollyhock House, "We Buy Souls" on show, Paws on Parchmont, and much more
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Dear DNA readers,
I hope you’re doing well, despite the Dear Leader's ongoing "rupture" of "order" overseas and at home.
Amidst all the stuff that’s hair-raising, however, one initiative relating to housing affordability, expected to be announced by POTUS at Davos on Wednesday, piques interest: a plan to ban large institutional investors from buying single-family houses. Real estate investment trusts, or REITs, most infamously Blackstone, scooped up thousands of homes following the '08 crash and during Covid, and turned them into rentals. This mass acquisition is considered by some experts to be a cause of today’s lack of affordable homes (but hard to untangle given that many pension funds invest in REITs).
One of the other factors affecting affordability is the simple lack of supply. A housing advocate remarked to me recently that if San Francisco and Los Angeles had built in-step with their rocketing economic development over the last decades, by now San Francisco would be the Manhattan of America, and LA, well, LA would be a towering megalopolis.
Instead, LA lurches along, caught in a push-me-pull-you between voters for and against growth. Despite numerous measures and incentives, passed locally and in Sacramento, aimed at speeding up the production of housing, construction in the city of Los Angeles has been dropping (unlike San Diego, which is "more welcoming to developers.")
You can find out some of the reasons why in an upcoming conversation hosted by Westside Urban Forum, or WUF, (see, Design Things to Do). And you can help sell Angelenos on the idea of exciting housing by entering Frame the Future! LA’s Housing Manifesto + Poster Showdown, an open competition and public exhibition that calls on creatives to use “powerful visual and verbal messaging to boldly make the case for a new residential dream for the Southland.”
Frame The Future; image courtesy FORT: LA
This competition is produced by Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles (FORT: LA) and me, in partnership with local nonprofits, including the aforementioned WUF, and KCRW. The notion is that there are many good ideas percolating in LA for accommodating the next generation; the sticky part is persuading a skeptical public and slow-moving bureaucracy to push for them.
Cash prizes will go to winners selected by a jury of graphic designers, developers, architects, advocates, elected officials, and world builders. They include designer Silas Munro, councilmember Nithya Raman, and futurist Liam Young.
Young is known for thinking really big with his Planet City concept, in which the world’s 10 billion people would be shoehorned into one gigantic city, leaving the rest of Mother Earth wild. He has expanded on that idea in Planetary Imaginaries, his upcoming exhibition at SCI-Arc (see, Design Things To Do), in which “vast restoration projects, geoengineered skies, planetary infrastructures” (image above) are delivered in a “Planetary Punk” aesthetic.
So, enter Frame The Future, and read on for more exciting Design Things to Do.
Design Things To Do
The State of Development in LA A conversation hosted by Westside Urban Forum Thursday, January 22nd, 7:45–10:00 AM Helms Design Center, 8745 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232
"With so many state and local legislative changes aimed at making development easier and demand still running hot, why does development still seem to be cooling?"
That’s a great question being posed by Westside Urban Forum (WUF), and luckily, you will hear some answers at their State of Development breakfast panel discussion, taking place this Thursday morning, with speakers Donna Shen Tripp, Jack Wickersham III, and Gabe Hungerford.
Not only does WUF host very engaging discussions, but they typically provide excellent breakfast burritos.
Ryan Preciado: Diary Of A Fly January 22nd–April 25th, 2026 Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Last year, Ryan Preciado added another layer to the experience of the Schindler House with an installation of artful furniture. Now he's intervening Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House with furniture, sculptures, and textiles that “contend with the rhythmic patterning of abstracted hollyhock motifs that appear across the house’s furniture and concrete facade.”
Curated by Cole Akers, the exhibition, Diary of a Fly, takes its title from a 1930s composition by Béla Bartók "that imitates the frenzied pace of a fly." Looking at the soft-focus, dreamy images by Roman Koval of Preciado’s bright-yellow Eight Different Ways (below), he seems to have calmed down the fly.
While there, be sure to catch Even by Proxy, Janna Ireland’s show of photos of Hollyhock House building details, extended through April 25th.
Ryan Preciado, Eight Different Ways, 2025, steel, aluminum, and automotive paint. Photo by Roman Koval.
Natura Naturata: Nature’s Action Descanso Gardens, Sturt Haaga Gallery, 1418 Descanso Drive, La Cañada Flintridge, CA 91011 January 24th–May 31st, 2026; Opening reception: Saturday, January 24th, 3:00–5:00 PM; Curator-led tours: January 31st, 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM.
Way before our omnivorous "Anthropocene," the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza came up with the concept of “natura naturata,” or “natured Nature,” meaning nature is "an active system shaped by both natural forces and human intervention," says Claudia Pretelin, curator of Natura Naturata: Nature’s Action, an exhibition opening this Saturday.
