Accidentally Wes Anderson in Santa Monica, Design Miami in LA, Architectures for Art and Crime
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Dear DNA friends,
I hope you are all doing well and ready to attend some Design Things To Do, including Design Miami.LA, and a Q and A with the author of a book about the eerie connections between prisons and art museums.
I’m writing to you again from England where I’m still helping Mom and taking a few work trips. That means I’ve been on and off planes, trains, and buses, heaving heavy bags — and finding that traveling today is hard to do in style unless you are very rich or inhabit a Wes Anderson movie. This brings me to Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA), a peach of a show I saw in London that opens May 15th at Santa Monica Museum of Art on 3rd Street Promenade.
AWA is an online community, book, and traveling exhibition that grew from an Instagram account founded in 2017 by Wally and Amanda Koval. They posted a bucket list of places that evoked the buildings and production design in films from Fantastic Mr. Fox to The Grand Budapest Hotel.
“Over the course of 10 films and counting,” they write, “Wes has honed in on a distinct visual aesthetic that is both undeniably beautiful and deserving of adulation. Each frame of his films stands alone, resulting in a collection of delightful gems. AWA has built upon Wes’ imaginative scenes and seeks out their real-life counterparts around the globe.”
The show, catnip for architecture and photography enthusiasts, consists of more than 200 images culled from thousands sent in by AWA community members from around the world. They are arranged in themes including transport, sport, hotels and motels, nature, and doors. You can snap a QR code for in-depth info about the subjects.
The Georgian sits beside other hotels in images that evoke "Wes Anderson." Photo by Frances Anderton.
Some are staged in interesting juxtapositions; for example, LA architect Josh Schweitzer’s Monument House in Joshua Tree sits harmoniously beside images of a decorative tent and camper. The Georgian hotel in Santa Monica shares a wall with Hotel Moskva in Belgrade, Serbia, and Hotel Olivedo, Lake Como, Italy (above.) The photos, mostly symmetrical, axial compositions in saturated colors as in Anderson’s setpieces, hang on richly painted or wallpapered walls. The effect is a decorative reminder that an art installation does not have to be spartan (as with exhibit spaces described in Corrections and Collections; see Design Things to Do, below), and that traveling can be a breeze.
Few film directors have established such a distinctive and consistent visual language that you can be anywhere in the world and spot a ski chalet, or Belle Époque hotel, or a niftily attired train conductor and think, Wes Anderson! As the Kovals write, “We are forever indebted to Wes for opening our eyes to the beauty that surrounds us. Sometimes all we need to do is ‘reframe the perspective’.”
A lighthouse in Húsavik, Iceland, at Accidentally Wes Anderson. Photo by Matthijs Van Mierlo
Design Things To Do
Design Miami.LA May 16th–20th
Design Miami Los Angeles opens this Thursday, and lasts through Sunday, at a three-acre Holmby Hills estate designed by Paul Revere Williams.
Curatorial Director Ashlee Harrison has cooked up a program of talks and an exhibition, Masterworks of Collectible Design, showcasing significant design objects dating from 1938, the year of completion of the Williams-designed house.
18 exhibitors and gallerists, including Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Moderne Gallery, Friedman Benda, Future Perfect, and Southern Guild, have installed collections that explore, says Harrison, “themes of nostalgia and cultural heritage, imagination and pop culture, and iconic moments of innovation.”
Click here for more information, and here to register interest in attending.
Ohanna Grawunder's Meteorite Chair (2023), viewable at Design Miami.LA; Photo by Phillip Maisel; Courtesy of Jessica Silverman Gallery
Distraction and Focus Adam Moss talks about The Work of Art UCLA Hammer Museum Thursday, May 16th, 7:30 PM.
When Adam Moss, the former editor of New York magazine, gave up editing to paint and then faced the frustrations of filling the blank canvas, he became consumed with the nature of creativity and how artists realize their work.
Out of this has come a book, The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing, featuring interviews, journal entries, napkin doodles, and sketches by creators of “transcendent” novels, paintings, movies, songs, jokes, and more. Moss will talk with UCLA professor and author Mona Simpson about his book at the Hammer Museum this Thursday evening.
To the extent he found a common thread, all his subjects experienced “a balance of distractedness and focus,” akin to ADHD, Moss told NPR. "You need to be distracted enough for your mind, for your imagination to go fishing, and you need to be focused enough to know what to do with it."
Los Angeles: A Model City Wednesdays–Sundays: 12:00–6:00 PM Exhibition Public Opening and Reception, May 17th, 6:00 PM A+D Museum, 170 S. La Brea Ave. Ste.102, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Models both full-size and small-scale are the vehicle for testing design visions. Sometimes the model is all that remains (see, Atlas of Unbuilt Architecture, below).
