Driving Gehry Nuts

Seven professors eulogized “old school socialist” Mike Davis in a daylong symposium held at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs in early March. They praised his blunt wit and determinedness to dig beneath the surface of things without ever giving in to despair. “Because Mike believed that the world belongs to labor,” US historian Robin D.G. Kelley said, “he rejected pessimism as political fatalism in favor of the optimism necessary for organization.” As other speakers noted, it was precisely through activism that Davis was able to develop far sharper connections between bigotry and the built environment than his peers. Architects weren’t always appreciative. UCLA professor Dana Cuff recalled how “Mike drove Frank Gehry nuts with his take on the Goldwyn Library,” a Hollywood repository that Davis called “undoubtedly the most menacing library ever built,” fortified against the unhoused in a city that had by that time abandoned them altogether.