I hope you are doing well and gearing up for the lighter days of summer, at least once this June Gloom lifts.

Speaking of which... it’s official, Santa Monica Beach is one of the best in class. A combo of experts and readers at USA Today recently ranked the Bay City’s sandy expanse sixth in the top 10 of the state’s 400 beaches (found on its 840 miles of coastline).

This is quite an accomplishment when you consider that this beach was essentially manufactured. As Elsa Devienne explains in her fascinating new book, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, the once dirty, narrower, oil derrick-dotted sands of SoCal were transformed by a white “beach lobby” into a playground for the suburban age. You can read my book review here, but in brief, Devienne delves deep, and fascinatingly, into the widening, cleaning, and corporate redevelopment projects that upended communities and excluded some racial groups and subcultures, while creating a shimmering coastline that has come to be enjoyed by millions, even as climate change means its future is in question.

More Open Space for Santa Monica?

It may not be green and leafy, but Santa Monica Beach is a gigantic public park and an asset to its residents and all who come from across the region to enjoy it. Yet, the beach community may get another expansive open space. The storied Santa Monica Airport is set to be decommissioned at the end of 2028 and, per Measure LC, passed by voters in 2014, the site is to be transformed into a gigantic recreational space, unless and until voters approve other uses and development on that land. Now a public outreach process is underway, helmed by the landscape and master planning firm Sasaki, and they are inviting public opinion from residents of Santa Monica and beyond, for what this amenity might look like.

Since 2014, there have been questions as to how the city can pay for the huge clean-up and a very large park. Moreover, some individuals and groups believe that the 175-acre site (also estimated at 227 acres) could accommodate generous open space plus some additional uses, from commercial hubs that help underwrite the park to housing, perhaps even some that is affordable for the local workers who cannot pay Westside prices.

While the outreach, which unfolds in four phases through next year, is designed mainly to elicit input on what a park might look like, it does offer opportunities to express "other" desired outcomes. Make your voice heard online at this survey, or go in person to Virginia Avenue Park this coming Saturday, June 15th. Sakaki and City staffers will be there for the last info-gathering event in the first phase of outreach. It takes place alongside the annual Juneteenth celebration, hosted by the City since 1992.

Click here for information.

Santa Monica Airport, 1950s, as shown on a timeline created by Sasaki/City of Santa Monica.

Design Things To Do

An Evening of Magic
Friday, June 14th, 6:00 PM
Neutra VDL House, 2300 Silver Lake Boulevard, Los Angeles, 90039

An Evening of Magic is the appropriate theme and topic for a fundraiser later this week at the Neutra VDL House. After all, the lantern of layered glass overlooking the reservoir in Silverlake, built in 1932 by architect Richard Neutra, and subsequently rebuilt by him and his son Dion following a fire in 1963, does have an air of magic about it. 

As with the Kings Road house by Rudolph Schindler in West Hollywood, it’s a testament to the innovative spirit of the Austrian emigres. It was a storied gathering spot for Neutra and his wife Dione and their family and circle, and subsequently for the LA design community. They gather for events and exhibitions overseen by the director, currently Noam Saragosti, who has planned what sounds like a lively event this Friday, “filled with magicians, cocktails, and live music.” The fundraiser will support an upcoming publication about the VDL House, produced in collaboration with Mouthwash Studio.

Click here for details, Event capacity is limited, so please RSVP early. 

Isla Intersections: Public Opening
Saturday, June 15th, 11:00 AM–3:00 PM
283 W. Imperial Highway, Los Angeles

Despite the difficulty of producing affordable housing in Los Angeles, it is in this realm that you also find some great creativity. Take for example Isla Intersections, opening this Saturday, designed by architect Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects (LOHA) for the nonprofit developer Holos Communities (formerly Clifford Beers Housing) and American Family Housing.

This project, a complex of 53 new one-bedroom permanent supportive housing units, is the very definition of making lemonade out of lemons. It sits on a triangle of "surplus" land at the intersection of Broadway and Imperial Highway, right by one of the world’s busiest freeway interchanges, the meeting of the 110 and 105 freeways.

