On loving where you live
An old tagline + evergreen sentiment
The situation in LA is ongoing and given the amount of brain (and heart) space it’s occupying in our collective lives, today’s issue is focused on sharing a few thoughts and resources.
I love LA—the place, the people, the buildings—and seeing yet another climate disaster unfold so swiftly and intensely is a dark sign of the times. (Anyone able to write cogently about this, I salute you.) The Will Rogers estate—home of an original German silver sink—burned to the ground. The Eames House is, as yet, spared, as are the other Case Study houses nearby. The Ray Kappe houses in Rustic Canyon are fine, though his Keeler House, which had been on the market, is gone. (Kappe’s house own house, built in 1967, has always been the ne plus ultra for me and I will never forgive myself for not knocking on the door when Kappe himself was still around.) An early Eric Owen Moss project—a Constructivist renovation for his family—also gone. Ditto Neutra’s Freedman House (1949). There are near-constant updates, from LA architecture writer Sam Lubell’s dispatch for the New York Times, or Charles Moore Foundation director Kevin Keim’s on-the-ground posts from Rustic Canyon.
A few things to dig into: My old colleague Alissa Walker’s urbanism dispatch from Los Angeles, a must-read. Rachel Davies, another design/culture journalist who just launched a Substack, compiled a list of GoFundMes for direct assistance for those who have lost their homes in this week’s wildfires. And on Google Sheets, a compilation of GoFundMes supporting displaced Black families following the Eaton Fire. KCRW has a segment on the significance of this community and its history—specifically the areas of Altadena that were exempt from mid-century redlining policies. There is also a mutual aid directory for Latine families displaced by the wildfires.
A friend in LA asked me for leads on journalism and reported non-fiction books around rebuilding after natural disasters. One person to read is Susie Cagle, who has written extensively on this specific situation in California and is, I hear, working on a book. Some good pieces to reference chronicle rebuilding attempts after the Woolsey Fire, fire protection in Sonoma County, the quest for fire-resistant homes.
Ongoing: @collective_altadena is a volunteer group of 300+ design and building industry professionals who will be working on conscientious rebuilding efforts in Altadena. (Sign up here to join as a volunteer.) And Office of Office—a non-profit founded by former LA-Más architects—is offering pro bono design services to residents of color who have been impacted by the fires. Requests can be submitted through the Google Form here.
This will be a marathon, not a sprint, and my hope is that there is an opportunity for sensitive rebuilding that honors the spirit of the community—supporting multigenerational housing, communal living, and all the organic family arrangements that people say they want but so rarely achieve for reasons related to cost, policy, bureaucracy, and building code. And let’s not forget that big real estate business is already looking at how to turn this situation to their advantage:
There has to be another way. (Consider architect Gregory Ain*’s Park Planned homes in Altadena, now destroyed. A fantastic model to emulate.) Any ethical housing developers or housing advocates reading this who want to chat? I’m all ears.
As for the emotional side of things, there is nothing like sudden and vicious disaster to dredge up feelings around home. Home, as in a physical place of residence is one thing; the idea of home is much more ephemeral. This isn’t a novel observation, by the way—even the ancient Greeks accommodated this duality in their definition of home (“oikos”).
As David Michon described so well in
:Monuments may burn, for example, but that will never transform one’s world as much as a home destroyed. A monument is an *idea*; and a home is that too – but it’s also a very practical, life-supporting, personhood-affirming mini-universe.
Odds and ends
More on Gregory Ain: Ain was a modernist architect who was a well-known proponent of social housing and ended up under surveillance by Hoover’s FBI for a decade, effectively ending his career. Avenel Homes in Silver Lake, Dunsmuir Flats in Mid-City, Mar Vista Housing, and Community Homes Cooperative (unbuilt in Reseda) are a few other local co-op projects he designed. Woodbury’s Anthony Fontenot wrote a book about Ain’s housing projects for MIT Press, which you can pick up here.
The most delightful strip-mall Frank Gehry project, New York Bagel in Brentwood, was shuttered back in December. The bagels were horrid, but my god was it cool to see hallmark Gehry moves like sheet plywood mingle with one-of-a-kind oddities like a 33-foot-long steel Chrysler Building crashing through the ceiling. Dwell covers the preservation oversight, and the story quotes local architect Alan Hess, who posits: "Gehry himself is not especially an advocate for preservation, even of his own work. For Gehry, Los Angeles is a city looking to the future, and it’s a very practical philosophy for an architect… who want[s] to do new buildings.”
I’ve started reading some new-to-me design and decor Substacks, and have to mention this RILLY good ode to the utilitarian basket on Mundo de Menda (the author is correct, you can never have too many woven baskets). Related: I’ve been overthinking ‘laundry hampers’ as a category. The answer is basket.
As previously stated, my very favorite non-archival light is industrial designer Tom Chung’s Beam Table Lamp for Muuto. Tom recently reworked Beam in a larger size, with user-replaceable LED bulb and a polished aluminum casing. Must!
Via the consistently excellent Staring at the Ceiling: a tool for creating triad, tetrad, adjacent, or freestyle color palettes.
How many designers does it take to rework one Herb Lubalin logotype? Answer here!
And back to our issue theme, houses: OfHouses is “a collection of old forgotten homes,” aka a database of modern and contemporary residential architecture that is an immensely useful resource—and source of pleasure. (Many of the 1200+ entries are even mapped.)
On the auction front
A friend of mine with elite auction status is addicted to Invaluable. Her home is filled with treasures, and she generously passed on her passion for browsing to me. And to be clear, I consider this kind of obsession a very positive thing, because deep reading of auction lots counts as design research. (I, in fact, have always referred to Wright auctions as “sports.”)
This is an exceptional case, of course, but consider the Guy Tobin sale at Dreweatts in the UK. Tobin, an antiques dealer, has wide-ranging taste and a flair for the gothic. An object description like this is a meditation and an art form:
Probably a sewing box, with stellar inlaid lid above chequerboard sides, tumbling cube front, fitted interior with pink and gold paper lining, turned ivory lid knob. Together with a rosewood and pale wood keepsake box, of spiral segmented form, interior with wax impression of a regal lady, probably Elizabeth I.
PSA: Cola Studios, an interior design duo based in New York whom I have mentioned before, sends out a monthly roundup of great auction finds, 100% worth your time and attention.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Next time, interior secrets revealed from Martha’s Vineyard to Copenhagen.
Stay safe and take care,
Kelsey