- Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher
For a review of books, not bricks, the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) has demonstrated excellent taste in architecture. Their MacArthur Park home, a 1927 Spanish colonial revival complex by Franklin Harper known as the Granada Buildings, has a cult following. In the 1982 book Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles, authors Stefanos Polyzoides, Roger Sherwood, and James Tice did not mince words. The Granada Buildings are a “monument of Southern California architecture and one that contains the seeds of an urban existence whose promise was never fulfilled.” Two years later, in his entry for the building in The City Observed, Charles Moore described the Mediterranean experience the Granada delivers:
1) a number of intimately scaled structures, which 2) constitute a simple, strong place with 3) an interesting sequence of small and middle-size spaces, 4) simple walls on which dance the shadows of lush plants and 5) a little bit of fascinating ornament.
Sure, LARB’s previous digs in Hollywood, Crossroads of the World, designed by Robert V. Derrah in 1936, is another local icon. Conceived as the world’s first outdoor mall, a village of little buildings clusters around Taschen’s headquarters, a building which the LA Times dubbed “Hollywood’s beached boat.” The streamline moderne “boat” sported portholes, a bright red door, and a mast holding aloft a globe. Tenants included producers, set designers, and costume makers. When he worked for Taschen, NYRA columnist Eric Schwartau told me he used to see Jason Schwartzman strolling by. “Sometimes,” LARB editor in chief Medaya Ocher told me, “you would come to work and you would see a group of ten doctors walking around”—only to realize it was a casting call.
But the Granada is the real hit. The complex has no hallways. The entrance leads into an internal linear courtyard with ficus trees and a little pond on one side. All the ground floor units have their own door onto the courtyard. Many of them have shop fronts. The units on the second level all exit onto an outdoor wooden walkway with wrought iron railings. Conceived as live-in artist studios, each unit has two stories and a kitchenette. Often referred to as a singular building, the Granada in fact encompasses four structures. Their plan is clean symmetry and axes: four roughly identical buildings split into a total of forty-eight roughly identical spaces. The elevation, however, is pure whimsy: Every entrance is unique, with its own medley of vaguely Mediterranean windows and doors, making the courtyard feel like a narrow street lined by narrow buildings. LARB’s office, which is up on the walkway, has a green shingle sign with its nameplate hanging out over the walkway. Green is LARB’s color; it also happens to be the Granada’s (and, for that matter, LARA’s). The owners painted the doors and windows of each unit with a different shade.
For a review of books, not bricks, LARB has demonstrated excellent taste in architecture.
I called Emily VanKoughnett, LARB’s public programs and engagement manager, to take me behind the scenes of how their editorial team scouted and secured such a remarkable home. In 2023, on VanKoughnett’s very first week of work, she heard developers had bought Crossroads—where LARB had been since 2015—with aspirations to gentrify it, and therefore LARB needed a new space. She sprang into action: “I love looking at listings, and I found a listing for this building.” She polled her coworkers: “Is this everyone’s vibe? Does this place look cool? It is really cheap…” By July, they had made the move.
The staff works on the open-plan first floor—“Selling Sunset-style,” said VanKoughnett, who recently moved some desks to create an “intern island” for an incoming cohort. Ocher and executive director Irene Yoon share a private office at the end of the room, accessed by a French door. The second floor has a long room with a long table that connects to a short room with a short table with a door out to the balcony, through which one accesses an actual turret containing a round room with a couch, two wicker chairs, and a very small, round table.
It is as if the site embodies two paths for LA-led development: the courtyard house as a model that could merge nature and walkable urbanism, or a recursive loop of parking lots and tar pits.
Like its building, LARB has the appearance of something substantially older and more established than it is (something we here at New York Review of Architecture, est. 2019, would know nothing about). Not quite fifteen years old, LARB began as a tumblr in 2011. (The founder, Tom Lutz, was working on a proper website, but the developer was working pro bono, so the website did not arrive for another year.) The original office was Lutz’s basement.
Unlike, say, The Paris Review—which was started by Americans, is based in New York, and does not publish reviews (“544 West Twenty-Seventh Street,” NYRA #42)—LARB’s name is also its mission: building a platform for West Coast readers and writers. Lutz was sick of waiting on New York editors: “Nobody took what was happening in LA very seriously.” Having in 2004 written a book about regionalism, Cosmopolitan Vistas, Lutz could see the problem was not about to change, telling me in an interview that “already in the 1890s people were complaining about the hegemony of New York publishing.”
Lutz quickly learned he was not alone. Almost immediately a PhD candidate, Evan Kindley, reached out and became a cofounder. After that, the masthead scaled up quite quickly: “When I got going, I asked every writer I knew if they wanted to be a contributing editor. I did not ask them to actually contribute anything, just to help with publicity.” One hundred fifty people said yes, so he put one hundred fifty contributing editors on the masthead.
“I can always make time for NYRA. It is one of the only publications I don’t skim.”
