Archinect - News

Christopher Hawthorne dissects Zumthor's inkblot with LACMA Director Michael Govan

2015-03-28T09:02:00-04:00

Since opening the doors of its original William Pereira buildings in 1965, the Los Angele County Museum of Art has grown along with its home. The version of the city beloved by Reyner Banham and Pereira was alive then on the historic Miracle Mile, proselytizing megasized car-infrastructure and New Suburban models of living. From the 1980s through the 2000s, the museum expanded and reorganized, adding Bruce Goff’s Japanese Pavilion and Renzo Piano’s additions. Now, the entire conglomerate is slated for a redesign, into a singular swath by famed museum architect Peter Zumthor, with new attention paid to an incoming Metro station. And according to the Los Angeles Times’ architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, this is distinctly on track with where the megaregion as a whole is going – part of his so-called “Third Los Angeles”.

This third stage of Los Angeles is “an altogether more integrated, metropolitan-oriented” place, and is the namesake for Hawthorne’s ongoing lecture series exp...

The Days of Infinite Thinking: What "City of Quartz" means for Los Angeles 25 years later

2015-03-10T20:19:00-04:00

If you conceive of Los Angeles as having three distinct historical periods – as Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times and the driving force behind The Third L.A. series, does – then the first period encapsulated the 1880s to the 1940s, the second the 1940s to the new millennium, and the third from 2000 to now. It is this current period which The Third L.A. series situates itself. It's also the era which fascinates Hawthorne: specifically, his series investigates how the city's denizens are conceiving of and working toward creating an altogether more integrated, metropolitan-oriented Los Angeles. In partnership with southern California public radio station KPCC and Occidental College, Hawthorne assembled Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Rick Cole, Occidental Art History Professor Amy Lyford, and fellow L.A. Times book critic David Ulin to discuss the influence on city politics and culture of Mike Davis' frothy, passionate, anti-booster classic City of Quartz, a book w...