Ian Volner on the changing face of Los Angeles

2021-09-07T18:21:00-04:00

The rude stop-start of the pandemic economy has meant that scads of new marquee developments—new infrastructure, new performance venues, new housing, new museums, new everything—are now hurtling toward completion almost simultaneously. Five days spent crisscrossing from the hills to the beach and back, occasionally by car but also by bus, by train, and, yes, by bike, revealed a city seized by startling, epochal changes. For Los Angeles, it has been a long time coming.

The city is starting to ramp up for a development spree spurred on by attendant social and environmental issues that will fundamentally change the urban landscape of the city in a building boom which may also herald the end of Christopher Hawthorne’s “Third Los Angeles.”

Recently published on Archinect: Reyner Banham Is Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies at 50

LA has set very ambitious goals for development during the coming decade of transition. Ian Volner gives us a scope of some of the architectural changes coming to the city here.

"Design and power, locked in an uncanny embrace": Ian Vollner on the Chicago Architecture Biennial

2015-12-02T14:30:00-05:00

Look closely and you might find that the two operations are connected: Bureaucracy turns out the statistical slurry, and architecture reconstitutes it into built form. And since the actual process of making architecture occupies the lower half, as it were, of this digestive cycle, it is generally held to be an ancillary thing, tedious and occult.

"Given the popularity of this perception, it’s understandable that the field of design is seized by a sneaking inferiority complex—which is why, from time to time, architects must meet up to remind the world, and one another, that what they do is Important Shit."

After some linguistic judo and a slew of qualifiers aimed primarily at tenuous power relations and poorly-disguised disciplinary insecurities, Volner concludes, "CAB has a fighting chance to emerge as the leader in its field."

In case you're not already glutted from all the reviews of the CAB, here's some more:

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Ian Volner on the changing face of Los Angeles

"Design and power, locked in an uncanny embrace": Ian Vollner on the Chicago Architecture Biennial