Steve Wasserman, the longtime editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review had wanted to start his own Los Angeles Review of Books in the early 2000s but could not find the funding for it. Lutz simply started with a budget of zero: “The only way this could have started was crazy kids doing their own thing, a guerrilla zine thing, and building it up.” Whatever money Lutz raised he parceled out to staff and writers, who were otherwise volunteers. They published prolifically: two to four pieces a day. Lutz liked to drop two contrasting reviews at the same time, “Siskel and Ebert style.” (Coincidentally Siskel’s daughter Callie Siskel has been LARB’s poetry editor for many years.) “I don’t know how I did it,” said Lutz, “I tried to clock it at one point, and I was doing about seventy to eighty hours a week on LARB—and I had a job at the time, and was writing my book. I was just in this weird, mad work mode. I went to sleep with my computer on my lap on my bed, woke up and picked it up again, sometimes woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, worked between three and four a.m. on very little sleep. A lot of us just worked all the time on it.”
Lutz’s basement had two rooms. One—lined with bookshelves—had a cluster of small desks for the staff. A big table filled the second room, which they used for meetings. For particularly large meetings, they would move upstairs. The only bathroom was also upstairs. Early one morning the executive editor, Jonathan Hahn, came up the stairs to use said bathroom. Recalled Lutz, “I heard some steps, turned around to give my wife a big hug and kiss, and it was Jonathan. OK, I thought, I think it is time to move this operation somewhere else.”
So in 2013 they moved to Atwater Village. The office was there when Ocher joined as a volunteer, and in our conversation she described it as “a tiny, tiny space,” whose “main attraction was a huge galley library that we had downstairs.” The same year, Hahn spearheaded the creation of the print quarterly, which paradoxically came about as a way to support the digital production. “It turned out,” said Lutz, “that our funders loved the print magazine—we realized we could afford to do a print journal if we thought of it primarily as a fundraising mechanism.”
Lutz was sick of waiting on New York editors: “Nobody took what was happening in LA very seriously.”
Today LARB still publishes two stories online a day, puts out the quarterly journal, produces a podcast, and hosts monthly events. Through a mix of fundraising and subscriptions, Lutz and his successors were able to build up to a seven-figure budget, allowing for a salaried staff working (mostly) regular hours. Even as people acquired job descriptions, Lutz kept a light managerial touch. In 2006 he had written Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America, and from his research he concluded that “the main variable for work satisfaction is having control over your time.” Lutz’s touch today is light indeed. Still the publisher and on the board, he lives in France now, leaving Yoon and Ocher a free hand to manage the publication.
The allegiance to Los Angeles and the West Coast remains a core principle. Said Ocher, “What happens with West Coast writers is that at some point it is as if the East Coast made a discovery: ‘Have you heard of Eve Babitz?’ Or there is a large piece about Claudia Rankine, Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, or Percival Everett—all of these people have been an integral part of the Los Angeles literary community for decades.” In that spirit of local pride, LARB has grown its ecosystem—along with featuring West Coast writers and books, it hosts an annual bookfair, LITLIT (The Little Literary Fair), for local publishers.
Like its building, LARB has the appearance of something substantially older and more established than it is (something we here at New York Review of Architecture, est. 2019, would know nothing about).
In the entry for the Granada Buildings in Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles, the authors note that—like the exposed party wall of a town house—the blank terminus of the complex “suggest[s] the continuation of the building to encompass many more Granadas in the future.” Today, it is surrounded on two sides by parking lots. Because the whole complex is built on top of a tar pit, the city collects tar along a service corridor between the complex and one of the parking lots, presumably to pave still more parking lots. Said VanKoughnett, “It is the most LA thing. There is a big barricade wall, with a bunch of spigots draining tar into Home Depot buckets.” It is as if the site embodies two paths for LA-led development: the courtyard house as a model that could merge nature and walkable urbanism, or a recursive loop of parking lots and tar pits.
In the 1982 book Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles, authors Stefanos Polyzoides, Roger Sherwood, and James Tice did not mince words. The Granada Buildings are a “monument of Southern California architecture and one that contains the seeds of an urban existence whose promise was never fulfilled.”
Within its walls the Granada (today advertised as “Granada Shoppes and Studios”) incubates a remarkable medley of neighbors, including the news site LA Public Press, Astrolabe Magazine, the spoken word poetry program Get Lit, and the architecture firm West of West, which, in turn, hosts another magazine, the Contemporary Art Review of Los Angeles (CARLA) in its offices. A longtime tenant, an upright bass shop, is on the second level. Because the elevator is too small for the basses, a common sight is people hauling basses up and down the stairs. Readings, gallery openings and lunches often take over or spill into the central court, where there are tables and chairs scattered beneath twinkle lights and the ficus leaves.
Outside the Granada’s walls, federal raids have drained downtown LA of life as street vendors disappear and undocumented immigrants avoid going to local businesses. At MacArthur Park just a few blocks away, the Department of Homeland Security staged its infamous and bizarre parade this past July.
Is the Granada a model for a future city—a walkable public realm full of nature and nonprofits? Or is it just another variant of the hedges, gates, and back patios that render large parts of Los Angeles invisible? For now, maybe it is both: protected by its walls from the onslaught of car-led urbanism outside, but containing that seed for a better future within. Just as LARB found its way off Tumblr and out of Lutz’s basement, one day the Granada will have progeny, tearing up the surrounding parking lots and turning its street-like courtyard into an actual street.