- 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 fasc…