Articles

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

A hole in the universe opened in the Valley. We tried lying on top of it.
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.
The Small Lots, Big Impacts initiative is a collaboration between cityLAB-UCLA, LA4LA, and the City of Los Angeles. The winners of its inaugural design competition were announced in May.
There’s room aplenty within LA’s vast sprawl, where interstices of immanent potential have been left unbothered for the last hundred years.
“Something to wrap the herring in” by Esther McCoy appeared in the February 1986 issue of Progressive Architecture. The magazine published Roger Corman’s response in August of that year.
McCoy takes shots at MGM Studios, Mel Brooks, and the director Herbert Ross—La Mesa property owners all—but reserves the bulk of her disgust for Roger Corman.

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

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

The higher the New York observatory experience climbs, the dumber it gets.

New York University’s John A. Paulson Center announces the triumph of a new civilization: thrusting, dismissive, cruel.

Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

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

Once a sparkling fixture of New York high society, the Plaza Hotel has lost its fizz.

Van Nuys Government Center is a stand-in for downtown democracy flung out to the suburban hinterlands.

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.

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.

Suddenly, the beaver cosplay is feeling very real.

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.