Hope you are doing well, despite everything. Everywhere. All at once.

If you watched the Oscars this past weekend, you may have felt a cloud of melancholy hanging over the show. “The Oscars broadcast seemed more fixated on the problems inside the industry than the crises everywhere else,” said one NYT critic, referencing gags about AI and the death of theatrical screenings. After all, Conan O’Brien may have made a controversial joke about the lack of British nominees, but Hamnet, Frankenstein, F1, and Bugonia were filmed at least partly on U.K. soil.

That cloud might pass if you met Tima Bell, architect of the just-completed East End Studios at 2233 E. Jesse Street in Boyle Heights, at the base of Sixth Street bridge (above). There, he has repurposed portions of a former cold storage facility into a $250 million complex of five soundstages, ranging from 14,000 to 36,000 square feet in size, with production offices, support facilities, on-site catering, and rooftop seating areas with stunning views, especially of the bridge and its park currently under construction. They include all the digital age bells and whistles, including stages to be prepared for LED wall backgrounds and on-site computer simulation systems. In the vast sound stages, says my partner Robin Bennett Stein, you can "listen to how the barking mad world drops to a hush, listen to your heartbeat, and dream up your story." 

The buoyant Bell, who has personally invested in a production facility adjacent to East End Studios, is convinced Hollywood productions will come roaring back, especially following the state tax credits issued last year, making LA competitive again with other states and countries. After all, says Bell, whose father was the actor Edward Bell, and whose stepmother was legendary swimmer and movie star, Esther Williams, this is where the creatives want to be. "LA has the best restaurants and best infrastructure to support the productions, right close to home for most of them."

And if East End Studios don’t fill up with filmmakers? There are plenty of other uses for the vast sound stages, with wall-to-wall acoustic padding, says Bell, adding that a similar structure he built in Glendale hosted a blockbuster DJ festival. East End Studios is scheduled to open its doors this month.  

Tima Bell, inside a sound stage at East End Studios. Photo by Frances Anderton

Frame The Future

Hollywood never just created jobs; it helped create LA’s ethos of optimism and delight. After all, it is the dream factory. That extended to livability. This was a place where housing was affordable, not only for the above-the-line talent. Moreover, much of it built during Hollywood’s Golden Age was delivered with sparkle, from Mediterranean fantasies to Modern easy living. Real estate and storytelling have long intermingled in the California Dream.

How to retrieve that sense of the dream, for another, more challenging era in the Southland's evolution, is the goal of Frame The Future, a competition presented by Friends of Residential Treasures Los Angeles (FORT: LA), along with KCRW and a coalition of community partners.

The premise is that Los Angeles needs more homes, and many Angelenos have great housing ideas, but they often meet resistance. So creatives of all stripes are invited to help sell tomorrow's residential dream to a skeptical public by taking part in Frame the Future: LA’s Housing Manifesto + Poster Showdown.

Winners will receive cash prizes up to $3,000, plus the chance to be featured in a public exhibition and awards celebration at The Ebell of Los Angeles.

The deadline is the end of this month. Read all the details here.

Design Things To Do

Top Pick: Concrete Pour Party

Of all the ways to build a brand, perhaps one of the niftiest IRL is Thomas Musca’s concrete pour parties. Seven years ago, the Cornell architecture-educated Angeleno founded Cassius Castings, a studio focused on hand-cast concrete pieces “that sit somewhere between furniture and small-scale architecture,” for restaurants, shops, and homes. Their stark but curvy forms evoke a decorative take on beton brut.

Musca then turned the “hyper-analog” fabrication of these pieces into an event. In a bougie variant on barn raising, he holds public pour parties, where he and a team of experts, watched by a curious crowd, mix together cement, plasticizer, and GFRC (glass fiber reinforced concrete), and then pour the goop into a wooden mold. It sets in about an hour.

“That lets the pour unfold almost like a three-act structure: dust → liquid → solid, all within the span of a feature film,” says Musca. “When someone sees the work go from raw materials to a standing object, they gain an intuitive and spiritual connection to the piece.”

Thomas Musca pours concrete at a pour party, Santa Monica, August 2025. Photo by Frances Anderton.

This Thursday, March 19th, Musca and team will take to a sidewalk in Echo Park to pour “one of the tallest and most audacious structures” he has made to date (see below). The sculptural shelving is for Wares Wares Wares, a multi-venue space and vintage store opening on March 21st. Click here for details.

These pours are a lot of fun (though make sure to wear the masks he will have on hand, to protect against the high levels of particulate). “In the groovy 1960s, this was called a happening or a be-in or scene or a bag, as in what's your bag, man?,” says my partner Robin Bennett Stein, adding, “Thomas is a kind of wizard in that he designs community experiences that have an air of promise and connection to humanity.”

Quick Picks

Docomomo's 2026 conference kicks off Tuesday, March 17th, in LA with a sold-out Keynote from Thom Mayne, and runs through Sunday, March 22nd. But tickets remain for some of the other sessions and tours, including one of four buildings by postmodernist Charles Moore, which will put a pep in your step if you love color and complexity.

