Move Fast and Break Things — Classicists become Iconoclasts at the East Wing

Dear DnA friends,

Hope you are doing well.

I'd like to thank the two blue teams for giving us an epic distraction from the epic destruction that's been on many minds in the last week.

Much has been said about the crushing of the White House's East Wing, so I’ll keep my thoughts brief and on the architects of the glitzy ballroom that will replace it.

Demolition without prior consultation from DC advisory groups seems to be in keeping with Trump's nothing-is-sacred MO, not to mention it jives with the “move fast and break things" ethos of several of his donors — reportedly including Apple, Amazon, Coinbase, Google, and Meta.

But what's interesting is the silence of the architect, who one would typically expect to stand firm against such a demolition without public process. James McCrery is cofounder and board member of the National Civic Art Society, a conservative group committed to the “preservation and creation of beautiful, dignified public buildings, monuments, and spaces.”

This is the same group that proudly "led a six-year campaign to stop" the construction of Frank Gehry's Eisenhower Memorial, an inventive take on monumentality. They detest the optimistic Modern era of federal design that produced government buildings that "did not and do not appear to be public buildings. In particular, courthouses (that) did not look like courthouses.” They doubtless mean designs like the iconoclastic San Francisco Federal Building by L.A.-based Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne. They have pushed for the "Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” mandate for the GSA, which explicitly bans Brutalist and Deconstructivist architecture.

Now we see that the most ardent defenders of the traditional civic realm are the iconoclasts, ready to sweep away, in the words of LA Conservancy CEO Adrian Scott Fine, this “container for events, stories, and countless individuals… discarding the space where First Ladies have held this role since the Carter administration.”

Even more curiously, McCrery once worked for famed “deconstructivist” Peter Eisenman, until he pivoted to classicism. But he may not have absorbed Greco-Roman lessons about proportion and scale. The ballroom, at 90,000 square feet, looks set to overwhelm the 50,000 square feet White House itself. What would Vitruvius say?

I have reached out to the NCAS for comment and will keep you posted.

Now onto the fun Design Things to Do!

Design Things To Do

Freak Funeral
Saturday, November 1st, 7:00 PM
Three Clubs, 1123 Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA 90038

KCRW has you covered for Halloween events here. But if you want to carry on celebrating the dead, the Hollywood Fringe Festival has a fundraising party for you on Saturday night. At their Freak Funeral to raise funds for the 2026 Hollywood Fringe Festival and low-income Angeleno creators, you'll experience "the wake of the decade!" Join as they "celebrate the freaks [who] died as they lived: Freaky."

Past HFF artists + special guests, including Woody Fu, Natasha Mercado, Liz Toonkel, Sylvie Wang, and Couplet, will offer up cabaret performances in the newly redesigned Three Clubs in Hollywood, a historic dive-bar and club, complete with productive design from Rody Villegas of Zanni Theatrics.

Click here for tickets.

Image courtesy Hollywood Fringe Festival

Architecture Uncorked
Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, 4800 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles
Saturday, November 8th, 5:00–6:30 PM

Is LA in Freefall?
Public conversation, online
Tuesday, October 28th, 5:00 PM

Trivia, Important Topics, and wine come together again at the latest outing of FORT:LA's Architecture Uncorked at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre. I'll talk with the very lively Max Podemski, urban planner and author of A Paradise of Small Houses. He'll preview his upcoming FORT Trail centered on Silver Lake. Then sommelier and historian India Mandelkern will uncork a custom-selected wine inspired by the Silver Lake spirit.

Before that... on Tuesday, October 28th, starting at 5:00 PM, FORT and I have convened some great speakers to discuss "Is LA in Freefall?," an online conversation about the state of the City of Angels, in light of Fires, ICE, Housing, Hollywood, and Budget woes, and an Olympics to host.

Click here for Is LA in Freefall?; Click here for Architecture Uncorked.

Image courtesy Barnsdall.org

50 Years: A Golden Anniversary Weekend
Friday, November 7th–Sunday November, 9th
Norton Simon Museum, 411 West Colorado Boulevard
Pasadena, California 91105

The Norton Simon Museum, designed by Ladd & Kelsey, later renovated by Frank Gehry, has reached middle age.

So the museum embarked on a big exterior cleanup, encompassing repairing the Museum‘s sculpture garden, below, redesigned by Nancy Goslee Power in the late 1990s; restoring and cleaning the thousands of ceramic tiles designed by Edith Heath, and improving entranceways — which meant relocating their prize sculpture, Rodin’s The Thinker.

Come see the shiny new place next weekend when everyone's invited to enjoy live music and art-making activities, along with viewing the exhibition Gold: Enduring Power and Sacred Craft and Retrospect.

Click here for information.

Image courtesy Norton Simon Museum.

Historic Moons Redux
Sunday, November 9th, 3:00 PM–7:00 PM
496 Stonehurst Drive, Altadena

There's more from India Mandelkern (above). She wrote an eloquent book about LA's streetlights called Electric Moons. Now she has curated a show of seven “electric moons” as painted by French artist and winemaker Vincent Cruège.