This Friday, come to the opening of Los Angeles: A Model City, an exhibition at A+D Museum of models of schemes for tomorrow's Los Angeles by students from the region's architecture schools (Cal Poly Pomona, SCI-Arc, UCLA, USC, Woodbury University).
Then, on Sunday, June 9th, join an A+D museum tour of the 1:1 model apartment that was the only part built of the 1958 Marina Tower Cooperative Development, proposed by Killingsworth, Brady & Smith (see Music for Modernity, below). The 12-story, mid-rise condo building was never built but the model apartment became a permanent home.
Click here for details about Model City, and click here for details about the June 9th tour.
The model apartment is all that exists of the Marina Tower Coop. Image courtesy of A+D Museum.
At Home, then Not, in Venice Exhibition and Talk on The Human Right To Housing In Los Angeles Saturday, May 18th, 2:30–4:30 PM Venice Public Library, 501 S. Venice Blvd, Venice 90291
Housing is the biggest challenge facing Los Angeles and the state of California, and policymakers are generally trying to solve the problem by speeding up and incentivizing the construction of new homes. However, some experts argue we should focus as much on preserving existing, rent-controlled or stabilized, housing as on producing new housing (which sometimes displaces affordable homes already there.)
To convey in tangible terms what that means, the filmmaker and labor and social justice researcher Judy Branfman, and a coalition of partners, dove into the effects of the Ellis Act, tenant harassment, and conversion to short-term rentals specifically on homes in Venice, CA.
In early 2023, she and more than twenty community members — “lifelong Venetians, new Venetians, evicted Venetians, newly housed Venetians, and unhoused Venetians” — photographed and mapped hundreds of properties from where people had been evicted. The resulting project, entitled Where Has All The (affordable) Housing Gone?, was displayed at Beyond Baroque and was viscerally powerful in its impact (below).
How many homes were lost? Researchers found that since 1999, 1400 units of affordable, rent-controlled housing had gone, using California’s Ellis Act. On Ocean Front Walk alone, 220 affordable, rent-stabilized apartments and singles were illegally converted into hotel rooms and short-term rentals. Also, “over 6000 complaints were filed between 2021 and early 2023 under the new Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance, and not one was forwarded to the City Attorney for legal attention.” The project clearly demonstrated a primary cause of homelessness: simply, loss of a home.
Now that mapping project will be displayed in adapted form this Saturday at the Venice Library, together with a reception, art and poetry readings, and a report from John Raphling, with Human Rights Watch, on the criminalization of the unhoused and the human right to housing.
At Home in Venice: Houselessness & The Human Right To Housing In Los Angeles is co-hosted with Beyond Baroque, CD11 Coalition for Human Rights, Venice Community Housing, and Westside Tenants Union.
Busy at the Beehive: California Green Building Conference Thursday, May 23rd, 8:00 AM - 5:30 PM Beehive, 961 E 61st St, Los Angeles
In my experience, conventions are more persuasive and memorable when they take place in venues that express the ideals of the convening organization, rather than in a characterless convention center.
So it’s good to see that the California Green Building Conference, taking place next Thursday, will be back at The Beehive, the Black-owned business incubator and events space created by SoLa Impact in South Los Angeles. The campus of retrofitted warehouses, wrapped around an inviting landscaped plaza is an apt setting for programs like “Materials Reuse in the Built Environment” and “Nature-based solutions.”
Hosted by USGBC California (or USGBC-CA, formally USGBC-LA), headliners at the conference are energy policy expert Kate Gordon, and Obi Kaufmann, author and artist of The California Field Atlas series.
The Buildings That Never Were Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin on the Atlas of Neverbuilt Architecture Thursday, May 23rd, 6:30–8:30 PM Helms Design Center, 8745 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232
For every visionary scheme by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Norman Foster, and Zaha Hadid, there are the ones that got away, unbuilt dream schemes that could have sent a city in a different direction, perhaps better, perhaps worse.
Next Thursday, I’ll sit down for a conversation with Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, authors of the newly published Atlas of Never Built Architecture. The book features hundreds of the most spectacular near-misses of the 20th and 21st centuries, including parliamentary buildings, museums, arts centers, skyscrapers, artificial islands, and city plans. The imagery and their backstories reveal how "architectural projects are conceived, developed, and dashed."
The talk is co-hosted by Helms Bakery District and the Cal Poly SLO LA Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design. It is free and open to all.
Unbuilt Stone Towers, by Zaha Hadid, Cairo (EGI.2009).
Corrections and Collections A conversation about architectures for art and crime, with author Joe Day. Saturday, May 25th, 2:00 PM Wende Museum, 10808 Culver Blvd, Culver City, CA 90230
Every now and then a truly original book appears and stays in one's mind for years. One of those for me was the 2013 Corrections and Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime, written by architect and SCI-Arc professor Joe Day, with a foreword by the legendary urban theorist Mike Davis.
