Dear DNA friends,

I hope you are doing well.

I have recently had several encounters with Angelenos driven by obsession. This past Saturday I was at an event at the Mosaic Mansion, the Mediterranean-style house in the hills whose owner George Ehling spent 47 years cladding the entire building, inside and out, in tile. By all accounts, never a day went by when he did not add some tiles – old, new, patterned, decorated with images from religion, nature, geometry; shiny, matt, smooth, rough –– until he finished the job and soon thereafter died.

A week before, I attended a ceremony to mark the completion of the current phase of Bending The River, the project by environmental artist Lauren Bon and her team at Metabolic Studio to pipe water from the channelized LA River to the Cornfield, now the Los Angeles State Historic Park. Building on her previous artwork Not A Cornfield –– in which she planted the entire park with corn –– she has spent 11 years working to redirect some low flow water through pipes buried into the river. In addition to the engineering which involved removing huge chunks of concrete, Bending The River necessitated getting 80 permits from 27 government agencies, with many more to come. As anyone who has tried to pull a permit knows, getting one is an accomplishment.

This past Sunday I went to the Academy Museum to see the Pope of Trash show honoring the marvelous John Waters (another obsessive; see more below in Design Things to Do) and while there gawped at the scaffolding and emerging structure of the LACMA expansion, now wending its way across Wilshire Boulevard. The jury is out as to whether the completed building will warrant the upset and effort it has taken to get here (the most recent glitch is cost overruns caused by doubling the foundations on finding "soft soil" at the site right next to the tar pits). But the fact that it is under construction now is due to the unflinching determination of Michael Govan, who made rebuilding the campus with the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor his personal goal, on becoming LACMA director in 2006.

Mad obsessives can of course at times be dangerous, but driven people are also wildly inspiring –– think Simon Rodia, builder of the Watts Towers, or Ted Ngoy, the donut king –– and I’ve always felt that LA had a disproportionate number of them, thanks to its role as a boom town, a dream town, a laissez-faire place to come and fulfill a quest, with plenty of cheap land and open space in which to do so. 

So it was with interest that I read recent analyses of population projections for the state of California, which are set to decline by 2060, due to factors including outmigration. According to Newgeography.com, “the real loser is Los Angeles County, where the population is projected to drop from 10,013,000 in 2020 to 8,284,000 in 2060, a loss of 1,729,000. The last time Los Angeles County had this few residents was in 1985.” In this explainer, the Public Policy Institute of California finds that 34% of Californians say they are considering moving out of the state due to housing costs, and by 2060, adults 65+ are projected to make up a larger share of most CA counties.

What this means is that California is becoming a gerontocracy, and I wonder what will become of the Golden State when it is the Gray State. Will there be room for the dreamers, the adventurers, the obsessives? If this matters to people, then we have to think beyond current, localized fights about development and figure out a path to a future with room for middle-income earners and young households that currently have no place to go but elsewhere. (Stay tuned for more from me on "missing middle" housing.)

Flower-filled car at the entrance to Metabolic Studio; Photo: Robin Bennett Stein

Design Things To Do

Modeling Sound:
An Evening of Music and Conversation with Frank Gehry and Esa-Pekka Salonen
Walt Disney Concert Hall, October 24, 8 PM
And Sculpting Harmony
Walt Disney Concert Hall, through October 29
It’s hard to believe that the Walt Disney Concert Hall has turned 20 –– especially after a long road to realize the building that began when the architect Frank Gehry was selected from a shortlist in the late 1980s. As you can see from the image below of the model made by his office then, the early concept was quite different from the final design. It was conceived before the advent of the CATIA 3D CAD design software that Gehry deployed so innovatively to create the wavy-walled building we see today.

Gehry himself shows no sign of taking it easy as he wraps a month of celebrations with a conversation this Tuesday night with Esa-Pekka Salonen. Tickets are still available for an evening of music and reflections, “that tell the story of the Hall’s creation and demonstrate its perfect union of space and sound.” It will be moderated by the Getty Research Institute’s Senior Curator and Head of Architectural Collections Maristella Casciato. All general admission seats are $10.

Click here for tickets.  

You can also see, on show in the BP Hall at WDCH, six of the models made as the design evolved. Also on display, online: Sculpting Harmony, a digital exhibition, featuring more than 150 models, sketches, and archival photographs documenting the concert hall’s development.  

Click here for information.

What I'm Digging

The no-brand big bookstore

Having recently got the good news about the return to our neighborhood of a Barnes & Noble store that closed in 2018, I was intrigued to read this story about the chain’s efforts to appear not like a chain, through makeovers devoid of a uniform identity. The change comes since B&N was acquired by the owner of British book behemoth Waterstones, and the head of both companies, James Daunt, “is pushing the chain to act more like the indie stores it was once notorious for displacing.” Interesting.

Bad Bad Bunny

Bad Bunny the singer doesn’t quite ring my bell, but Bad Bunny the comedian, now that’s something else. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was hilarious on this SNL as a crazed Spanish king, an overprotective aunt, and a naughty nun, among several other cameos. He was so good in drag, he could star in a John Waters movie.

Annie Philbin, Appreciated

Sad to learn that Ann “Annie” Philbin will leave the institution that she so carefully transformed into an LA art powerhouse, without ever demanding the spotlight herself. But happy to read this appreciation by Christopher Knight, and to visit the museum right now, where, in the 6th iteration of Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, you can see the fruits of her 25-year commitment –– to seeking out and centering regional artists, to programming with a keen sense of social justice, and to transforming the once unprepossessing location through a multi-phase makeover by architect Michael Maltzan that is now so welcoming with its street-facing lobby and its multi-tiered inner court.

Ishi Glinsky’s “Inertia — Warn the Animals,” 2023, Made in L.A. 2023. Photo: Robin Bennett Stein