Fifty years ago, the Cesar Pelli-designed Pacific Design Center opened its doors to the interior design trade. The PDC’s ownership and the LA design industry have changed over the years, but this Wednesday and Thursday, March 18th and 19th, numerous talents — including Thomas Lavin, Brian Pinkett, Erika Heet, Emma deRoche, Cesar Giraldo, and Gulla Jonsdottir — will gather for a special anniversary Westweek 2026.

It’s not always about the City of Angels! This Thursday, March 19th, the mayors of neighboring cities Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Inglewood, and West Hollywood will “come together for a candid conversation about their land use priorities and the challenges shaping their cities” at Westside Urban Forum’s 2026 Annual Westside Mayors Forum, at Helms Design Center. With the World Cup and 2028 Olympics and Paralympics on the horizon, expect this to be interesting.

Beverly Hills Civic Center, with Charles Moore addition. Photo by Frances Anderton

There have been many public conversations about rebuilding the houses lost to the Eaton and Palisades fires. Here comes one that takes stock of where things stand while considering the potential for broader changes afforded by the devastation. Join me and stakeholders from Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Altadena this Thursday at State of the Rebuild at AIA/LA HQ.

Between 2021 and 2023, the famed architectural photographer Iwan Baan turned his lens on Rome and Las Vegas, raising questions about the two seemingly opposed cities — one, perceived as "surreal, thin, dishonest and new;" the other as "authentic, thick, honest, and ancient." Catch the opening of an exhibition and talk by Baan this Friday, March 20th at 6 PM in the SCI-Arc Gallery. Highly recommended.

Competing visions are emerging for the area vacated by the Santa Monica Airport, following its anticipated closure in 2028. This Saturday, March 21st, 9:00–11:00 AM, advocates for affordable housing on a portion of the area that voters hope will become a Great Park, will lead a tour of the airport. Sign up for After The Runway  by emailing events@communitycorp.org, and receive the meeting point with your RSVP.

The Ebell of Los Angeles shines light on the hidden stories of Los Angeles’ remarkable women at its Third Annual Public Symposium, taking place next Thursday, March 26th, on The Ebell’s historic Mid-Wilshire campus from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM. I’ll join a panel about pioneering designers and builders, including Edith Northman, Edla Muir, and homes lived in by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Eve Babitz, and other legendary Angelena writers.

xAbduction, by Cole Case. Image courtesy Track 16.

Painter Cole Case paints Los Angeles in all its sunlight and darkness, such as the “Abduction” of Rosalin Vargas by ICE agents in Pasadena, in his show And it Keeps Coming 'Til the Day it Stops at Track 16 in DTLA. Next Thursday, March 26th, Case will talk with art critic and always astute moderator Shana Nys Dambrot about his art in relation to art history and contemporary LA.

What I'm Digging

Watching... the masterful Code of Silence, about a deaf woman, Alison Brooks (Rose Ayling-Ellis), who becomes a police informant and grows dangerously close to one of her targets. The series is Hitchcockian in its combo of desire and edge-of-the-seat tension, while totally fresh in the way it draws viewers into the world as experienced by the hearing-impaired.

Admiring... the singular, ethereal buildings by Smiljan Radić Clarke, the 2026 Pritzker Prize winner, announced last week. The Chilean designer operates in the realm of architecture as high art, conferring names on his buildings like House for the Poem of the Right Angle. His work, said the jury, "is positioned at the crossroads of uncertainty, material experimentation, and cultural memory." Beautiful.

Laugh-crying... at the latest SNL's take on The Pitt, in which pumped medical teams prescribe remedies like "bull semen" and "a cold plunge in blue jeans" to patients dying of injuries and illnesses. Sick, literally, and hilarious.

Reading... Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV, a book by Jack Balderrama Morley, managing editor at Dwell, who delivers a sharp, angry and idea-packed critique of architecture, urbanism and inequity, based on obsessive viewing of seven reality TV shows — Selling Sunset; The Kardashians; The Real World; The Bachelor; Trading Spaces; The Real Housewives of Atlanta; and Fire Island. Great writing.

The residential dream in Selling Sunset. Image courtesy Netflix

What I'm NOT Digging

Air Block

In researching for KCRW, the updated Citywide Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, aka ARO 2.0, which allows office and other commercial buildings at least 15 years old to be turned into housing, I learned that structures with sealed-in glazing, standard since the 1970s, can be exempted from providing openable windows. These are mandatory in regular new homes. In select conversions, mechanical ventilation can suffice. But I thought we had learned  from the pandemic that access to fresh air is vital. And that extreme heat events, which are increasing, can crash HVAC systems. I am very hopeful that ARO 2.0 can deliver new housing in non-residential buildings, but I wonder about the appeal of non-operable windows. Let me know your thoughts on this and other aspects of the ordinance by writing me at francesanderton@gmail.com.

How would these dogs feel without access to air? Photo by Frances Anderton 

Well, that's it for this week's newsletter. Write me with design news, questions, and comments at francesanderton@gmail.com. Get back issues here. And remind your friends to sign up for the newsletter here.

Yours with very best wishes,

Frances