Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

Ever since the Getty’s initiative Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. kicked off in April and continued all spring and summer with nearly a dozen exhibitions and dozens more programs and events across Los Angeles institutions, there’s been a conversational buzz. At openings, on panel discussions, and in reviews those murmurs have been less about celebrating any particularly iconic buildings in the city and more about the dialogues, blurred boundaries, and differences between art and architecture. Read More …

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 …

In Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham describes Freewayland: the swaths of flat acreage by the I-10 and former ranchos heading out towards Irvine and Pomona. He drolly titled the chapter on these suburban territories “The Plains of Id.” But really, architecture is a landscape of ego. In LA, the icons of modern architecture take to the hills. Houses and apartment buildings climbing up foothills and canyons, climbing higher as economy permits and striving for ridge tops, Freewayland famously appears as backdrop in photographs of these home — a twinkling grid of lights in the distance.

Sitting in that distant grid, on a street south of the Miracle Mile where an early developer skimped on trees, are the Mackey Apartments, designed in 1939 by Rudolph Schindler. Pearl Mackey’s commission was limited: three units and a two-level penthouse for herself. The white stucco box, broken up by the architect’s signature slippage of volumes, is one of Schindler’s few forays into Freewayland. With two exceptions — the Buck House and the iconic Chase House, located on Kings Road in fairly-flat West Hollywood — his residences tend to perch atop or cascade down hillsides. Read More …