FF: Let’s begin by talking about your connection to Los Angeles.
SA: I visited L.A. a couple of times quite a while ago, but in the '90s, many people I knew from New York had moved out to Los Angeles; people like Michael Speaks, Grey Lynn, and Sylvia Lavin. For some reason, it felt like a lot was always happening in Los Angeles. I got invited to SCI-Arc and UCLA for reviews.
Before that, I should start with something more personal, which is rather far-fetched. I was born in Colorado. My family moved East when I was a teenager. But I've always felt a connection to the dry, open Western landscapes—a connection I felt in Los Angeles as well. Particularly in the later part of the 1990s, around the time I wrote the Field Conditions piece, I got interested in the idea of the dispersed American city. I started reading works of people like Reyner Banham, yet another outsider who had great insights about Los Angeles. I became fascinated with the open, expansive, porous field condition of Los Angeles on all those different trips. Then, the final piece of the puzzle is that towards the end of the 1990s, I got a commission to design a house out in Glendale. It was a house for an artist and had very complicated planning conditions. She owned two adjacent properties and we had to move a property line around to get permission to build. That certain period was taking me to Los Angeles about once a month. From 1995 to the early 2000s, I visited frequently, and it was then that I became fascinated by the city.
I probably have to add what everybody adds, which is that so much of my image of Los Angeles was formed through the movies: from classic films like Chinatown, or particularly Paris, Texas in relation to the time I was working in Glendale. In Wim Wenders’ movie, the protagonist’s child, brother, and his family live in Glendale. The brother’s profession is a sign painter, and he paints billboards over the highways. The movie pictures these incredible views looking over the city from the ridgetop in Glendale. Wenders has an amazing intuition about the space of the American city, some of which are very typical and usual, but there is that sort of connection as well.
FF: My fellow board member at L.A. Forum, Ben Hidalgo, remembers you being his project reviewer at SCI-Arc in the early 2000s when Michael Speaks was the director. Was that concurrent with the time you were working on the L/B House in Glendale?
SA: Yes. It was exactly that time. I should mention that I knew Neil Denari from New York, so I reconnected with him when I moved to L.A. It was an interesting moment because it felt like I knew more people in Los Angeles than I did in New York. Greg [Lynn] went to L.A. in the late 1990s. I certainly do not want to sell myself as an expert on Los Angeles, as I am very much of an outsider. But I've also watched the changes over thirty years.
Looking back at some of my earliest trips to Los Angeles, I should mention that my wife is an artist, and she had a couple of shows in Los Angeles at the time. I had a friend named Terry Myers, who was an art critic. Terry introduced me to the L/B House client, Linda Burnham, who was married to a very, very interesting artist called Robert Overby. Bob passed away and left her this plot of land with a typical Los Angeles warehouse—fifty feet wide by a hundred feet deep with big glulam trusses every sixteen feet. This big open area was their living and working space, and she wanted to build a house on the adjacent property. I was introduced to Linda in 1996 when I traveled to L.A. for the Pritzker Prize ceremony for Rafael Moneo, who I worked with in Spain. The ceremony was held at the Getty Museum, which was unfinished at that time. I remember walking around with a group of people around the unfinished Getty Museum building site that had been cleaned up and secured for the prize ceremony.
So, yes! I have a thirty-year history with Los Angeles.
FF: Do you notice any specific ways your relationship with Los Angeles shows up in your work? Are there any projects that immediately pop into your mind?
SA: I should probably back up a bit to the middle of the 1990s at Columbia and back to when I went to Princeton with Greg Lynn. Part of what drew me to Los Angeles was the work on field conditions and thinking about that particular character of the American city outside of the East Coast—the open field condition of the city that is organized by infrastructure and the highway system. Los Angeles exemplifies this, and it’s a city where nature is very much present and part of the city. It was around this time that Mike Davis's book, Ecologies of Fear, came out. Without any serious, in-depth research, Los Angeles was a model for me that was informing my thinking in the late 90s and early 2000s.
I collaborated with James Corner for two years, from 1999 to 2002, when I got the Princeton position. The Gwanggyo Park Competition was done in 2008, by which time Jim and I were working separately, and it was the first time I was invited to a competition where I was going to be competing against Jim. I was the only architect. All the other competitors were landscape architects. That was around the time I worked on Landform Building, and I think this project is included in that book as an example.