Eight established and emerging artists examine humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world in photography, installation, and video. They include “Ivy” by Luciana Abait, below, whose work “imagines a world where humanity does not dominate nature but instead harmoniously integrates with it.”
Liam Young: Planetary Imaginaries SCI-Arc Gallery, 960 E. 3rd Street, DTLA, CA 90013 January 30th–March 8th, 2026; Opening reception: January 30th, 6:00 PM; Artist talk: February 20th, 6:00 PM
With Planet City, the director and worldbuilder Liam Young asked us to imagine a world in which all humans are packed into one giant megalopolis, while the remaining land goes back to the wild.
Even though he and his collaborators imagine super tall buildings and humungous vertical farms, Young's visions do not appear techno-fetishistic; rather, he deploys craft and costume to hold onto ritual and create "new mythologies for an Earth in repair."
In this SCI-Arc exhibition, Young expands his “Planetary Punk” aesthetic with films, speculative architectures, ceremonial costumes, and action figures representing “vast restoration projects, geoengineered skies, planetary infrastructures” – and dancing astronauts!
Hammer Conversations: Shigeru Ban Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, LA, CA 90024 Friday, January 30th, 7:30 PM
“I don't like waste,” says the Pritzer Award-winning architect Shigeru Ban, who has also been described as a "radical humanist."
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Ban pioneered the structural use of recycled cardboard tubes, applying them to cultural buildings and disaster relief architecture deployed across five continents. He even proposed these paper log structures for fire-torn Altadena.
Ban will share his philosophy at a Hammer Conversation next week.
Shigeru Ban Architects, Mt.Fuji World Heritage Centre
Recurrence: paintings by Leo Marmol Chuck Arnoldi's Venice Studio, 721 Hampton Dr, Venice, CA 90291 February 5th–March 1st, 2026; Public opening: Thursday, February 5th, 6:00–8:00 PM
It is always a treat to step inside the Venice studio of longtime artist Chuck Arnoldi. There you can witness both his prolific output as painter and sculptor and, in the thoughtful structural details of his retofitted warehouse, his building skills.
Now there is an added guest: paintings by architect Leo Marmol, principal at Marmol Radziner. Marmol says Recurrence brings together oil-and-wax paintings inspired by his "long engagement with the shifting light and sand of the California landscape alongside a new series centered on cyclical gesture."
How Much is Your Soul worth? We Buy Souls! exhibition Through Saturday, February 14th Good Mother Gallery, 5103 W. Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016
You may have seen the intriguing WE BUY SOULS! flyers posted around town for the past four years. After receiving more than 40,000 voicemails containing “confessions, doubts, and deeply personal reflections,” their creator, the Los Angeles-based artist RABI (David Emanuel Mordechai Torres), has transformed his findings into artworks, now on display at Good Mother Gallery.
In the foreword to a limited edition monograph accompanying the show, Shantell Martin writes that We Buy Souls “explores life itself, what we do with our time and money, how we value ourselves, and where our darkest or most hidden thoughts go when they need a home, giving them a resting place. Would you sell yours? How much is it worth?”
The American Dream is synonymous with alarger, suburban house, writes the Washington Post. Or, as a coliving developer told me once, with wealth increases, people tend to "buy more isolation." But, the WaPo article continues, “as the size of the average American home has nearlydoubled, the people living in them aren’t any happier.” Very interesting article making the emotional and social case for smaller homes.
Incidentally, you can find many examples of exemplary small dwelling designs at Small Lots, Big Impacts (such as Echo Yards, below.)
Echo Yards, Shin Shin Architecture
Vroom, Vroom
Hubby and I share a guilty pleasure: Mustangs. We work hard to suppress our desire for these gas-guzzling all-American dreamboats (and are not sure the all-electric Mach-E has the same oomph.) If they appeal to you too, catch the KCRW Sponsored Experience at Ace Mission Studios in Downtown LA through February 8th: "American Icon: A Mustang Immersive Experience," a “bold, multi-sensory journey through six decades of American culture, told through the legacy of the Ford Mustang.”
"A Mustang Immersive Experience"
Paws on Parchmont
“More than 500 years ago, after dedicating hours to the meticulous transcription of a crucial manuscript, a Flemish scribe set the parchment out to dry — only to later return and discover the page smeared, filled with inky paw prints.” So begins this delightful Smithsonian story about a delightful-sounding show at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Paws on Parchment. Need I say more?
15th-century prayer book featuring an illustrated gray cat. The Walters Museum
Well, that's it for this week. As always, thank you for reading the newsletter. Reach out to me at francesanderton@gmail.com.
Yours, Frances
KCRW 1900 Pico Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90405 You received this email because you are subscribed to Design and Architecture Newsletter from KCRW. Update your email preferences to choose the types of emails you receive. Unsubscribe from all future emails.
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