Articles

An unconventional key to some of the features of a Los Angeles housing tract

Is anyone still buying what Sunset is selling?

A hole in the universe opened in the Valley. We tried lying on top of it.

Welcome to Sun City, cradle of American retirement.

  • The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City by Alexis Madrigal. Picador, 384 pp., $32.

For activists of air, the atmosphere is not only “up there” but comes from, and returns to, the ground.

  • Lawrence Lek: NOX High-Rise is open at the Hammer Museum through November 16, 2025.

NOX presents consciousness not as humanity’s exclusive domain, but an emergent property that brings with it inevitable suffering.

  • Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture by Todd Gannon. Getty Research Institute, 256 pp., $60.

Franklin D. Israel embraced the “intensification of uncertainty” on the long slide toward oblivion of the American Century, with Los Angeles, as always, glittering on the precipice.

  • Tesla Diner, designed by Stantec, opened at 7001 Santa Monica Boulevard in July.

In July, Tesla opened its own neo-Googie Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard, giving Los Angeles a slice of Muskian techno-utopia.

Rick Caruso’s Cheesecake Factory of the mind

The petty cause célèbre of Elizabeth Street Garden

To have Jane Jacobs, we need to go beyond Jane Jacobs.

The Tenement Museum memorializes working-class families even as it evicts them.

Who built Case Study House #16?

Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

The Hungarian Pastry Shop plays itself.

Maligned and condemned, the Port Authority Bus Terminal will be missed after it’s gone.

With its sloping shake roof and sliding glass doors, the Scandi-shack was meant to sell itself—sidesaddle and sunbaked on the roadside, a prefab portal to the pine-strewn, snow-covered San Gabriels beyond.

The plight of a choleric columnist

On January 5, Doctor Kathy Hochul finally gave New York its gogo juice, prescribing a bitter pill known as congestion pricing to clear its clogged passages and stimulate its mass transit system.

Wherever man spews his seed, there are rats indeed.

Archforum, which continues our tradition of shamelessly purloining the mastheads and editorial savior faire of long-out-of-print design publications (Architectural Forum, 1917–74.), aims to convene consequential voices in architecture, culture, technology, and politics on the issues of the day.