It’s interesting that you made that connection! It wasn’t explicit in my mind, but it’s certainly there. As a polemic, my idea was to use a building at the scale of landscape to organize the site, rather than purely a landscape strategy. Probably, the Art Center was subliminally in the back of my mind!
FF: You were a student at The Institute for Architecture & Urban Studies (IAUS) during the heyday of architecture theory, when New York was influencing ideas across the country and around the world. How was the theoretical scene at the time in Los Angeles?
SA: I was twenty-one years old when I came down to New York and landed at the Institute. I did not know what kind of place it was, but I was very lucky to land there at that specific moment. Looking back at the late 70s and the early 80s when I was a student, as you said, the influence of people around New York and The Institute, Peter Eisenman in particular, and The New York Five was incredibly strong. It’s a personal point of view, but those voices drowned out other voices.
We were certainly aware of what was going on in Los Angeles. Frank Gehry came out to the scene relatively later. Again, it’s a personal point of view, but the strength of people like Peter Eisenman and Philip Johnson that dominated the New York scene, meant that the voices of the next generation were not heard so much. That would be people like Steven Holl, Tod Williams, Billie Tsien, and, even later, the young Liz Diller. Let me tell you my sense as an outsider. If Frank Gehry was the corresponding figure in Los Angeles to Peter Eisenman, he was much more open and supportive of the generation that followed: the generation around SCI-Arc, namely Thom Mayne, Michael Rotondi, Coy Howard, and Eric Owen Moss. Again, as a New Yorker and an outsider, I was always fascinated by their work, which was more independent in some ways, more intuitive, less based on theory, and more hands-on. At the time, it was a valuable counter-voice to the strong theoretical focus that was going on in New York—the focus that often drowned out some of the younger voices.
FF: Interestingly, you brought up the hands-on aspect of Los Angeles. In her 1976 essay, “Los Angeles: The Know-How City,” Jan Morris describes "know-how" as America's great gift to history—something no city but L.A. could have ever portrayed. While that observation dates back to the 1970s, do you find it relevant to L.A. today? Can we still claim that the "know-how" quality holds, especially when compared to the pervasive intellectualism of the East Coast?
SA: Probably not today! I think we are living at a time when a lot of those more specific local, cultural formations are not as strong. Everybody's trading information much faster.
I think history is significant. Weirdly, there was this whole generation of people who went to school at Columbia who ended up teaching in California. I also mentioned my close contact with Michael Speaks. In the early 2000s, Michael and I were involved in a conference at the Museum of Modern Art about pragmatism, which was also pushing back on the theoretical scene. That belongs to a slightly earlier generation. First, there was the high theory moment of the 1970s that was associated with the Institute. Then, when I was a graduate student, it was the next generation of thinkers such as Michael Speaks, Beatriz Colomina, and Mark Wigley. Then our generation comes along —Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, myself. Sarah, Greg, and I were all graduate students at Princeton, and we started pushing back on that generation in our own way. It is what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences. Some of those people were not so keen on what Michael Speaks was talking about when he started talking about design intelligence. Michael himself identified more with pragmatism. I felt very sympathetic to that, but I do think that as a kind of regional difference, it is still that strong, and you can find examples everywhere.
As part of the history that I was quite aware of, there is also the older generation of Los Angeles artists who learned from the culture of the city they were working in. You cannot disentangle Ed Ruscha from Los Angeles. When Ruscha was younger, it was difficult for a Los Angeles artist to get a show in New York.
FF: I understand your connection with Los Angeles is profoundly influenced by Reyner Banham’s work. Can you share more about how reading Banham influenced your work?
SA: I had read Rayner Banham's writings on Los Angeles before I actually spent time in L.A. Banham was one of those outsiders who came to Los Angeles but had great insight. He also uses the idea of ecology in a way that does not have much to do with landscape and nature. That is the lens that helps him to get out of the typical art historical mode of tracing influences and close formal readings. From Banham, I got the idea that you need to see the architecture in Los Angeles through a different lens.
I can mention other thinkers as well. For instance, J.B. Jackson, the essayist, wrote about what he refers to as “vernacular landscape.” He wrote about landscape not purely from the point of view of looking at nature, but perpetually seeing the co-presence of human intervention with landscape. J.B. Jackson lived in Santa Fe and had a strong awareness of Western landscapes.
