Eye candy: enjoy these freshly digitized, gorgeous contemporary photos of Southern California's finest midcentury modern architecture

2016-03-25T18:29:00-04:00

No longer confined to collecting dust in storage rooms, over a thousand slides documenting modern architecture's emergence in Southern California have been digitized by the USC Library, and are now available to view for free online.

The approximately 1300 slides were culled from the collections of Fritz Block and Pierre Koenig, which both belong to the USC Libraries. Koenig himself chose which slides he wanted digitized in the late 1990s, for a project that never fully came to pass, but from which a delightfully dated prototype website is still accessible. The slides feature work by various architects, mostly within Southern California.

Check out the full collection here, and a few select images below:

↑ John Lautner's Foster Residence in Sherman Oaks, from Pierre Koenig's collection.

↑ Frank Lloyd Wright's Millard Residence in Pasadena, from Fritz Block's collection.

↑ Pierre Koenig's Schwartz residence in Santa Monica (1996), from Pierre Koenig's collection.

↑ Albert Frey's Frey Residen...

Geoff Manaugh, Smout Allen, and co. investigate the future of Los Angeles in a new exhibition at the USC Libraries

2015-10-28T15:39:00-04:00

It’s 2040, and Los Angeles has just begun to recover from a devastating epidemic that wiped out much of its population. Former residents slowly trickle back, alongside new immigrants drawn to the city’s surplus housing stock. But at a lab in Westwood, epidemiologists fear the disease is mutating and could potentially return…

At least that’s one possibility. Alternatively, the city may triple in population and expand into the Pacific Northwest. Immigrants may flock to Southern California from Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia. Or, contrarily, officials may exploit census data to facilitate mass deportations.

These are some of the many possible future scenarios for Los Angeles imagined in L.A.T.B.D., a project by writer Geoff Manaugh in collaboration with the London-based studio Smout Allen – comprised of Mark Smout and Laura Allen – and Jeff Watson, the Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Games at the University of Southern California, with input from a host of other experts incl...

Archinect - News

Eye candy: enjoy these freshly digitized, gorgeous contemporary photos of Southern California's finest midcentury modern architecture

Geoff Manaugh, Smout Allen, and co. investigate the future of Los Angeles in a new exhibition at the USC Libraries