Archinect - News

Archinect remembers Mike Davis

2022-10-26T16:33:00-04:00

Who was Mike Davis? Many know him as a prolific American writer, storyteller, and brass tacks commentator on all things history, urbanism, politics, labor, activism, and society. However, for many, his words and work were grounding stones for their own perspectives on architecture, urban planning, theory, culture, and social discourse.

A few months prior, our editorial team learned of Davis' health condition when he spoke with The Guardian's Lois Beckett in September. Knowing he was terminally ill added more weight to his words and responses with Beckett. They discussed his previous work, California, climate change, and, as staff writer Josh Niland explained, the "early warnings of the state’s slow-motion social and ecological demise that has taken three decades to manifest." Adding, "True to form, Davis was critical of everything..."

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30 years of Mike Davis, the clairvoyant, Talmudic and Hibernian, public intellectual

2020-07-22T15:24:00-04:00

You can’t overstate the importance of City of Quartz...it remains the best socio-political critique of modern L.A, the first book you’d recommend to someone seeking to understand the dark nativist currents and unyielding avarice that still shape a city so easily stereotyped but rarely understood. It is noir to the core...Even Vince Staples insisted that I read City of Quartz had I not already.

On the 30th anniversary of the dystopian L.A. touchstone, Jeff Weiss talks to the prophetic author and oft-misunderstood activist about political uprisings, the pandemic, and what gives him hope for the future.

In related news, back in 2015 Julia Ingalls reported on the third installment of The Third L.A. series, "which focused on the influence on city politics and culture of Mike Davis' frothy, passionate, anti-booster classic".

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...