That is how I see Los Angeles and the way it has always been a model for the field condition idea: local connections, small scale, and flatness that multiply over time. Also, the idea of a freeway system is an example of what I call “The Thick 2-D”. A lot of things came together around my first reading of Banham’s book and then again re-reading it after diving deeper into questions around ecology.
FF: Banham's portrayal of L.A. largely focuses on relationships to the ground. Last year, you taught a course at Cooper Union called “Architecture, Cities, and Landscape.” Did you at any point revisit your view of cities through Banham’s perspective?
SA: I love one particular photograph, which I had initially seen many years ago on the cover of the issue of Lotus magazine devoted to theater, which is interesting, the idea of illusion. You may be thinking of a short piece I once wrote on that particular photograph. That is another thing that fascinates me about Los Angeles. It is a place where the real and the illusion are so caught up with one another. Los Angeles is a city that is all about the creation of an image. That is an interesting complement to that culture of know-how and sort of hands-on experimentation. Los Angeles is also a place of fantasy. I think Banham actually caught that aspect, particularly in the film he made.
There is another book that influenced me a lot. It is not about Los Angeles, but it offers a certain amount of clarification about L.A. It is a book by William Cronon named Nature’s Metropolis. It is about Chicago in the 19th century and the relationship of the city to its larger region. Cronon talks about Chicago from the wheat farming on the prairies and the markets, all the grain shipped in Chicago, and how Chicago became a center for the Grain Exchange and speculation. He talks about Chicago in relation to the forests of Wisconsin, where all the timber was harvested to make balloon-frame houses.
Interestingly enough, the course I taught was a close look at New York City as a case study for the relationship between the city and its larger region. We explored the idea that you could never see a city as something totally disconnected from its larger region. In that course, we looked at New York City through five lenses: water, waste, energy, leisure, and workforce. In contrast, you could never isolate Los Angeles from its larger ecological region, even within the city itself.
Coming back to Banham, there is the idea that there are multiple ecologies even within the city limits or the larger municipal area. But because Los Angeles is such a large and all-encompassing city, or because of the politics of water in Los Angeles that extend right through the state, you cannot think of L.A. without including Owens Valley, which is two hundred miles away, where Mulholland stole the water rights. I think Los Angeles has become this incredibly interesting laboratory for thinking about cities in a new way. Unlike the old European model of the city, where the city is a clearly defined entity with boundaries separating it from the countryside (I don’t even think this model exists in Europe today!). There is always going to be a complex interrelationship.
You could do a similar research study around Los Angeles, but in some ways, it will be harder because that was never a kind of division in the first place. In New York, Manhattan is an island, and there is a relatively defined limit to the metropolitan area. It was one of several classes devoted to Los Angeles. We were doing case studies of New York, but parallel to that, we also looked at other examples from Brasília to Chandigarh to Los Angeles. We looked at phenomena like Broadacre City to give the students a wide range of examples about how cities and nature and the surrounding ecological regions are related. But it is a hard exercise about Los Angeles because you could never define the boundary.
FF: Banham believed it was unproductive to study L.A. in a conventional manner, not simply because L.A. is an unprecedented entity, but also for its history that is “compressed and distorted.” Let’s talk about compressed and distorted.
SA: I might be able to add something here. I have this paradoxical theory about history in Los Angeles, which nobody quite buys. Probably, it hasn’t been true for fifteen or twenty years, and we can talk about that.
People from the East Coast often say, "There’s no history in Los Angeles," but clearly, that’s not true. There are all these interesting layers of history in Los Angeles: the native settlements that go back a long way, the mission, etc. But in New York, history means the 19th century. They preserved the brownstones and all those historic buildings. I look out my window at the Brooklyn Bridge, and I see all these monuments of the 19th century. But it is extremely hard to feel a connection to that time. When I first started visiting Los Angeles, what struck me was how its history, at least on the surface, seemed to be defined by the 1930s to the 1950s. Hollywood in the 1930s, the post-war period, all the amazing films from the ‘50s and ‘60s, even ‘70s. That history, that fabric from the ‘30s and the ‘50s, is still very present in Los Angeles. You have these little pockets of 19th-century history in New York, but it is hard to feel a connection to that. I think until fairly recently in Los Angeles, you could still feel a connection to that history from the '30s and the '50s. There are still people alive from the ‘30s to the ‘50s in Los Angeles.
