Let’s put aside the question of whether Of the Moment, a fifty-two-page broadsheet focused (ostensibly) on Los Angeles architecture and produced by a team including Thom Mayne and the writer and former public radio host Frances Anderton, emerged in response to the Los Angeles Review of Architecture, the NYRA sibling that made its debut this past winter. Why not consider the publication on its own terms? From the top, then: Beneath the phrase “Volume 1 No. 1,” which hints unnervingly at future editions, the cover features a murky photograph of an architectural model anchored by a slablike tower. The photo, we learn in a lengthy caption, shows a project called “A Place Models the World” by Preliminary Research Office. Is this a firm with any connection to Los Angeles? How about the tower? Is it meant for a site in the city? The reader is not made privy to any of this information, though the caption goes on to explain that “A Place Models the World is an ongoing investigation into architecture and its relationship with contemporary physical space.”
The rest of what follows isn’t quite so rockheaded. For the most part Of the Moment is made up of intermittently enlightening if rambling conversations among talented LA architects (including Barbara Bestor, Michael Maltzan, and Craig Hodgetts) about housing, infrastructure, and other topics, which is to say this is a publication more transcribed than written or edited—and, in terms of how its audience engages with it, more scanned than read. Perhaps sensing this, Mayne, after installing himself at the top of the masthead, identifies himself there not as editor but “instigator.” It’s a choice very much on brand for the eighty-year-old Pritzker laureate, a self-styled public intellectual—even better, “thought leader”—who cofounded the Southern California Institute of Architecture and spent twenty-six years on the UCLA faculty but doesn’t, inconveniently enough for a publication like this one, have much time for writing or writers. A decade ago, Mayne bought Ray Bradbury’s modest former house, in LA’s Cheviot Hills neighborhood, only to demolish it to make room for one of his own design. Mayne’s defense, when preservationists and literary critics alike cried foul, was that he hadn’t realized Bradbury had ever lived there. (In fact, the novelist did so for more than fifty years, and the listing agent marketed the property, however hyperbolically, as “the Ray Bradbury estate.”) Mayne eventually did add a memorial of sorts, incorporating lines from several Bradbury books written on the premises into the design of the weathered-steel front gate. A simple plaque would have been more honest: Former residence of Ray Bradbury. Built 1937. Instigated 2015.