Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

By valuing small spaces, we find pleasures through design more generous and more humane than solutions made for bigger projects—adding to the case for living with less.

This past summer, Barbie Dreamhouses sprawled out across our collective imagination like a rose-colored suburban subdivision. They feature prominently in Greta Gerwig’s movie, where a solitary Barbie occupies each multistory home. Notably wall-less and stair-less (who needs a staircase when a spiral slide will do?), the toy houses reflect vast expansiveness—in pink. Boundless, they combine manifest destiny, the American dream, and a pop feminist utopia. If Virginia Woolf wanted a room of one’s own, Barbie craves the world.

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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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At the turn of the last century, the 10 acres on which Vista Hermosa Natural Park sits was a forest of oil derricks. Located on the outskirts of a nascent downtown Los Angeles, dozens of wellheads replaced the native sage and chaparral scrub. A photograph from 1901 shows a poisonous landscape glistening with pools of what might be water—or oil. 

Fast-forward a century and the land was still a toxic mess. Working-class homes (built decades after drilling) were bulldozed to make way for the Belmont Learning Complex. A project of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the $200 million middle school campus and housing complex was once deemed “the most expensive school in America” and was meant to bring high-tech learning to the city’s Temple-Beaudry neighborhood. But by 2000, construction had halted, and the planned complex was enmeshed in political scandal that bubbled up to mainstream news outlets. 

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The demise was probably inevitable, foretold by an Ed Ruscha painting. William Pereira’s LACMA opened in 1962, but the buildings were never great. Its corporate modernism was inward‑looking, and its flourishes didn’t age well. Later additions by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates (1986) and Renzo Piano (2008, 2010) atomised the campus, but there was always something pleasant about sitting in the plaza and watching museum‑goers drift from building to building – a piece of pedestrian urbanism in a town long blasted for not having any. (It does.) Read More …

Out of the windows of Lenny Steinberg’s Venice Beach living room, there are a few hundred metres of sand, a line of white surf, then the grey-blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a remarkable, pinch-me view, the kind most folks only see from the nearby boardwalk at Muscle Beach, where tourists and roller skaters glide through a perfume of cannabis dispensaries and fish taco stands.

The LA-based designer’s home is just a few doors down from Frank Gehry’s Norton House, a mid-1980s landmark that mimics a lifeguard tower. She and her husband, Bob, a prominent lawyer, moved here in the 1990s, transforming a 1960s post-and-beam duplex into a minimalist roost that now houses an archive and showroom of five decades of her work, alongside her art and object collection. Each piece – from the Lucite high heels on a table by the front door to the Frank Stella print in the main bedroom – reflects, in short, the fruits of a highly creative life.

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Lesley Lokko’s sprawling, dense Biennale asks us to engage different representational languages. It’s a slow burn, but finding new legibility takes a moment.

“Zt. Zzt. ZZZzzzZZZzzzzZZZzzzzzzZZZZzzzzzzzzZZZzzzzzZZZzzzzo’ona,” begins The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell’s 2019 novel set in Zambia. The insistent whine of a mosquito. Her pesky, omniscient narrator traverses generations and geographies. It’s a tale of violence and the folly of colonization. That hum, indigenous and persistent, singular and swarm, is the consciousness of the African continent.Those ZZZs droned through the Arsenale and Giardini as participants, journalists, and VIPs gathered to kick off the eighteenth International Venice Architecture Biennale, and echoed across alleys and piazze made damp by unseasonal rain and high tides. Venice, after all, is a reformed swamp with mosquitos of its own.

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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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An anachronistic exoskeleton design first conceived in 1999, resurrected in 2006, and now looming over the Expo line, it’s impossible to look at the baroquely formalist (W)rapper tower without gagging on certain circumstances surrounding its rise: an evaporating market for any office space much less the lofty double- and triple-height ceilings on offer and ERIC OWEN MOSS’s tenure as SCI-Arc director and the inflated high six-figure salary he pocketed. (W)rapper encapsulates architecture not as autonomous form but as a succubus that extracts everything from tuition to natural resources.

“This is the beginning of a cultural institution,” said Morphosis principal Thom Mayne in late September, seated in the plaza of the nearly completed Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), in Costa Mesa, California. Behind him, VIPs dressed in black tie streamed from the valet to the white-on-white lobby for an exclusive opening event on the structure’s upper terrace. The $94 million building—its swooping prow jutting like a glazed pompadour from the facade—opened to the public on October 8.

Located at Segerstrom Center for the Arts, a suburban campus studded with architecture by Pelli Clarke Pelli and Michael Maltzan Architecture, Morphosis’s 53,000-square-foot museum is the last piece of a plan devised by civic leaders and philanthropists in the late 1960s and begun in the ’80s. It was designed to cluster Orange County’s arts organizations—like a food court for culture where you can catch the symphony, a touring production of Hamilton, and now an art exhibition.

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The Architecture of Disability uses the lens of disability to reevaluate received architectural histories and speculate on a more inclusive architectural environment.

A shock of recognition comes early in The Architecture of Disability. Author David Gissen argues in his introduction that while providing adequate access for disabled people is necessary, making it the dominant principle by which architecture responds to impairment not only is insufficient but also reinforces alienating functionalist narratives. And then, toward the end of this initial essay, he turns the mirror on the discipline itself—to the hustles of studio, site visits, and archival work that compose common design and research practices. In short, the ways that architecture cultivates an unwritten doctrine of, as Elon Musk might put it, hard core. Read More …