I should also mention the incredible immigrant culture in Los Angeles after the Second World War. Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, and many other incredible individuals moved to Los Angeles. So, it is true! It is a compressed history. We are talking about hundreds of years of history, not five hundred. There is a sense of history very much present in Los Angeles. The 1960s and 1970s beach culture of Venice Beach and Santa Monica has pretty much disappeared today.
One of the things that struck me in my recent visit to L.A. was that downtown is starting to look more and more like New York. It is a dense, walkable city with tall buildings and street life. The jokes about nobody ever walking in Los Angeles are gone! I know young people in L.A. who don’t even own a car.
My statement probably relates much more to the L.A. that I first knew in the 1990s. I think it is a different sense of history, but it does not mean that there is no history there.
FF: Circling back to L/B house, which was your first freestanding project, did it come about simply because it was located in L.A.?
SA: Yes! That is very much the case. In the 1990s, when I was getting started as an architect, the typical project for the typical build project for a young architect in New York City was a loft renovation and a gallery storefront or interior. I do not think it is true anymore, but at that time, young architects in Los Angeles would build houses.
Talking of history, another aspect of Los Angeles that fascinates me is its 20th-century residential architecture. You can drive around the city and discover remarkable works, not just by well-known figures like Neutra and Schindler but by many others as well. That tradition from around the turn of the 20th century was still viable in Los Angeles.
In New York City and its surrounding areas, the building culture is more traditional. Even builders are traditional. You have to explain modern details to the builders. But you talk to builders in Los Angeles, and this is the kind of work they have been doing. I am going in many different directions. But let’s, for instance, talk about an architect like Schindler. There is a kind of lightness, a kind of improvisational character to his work. One of the things I love about Schindler is that a lot of his clients were very modest people. They were school teachers. They weren’t looking for a trophy house. They believed in the modernist project and wanted a modern living space. Some of those early houses were built very cheaply.
I'm not sure I was fully attuned to all of those traditions, but the fact that my first opportunity to do a free-standing building was in Los Angeles is not a coincidence.
FF: In the “Zoom Out” series, I am trying to uncover more architectural knowledge exchanges between the East Coast and L.A. specifically. How did L/B House and working in L.A. inspire your future works?
SA: My first two clients for those built projects were both women artists who would meet with me from time to time and debate over whose house was first. The L/B house was the first design, but because of the delays with permitting, it was finished after one of the houses that I built in Hudson Valley for an artist called Marilyn Minter.
In both of those early projects, in ways that I later articulated more clearly in my most recent book Situated Objects, I was interested in the relationship between the house and the site. I don't think you can escape that in Los Angeles. You cannot escape the presence of nature. To go to L/B House, you should drive through Atwater Village, and you will feel the presence of the infrastructure. That was quite important to me. That house was a kind of compound. It was a house for a working artist. It is set in a working compound with the studio and the house, and the landscaping between the two was very important.
Undoubtedly, I learned a lot from that project. In terms of the work I was doing around that period, I think you could draw more of a connection between the L/B House and some of the larger-scale works. For example, I did a building in Korea, Paju Book City, that in my mind has something to do with the L/B House. But maybe it has less to do with the subsequent series of houses and studio buildings that I did in the Hudson Valley in the late 2000s up to the present.
FF: Do you have anything to share about the L.A. Forum? Maybe a memory from the earlier days?
SA: Again, this is a weird sort of irony for me. Hernan Diaz Alonso was a student of mine at Columbia. Or Marcelo Spina. There is this generation of students, not necessarily my students, but students that I knew from Columbia, who are now part of that L.A. scene. I more recently became friends with Mark Lee and Sharon Johnston.
This might be an outsider’s view and maybe goes back to that period when I was going out to Los Angeles quite frequently and moved between SCI-Arc and UCLA. There seemed to be a sense of community among the Los Angeles architects around the MAK Center and the L.A. Forum. I do not know if that continues to be true. But as a bolder perspective, I think there is a greater sense that Los Angeles architects identify with a sense of place in Los Angeles than New York. New York architects are building all over. They do not build much in New York. I think that is one of the things that, for me, at least, gives Los Angeles and the architecture community a particular identity, that there is a sense of identifying with and focusing on questions around the city of Los Angeles.
FF: What is your synopsis of Los Angeles?
SA: This sounds a bit like a cliché, but I think Los Angeles is as much a state of mind as it is a physical place.
May, 2024