Architectural variety in Los Angeles (and help)... Obs 102
Auctions include a bat-crap sofa, xx and xx
Hello… auctions below
I urge individuals with means and inclination to donate to this list of GFMs on the
SS:
and my friend Quinn’s, who works in LA documenting architecture, and who lost everything material in the fire and whose work going forward has been affected.
I wrote a year ago about spending a month in Los Angeles, the architecture there got under my skin in a way much does not. Some of this was because I had been thinking about LA for a while, some, though, is because of the specificity and directness of the residential architecture there… I interact with such buildings more. (I don’t live in an office building.) I remember my first time driving through LA with my eyes open, in, I want to say… Silver Lake, down a regular residential road, from Pasadena to Hollywood… who knows for what. I believe it was on a Mil-Spec Diztort tour, we were on our way to get pre-vibe shift breakfast.
There was such a wide variety of houses there, on that one block, maybe Silver Lea Terr., a discrepancy I had not seen before… and haven’t seen since. A diversity of construction… freedom. The street I was on jumped out at me since the houses were so characteristic and so different. They didn’t look different, they were different. Distinct. One building was set back deep from the road, and poked high, vertical… it was bright, maybe yellow. It was just holding on. A broad fatty, completely square, was to its left, and to its right… was a house or building I remember having tin doors—tin garage doors… like a Parisian bar… like the bar at Lucky Strike… but the garage… just two doors, tin. The wood, apart from the tin, was very dark brown, and peeling… making it look like a lean-to… ramshackle, and just holding on. But nothing was being done here. It was sunny out and so the doors glinted… old Toyota trucks in some driveways. To be sure, nobody can truly trust their memory… least of all me… but if I was back in LA with nothing to do I would case those few dozen blocks to check myself.
A similar diversity of residential architecture in close quarters can be found in the levant and some parts of New York, closer to the airport… but the houses are not as big as this neighborhood in LA. So this was unique. I had an LA itch for a while—good gyms there, good produce, all those one-off donut places…—since well before that trip. But that row of houses got under my skin… moving down that block, go to LA… where one can make their own decisions in private…
What was and is special, to me… about this city was/is… well, many things, but the variety of the architecture for… smaller buildings: houses, offices, small malls… is an aesthetic and, beneath it… a hint at some values. The same level of expression that goes into not only just skyscrapers, or city-funded buildings… but private places for people to live. Just anyone. LA is such a big city. Equal to this are the amount of bad, so to speak, decisions—the amount of architectural decisions done by budget or necessity, on the fly, to these buildings… strange ones, which are incorrect by any academic look: differing complements of materials; odd-sized lots… height and brick discrepancies… batcrap crazy signage… but which were good enough for the vendor and buyer, and which have, until these fires, stayed. There is a vernacular way places exist there, in LA, and a way in which they are not necessarily in discussion, or addressing each other… that is so freeing. That’s probably the way life should be… or the way America should be, anyways. Just build your house. Some will drive by and ignore it, neighbors will deal with it, the odd person may love it… or feel something… at the very least it will do its job. There’s a humility there: we each like our houses… we let our neighbor build as he wants. The obvious answers—one neighbor might have a lot more money than the other; one updated theirs recently, one has to leave theirs as is—aren’t as interesting to me as… construction occurring so quickly, so freely, of a city that I do not understand. Quite freeing. Below, some books about architecture in that city from other vantages:
LA Architecture Books
LA’s ugliest buildings by Richard Meltzer—one of my favorite writers when I was in college, Belzer wrote “Aesthetics of Rock” and has a sort of psychic wall around himself and his writing, daring people to like it and connect… but then was a formal trailblazer, more or less inventing rock criticism. So who can judge? This book, written in the 1980s, was later work (though at the time of its publishing he was only in his 30s), and goes for a ton of money. $402, actually, on eBay, linked above. There’s also one on Johan Kugelberg’s website store for around the same price. There’s a cult around this book I suppose. It is something. Its aesthetic assessments are, to a man, incorrect…. here is a photo of one of the buildings he calls ugly:
It is a beautiful building… in this photo it is a very beautiful building. Very Mattheo Thun/classic Shire/Memphis, more white in person. I do not understand how someone might think this was ugly. But one must allow every writer their own taste, idiosyncrasies… there is nothing to be blamed here. Worth noting the house is still there and is pretty affordable, a couple clicks from the Santa Monica Erewhon. (above pic from fan account)
