It came as quite a surprise, while perusing the last sizzling issue of LARA, to find my name mentioned in the same breath as Reyner Banham (“City of Memes,” LARA #1). My beard may not be as magnificent, nor my bicycle so small, but for a few months I shared his pleasure and pain of attempting to decipher architectural goings-on in LA, and report back to the outside world, as a visiting Brit.
Thanks to the always perceptive Shane Reiner-Roth (compiler of the mind-boggling surrealist compendium @everyverything) for perusing the highs and lows of my brief missives from the Southland. Seeking out the best contemporary architecture is sadly not the reason a European critic would ever come to the US, so I found my interests instead drifting to phenomena unique to the region—from theatrical cannabis consumption parlors to gargantuan cathedrals sprouting from the Central Valley’s nut orchards to LA’s fertile history of high density multifamily housing, before zoning changes outlawed such common sense.
Reiner-Roth is right that we fly-by-night visitors can have a tendency to skim over some of the city’s knottier complexities. But I soon discovered that one of the chief benefits of being an outsider—beyond observing things that are too familiar for locals to register as being of interest to nonnatives—is having no bridges to burn, no in-laws to upset.
For all its depictions as a global megalopolis on the silver screen, LA is a surprisingly parochial place, even more a patchwork of introspective villages than London, both physically and psychologically. Architecture is a small world, but it felt even smaller here, still ruled over by an ancien régime of once-radical beach boys. They may now be semi- retired, and spend their time action painting and self-publishing, but their grip still looms large over the city and its schools.
By pointing out the blindingly obvious—that some of their recent work is not only environmental anathema, but shockingly badly built—it seemed that I was writing what few Angelenos were willing to say out loud. Sometimes it requires the innocent immunity of a visiting alien to call out the emperor’s new clothes, and say in print what everyone else is thinking.