Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

The collapse of LA’s Skid Row Housing Trust reveals a lack of investment in the maintenance of supportive housing properties.

‘One of Skid Row’s largest housing providers faces financial implosion,’ ran a headline in the Los Angeles Times in early February. Prospects looked bleak for the Skid Row Housing Trust (SRHT), a non‑profit property developer and pioneer in providing housing and services for Los Angeles’ unhoused people. 

A month later, a second article in the newspaper reported appalling conditions in the older single‑room occupancy (SRO) properties: mouldering corridors, broken plumbing, waste and hoarding. There are 29 buildings in the organisation’s portfolio. A little more than half of these are permanent supportive housing (PSH) designed by top architecture firms, while the rest are SROs, constructed in the early 20th century and serving the city’s lowest‑income populations. 

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Much has been said about how we live in a time of acceleration. We strive for fast and interconnected. And yet, a considerable body of discourse takes the counter position, arguing for rest, care, and immobility. In her 2019 book How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell urges us to turn away from the churn, writing, “Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”

Architecture, too, is caught in the thrall. Although buildings take time, we’re junkies for novelty. Museumbuildings are particular eye candy. Supposed freedoms of art and culture push desires for formal inventiveness. But what would it mean to construct a museum in slow motion?

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Tras una década en desarrollo, el viaducto de la Calle Sexta de Los Ángeles abrió al público a principios de julio de 2022 entre fanfarria y caos. Diez pares de arcos de concreto, cada uno inclinado expresivamente hacia afuera 9 grados, se iluminaron con luces LED azules y rojas. El alcalde de Los Ángeles, Eric Garcetti, se unió a políticos locales y al arquitecto del puente, Michael Maltzan, para el corte de listón y los eventos de apertura que dieron la bienvenida a los residentes de Los Ángeles para ocupar la carretera de poco más de 1 kilómetro de largo antes de que se llenara de tráfico de automóviles.

Construido en 1932, el puente art déco original fue demolido en 2016 debido al deterioro de su integridad estructural, causado por reacciones de álcali-sílice, o “cáncer del concreto”. Su reemplazo es un viaducto atirantado con un costo de $588 millones que cruza el río L.A., uniendo el canal de concreto que se hizo famoso en películas como Terminator 2: Judgment Day y Repo Man. A medida que la carretera conecta el vecindario de Boyle Heights con el Arts District, anteriormente industrial y ahora gentrificado, sus arcos saltan sobre 18 pares de vías férreas y la autopista US 101. Durante el fin de semana inaugural, un desfile de relucientes lowriders avanzó lentamente por la plataforma, una representación de la cultura chicana de Boyle Heights.

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Nearly every article about the demolition of the old Sixth Street Viaduct in 2016 mentions Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In Los Angeles, where every location is scenery, the iconic, double-arched span played backdrop to the Skynet apocalypse. Architect Michael Maltzan, designer along with engineering firm HNTB, of the new expressive, ribbon-like Sixth Street Viaduct, has a rosier vision—one of equity and accessibility. L.A. infrastructure, however, is linked to unjust acts of clearance and partition, localized catastrophes not always captured by Hollywood. Can a new bridge rewrite the narrative?

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“Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality,” writes José Esteban Muñoz in his introduction to Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Utopia.1 Published in 2009, Muñoz argues against the pragmatics of the present and sees radicalism in the potential of an evasive event horizon. As such, he values utopia as a map towards the potentiality of queerness—a future world just beyond reach.

This position, by default, destabilizes notions of queer space in relationship to architecture that were historically tied to acts of desire, transgression, and artifice.2 Texts such as Stud, edited by architect Joel Sanders (1996) and Aaron Betsky’s Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (1997) focused primarily on spaces occupied or designed by gay men and were temporally concerned with observing and theorizing contemporaneous conditions—bars, bathhouses, nightclubs—conditions that Betsky has more recently noted have been largely assimilated out of existence.3

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The internet gets blamed for a lot of things, our current crisis of criticism being just one of its victims. The explosion of free content, the rise of unpaid bloggers, a diffuse democracy of likes and retweets, has surely weakened the authority of traditional critics. But in this new landscape Mimi Zeiger sees a host of new possibilities for architectural debate. Explaining her notion of ‘collective criticism’, she shows how platforms like Twitter can help build momentum on critical issues that often fall through the cracks of the pressroom floor.

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If you’ve ever looked at an aerial view of Los Angeles via Google Maps or on decent into LAX then you know: L.A. is a city of houses. Precarious mansions climb up the hills and fill in the canyons. Detached single-family homes sit side-by-side on modest lots across the basin. “Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a Technicolor sky,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his diary in May 1939, aghast. British expat viewed L.A. as ugly and unreal when compared to East Coast and European cities — New York, London, Berlin — are dense with skyscrapers, office towers, apartment buildings, and tenements. But the reality is that this condition makes the city rich with possibilities for how to live.

“The house was and continues to be the most predominant building type in the city. It was just the sheer numbers that made it so the experiment could happen,” explains architect Michael Maltzan on the phone from his Silver Lake office. Read More …