In 2016, architect Barbara Bestor used the term “stealth density” to describe a multifamily residential development that her firm, Bestor Architecture, designed in Los Angeles’s Echo Park. The neighborhood, historically a mix of Latinx families and bohemian artists and writers, was slowly, then very rapidly, gentrifying in LA’s overheated housing market. Any new construction was bound to be suspect—both as a harbinger of displacement and disruption of the old, streetcar-era urban fabric. Although the term “stealth” conveys a contextually sensitive approach, a way to fit into an existing condition, it also reflects the anxieties of a neighborhood in transition. Changing a neighborhood’s physical character threatens both longtime and recent residents.
It’s easy to picture Philip Johnson seated in his regular booth in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons; his back to the windows, his bespectacled eyes on the door, he’s confident and at the top of his game as he presides over a room of his own design.
Now imagine him jittery and hesitant in a different room on a different coast. It’s the late 1950s and, faced with a University of California, Berkeley researcher trying to uncover the secrets to his creativity, Johnson uses his ample verbal and social gifts to upend the interview. In a typed report, the researcher would later write, “He showed many classic features of the manic: self-centered, irritable, jumpy, flight of ideas, arrogance, use of humor to defend against serious consideration of anxiety-producing topics.” Read More …
Barbara Bestor (architect and executive director of the Woodbury University Julius Shulman Institute) moderates a panel on the critical and engaged eye that photographers bring to the built environment. In LA the human experience of space has undergone constant transformation and we will discuss the urban environment and its changing representations.
Moderator: Barbara Bestor: Architect and Executive Director of the Woodbury University Julius Shulman Institute
Panelists:
Frances Anderton: Producer, Writer & Host of DnA, Design & Architecture, KCRW
James Welling: Artist & Professor of Photography, UCLA Department of Art
Mimi Zeiger: Critic, Editor & Writer
Grant Mudford: Photographer
Gordon Baldwin: Independent Curator, Writer & Editor, Former Curator
Department of Photographs, Getty Museum
Los Angeles–based architect Barbara Bestor may have been dubbed queen of her neighborhood after publishing the book Bohemian Modern: Living in Silver Lake, but her love of art and culture goes beyond any zip code. A nonstop traveler, Bestor works what she’s seen—bright tile in Istanbul, mud mosques in Mali—into bold designs that are changing the face of L.A.
“Could life be more beautiful?” wrote Deborah Sussman on 1 November 1954 in a letter home to her parents. A young designer living in the Eames house and working for the office, she would become the environmental designer responsible for the iconic colourful graphics of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and countless bold visions, including the cartoonish lettering used on the billboard for the 1972 documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles.
Sussman passed away in August. Sharply present on the LA scene, even at 83, she had been quietly fighting breast cancer over the last year and news of her death was a sad shock to the design and architecture community. How could someone so vital be gone? Graphic designer April Greiman recalled a story of petite Sussman introducing herself by saying, “I’m kinda a big deal”. Read More …
Apple may have acquired Beats Music and Beats Electronics in May, but the new Beats by Dre headquarters in Culver City couldn’t be farther from the all-white aesthetic favored by Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs or Norman Foster’s spaceship-in-the-garden landing soon in Cupertino. “We come from hip-hop, hardcore punk, and indie rock. Hype Williams to Paul Williams, Robert Mapplethorpe to Robert Kelly. How do you design for that without being cliché?” asks Luke Wood, cofounder of the company with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine. Read More …
JOIN US FOR THE FINAL DISCUSSION OF DIALOGUES
AND THE CLOSING OF THE EXHIBITION
HTTP://
DIALOGUES #4
ART/ARCHITECTURE
PARIS/LOS ANGELES
BARBARA BESTOR
CLAUDE COLLINS-STRACENSKY
VINCENT LAMOUROUX
DOROTHEE PERRET
FRANCOIS PERRIN
moderated by
MIMI ZEIGER
TUESDAY, APRIL 16, 2013, 6-8pm
ForYourArt
6020 WILSHIRE BLVD
LOS ANGELES, CA 90036
THE PROGRAM IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MICHAEL ASHER