An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles 5th ed. and 6th edition—by David Gebhard and Robert Winter. Referred to, in an unholy and secular way, as The Bible by industry professionals (so says the foreword)… this is the one if you’re feeling antsy… editions differ a great deal here. The 6th (and most recent) edition is by Winter and a co-author, and is a subjective collection of about 700 buildings, starting downtown, circling out (think Paris) which removes many (nearly 500) buildings that were written in in earlier editions. Such is the nature of architecture criticism. Older editions, which Gerbhard (who passed in 1996) wrote have a different… narrative layout. But these are quibbles… the books are… only very different to architecture professionals and full-on Angelenos… and probably homeowners. The rest of us can get lots of vitality out of any single one… includes brisk writing on the greats: Case Study houses, Eames, the Mar Vista tract (which is on Beethoven Street—twisted city), with a broad inclusion of subjects (gas stations, bridges)… fine taste—includes the Aztec Hotel (goated). Nice review of the 6th ed. here on LAT
The work of Paul R. Williams in Los Angeles—link there is to a NY Review of Books story about books about him. PRW was one of the preeminent LA builders and arguably the Golden Age of HW’s main architect (3,000 designs; some sources say 2K)… who did a little bit of everything. Frank Sinatra hired him to build out his home when he hit it big (Frank was Italian)… another house was owned by none other than Lon Chaney… the NYRB story mentions that while he could churn out modernist houses here and there (like this one in Ontario, California, mostly he varied his designs—lots of Spanish, Oriental, Hollywood Regency houses—per client wishes… or trends… what have you. He was very busy during the ‘50s, around the same time as the Schindler, Neutra, Case Study and Koenig houses changed over the LA landscape… and so his stuff, for a while looked from a different time. But things come full circle, hence the books, a few years ago, evaluating his legacy. Good pic of Sinatra and Williams:
Williams on the right. Frank’s house and the video this pic is taken from. The book to get is probably this one. This one too.
Many newsletters about interiors and architecture and things are purportedly anti-materialistic, including mine now and then, probably as a way to distance ourselves from the reality of actually liking something… actually finding meaning in an inanimate object. But our lives are defined by material things, or at least depend on them in a real, material capacity. One can be perfectly happy with nothing, but you lose your home and it suddenly becomes much more important: you must do everything to replace it. If you have kids or whatever it is worse, and a tragedy. As to whether possessions matter or not, we definitely need a roof over our heads, and the decisions to rid ourselves of these things are probably best decided when the owner looks into these things on their own time. Good luck to everyone out there who has been affected—consider helping at the links above if you can.
Housekeeping:
I guested on
, the fine podcast, now on Substack—subscribe to them and keep up—and discussed wellness, being hardline, and skin. Raw dairy, soap, sleep, wellness, very territory… ask me for my raw milk referral code. Thanks Evan and Emilio.Wrote a story about my new year’s resolution—drinking more coffee—for GQ. Why more coffee? Because "ore life and more energy can solve many of the basic problems of life."So said Dr. Ray Peat. Thanks Nick for the assignment.
Obs 102
Wed:
Nanda Vigo lamp, Kartell ‘67, Turin—Domus featured; one of the better pole/minimal lamps out there, even for Kartell; presaged a lot of what was to come later… Vigo was an architect, this has an easy bar sketch quality to it
perfect Tolomeo desk, Col. Blimp style—1958 and in grand condition; full on for a room, movie set material
‘Harlequin’ sofas (upholstered by Alexander Julian), maybe ‘80s, Phila—pictured; among the better no-designer pieces I’ve seen on auction… perhaps ever. Though has legit premium upholstery, and the colors are so excellent—which makes sense, since Julian did the Colours line… that is in the top 5 of sleeper vintage sweater brands—… the shape is likely nostalgic for more people than we think
Fun iron/cerule chairs, also-ran Italian swivel, an expressive white angular coffee table, a pleasant kilim… Brutalist chain link tables (Bruises style)…
Louis Vuitton soccer ball, Ca.—Jerry Lewis had one just like it… along with an entire range of monogrammed furniture. Definitely the best promotional item… specifically produced around the World Cup in ‘98. One of my all-time items for the past eight or nine years… this is the first legit auction I’ve seen for it in a while… house seems to have a handful…
Thurs:
Piretti for Castelli Luce folders, set 4, Queens—severe deal here, one is off-colored, with smoked, or oxidized glass… which makes it a deal here, part of a special auction that is heavy on modern Italian, everything cheap, including:
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