Isla Intersections is made of 20-foot-long by 8-foot-wide shipping containers, which are, O'Herlihy explains, "stacked and arranged into towers that are connected by a series of walkways to create a single unified building." It's an adventure to walk around and has landscaped open decks at the top. The containers are angled to create acoustic walls and limit the noise from the freeway. A central courtyard is filled with trees to absorb air pollutants, and that space connects to a longer Annenberg Paseo, a public walk for locals connecting to the larger Broadway Sur, a street improvement project for a long stretch of Broadway at Manchester in South Los Angeles.  Cristian Ahumada, Holos Communities Executive Director and CEO, has described the concept as a “living lung.” In today’s world, destroyed by car-based sprawl and climate change, he says, “we're no longer builders of buildings. We are builders of ecosystems.” 

Mayor Karen Bass will speak at the opening this Saturday. All are welcome.

Affordable Housing on Air

I've been exploring affordable housing in great depth with co-writer David Kersh at Awesome and Affordable: Great Housing Now. Our findings were the subject of this recent podcast interview by Sam Pepper. Thank you Sam!

Isla Intersections, viewed from above. Photo by Eric Staudenmaier.

Working with the Greats of Organic Modernism
John Vugrin and Alan Hess
Saturday, June 15th, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
The Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation
5131 Carnelian Street, Rancho Cucamonga, California

While LA was developing its much celebrated modernist architecture of extreme lightness in the landscape, exemplified by Richard Neutra's VDL house, above, further south in Southern California a community of architects and designers, notably, James Hubbell and Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, was pursuing a far more organic strand of modernism.

Both Hubbell and Kellogg passed this year. However, their long-time collaborator John Vugrin, designer and maker of furniture, lighting, and decoration, will talk this Saturday with historian Alan Hess about his work with these masters, especially the ever-evolving interior of Ken Kellogg’s extraordinary Kellogg/Doolittle House in Joshua Tree, California.

The event is at the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts in Rancho Cucamonga, and is in conjunction with the exhibit: Jack Rogers Hopkins: California Design Maverick (see more about that show in this newsletter.) Vugrin, a San Diego native, was a student of Hopkins, the important mid-century designer/craftsman. 

Free and open to the public but space is limited, RSVP to: melanie.swezey@malooffoundation.org.

The Doolittle House in Joshua Tree, designed by Ken Kellogg. Photo courtesy of the Kellogg/Doolittle House.

Celebrate the Icons, Legends, and Trailblazers of Sugar Hill
Saturday, June 15th, 10:00 AM–11:30 AM, including a walking tour of Village Green
Village Green Clubhouse 5300 Obama Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016 

Sugar Hill in West Adams was one of LA’s oldest Black neighborhoods, with homes dating back to the 19th century, resided in by a thriving community of Black entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, and entertainers. But their peace was disturbed, first by legal struggles over racially restrictive property covenants (successfully won by NAACP lawyer Loren Miller), and then by the construction of the 10 freeway, which tore through the area.

This Saturday Joshua A. Foster, community builder and architectural designer, will talk about the history and legacy of Sugar Hill with Madelene Dailey, recipient of a FORT: LA Fellowship. It takes place at the nearby, very bucolic Village Green. 

Expect to learn about the future of the neighborhood and the efforts underway for its preservation as well as its past, including “the founding of the Wilfandel Club by Della Williams and Fannie Williams, Alan and Vera Clarke Ifill’s founding of the Caribbean Credit Union, Yvonne Miller who was one of the founders of the First Negro Classical Ballet, and Paul R. Williams, the iconic architect who designed the legendary FAME Church." 

What I'm Digging

Still Dreaming in California

While California struggles over housing shortages and what growth should look like, those with means can still obtain a plot of land and build their residential dream. Some of those contemporary visions have been captured by longtime architecture writer Michael Webb in his new book, California Houses: Creativity in Context. 

Ogle 36 stunning homes by designers established and new, from Tom Kundig to Oonagh Ryan Architects (also designer of the newly opened Uchi West Hollywood) and Koji Tsutsui, designer of the Cube House in Mill Valley, below. You will be reminded, as Sam Lubell puts it in a review for Archinect, that “despite its many challenges, California is still an extraordinarily creative and beautiful place. The homes’ talented architects dive into nature, urban context, sustainability, and more in surprisingly fresh ways. But in the end, all of the work evokes a quote that Webb features by Alvar Aalto: 'Every building, every architectural product that is its symbol, is intended to show that we wish to build a paradise on earth for man.”

Sometimes of course dream houses turn into nightmares. Just consider Kanye West's dismantling of his Tadao Ando-designed Malibu home, explored in delicious detail with insights from LA architects Ron Radziner and Kulapat Yantrasast, in this New Yorker story.

Cube House, Mill Valley. Photo courtesy California Houses: Creativity in Context/Thames & Hudson.