Day delved into the eerie connection between prisons and museums, both of which had exploded in number since the 1970s — with more than two million inmates in its prisons and jails, at the time of writing, while museums hosted more than two million daily visits.
He explained how “prisons and museums, though diametrically opposed in terms of public engagement, class representation, and civic pride, are complementary structures, employing related spatial and visual tactics [read: minimalist “penitential aesthetics”] to secure and array problematic citizens or priceless treasures.”
On Saturday, May 25th, I’ll sit down with Joe for a Q and A at the Wende Museum. It takes place in conjunction with the museum's current exhibition Visions of Transcendence, which shows artworks by "incarcerated and unhoused persons and their allies from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe."
Left: Yale Center For British Art, Louis Kahn, New Haven, CT; Right: Brest Prison, Brest, France; image courtesy Joe Day
The Edge of Summer: Belonging in a Strange Land Clockshop Celebration and Fundraiser Saturday, June 1st; Reception: 3:00 PM; Program: 5:00 PM 2806 Clearwater St, Elysian Valley, CA 90039
In 1898, Julia Meltzer’s great-grandfather left Eastern Europe for Los Angeles. He built the family trade in timepieces into the Eastern Clock Company, later housed in the gorgeous 1930 turquoise art deco Eastern Columbia Outfitting Company (now known as Eastern Columbia Building) at Broadway and Ninth, designed and built by Claud Beelman with Meltzer’s grandfather Julian.
Fast forward to recent times and Julia Meltzer entered into her own engagement with time and place. In 2004, she created Clockshop, an arts and culture nonprofit that produces free public programming and commissions contemporary artist projects with the goal of “better connecting Angelenos to the land we live on.”
Now Clockshop turns 20 and will celebrate with a fundraiser — to be MC’ed by yours truly. Meltzer will be honored, along with Elva Yañez (Save Elephant Hill), and Abby Sher, philanthropist and developer of one of my favorite places, the Edgemar Mall in Santa Monica, designed by Frank Gehry in the mid-1980s.
Over Clockshop’s 20 years, reflects Meltzer, “I have come to see deeper significance in our chosen name; Clockshop takes time; we invest in going slowly, building relationships, and going deep with people and place.”
Kite Festival. Photo by Gina Clyne, courtesy of Clockshop.
What I'm Digging
Trees for Life
While in London, I spent a night in a hotel overlooking Hyde Park. This was the view out of the window (below), a seemingly infinite expanse of green right in the heart of the city. On seeing it, I felt a teeny bit of optimism. Perhaps we can forestall climate disaster with the help of our arboreal friends and the rich biodiversity that lives within them. So I was excited to read about this “micro-forest” just planted at Santa Monica College. I’m probably being naïve, but hopefully, every tree helps.
View of Hyde Park, one of the lungs of London. Photo by Frances Anderton.
Music for Modernity
In addition to self-driving trails and research into pressing contemporary issues such as affordable housing, Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles (fortla.org) celebrates significant Los Angeles homes through film, poetry, and music mixes designed to evoke the essence of a house. Most recently, DJ Caviar, aka Robin Bennett Stein (nepotism alert; he is my spouse) created a set for the Seeley house in Long Beach, designed by architect Edward A. Killingsworth (co-designer of three Case Study Houses and this sadly unbuilt Case Study apartment building.) In an interview, “Caviar” explains his thinking. Study #25, for example, by Conlon Nancarrow, the avant-garde Mexican-American pianist-composer, “echoes to a T the house's zebraic arrays of shadow, that constantly shift…with each minute of ...passing sun.”
Seeley House, interior. Photo by Joe Fletcher; courtesy of Monocle.
Cracking The Code
The 68th Eurovision Contest was on the brink of being undone by geopolitics, or perhaps upstaged by the Northern Lights. However, come showtime, the annual spectacle of glitz, camp, comedy (for laughs see this year’s entry from Finland), and nail-biting voting hit all the high notes. It crescendoed in Swiss artist Nemo’s winning entry, "The Code," a soaring song Nemo delivered while dashing around a spinning disc. It was about, in their words, “coming to terms with their non-binary identity.” Exquisite pop. Catch the 2024 contest in replay on Peacock.
Nemo, cracking The Code at Eurovision 2024. Photo by Corinne Cummings/EBU.
Well, that's it for now. I get back to LA later this week and look forward to seeing you out and about. Keep me posted about design things coming up.
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The model apartment is all that exists of the Marina Tower Coop. Image courtesy of 
The "Eviction Map" of Venice. Image courtesy of 
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Left: Yale Center For British Art, Louis Kahn, New Haven, CT; Right: Brest Prison, Brest, France; image courtesy Joe Day
Kite Festival. Photo by Gina Clyne, courtesy of Clockshop.
Seeley House, interior. Photo by Joe Fletcher; courtesy of Monocle.