It's at a pop-up gallery in Altadena, at the Eaton Fire’s western boundary. Mandelkern chose paintings that "transpose ideas of light and renewal into a new visual language."

L.A. streetlamps, as painted by Vincent Cruège

The House I Grew Up In
Making Space: L.A. Symposium
Wednesday, November 12th, 6:00 PM–8:30 PM, program starts 6:30 PM
Henrybuilt, 806 Mateo Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021

How are designers shaped by their childhood homes? Find out at Making Space, a symposium cohosted by the design journal Untapped and L.A. Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, at the DTLA showroom of Untapped publisher, the design company Henrybuilt.

Architects, artists, directors, and journalists Kenturah Davis, Erich Joiner, Sam Klemick, Annie Chu, Joe Dangaran, and Yours Truly will share reflections on “The House I Grew Up In” and how it impacted our work and lives today.

Click here for information and to RSVP.

Walter Hood’s childhood home on Moretz Avenue in Charlotte, North Carolina. Image courtesy Untapped.

The Porch: A Public Conversation
Annenberg Community Beach House, 415 Pacific Coast Hwy, Santa Monica, CA 90402
Thursday, November 13th, 6:00 PM–8:00 PM

More outdoor dining in parklets? Gathering spaces on wide traffic medians? Community coffee served out of the garage? These are all examples of urban "porch-like" spaces to be analyzed and dreamed of at The Porch: A Public Conversation, led by three 2025 Santa Monica Artist Fellows (below) — Nicola Goode, Jona Frank, and me.

Inspired by this year's US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennial, themed PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, we will talk about porches both literal and metaphorical through the lens of Santa Monica’s people, places, and culture.

Click here to RSVP for this free event.

Enjoy the good life in an urban "porch." Image courtesy City of Santa Monica

Case Study: Adapt (CSA) Symposium and Design Launch
Friday, November 14th, 6:00 PM
Wong Conference Center (HAR101), Watt Hall, USC School of Architecture, 823 Exposition Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90007

You may have read about Case Study: Adapt (CSA), a revival of the pioneering mid-century Case Study House Program, reimagined for today’s climate challenges.

Ten architects partnered with households who lost their homes in recent wildfires, and they will reveal their "innovative, climate-resilient residences" to the public at an event being held at USC Architecture school on November 14th.

Expect a reception, an exhibition, and explainers about the designs from the architects and CSA founders Leo Seigal and Dustin Bramell. The architects are: Barbara Bestor (Bestor Architecture), Noah Walker (Walker Workshop), Sharon Johnston (Johnston Marklee), Brett Woods (Woods + Dangaran), Ron Radziner (Marmol Radziner), Silvia Kuhle (Standard Architecture | Design), David Montalba (Montalba Architects), Steven Ehrlich (EYRC Architects), David Thompson (Assembledge+), and Geoffrey von Oeyen (von Oeyen Architects).

Click here to RSVP.

CSA at its inception. Image courtesy casestudyadapt.org.

What I'm Digging

"We Are The Slop"

In getting ready to present “the house I grew up in" (see above), I discovered I had almost no photos of the house(s) I grew up in. My parents rarely photographed them, nor me and my sisters. Entire swaths of my life are unrecorded and simply live in my head or have vanished altogether. Not so today, where the reverse is true, as Freya India laments in this powerful piece about her peer group parading every aspect of their lives — and their children’s — for Likes. Why even bother with relationships, creating families, leaving the house, if these quotidian actions can't be posted, she asks, adding, “We were raised on recognition, a generation sustained by likes and attention and advertising ourselves, and without it we are nothing.” Wow.

Screenshots of YouTube thumbnails. Courtesy Freya India, After Babel.

Go Daredevils

While on the topic of my childhood, I was amused to come across this article in Smithsonian magazine about the fearless stunt motorcyclist Evel Knievel and his 1975 try at jumping 13 buses in Wembley Stadium, London, that left him with multiple broken bones — and the urge to jump 14 buses in Mason, Ohio! I don’t have any photos, but I was there! An Americaphile family friend took our family, and it was one of the most extraordinary events of my childhood, helping birth the desire to move to this country, seemingly filled with madcap daredevils.

Still from YouTube video of Evel Knievel's Wembley Stadium jump.

Kitty, We Worship Thee

This newsletter is incomplete without a cat story, so I was thrilled to receive a book's worth of them by Cal State Dominguez Hills professor and anthropologist Jerry Moore. Cat Tales: A History is filled with images dating back millennia, illustrating cat adoration, fear, and domestic compatibility. Moore charts "the cat's path from deadly enemy to improbable roommate." Along the way, he finds the most popular names for cats in the US are Max and Kitty. Kitty? Don't our feline superiors warrant a grander name?

Courtesy Thames & Hudson

Well, 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.